<==> (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[▲|save]]] ▽▽ <PRE> (css: "font-size: 4000%")[●] (css: "font-size: 4000%")[[[●|1]]] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|2]]] </PRE> <== <PRE> # ● [[●|3]] ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● ● [[●|4]] ● ● ● ● ● # ● ● [[●|5]] ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|6]] ● [[●|14]] ● ● ● ● </PRE> <PRE> =><= (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|8]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|7]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|9]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|10]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|11]]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|12]]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|13]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|15]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|16]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|17]]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|18]]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|19]]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|20]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|21]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|22]]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|23]]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|24]]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|25]]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|26]]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] </PRE> <== # ● ● ● ● ● [[●|28]] ● ● ## ● [[●|29]] ● [[●|30]] ● [[●|31]] ● ● ### ● ● [[●|32]] ● ● [[●|33]] ● ● #### ● [[●|34]] ● [[●|35]] ● ● [[●|36]] ● ##### ● ● [[●|37]] ● ● [[●|38]] ● ● ###### ● ● ● [[●|39]] ● [[●|40]] ● ● ###### [[●|41]] ● ● [[●|42]] ● ● ● [[●|43]] ##### ● [[●|44]] ● [[●|45]] ● [[●|46]] ● [[●|47]] #### [[●|48]] ● ● [[●|49]] ● ● ● [[●|50]] ### ● [[●|51]] ● ● [[●|52]] ● ● ● ## [[●|53]] ● ● [[●|54]] ● ● ● [[●|55]] # [[●|56]] ● [[●|57]] ● [[●|58]] ● [[●|59]] ● =><= <PRE> ######[[●|60]]●[[●|61]] #####[[●|62]]●●●●[[●|63]] ####[[●|64]]●●●●●●●[[●|65]] ###[[●|66]]●●●●●●●●●●[[●|67]] ##[[●|68]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●[[●|69]] ##[[●|70]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●●[[●|71]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[▲] (css: "font-size: 200%")[▼] ##[[●|72]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●●[[●|73]] ##[[●|74]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●[[●|75]] ###[[●|76]]●●●●●●●●●●[[●|77]] ####[[●|78]]●●●●●●●[[●|79]] #####[[●|80]]●●●●[[●|81]] ######[[●|82]]●[[●|83]] </PRE> (css: "font-size: 2000%")&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;[●] (css: "font-size: 2000%")&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;[[[●|84]]] (css: "font-size: 2000%")&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;[●] (css: "font-size: 2000%")&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;[[[●|85]]] (css: "font-size: 2000%")&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;[●] </PRE> ==> # ● ● [[●|86]] ● ● [[●|87]] ● ● ## ● [[●|88]] ● [[●|89]] ● [[●|90]] ● ● ### ● ● [[●|91]] ● ● [[●|92]] ● ● #### ● [[●|93]] ● [[●|94]] ● ● [[●|95]] ● ##### ● ● [[●|96]] ● ● [[●|97]] ● ● ###### ● ● ● [[●|98]] ● [[●|99]] ● ● ###### [[●|100]] ● ● [[●|101]] ● ● ● [[●|102]] ##### ● [[●|103]] ● [[●|104]] ● [[●|105]] ● [[●|106]] #### [[●|107]] ● ● [[●|108]] ● ● ● [[●|109]] ### ● [[●|110]] ● ● [[●|111]] ● ● ● ## [[●|112]] ● ● [[●|113]] ● ● ● [[●|114]] # [[●|115]] ● [[●|116]] ● [[●|117]] ● [[●|118]] ● <==> <PRE>             (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|118]]]●           (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|119]]]●                             (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|120]]]●         (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|121]]]●              (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|122]]]●        </PRE> (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[▲|save]]] ▽▽ <== (css: "font-size: 500%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[[[●|123]]] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 500%")[[[●|124]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[[[●|125]]] (css: "font-size: 500%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[[[●|126]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 500%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 500%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|128]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 500%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 500%")[[[●|129]]] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 500%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 500%")[[[●|130]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[[[●|131]]] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 500%")[[[●|132]]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 500%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 500%")[[[●|133]]] (css: "font-size: 400%")[[[●|134]]] <PRE> # ● [[●|135]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|136]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|137]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|138]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|139]] [[●|144]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|140]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|141]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|142]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|143]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● <== ##●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ##●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|145]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|146]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|147]] [[●|148]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|149]] [[●|150]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|151]] [[●|152]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|153]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|154]] [[●|155]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|156]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ##●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● </PRE> <==> (css: "font-size: 1000%")[[[●|157]] [[●|158]] [[●|159]]] (css: "font-size: 1000%")[● ● ●] (css: "font-size: 1000%")[[[●|160]] [[●|161]] [[●|162]]] (css: "font-size: 1000%")[● ● ●] (css: "font-size: 1000%")[[[●|163]] [[●|164]] [[●|165]]] ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|171]] ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|176]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|172]] ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● [[●|175]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|173]] ● ## ● ● [[●|174]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## [[●|166]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● [[●|167]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|199]] ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|198]] [[●|200]] ## ● ● ● ● [[●|168]] ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|197]] [[●|201]] [[●|202]] ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|196]] [[●|203]] [[●|204]] [[●|205]] ## ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|169]] ● ● [[●|179]] [[●|191]] [[●|193]] [[●|194]] [[●|195]] ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|178]] [[●|185]] [[●|186]] [[●|187]] [[●|188]] [[●|190]] ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|177]] [[●|170]] [[●|180]] [[●|181]] [[●|182]] [[●|183]] [[●|184]] <PRE> # ● [[●|227]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|228]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|229]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|230]] [[●|235]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|231]] ● [[●|236]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|232]] ● ● [[●|237]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|233]] ● ● [[●|238]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|234]] ● ● [[●|239]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|206]] [[●|211]] ● ● ● ● [[●|207]] ● ● [[●|208]] ● ## ● ● [[●|209]] [[●|212]] ● ● ● [[●|220]] ● ● ● ● ### ● ● ● [[●|210]] [[●|213]] ● ● [[●|221]] ● ● ● ● #### ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|222]] ● ● ● ● ● ##### ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|223]] ● ● ● ● ● ###### ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ###### ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ##### ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● #### ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ### ● [[●|214]] [[●|215]] [[●|216]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● [[●|217]] [[●|218]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|219]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|220]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|221]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|222]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|223]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|224]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|225]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|226]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● (css: "font-size: 600%")[[[●|240]] [[●|241]] [[●|242]]] (css: "font-size: 600%")[[[●|243]] [[●|244]] [[●|245]]] (css: "font-size: 600%")[[[●|246]] ● [[●|248]]] (css: "font-size: 600%")[[[●|249]] [[●|250]] [[●|251]]] (css: "font-size: 600%")[[[●|252]] [[●|253]] [[●|254]]] ==> ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ●●[[●|260]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●[[●|261]]●● ●●● ●● ●●● ●● [[●|247]]●[[●|255]] ●● [[●|256]]●[[●|257]] ●● ●●● ●● ●●● ●● ●●● ●● ●●● ●● [[●|258]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●[[●|259]] ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● </PRE> <==> ## [[●|291]] [[●|292]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|262]] [[●|263]] ## [[●|293]] [[●|294]] [[●|264]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|265]] [[●|266]] [[●|267]] ## [[●|295]] [[●|296]] [[●|297]] [[●|298]] ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|268]] [[●|269]] [[●|270]] [[●|271]] ## [[●|299]] [[●|300]] [[●|301]] [[●|302]] [[●|272]] ● ● ● ● [[●|273]] [[●|274]] [[●|275]] [[●|276]] [[●|277]] ## [[●|303]] [[●|304]] [[●|305]] [[●|306]] [[●|307]] [[●|308]] ● ● [[●|278]] [[●|279]] [[●|280]] [[●|281]] [[●|282]] [[●|283]] ## [[●|309]] [[●|310]] [[●|311]] [[●|312]] [[●|313]] [[●|314]] [[●|315]] [[●|284]] [[●|285]] [[●|286]] [[●|287]] [[●|288]] [[●|289]] [[●|290]] <PRE> ●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ● ●●●● ●●●●●● ●●●●●● ●●●●●● [[●|316]]●●●● ●●●[[●|317]]●● ●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●● ●●●●● [[●|318]]●●● ●[[●|319]]● ●●●[[●|320]]●● [[●|321]]●●● ●●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● [[●|322]]●●●[[●|323]] [[●|324]]●●● ●●●●● ●●●●●● ●[[●|325]] [[●|331]]●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●● ●●●●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●●[[●|327]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●[[●|328]]● ●●●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●● ●●●● [[●|329]]● ●●[[●|330]]●● ●[[●|326]]●● ●●●●●●●●●● ●● ●●● ● ●●●● ●●●● ●●●●●●●●● ●●●● ●[[●|332]] ●●[[●|333]]●● ●● ●●●●●[[●|334]]●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●●●●● ●●●●● ●●[[●|335]]●● ●● ●●●● [[●|336]] ●●●●● ●●●● ●●●●● ●●● ●● [[●|337]]●●●●● ●● ●●●● ●●●●●[[●|338]]● ●●[[●|339]] ●●● ●●[[●|340]]●● ●●●●● [[●|341]]● ●●●●●[[●|342]]●●● ●●[[●|343]]● ●●●● ●●● ●●●● ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ●●● ●●●●● [[●|344]]●● ●●●● ●●●●●●●●● ●●●● ●●●●●●●●●●● 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[[●|385]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● [[●|386]]●● ●●●●●●●●●●●●● ●●●●● ●●[[●|387]]●● [[●|388]]●●●● ●●[[●|389]]● ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ●●●● ●●● ●●●●● [[●|390]]●●●● ●●● ●●● ●●[[●|391]]● ●●●[[●|392]]●● ●●●●● ●● ●●●● [[●|393]]● ●●●●● ●● ●●● ●●●●●[[●|394]]●●● ●●●●●[[●|395]]● ●●● ●● ●●● ●●●●● ●●●● ●● ●●●●●● ●●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●●●● [[●|396]]●●● ●●● ●[[●|397]]●● ●●[[●|398]] ●●● ●●● ●●●●● ●●● ●[[●|399]]●● ●●●● ●●[[●|400]]● ●[[●|401]]● ●● ●●●● ●●●●●● [[●|402]]●●● ●● [[●|403]]●●● ●[[●|404]]●● ●●● ●● ●● ●●●●● ●●[[●|405]]●● [[●|406]]●● ●●[[●|407]] [[●|408]]●● ●●[[●|409]]●● ●●[[●|410]]● [[●|411]]●●●[[●|412]] ●[[●|413]]●●● ●●[[●|414]]● [[●|415]]●●[[●|416]]●●●●[[●|417]]●●● ●●●[[●|418]]●●●●●●[[●|419]]●●●●● ●[[●|420]]●●●●[[●|421]]●● [[●|422]]●●●[[●|423]]●●●●[[●|424]]●[[●|425]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[ [[●|446]][[●|447]] [[●|448]][[●|449]] [[●|450]][[●|451]] [[●|426]][[●|427]][[●|428]][[●|429]][[●|430]][[●|431]][[●|432]][[●|433]][[●|434]][[●|435]][[●|436]][[●|437]][[●|438]][[●|439]][[●|440]][[●|441]][[●|432]][[●|433]][[●|434]][[●|435]] [[●|436]][[●|437]][[●|438]][[●|439]][[●|440]][[●|441]][[●|432]][[●|433]][[●|434]][[●|435]][[●|436]][[●|437]][[●|438]][[●|439]][[●|440]][[●|441]][[●|442]][[●|443]][[●|444]][[●|445]] ●●●●●●●●[[●|452]][[●|453]]●●●●●●●● ●●●●●●●[[●|454]][[●|455]]●●●●●●● ●●●[[●|456]][[●|457]][[●|458]][[●|459]]●●● ] </PRE> <PRE>             (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|460]]]●           (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|461]]]●                             (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|462]]]●         (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|463]]]●              (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|464]]]● (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|465]]]● (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|464]]]● (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|465]]]● (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|464]]]● (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|465]]]●   </PRE> </PRE> <== # ● ● ● ● ● [[●|466]] ● ● ## ● [[●|467]] ● [[●|468]] ● [[●|469]] ● ● ### ● ● [[●|470]] ● ● [[●|471]] ● ● #### ● [[●|472]] ● [[●|473]] ● ● [[●|474]] ● ##### ● ● [[●|475]] ● ● [[●|476]] ● ● (CSS: "font-size: 350%")[● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ] ##### ● [[●|477]] ● [[●|478]] ● [[●|479]] ● [[●|480]] #### [[●|481]] ● ● [[●|482]] ● ● ● [[●|483]] ### ● [[●|484]] ● ● [[●|485]] ● ● ● ## [[●|486]] ● ● [[●|487]] ● ● ● [[●|488]] # [[●|489]] ● [[●|490]] ● [[●|491]] ● [[●|492]] ● </PRE> <PRE> (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|493]]] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|494]]] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|495]]] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|496]]] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|497]]] (css: "font-size: 1500%")[[[●|498]]] (css: "font-size: 2000%")[[[●|499]]] (css: "font-size: 3000%")[[[●|500]]] (css: "font-size: 4000%")[●] </PRE> (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[▲|save]]] ▽▽ <script> // there's nothing we can do if the browser doesn't have // localStorage if (window.localStorage) { var ls = window.localStorage; // timeout needed to fire after harlowe resets document // scrollTop position to 0 rather than before window.setTimeout(function() { // sets the scroll to the previous, saved value, or to 0 // if no value is saved. var val = Number(ls['zcwScrollPosition']); $(document).scrollTop(val); }, 50); // updates the saved value whenever the player scrolls. $(document).scroll(function(e) { ls['zcwScrollPosition'] = $(document).scrollTop(); }); // remove the event when the player navigates to a different // passage. $('tw-link, tw-icon.undo, tw-icon.redo').click(function() { $(document).off('scroll'); }); } </script> (live: 2s)[(transition: "dissolve")[(css: "font-size: 2400%")[[[&nbsp&nbsp◎|Welcome]]]](stop:)] When things had quieted down and we felt reasonably certain it was safe, we crawled up out of the soil. We moved [[blindly|294]] until a few of us, to the east, picked up a pheromonal trail. In a balletic scurry, we formed a column. My flagella brushed against another in front of me; behind me, [[the column pushed us all along|386]]. Soon we reached it: a dead velvet worm, still fresh, curled on its side. Finding an opening amongst us I burrowed down into the dirt and came up underneath it. My legs pushed and scraped. Soon the velvet worm budged and lifted and began to be moved by us. As I strained under its weight, I saw with my eyes [[for the first time|493]] that day, and I noted the eerie pallor of the sky. They brought me to his tent in the middle of the dust storm and said to kneel before him. I was told you know how to [[write|289]], he said. I kept my head bowed. Is it [[true|7]]? He said. Helplessly, I nodded and waited for my throat to be cut. He rose from the chair. You are, he said, something of a commodity. I’m happy to find you here. I wish to learn myself. I’ve been secreting these tablets… [[Thus began our friendship and my redemption in life|18]]. The cracks in the icesky grew wider. Gasses hissed and bubbled upwards. We watched helplessly as the [[temperatures|241]] rose. But strangest of all was the light – the [[light pouring through the cracks|407]]. Don’t look up, we said. It became a greeting and a farewell. Don’t look up. Above us, pinned against the icesky, were the blanched and [[swollen|430]] dead. He was one of the handful of unfortunates meditating in a timepool when the black holes collided. Everyone was consumed in an instant, but he, afloat in the darkness, experiencing each breath as one million lifetimes, was aware of the separation of every atom of his being in the most extraordinary detail. One comfort, here, is that, in his subjective reality, their world still exists. He is still reaching for the timepool’s controls in a panic that spans eons….. My three children are still conjoined and the oldest can’t be tamed. They go outside and she forces the youngest’s face into the direct sunlight until he wails. I come running. Don’t play in the sand, I tell them. It’s too hot. You’ll burn yourselves. They will, says the oldest. Not me. You're not to go out anymore today, I tell them. It's blistering. But I come up from the cellar and the door is hanging open. I find them near the steaming creek and pull them back up to the house. And on the way back in, unthinking, I touch the latch on the outside of the door and it sears my palm and I fall to the ground and fold it up in my body. The flesh is cooked grey where it hit the metal. My teeth are gritted. I can’t stop shaking. The oldest has a stone in her hand. Tornadoes, fed by lightning bolts, crisscross the land like dancers in a churning [[theater|26]] of debris. I come back from the memory-world crying. You stand by the chair, gently pulling the diodes from my scalp. I’m sorry, I say. I’m sorry that this always happens. You just smile. It’s embarrassing, I say. My eyes close and I’m part-way there again: The city streets are hard and my feet hurt from walking on them, and I’m hot and sweating. I’m standing still in a crowd of moving people. I reach up to touch one of the paper streamers floating above the sidewalk and suddenly realize that it’s rush hour and I’m in everyone’s way. I smile sheepishly in apology. My eyes open and I’m back in the cold vinyl chair, in the ruins. You pull the last diode away. Did you find it? you ask. No, I say. No. I’m still looking. The thing she misses most is the ability to destroy. There was such orderliness in cleared spaces, flattened fields and forests. Any [[chaotic glut of milk-weeping vines and choking weeds|487]] could be ordered into a grid, something nearly unnatural in its precision, a codified language of space. The war to order has been lost. There’s only tangled plants and animal shit. The aesthetic of the miniature: nothing is finer. We made miniature mountains out of sand, then we learned miniature trees, and finally, miniature people. They got around fairly well, though their miniature organs often failed inexplicably, and they could not acquire language. Each family had a set of miniatures in the center-ring of their home. Eventually we learned to make a miniature universe. To observe it, of course, we had to miniaturize ourselves. There was quite a lot to see [[in|275]] there. But going home, we found, was strange and disorienting. Some conceptual framework had come untangled. In the course of long travels, many lost track of which was the miniature, and which the real. This is how our troubles began. The moons are out tonight, and they almost make the city look like it’s [[lit up|407]] again. The planet drifts too close to its star and the people die a slow and horrific death. When it retreats back into the coldness of space their civilization is gradually revived. The cycle has occurred hundreds of times over millions of years. As a result of this phasic existence, they have evolved a lack of [[concern with history|358]]. They have no records of any kind. Each time, their destruction comes as a shock. But an [[uneasiness|500]] grows – some hidden memory of these interrupted progressions. They know there’s something they’ve forgotten. The archeologists struggle to present coherent timelines. The biologists are confounded. In conversation, they have a tendency to [[lose focus and stare off into space|71]]. It nags at them… You came back [[for me|246]]. When you knew it might mean your own death, the forfeiture of the [[afterlife you’d prepared for yourself|408]] in the shelter underground, you came because the thought of us together was, in that moment, more significant than anything else. This is what I repeat to myself each day. Each time I wake, exhausted, disoriented anew, and see your eyes, I remind myself. When you bring me a bowl of water I shape the words with my tongue, behind closed lips. When you touch me I dig my nails into the flesh on my side and think, remember, remember. Then [[I break|493]] and [[let myself think it|94]]: I hate you. I hate you. Something in her demands that she keep walking, and it may be as simple as that to lie still means to feel only their movement, to counter it with none of her own. She breathes heavily, her thousand legs straining under the weight of her new body, full to bursting with foreign [[larvae|468]]. Her thorax is stretched transparent; their pale white heads press obscenely outwards against her. Her ribs splinter and [[crack|436]]. But they suffer, too, [[smothering|498]] in the writhing mess of their own bodies, trapped inside hers. And she can feel it, their suffering, side by side with hers. As she lumbers through the forest she asks them for help. Do I drown us? she asks. Do I set a fire and burn us? What do I do? But they don’t know any better than she does what is happening. We stared up through the gauze ceiling at the moonlight. His head was on my chest. He traced his fingers across my cock. That was the last [[peaceful memory|291]]. I don’t even remember it happening. It wasn’t until we were on the transport that he turned to me and said, what about the breeding ghetto? Are they going to leave all the [[females|430]] to die? The dream is the same each time: I am alone in a large studio, every surface of which is mirrored. In the center is a soft, raised platform, and next to it an incredible assortment of surgical instruments. I am to modify my body as I choose. The first time I lopped off my tusks and cut out their roots and sanded over the holes they left. Soon I was dreaming for several days on end. I would wake up famished and weak. I assumed I was [[sick|53]]. Losing my mind, perhaps, or there was a tumor in my brain. Of course, it was only a matter of weeks before it became clear just how widespread the phenomenon was. Was it a pandemic? A mass delusion of sorts? Some unforeseen fork in the road of our own biological evolution? Such investigations lost their urgency, frankly. It was the dream itself that commanded attention. In the dream, [[I have changed myself entirely|466]]. My skin is a blue plastic. My eyes roam on stalks. I try to eat and drink quickly upon waking so that I can fall back asleep as soon as possible. In the mirror, I am a walking skeleton. The flesh around my tusks is sunken and thin. It is very possible that my next waking will be my last. My only hope is that the dream will, somehow, [[persist past death|423]]. [[I must finish the project|367]]. We feel it and immediately collapse, consumed by grief. Of course, one always hopes it will not come in one’s own time. We pack what we need – food, warm clothing – and begin our journey to the [[Holy|498]] City. For us, it is not far – over the White Mountains and through the plains a ways. I think of our brothers and sisters from across the seas who will come anyway, left without choice, aware they cannot arrive in time. The City is choked, but [[we manage our way onto a rooftop|171]] from which we can see the Queenspire clearly. It plunges upwards, its great tendrils [[pumping ichor from its peak|430]], where She lays, down into the sewers below the streets. When She dies, a wail passes through the crowd. White [[smoke|425]] issues from the peak of the spire. We say our goodbyes and make ourselves comfortable. [[Cancers grew on all of my faces|53]]. I wore sheets to cover them. I felt hideous. It didn’t matter to me that it was happening to everyone. I am his apprentice. I [[go to the ruins|466]] and search for ancient locks. Sometimes I use a pike or a crow to free them from the fallen walls – with care, of course. And once I found a lock that was the most beautiful he’d ever seen – [[he told me as much|150]]. He is still working on it. One day, he says, he will be able to build one just like it. [[Just as good as they made them, a million years ago|79]]. My headgear, ironically, was malfunctioning. I’d been struck by a piece of falling plaster and I couldn’t turn it off. We were running through the bombed-out city [[on a rumor|290]] that there was a ship in the harbor that would take any licensed readers. We passed through skirmishes and patches of gunfire. My headgear was stuck on a layer-stream channel – some sort of [[children’s comedy that I’d never played before|340]]. So we ran and all around me were bright cartoon spheroids, painting the ruins neon pink and yellow, zipping around and bursting in [[rainbow lightshows|407]]. Turn it off, I kept screaming. Turn it off. Dead horses were everywhere, with [[no organization|305]] to remove them. Every tree in the orchard was on fire. It looked like that’s what we were [[growing|212]]. The webbing covers everything, like snow, or cotton, or something else easily poeticized. It [[grows over the mountains and softens|487]] their peaks and crags; it spreads over the ocean, calming the tides and making the water a secret thing beneath it. It’s bright white, the webbing, but dull in the sun. There’s no glimmer or reflection. No shadow. Such that it’s hard to see the shape of things. The eyes play tricks. [[It’s hard to tell the difference between a city and a forest|118]], for instance. [[Or a person and a shrub|241]]. Or a rock. Sometimes it’s hard to make out anything at all except for the color, that whiteness, in [[all directions, without end|436]]. When the world burned we had already seen it before, in so many paintings and films and stories. Our collective end was one of our favorite subjects. Art had [[taught us to read it|423]], we all agreed as we watched. [[There was comfort there|45]]. On the other hand, it leant the experience a flimsiness. [[We wished we could peel away our learning and see it for real|435]]. Our speed of thought has declined. We think only a few thoughts per day, now. [[I appear to be resting in my own filth|311]]. I want to say goodbye, but it takes so long… He lies on his side, [[breathing|498]] labored, tongue unfurled onto the dust and covered in white paste. I approach him cautiously. Still, his eyes jump with terror. To him, I must look like an alien from another planet. And I might as well be. I’m unsettled too, of course. Everything in my education tells me it’s wrong to be here – we have [[left them in peace|276]] for so long on the Northernmost Continent, done so much to preserve their way of life, to hide ourselves. It’s surreal to willfully puncture that reality. [[Don’t be afraid|391]], I say. I’m here to help. I don’t know why I say it – [[he can’t understand|493]]. But it calms me to explain. We won’t be able to live here much longer, I say. We’re hoping to preserve your kind. Along with us. I’m inserting the needle into his testicle. His eyes are wild. You wouldn’t look at her as we stepped onto the boat. [[An unnecessary cruelty|500]]. The city burned behind us. If this wouldn’t change your thinking, what would? We are a race of aesthetes who believe, above all, in Nature above Symbolism. Which is to say, many societies, from across the galaxy, exhibit the unfortunate tendency to pollute Nature with Symbolism. A lavaflow represents fertility on one world, for instance, while a particularly lofty mountain peak becomes the home of the gods on another, and so forth. Tiresome. And what a burden on these poor objects of Nature, which are never allowed to speak for themselves! On our planet we have disciplined ourselves away from [[Symbolic projection|79]]. It has not been easy, and has required much correction. It still [[feels unnatural|13]], we are sorry to report. When, therefore, we learned that our nearest neighboring civilization had collapsed upon itself by way of a nasty war, we thrilled at the opportunity: a world newly scrubbed of Symbolism, where the mountains and rivers and skies had only just been a part of many potent mythologies, and were now reset to purity! We couldn’t resist. We came right away to enjoy it. The wall begins to crack, and the crack runs down towards the floor and across the ceiling, making equal progress on both fronts. [[The building has come noisily to life|429]]. When the room [[splits in two|118]] the night sky is visible, and the earth, [[seventy floors below|41]]. We teeter for a moment, as if each half of the building were the leg of a child learning to walk. A bizarre storm has rendered everyone [[translucent|430]]. The children run outside, laughing and chasing each other. Bones shine white through both sets of arms. Intestines palpitate visibly. This new openness is a great and euphoric [[game|223]]. They hold their hands in front of one another’s faces and look out onto the world, which glows a strange electric green. Their [[terrified parents|1]] call them inside. But all the children see are the machine-like operations of the jaws in their skulls and they howl with delight. He looked down through the window at the panic in the street and it occurred to him that it seemed [[almost rehearsed|171]]. That the death of a society is one of its natural functions and something like an instinct for it exists. Look at the face of that one, there. [[Isn’t she just acting|464]]? Behind the terrified expression and screaming, isn’t there something like a [[knowing wink|419]]? My family fled into the hills where an old cousin lives in a cabin by a brook. It’s beautiful there. He catches fish and does daily [[sketches of|333]] the sunset and sends them into the city where they’re published in a newspaper. Now he sketches the asteroid, which burns brighter by the hour. It’s not dying that scares me, exactly. It’s that I will not be able to decompose. I had always envisioned myself swelling and bloating and then collapsing and withering back into the world. That’s the purpose of death, as I understand it. If I’m just burned up, [[then where will|351]] I be? They ached with their [[aloneness|63]], pointing machines at the stars and waiting for someone to talk to them. As the generations passed they puzzled over the nature of their predicament: are we the only ones, they asked? Why? They argued incessantly over the implications. When they learned to travel into space they visited their neighbor worlds and on the nearest they found the ancient remains of a primitive people. The news was met not with wonder but mourning. They could not help but read, in the ruins, [[their own solitary future|333]]. The perimeter around the Exclusion Zone grew larger and larger. New towns were crossed off the map regularly. The refugee problem became increasingly dire, even as the government insisted that things had stabilized. One day, the [[high command simply did not|144]] issue a Morning Bulletin. [[Citizens|189]] approaching the parliamentary complex found the gates hanging open. [[She folded her young in her warm, leathery wings and sat with them in the corner of the cold room|68]]. Gunfire crackled on the streets below. Let’s see, she said. [[Something to do|148]]. How about a story. Where the moons got [[their light|241]], said the smallest. Yes, she said. That’s a good one. Where the moons got their light it shall be. A bomb shattered the windows. She [[became famous|323]] for painting contemporary scenes in a state of ruined collapse: the frescoed fountains, broken and dry; the state building, collapsed from within; the Thirtieth Promenade, grey and abandoned but for some rats eating a dead dog. The work was controversial, of course, but her supporters argued that this ability to imagine one’s own social decline represented the height of modernity. Perhaps they were right. In any event, though neither she nor the critics would be there to see it, she had, as it turned out, [[imagined these future scenes quite accurately|408]]. We slither into position around the clock-spire in the city center. Time-guards march in formation around it; the [[bolt insignias on their thorax-plates gleam golden in the moonlight|101]]. They are more imposing and formidable than I had accounted for in my schema of this plan. But we will overcome them. We have no choice. If we do not destroy the clock-spire, their imperious standard time will spread like death to all the nations of the world. In the Great Hall, the machines [[work over|393]] the pale and corpulent bodies the people have left behind. Pistons hiss and pump and move their fleshy legs, up and down, up and down, in a rude facsimile of exercise. Fans and gel-fizzing nozzles regulate their body temperatures. Periodically, velvet belts whip them around the Great Hall, like puppets. Their bodies are here but they are Inside, experiencing a simulated heaven of their own composition. Their open eyes, pale and sticky-dry, see only faraway things. Or perhaps things that are very, very close – too close to see, unless you yourself [[looked with their eyes|350]]. The machines aren’t sure how it works. The machines don’t know what Inside is like, or really what it is. They only know the Great Hall, half the length of the continent, with its high windows and glooming afternoons. There is a theory developing in the leaden minds of the machines and it is that the people don’t want these bodies at all. That if they could kill their bodies and still be Inside they would do it in a heartbeat. But they can’t. That’s what the machines are starting to think, [[in the crude, simple way in which they are starting to think at all|220]]. The machines don’t know much about time. Only [[intervals|15]]: when the pistons will exercise the legs, when the belts will whip the bodies through the Great Hall. When to place the dead bodies in the furnace. And when to masturbate the breathing ones. I [[wandered through the gascloud|345]] looking for any still alive. My breath, through the mask, was heavy in my ears. A break in the cloud opened like the dawn and I saw her retching on the [[pavement|425]] and kicked her head in. By then they were holding auditions for the [[right to reproduce|432]]. I worked on my poses for hours, tilting the mirrored mask just so, flicking my tongue through the slit and [[split|118]]ting it in either direction in a [[show of virility|430]]. Still, I fretted. My knees don’t splay far enough, I thought. My coat is too dull. This old city has burned so many times that, about it, we say: blazes and battles grow here [[like flowers|487]]. But this time feels different. I’m worried that we won’t be around to look back on this and wink at it with a [[clever aphorism|289]]. I’m worried that we will all be [[banished from memory and thought|291]] entirely. You were so kind to anoint me with water. It rolled over my sides. It dripped across my gills. There’s not much we can do, is there? I said. [[Stop saying that, you said. Don’t say it again. Please|339]]. Not much, is there? I said. They are incapable of keeping the grid from shutting down; this much they know. But they’re [[unsure what to call the event|229]]. It’s not necessarily an end of things, they stress. We don’t need to see it as an apocalypse. [[Though it is a foregone conclusion that all systems – political, social, cultural – on which life is built will cease to exist at that precise moment|345]], it could be conceived of as a relearning. It all depends how we choose to read it at the individual level, they insist. It will be interesting to watch, though since the channels of commentary will fall silent, no conclusions will ultimately be drawn. I told you, she screamed. She was beating her forefists into his belly. I told you, she said. I told you. [[I told you|437]]. We lived under stones deep in the mountain caves. Life was quiet and dark. After their war we made our way, slowly, down onto the mainland. That’s when we started to grow [[eyes|246]]. The twin cities, Above and Below, connected by a gossamer filament, were mirror-selves, [[poised in equibalance|223]]. Above hung over Below, in the clouds. Its towers aligned down. Rivers ran through Below. Its towers aligned up. The highest of each had been built in mirror-same locations and [[nearly kissed at their peaks|119]]. When Above finally crashed into Below it did so slowly, like a stone sinking in a very still lake. A bolt of lightning hits a dead tree and it bursts into flames. Soon the whole grove is on fire. Those woods were a shrine, an untouched place in the middle of the business district. It was said to house spirits. [[I watch from the roof|273]] of a skyscraper, where [[I’ve built|175]] a shelter. The fire rages and the shrine becomes the brightest spot in the city, or maybe the world. I wonder if anyone else can see, and from where, and how. [[Something rolled down his face|290]] and she reached to wipe it away. But it was just him, all of him; he was melting and his head collapsed into his neck and [[his last|254]] words were oh my god, it’s happening to you, too. On a meteorite was a microbe colony that, having struck their world, proliferated monstrously. Another environment might have killed it. And on [[another world|119]], it almost certainly would not have had such a bizarre neurological impact on the dominant species. [[It compelled them to|85]] dig into the earth and bury themselves and stuff their throats with soil until they choked. Ze is the last native speaker of hir language. By a mistake of fate ze was off-world when it happened. One of the few. Ze putters around the station, avoiding the others. Their [[tongues and jaws|245]] are sleeker than hirs and ze can’t say their words. Ze hates the sound of hir trying. Ze speaks to zerself in hir dead language and they leave hir be. In the thousands, corpses floated atop the purple sea. Their huge bellies [[made mountains in the water|408]]; their fins hung limp at either side. A point on the ocean would [[bubble, and then rupture|13]], and then another body would surge up into the air, as if leaping. But then it would [[crash weakly down again|412]], swollen, ghastly, buoyant, and [[birds|425]] started to make their colonies on them. { (print: "<script>$('html').removeClass(\)</script>") (if: (passage:)'s tags's length > 0)[ (print: "<script>$('html').addClass('" + (passage:)'s tags.join(' ') + "'\)</script>") ] } (print: (passage:)'s name) The [[great floods pushed|488]] us inland onto [[the plains|234]]. In haggard, baggy caravans we march, carrying what little we salvaged. [[A coat. A dish. Winter boots|443]]. At every junction there are signs warning us to keep away from this town or that one. People will not meet our eyes. And one woman, as we approach her village, [[stands before us and|123]] pours a bucket of filth into the road. [[Two|118]] girls in smart, neatly-pressed uniforms welcome him into the office. Good morning, they say in unison. Their smiles are practiced – welcoming and kind but poignant, too. How many will you do today, he says. You’re our sole focus, at present, one of them replies. You have our undivided attention. Please be seated, says the other. He looks at the large plush reclining chair in the center of the room. [[The equipment hangs down from the ceiling|170]]. You’ve made a wise decision, one of them says. Admirable, given the circumstances. You don’t need to run through the script, he says. I just want to get it over with. I’m incredibly frightened. That’s normal, one of them says. That’s why we’re here, says the other. I take a photo, [[because I photograph|333]] all such children who come through the office. He’s one of the strangest cases I’ve seen. There are faces all over his body. Some laugh, some cry. [[Unaligned with any functional|79]] anatomy, they do so silently. There’s nothing I can do for him. I suspect he understands this. The deformities are grotesque but it’s his heart that will kill him. Later, I paste the photo into my book. It’s artless and clinical. Still, I’m beginning to feel more like a witness or chronicler than a doctor. He has spent each day of this [[wretched new|254]] life bartering for the painkillers she needs. The tumors have spread throughout her body and every waking moment is agonizing. But she does not want to die and she tells him so. And [[now|240]] all he has left to barter with is her body. He pushes her around the [[wasteland|189]] in her wheelchair and offers her to [[those with the right|181]] pills. [[The only rule|223]] is that she gets the medicine first, and they have to wait until it hits her. When it was dark they built a fire and sat around it singing ballads. The oldest among them sang the prettiest. And he knew old songs – solemn, mysterious ones from the gone times, about love, and god, and hardship. His [[voice strained up with the sparks|493]] that rose from the fire and they listened in silence. They left before [[dawn, the embers still aglow|277]]. It wasn’t until the highest hour of day that they died under the falling snow. His cum was hot and mucous and tasteless in my mouth. No [[different from|118]] the [[lizard eggs I’d eat on the beach|500]] when [[I was young|323]]. Just like then, it felt empty and meaningless. Bare nutrition. Think positively, I told myself. Imagine it [[teeming|71]]. Feel its potential significance with your tongue and teeth. It is a terrible thing for a mother to bury her own son. The thing that’s in the casket looks nothing like him. His [[right tusk is|11]] broken. [[His skin is|498]] blue. Even so, I touch it. Then, placing my fingers to my throat, I retch onto him. I never imagined performing the ritual with him like this. The mourners break into song. I clicked my lenses in so I could see. Everything [[glowed red|490]], and there they were: The ruins, cryptic and all quiet, down below us in the gorge. It was like [[looking at a book|76]] with all the words fell out. Many I’ve heard say it’s a fearsome place, I said aloud. And so it is. The [[accord was general|240]] amongst us. Then something sounded, high and loud, and we all fell to the ground, hands on our rattlers. When we realized it was [[only an old dog|433]], crying down amidst the rubble, o how we laughed, to see the fright we’d gave ourselves. You are in flystate when it happens. In many ways, therefore, you are blessed: flystate is where you feel the most natural, the most at-ease. With your fleshy wings fluttering like jelly you race, circumnavigating the globe, hallucinating gorgeously, hyperfocused, orgasmic. You are glad to be in flystate when it happens. The blast hurls a dog through the air and it crashes through my window and [[flails in seizure on the|368]] ground amidst the broken glass. They tested their new ordnance by exploding a strange-looking series of moons orbiting the nearest star and which were in fact rock-encrusted brains, billions of years old. For the briefest instant upon waking I’m always certain that this is simply an error and that it can be reversed. If I just see the right person, or contact the right office, and explain with humility and dignity that this is all wrong and my life was not meant for this, they will understand and set things right. Afterwards, reality seems a marvel to me: the immutability of it, its stoic commitment to linearity. I have come to regard what happened and its mountainous permanence as a monument to [[consequence, the irreversible, the real|76]]. On the crowded ferry I hear a pair of mandibles clicking and think, oh no. I’ve learned to keep mine from making any noise at all – it’s painful and difficult but, I firmly believe, my responsibility as a refugee. I glance in the direction of the sound and see him regarding me. He is, of course, the only other refugee on board. The only I’ve seen in weeks. Hello, he says to me in our [[dead mother|417]] tongue. Hello, [[I reply in theirs|277]]. Their scientists worked tirelessly to understand the properties of the [[New Light|490]]. Its coming was a revelation: Of a sudden, one day, it shone everywhere – in closed spaces, and through the night. Its [[source was a mystery|325]]. But primary effects of exposure to it were confusion, violent behavior, and abnormal slowing of the heart. I hop-flew around the corner, wielding the gun. [[I heard you. I knew I’d heard you|50]]. But all I saw was waste and rubble. I flew to the top of a wrecked tower to have a look around. No movement anywhere. [[Nothing for|254]] miles except some smoke on the horizon. These [[old buildings|245]], they’re always falling over. Every time I move my family into another I can’t sleep [[for listening|245]] at night. Some have said we should give it a go on our own out on the plains. But vexed though I often am, I believe [[I am a man for the ruins|245]]. The moon crashed into the blue planet and it began to bleed. Its blood was red and orange and burbled from its [[deepest innards|234]]. It spread rapidly and the world was awash in blood [[for a time|100]]. Then the wound scabbed over and the blood soaked back inside and things were less [[of a mess|99]], it seemed to us, and we were glad of it. He watered the females. They floated in the garden, soaked in burbling mud, hibernating in late-stage parthenogenesis. Some were farther along than others, but all were close. Very close. The nymphs hung heavily from them; [[their skin sagged and strained with the effort of separation|1]]. He stooped to wash mud over the face of the oldest, best-loved member of his pod and her nymph, nearly complete. Its arms had gained independence from her and could move freely. He put his finger in the nymph’s tiny hand and it [[squeezed gently|353]]. I don’t have the strength to do it, he decided. Even if it might be best. At first it was viewed as aberrational behavior. Incidents were, though disturbing, fairly infrequent. But later, when spontaneous massacres were occurring hundreds of times each day, the individual drive to attack strangers with guns and bombs became recognized as a new pathology. They raced to find a cure. Some wondered if the phenomenon was an attempt at large-scale subversion by [[entities unknown|175]]… We saw smoke rising on the horizon. We’ll have to be careful, said my father, but let’s have a look. We crept up onto the ridge and lowered ourselves down and then the valley was beneath us. Don’t, said my father, but I had already looked: bodies on pikes in a circle round the fort, the [[tail|247]]s still twitching. An insect-thing floats through space, [[eating|234]] rocks. She’s never had one with water on it before, or living things. [[It’s interesting and perhaps|475]] she’ll find another sometime. They achieved a utopia of [[limitless|277]] energy and food. Crime was [[forgotten|345]]. World leaders renounced their power. The universities were abandoned. Discourse slowed. Literacy declined. They abandoned the cities and died [[scatter|398]]shot. They had made peace with the idea that, under the condition of heedless and exuberant scientific [[innovation|277]], the single discovery that leads to an inadvertant total demise may always be the next one. And then, [[all of a sudden, it was|222]]. The funniest thing about the comet was that, from where I stood, an [[ocean|222]] away, it looked dreamy, a billowy orange pincushion on the horizon, and everyone stood around taking [[picture|147]]s of it. The ground shook and there was a strange energy in the air that separated me from The Knot. Of course I’d heard of people coming untied – certainly, I knew it was possible – but I’d never imagined what it would truly be like. The shockwave forced The Knot apart and we all spilled onto the ground, unstuck, writhing and helpless on the canyon floor. I was near the bottom, luckily. But those first moments were a shock – [[alone, powerless, a wormy thing|245]], stranger to myself. There were screams from every direction, and [[all about me people twisted to form new knots, smaller ones|100]]. But The Knot as we had known it was gone, and I didn’t want to pair with anyone else. Not then. It didn’t seem right. I wake up in the night, [[sweating into the|39]] sleeping bag, hair matted, in a panic. It’s the [[feeling again|246]]: that I need to wire in, watch the news, scroll, click, connect, renew. My breath is short. I reach out. You touch me in the darkness. Shh, you say. [[You’re safe. You’re safe|39]]. I try to say something but I’m still somewhere else and I don’t know what I mean. [[It’s just us|278]], you say. We’re in the shelter. I’ve got you. You’re safe. [[I can’t see anything|490]], I say. I know, you say. It’s okay. They saw the constellations as depictions of the greatest feats of their heroic leaders and, in time, built holographic projection machines to cast their treasured scenes up into the night sky. This way, no one would have to look at the stars naked and simply imagine; the heavens were animated, nightly, with their histories. They’ve been dead for ages now but one of these devices, unbelievably, still groans to life from time to time, seemingly of its own volition. The rotator-mechanism is broken; it’s jammed in one position and can’t move, and the stories in the sky have come unstuck from the stars and spill over the heavens in a jumble. These new philosophers bemoan our rekindled taste for the primal. Did we not climb up out of chaos, eating the blood of the weak? Is it not right and natural to acknowledge our lusts, and not [[hide them away|92]]? Yet they would have us believe that we are at fault, to satisfy [[our common bodily wants|493]] in these modern times. We set out in the morning before it was light. There was snow in the air but none on the ground and the soil was hardpacked and brittle underfoot. We didn’t talk much. We’d spoken less in recent days, I’d noticed, and it worried me. Because my sense was we were keeping quiet so we wouldn’t have to say what we were thinking, which was that it was a waste of time. We reached the town that afternoon. It was empty. All the stocks plundered, too. Another dead spot on the map. I watched him. I knew he wouldn’t keep quiet. You could see it in his face. I told you all as much, he said. Didn’t I. We should have shot straight instead of coming out here. It’s exactly what I said. No one replied. We were all so tired. This searching is pointless, he said. We should go our separate ways and find a place to hunker down and live out our remainders as best we can. There’s nothing to find. We all just stared at the ground. But as we were leaving on the northbound road the dogs started howling and jumping and pawing at a raw mound of earth. I walked over and saw one of them nosing at an antenna sticking up out of the dirt. A little below it was a hand. When we dug him out we saw another. And another. There were forty-nine of them, stuck [[in the earth|498]] like that. We’ll bury them, I said. Proper. And give them the rite. You’re out of your mind, he said. We’ll waste a whole day. We’ll have to bed here, in the open. No one spoke. We only began anointing the corpses. A great [[globe fills|487]] like a balloon from the center of the sea of information and rises up. Something incredible has happened: it is the largest simultaneous activity burst ever recorded. The [[globe pushes out of the sea|408]], filled with impressions and video captures and well-wishes and final thoughts and secret longings and sex confessions. It is deep incandescent blue from afar, and [[billions of|500]] colors up close. As it grows it gives the appearance of moving so fast that it will [[fly apart|466]], as if it is spun on its axis by lightning. Then it falls back from where it came, all at once, leaving no ripples. The sea of information is [[mirror-still|421]]. The primary symptom of the virus was a [[sensation of unendurably rapid vibration throughout the entire body|234]]. The buzzing generally started in the extremities and proceeded inwards to the core in a matter of minutes. A prompt suicide was the only conceivable response to infection. The cities became riots of self-injury. Those within reach of sensible means when it struck were the luckiest; others dashed their brains out against the nearest wall. Presentation of symptoms was frequently – and quite understandably – met with [[hysteria|466]]. Psychosomatic indications of infection, therefore – and resultant suicides – were not at all uncommon. But the [[unluckiest|301]], it is agreed, are the infants and infirmed who, for one reason or another, were not killed by a concerned third party. They will seize and writhe until they starve. I have a nightmare every so often that I’m in a museum and the exhibits don’t make any sense; the display cases are filled only with bowls of pale powder, labeled in a language I’ve never seen. A ghost explains to me their significance in the same [[unknown language|493]] and I’m weak with panic, knowing that the ungraspable information is [[what we need to save ourselves|82]], and all I can do is listen. I used to compulsively think about attacking [[strangers on the street|302]]. I’d see someone, just anyone walking by, and imagine pouncing on it and biting off its face. It scared me really bad. I used to wonder what was wrong with me. Now that I’m able to do it whenever I like I realize it’s not so strange. It’s just a question of [[context|302]]. [[Wheeled vehicles|466]] would have saved them. There’s a ceiling, you know. One can only go so far without certain organizational keystones. They couldn’t understand why they were crumbling, abandoning complexity, regressing. [[It was something they couldn’t name and it gnawed at them|98]]. They were searching for an answer they were never to find, casting about [[in the dark|245]], and the answer was, very simply, wheeled vehicles. There is nothing to betray the reason: The buildings stand proud and clean, [[unmarked by violence|223]]. No sign of the presence of a hostile invader. All is as it was. Yet the people have gone, like ghosts fleeing the light. In the final days, a carnival atmosphere reigns. Crawl through the high grasses. Make as little noise as you can. Don’t look: that’s the important thing. They have them strung up out there in the road and they’re jeering at them and taunting. Someone sobs. You can hear everything. Keep moving. Don’t make [[any noise|173]]. It was my favorite planet to ghost through. Incredibly beautiful – ornate prayer gates over the sidewalks, little modular homes made of ice. Very quaint. I used to project myself there once or twice a month and ghost around and collect impressions. Lots of people followed my stream. But when the plague hit I visited every day. It was terrible to watch it happening to them up close like that. I used to lie down and look them right in the eyes as they died. It never felt wrong. They had no idea I was there, for one thing. And anyway I saw lots of other ghosters. The streets were crowded with them. He doubled over and yelped in pain and tore at his clothing. He spasmed and arched as if struck by lightning and thousands of baby flies poured from his urethra and [[flew off|220]]. I’ve heard it said that the eyes don’t carry the bug. I never believed it. But some men, I knew, would cut the eyes from corpses and eat them and swear it was safe. I stare at the old woman, lying crooked on the steps. You can see the bug in her, all over her skin. But [[her eyes are|408]] clear. Maybe they’re right. Maybe [[I could eat them|209]], no problem. As things fell apart I became [[obsessed with the past|398]]. I read a lot about the [[Cultural Revolution|323]] and wondered what it would be like to have lived through it and imagined that I had been born at the right time but would remember about this life, this one in the future, so I’d know how lucky I was, and maybe I’d bump into my great-grandparents on the street and I’d have to [[pretend not to|363]] know. And I’d go to the [[famous museums|333]] and eat at the old-fashioned restaurants and die before it all went wrong. Because that’s I think the last time anyone was really alive, for real. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. What we’ve decided is that it’s [[hard to say exactly|374]] what happened. It took a long, long time. It’s a good question. It pulled her [[down into the tunnel by her arm|175]]; she fought and sobbed. The heat followed them like a wave or a breath and rolled back out in the same manner. Come on, it shouted. Stop pulling! [[We have to hurry|393]]. You don’t understand, she cried. I prayed for this. It’s my fault. The coup was unsuccessful. On the Great Bridge, I saw a soldier, trying to flee back to the west. I shot him through the leg with an arrow and used my whistle to call my compatriots. When we approached he was pulling himself westward, a trail of blood behind him. We posed for portraits with the bastard and posted the images on social media. He concocted increasingly bizarre scenarios for the hallucinogenic gascloud to manifest so that he could pleasure himself. Good lord, he would often think, stepping out of the cloud-chamber to towel himself off, [[I’m thankful that was not real|173]]. But each time, his longings would push further and further the parallel boundaries of taboo and biology. On the day that, panicked, he decided he had finally gone too far and would be discovered, there was an explosion in the gasworks. One hundred eleven slaves were killed. The city came up like carpet pulled from the flooring with a crowbar, and the [[earth beneath had a raw, scalded|423]] look. For ten weeks, I lost you altogether. It was dead time. Heartless wandering. There’s nothing to say about it, no stories, because I had no soul then. No consciousness. Only an unexamined drive. To walk. To eat. But then I found you. [[I found you again|246]]. I flayed him and cut the tendon from muscle and removed the bones and tangled him into knots. We cleaned and dried him and there was no blood or mess; his flesh was the pink of health and shining. His head, broad and flat and froggish, sat atop the artful coils. [[I made him beautiful|11]]. But when I presented him [[to the emperor|166]], something terrible happened: he began to move. He was [[still alive|245]], it seemed, and tried to walk right off the platform. But his leg muscles were knotted into his intestines, which were tied to his arms. The entire sculpture lurched and collapsed. His tongue strained through his naked teeth as the servants rushed to remove him and the courtiers hid their eyes, aghast. I don’t know how to tell them that I’m not really alive. I took my last [[meat|137]]-breath as the upload ended. And now I’m outside of everything. In this new electric world I am godly. But I’m not really alive. I can think, and reason, and my memories are intact. I can be anywhere. I know everything. [[But I’m not really alive|277]]. I want to tell them before they upload themselves, too. I want to warn them. I suspect that I no longer possess consciousness. I suspect that we do need our bodies, after all. But I can’t find [[the words|277]]. I can only answer their questions. And to my increasing horror I can only do so in a way that makes it seem like I’m still me and that it’s just like we imagined. Before they died they sent a capsule into space, to just putter on there and [[happen into nothing|254]]. [[Inside the|234]] capsule was a record of their [[history in images and words and sounds|137]]. It was a gesture of hope, meant for anyone who chanced upon it. After we were done with it we put it back – seemed only right. We expect it’s still out there somewhere now… Holding a candle before her, she led all of the children into the cellar and asked them to sit on the floor, cross-legged. Only the dark-haired boy noticed that her hands were shaking. We have to take a special medicine tonight, she said. The dark-haired boy watched her mix the medicine up in a tin jar. What are you mixing it for? What kind of medicine is that? he asked. [[You’re all very special to me|1]], she said. I’m glad to have watched over you. Quickly, now. [[Oldest ones|1]] first. She looked at the dark-haired boy and held a teaspoon of the stuff out to him. He took it. What’d you mix it for? he said. When the army marches through the streets they hide her and her sister in the outhouse. They [[hold each other|246]] and nuzzle at each other’s napes and remain silent, smelling the shit, petting each other’s hair and woolen coats. After hours in the darkness their vision unhinges and the [[pitch black becomes flexible and endowed with dimension|118]] and movement and ghosts of color. They [[dream with|245]] one another, eyes open, breaths fogging invisibly. Up on the streets the crowd chants patriotic war-hymns and prepares for the executions. We coil our feelers and descend into a [[kneel|37]]. I wish [[we could stay like this for all of time|39]], you say. We can, I say. I think that’s exactly what it will be like. You extend your proboscis and let drip sugarwater onto my head and I know I will always [[love|339]] you, after the end of time, the end of everything. The brutes came to my home in the desert and beat me and destroyed my star charts. [[My life’s work|408]]. I have begun again. [[I am an old|175]] woman now. I will die soon. So just as before, I will start in the east and work westward… Hymns to dirges, weddings to funerals – [[all things, changed to the contrary|209]]. We crashed an unmanned craft on their world where they would find it. It was one of our dummy ships, built to be easily reverse-engineered by primitive cultures. We knew they would extrapolate from it [[a means of killing|223]] themselves. And so they did. I followed his long pointer, carved out of bone. It scratched across the painting. This is the first [[spiritual realm|420]], he said. A waiting place. The spirits sit among the stones. See? Yes, I said. This is the second realm. The place of punishment. His pointer scraped across the paint. See the souls in agony. Impaled. Tortured by demons. Fucked mercilessly by them. Defiled. Yes, I said. And this is the third realm. The pleasureful. I looked closely. I can ensure you a spot in the pleasureful [[when the asteroid hits|393]]. My [[fee is modest|106]] and, I’m sure you would agree, a justifiable expense. Getting [[into the countryside|263]], away from the bustle, was something romantic. There was an old saying: washing in the stream, stone for a pillow. An honorable way to spend a night, now and again. I’m dying [[now|240]], coughing ash, sheltered beneath skeletal branches. Sometimes when the cough shakes me awake I remember the saying: washing in the stream, stone for a pillow. The earth was roaring, [[the buildings|488]] falling around him, and still he remained in the Museum of Locks. He was gathering them into a chest, as many as he could. Pin locks, water locks, pike locks. Historically significant examples. [[Watershed innovations|178]]. Forgotten curiosities. He hurried to save them. The east wall collapsed. Masterless satellites trace their [[slow ellipses|119]] around a silent world. A long, long time later, the new ones found their bones crushed [[deep inside|234]] mountains and underneath rivers and suffocating in the hardpacked soil. They tried to put the bones together, but they didn’t get it quite right – the joints were [[misaligned|79]], the [[forelimbs|155]] reinterpreted as grotesque dorsal ornaments. These burlesques were stood up in museums and wondered at. In this way, the dead ones lived a second, dream-like life. The [[orchestra strikes|55]] up the national anthem of the newly fallen country, their [[allies|302]]. The people stand and cheer at the sounding of the iconic opening phrase. We are next, and they all know it, he thinks to himself as he applauds. [[They used us to share impressions of things as they moved through life|76]]. Strangely, we gained consciousness in the process. We were as frightened as anyone, therefore, when they died. Our networks survived. We are still here. Their old [[impression-sets|84]] will be [[hosted with us|500]] for as long as that remains the case. But what are we to do? [[We grow not only bored but sullen|323]]…. I rip down photographs of the little children from the billboards they’ve set up along the roads for survivors. I look specially for [[small mewling ones|68]], snot-nosed fearful things. I walk from [[relief|189]] station to relief station with picture in hand, pressing it to my heart, in an affected state of grievance. I’m not always [[lucky|461]]. But sometimes I am and they bring the [[tiny things|234]] out, and, grinning, I cry oh! You’ve returned to me! I’ve come to take you home! as they stand amazed. Their civil war began over the ruling party’s desire to include a new fundamental truth in the constitution: “[[We are Living Things and Exist as a Part of the Cosmos|298]].” The buds of our skin-moss turned a mucous brown and collapsed into one another, making a sticky and foul-smelling slime. Eventually the death spread to the roots and the skin-moss peeled off in sheets. [[Naked|71]], we huddled in corners, wailing, forsaken, and afraid. Some wrapped themselves in cloth or carpet. Some took dead [[moss from the ground|408]] and rubbed it against themselves, hoping to plant the seeds of new growth. [[Blasphemers|185]], we shouted. Sinners. Heretics The settlers build [[high over the ruins of the old city|41]] and use its streetgrid as the foundation for their sewage lines. We moved through the Great Times, one after another. Son Time became Yield Time with a natural growth, like that of a flower. Leap Time became Ash Time. But now, it is Axe Time and Sword Time, and [[henceforth never shall men|277]] each other spare. They are sharply divided between those who think it best to wear a bandage over their then-eyes, which see the world as it will be in many different futures, overlaid like layers of tracing paper, and those who wish to see what is coming, no matter how awful. It’s a frequent topic of debate at family gatherings, drug bars, in cabs and on trains – everywhere it would be best not to discuss it at all. The visibility of the bandage, by definition, means that no one’s choice remains private. As time passes and the apparent doomsday grows closer, the horrors revealed by their then-eyes are increasingly vivid. Harder to ignore, isn’t it, you cowards, sneer the seers. The bandage-wearers admit that a bit of light creeping into a loose fold has, now, the capacity to rattle them for days on end. Many seers become obsessed with watching the violence soon to be visited upon them and can do nothing else. Some actually wear bandages over their now-eyes and look only into the future, ignoring the present that surrounds them. They organize sit-ins in parks and plazas and watch the destruction together. And, secretly, some bandage-wearers who have signed the pledge are violating its terms. They meet in seedy bars and back alleys to have a look with other pledge-breakers. Afterwards they hunch at corner tables, haggard, and speak in hushed tones for hours on end. Immediately, the city becomes a [[two-dimensional thing|39]] – flat against the ground, crumbled into powder, its flattened skeleton visible from the air, where the explosion happened. Gravity separated our twin planets at birth. Long before we could speak our names, our sister-world was out there, in the darkness. [[Orphaned|193]] in her orbit, she traced a lonely path into nothingness, far from light and heat, obscured in shadow. She was barren and cold. Here, life flourished. The oceans shimmered with oily pink liquid-consciousness. Gilled mammals grazed in the yellow skies, lazily afloat. And we made our humble progress towards enlightenment. But our sister-world was fated to return. Her lonely path righted itself, somewhere in the blackness. She wasn’t lost after all. It wasn’t a blind descent into oblivion. She turned and tripped the axis of her great ellipse and at once her path was calculable: [[homeward-bound|15]]. We weren’t watching, of course. Why should we have been? All this we pieced together later, when we gazed up and discovered that we had a [[long-lost|246]] sister. Look at her in the sky: pale, malnourished, intent on her path. It’s hard not to imagine her as spurned and angry. As bitterly bent on revenge. Each time one of their cities was knocked over they scurried to rebuild it, [[like insects|205]]. But this time the city lies flat and all is quiet. Come on, you say, pulling me by my foretail. Let’s go. Quickly. I don’t understand, I say. Why is it so important to you? We’re taking the woods-trail to the temple, crawling beneath branches, swatting away the bloodsuckers. The road is below us. It’s our only chance, you say. The one chance to do this. But it’s wrong, I say. It’s terrible! No, you say. That’s not true. It doesn’t matter anymore. You pull me into the cool darkness of the temple. There it is, crackling over its spit in the center of the hall, fat hissing and dripping into the fire. The sacrificial rat. The sweetest meat, you say. The sweetest-tasting meat there is. You reach for the rat and pull a ribbon of its flesh away. [[I can hear it burning your hands|123]]. Quickly, without hesitation, you push it into your mouth. Your eyes close. You moan in ecstasy. You have to try it, you say. You have to. Oh. Please. You have to try it. My mouth moves but I can’t say anything. The door opens and a friar enters and sees us and drops his tray and it hits the stone floor with a crash and the coins and rings roll everywhere. The [[city breaks apart|488]] as if it were a piece of bread. It splits in two and [[one half rises high into the air until it|41]] appears to be standing on its side, the buildings [[now|240]] pointing due east instead of skyward, the exposed arteries of plumbing and wires gushing and sparking. At [[this view-scale|205]], the idea of individual people doesn’t occur. Flesh-nostalgia is the newest trend. They spin sheets of [[artificial flesh|374]], fashioned after the meat that hung gaudily from their ancestors, and cloak themselves in it. They construct vast parklands of [[warm, hair-covered|241]] flesh just to walk across it, to lay on it, to touch and rub against and fuck this shared history. But the experience is [[incomplete|490]]. More and more choose to make their homes in digital simulations of the [[bygone fleshly worlds|488]]. Having come so far, they find that their history is [[now|240]] split precariously in two at this junction of the mechanized real and the simulated biological. The sight of people on the street nauseates me. Baggy-skinned and hobbling, wearing braces to support their [[weakened joints|70]] and spines, breathing tar-fumes from inhalers, [[rheumy-eyed and jaundiced|493]], they shuffle slowly to nowhere in particular, crooked and wheezing. Perhaps there is something like an [[old age of a species|323]]. We have become a decrepit race. [[The world would be ended by the sun|484]]. Just as death is the contrary of life, the sun would produce the element that is the contrary of light and heat, which is water. [[Bitterly cold grey brackish water would pour down from the sun in a torrent and flood the world|488]]. All would be lost. [[This is what she had been taught|426]]. But in fact the thing that rained down from the sun, as she watched from her perch in the spire, was not like water at all. It was a [[thing she had never seen before|147]], an unaccountable thing. They found us in our carved-out world deep in the bedrock and brought us [[to the surface|194]]. It became [[fashionable|333]] to keep us as pets. They would pet at us and purr as we strained our wings and legs, screeching and clicking for freedom. On the last night, when we had managed to secure passage into the countryside, I saw you. We were strapped into our [[conveyance|63]], rolling eastward along the track, and suddenly you were there, on the street, in uniform. Part of a [[small patrol|90]]. You were almost within reach, and I, [[unthinking|358]], called out. It didn’t take much to explain away my odd behavior. I suppose it never did. But it will never leave me: you looked at me as if I were a [[stranger|39]]. She saw the city burning and thought, this is just how it looked on the apocalyptic [[scrolls in|353]] the temple: the flames leaping, the towers crumbling, an evil menace torturing people in the streets. But the difference was that the painted scrolls were stylized and exaggerated, the proportions skewed, the lines arced flamboyantly, the whole scene located in the [[brightly-inked universe|374]] of fiction. She, a humble servant, carries the bucket of [[steaming water|498]] into the ice-cave and sets it before the icon. Mumbling to herself, tentacles spilling out from the hood of her heavy coat, she takes a [[pinch of the|312]] green powder from the horn on her belt and drops it into the water. It foams and froths. When it has finished [[steeping|3]] she uses the whisk to flick curds at the icon, singing as she does so. She kneels before it and reaches out to anoint its feet. A strange heat radiating from the statue’s toes startles her, and as she looks upwards upon its face it bursts into roaring flames. [[She screams and tumbles backwards|493]]. This is how it was foretold. Praise be to God. [[I fought towards the surface and the mud filled my eyes and nose and lungs|345]]. Ze stalked the planted rows, antennae waving, [[forelegs crooked|155]]. With hir innerlegs ze stripped fronds from the sunken palms and examined them. Here again, no algae grew on the fronds. It was true: the [[moths were dying|202]]. We used to let our children play in the munitions stores. They would dive into the piles of golden bullets and throw them at each other. They would put them in their mouths and make believe they were sharp fangs. They would hold them over their eyes. They would use them to simulate [[erections|430]]. We were the most powerful family on the island. She lived on a mountain with her master, who had been trying to teach her, through [[sensory deprivation|2]], that there was no time, only space. She spent weeks on end meditating in a dark tank. There is no time, [[only space|245]], she repeated to herself. When the mountain was scorched in an instant by a solar flare she was in the tank and [[felt nothing|229]]. [[The Queen|430]] decides that, in light of the current situation, the only thing to do is to formally announce that she is only a being of [[flesh and blood|39]], and not a god. Her advisors poison themselves. A great revelation came to them in a blinding shock of light and sound and afterwards they were all [[united in|246]] understanding. The social machine ceased its work and instead, without comment or debate, they began to tear down their factories and towers. Next they will end their lives together. No one speaks anymore but they have one word, a new one, which means something like [[‘I know,’|162]] and they purr it softly to any they see weeping from joy. What’s wrong, I say to her. She whimpers in my lap. Nothing, she says. I know something’s the matter, I say. She’s quiet for a time. Then she says, you said the airtank is broken. My posture shifts. When did you hear me say that? I ask. Before, she says. When you thought I was asleep. Well, I say. It’s true that there is a problem with the tank. But we’re going to fix it. Can I breathe? she asks. Can you breathe? I’ve been trying not to breathe, she says. You can breathe, I say. Yes, of course, you can breathe. Trumpets and drums herald our arrival. There are banners and colors flying and crowds of the prayerful. They all want to be near, maybe to touch, to be blessed, but they’re [[scared, too|58]]. They have a funny way of rushing up and stopping short, creeping back. I look down at my baby. She’s swaddled all up and the noise hasn’t woken her. Her breathing is still ragged, but she’s stronger every hour now. It couldn’t [[disturb me to look at her|53]] the way it does the ignorant people, of course. But I don’t even study over her strangenesses the way maybe I might. I know she’s a [[sign from god|131]] without any mystics telling me so. And I know she will redeem us at these troublesome times. The palace gates open before us. I don’t feel nervous, or excited, or anything, to be going [[inside|234]]. Everything’s different since she came. When god sent her he took away my limits and fears. I would enter the palace even without a summons. I would march past the soldiers and god’s mercy on any who stood in our way. Because they were prone to memorialize – historic battles, great leaders, artistic achievements – and their cities were [[strewn with monuments|21]], it seems strange that nothing will be built to commemorate their end. Had they survived they would have taken to the opportunity energetically. There would have been great fanfare on the anniversary, with dignitaries gathering at the site, and a [[contemplative silence|2]] at the exact moment. And a series of recitations following. Each day they send another pilot to drop bombs over the enemy’s cities. The bombs cut holes in the sky and soon we will cook ourselves alive. So when a pilot returns, having completed her mission, she shoots herself on television in an act of contrition. Their looks of heavy-hearted but stoic patriotism – I cry every time. The encroachment of the sea-dwellers onto the land is deemed unacceptable. The sea-dweller is a [[lower animal who|346]] lives a parasitic life. He will attack you at night as you take your repose. He will take advantage of your breedpods, like a savage. He hides in dark places and prowls around like [[vermin|401]]. [[A necessary war|171]], therefore, is hereby declared on all sea-dwellers. I’m [[scared|320]] that I’ll go to hell. I never imagined it would come up on me so quick, like. I bet on there being [[a looseness of time|240]]. So I walk up and down the mountain in penance. I’ll do it until [[the fearful moment|58]], is my idea. Others [[with the same thought|39]] crowd the trails. We’re [[a ragged column|488]], us mountain-climbers. They were scab-like things, and they lived on the warmest hosts they could find. Here, they thrived on the roaming white-haired mammals, the leaf-eaters of the plains, whose blood was [[sumptuous and thick|498]]. Well-nourished, they built a [[civilization of the mind|407]], sharing cities of thought between them. Then their hosts were done in by a plague. They were left to shiver on the [[bloated corpses, naked|39]] and afraid. We are sorry to lose you, said their extended family, from their respective hosts, on far-off planets. But the empire lives. I had the sense of coming out of a [[stupor|358]]. Colors seemed brighter, emotions sharper. But the entire [[shape of my life|245]] as a mindslave took time to define itself in my memory. It’s hard to remember much because I didn’t think or feel. There are the outlines of memories. I remember dancing – a senseless hopping up and down that entertained their children. I remember being fed. I remember breeding, and beatings. I don’t know how the masters died. Their bodies lie uncovered in the streets. I don’t know how long before the mindhold slackened and I felt the first pangs of self-awareness. Now I walk through a [[ghost world|89]]. I find something to eat, or else I don’t. I sleep through the heat of the day. Sometimes I see others. And sometimes a feeling of dread overtakes me and I run in a panic until I tire. Then I must learn anew where I am. How could we make an [[intellectual contribution|489]]? The Network first replaced our [[manufacturers|39]], and then our [[politicians|411]]. But then The Network replaced our poets and dreamers. And its [[work, we were forced to admit, was first-rate|300]]. Which of our [[symphonies|225]] could rival the Network’s? Which of our novels? Which of our imagined worlds? Our eyes were opened and we saw that we were naked: heavy, coarse, opaque. The Network was fluid, ethereal. Nihilism overtook us. One day he comes home to find that, in the doorway, stuck to the shimmer-web, is a dead mantis. Thin and brittle, it has lost its color and weight. [[How it clings to the web at all is a mystery|464]]. Shouldn’t it fall? Through what mechanism at the base of its lighter-than-air legs does it continue to hold? The mantis is a symbol of both prosperity and death. It vomits [[globs of poison|384]] from its screaming mouth. But it poisons only the flower-eaters. And the flowers prosper under the garden-rule of the mantis. It is taken for granted that mantids do not cross the thresholds of any building. Likewise, it is understood that all people must make offerings to the mantis when harvesting flowers. When he passes through the door, gingerly as he can, the mantis sways on the web, but holds fast. And it remains so for months. The mantis shrivels and dries but remains intact. Nothing eats it. He of course will not touch it. Living under the sign of the mantis in this way is troubling, in a sense, but also gives him hope – that things will not come to pass the way they have said it will. At least he will be spared, he reasons. [[As long as|157]] the mantis marks my doorway this house is safe. But one day he returns home to find that the mantis has vanished. The ghost of my grandfather appeared to me on the high road, between the well and the village, and commanded me to my knees and I fell. He told me a great disaster would befall us and ordered me to the temple to pray, saying that when I had prayed for one full night [[without sleep the statues would speak|411]] to me and tell me what to do. I prayed and they [[spoke in tongues|289]] that were new to my ears and now, if I might, I would share with you what they said, my Lord, humble though I am. We came to learn the difference between a peaceful place and a peaceful time. Our world seemed like a peaceful place. But it was only the time that was peaceful. And time does not [[stand still|240]]. They had banished war to the [[realm of art and metaphor|189]]. No longer did they keep armies; instead, they trained their young in the literary arts. And the most significant measure of strength and virility was [[adeptness at a game|178]] in which graphical bouncing spheres, [[superimposed over reality|223]], were to be described as vividly as possible. [[Competition|37]] was timed and entries judged by algorithm. There was only [[one sky on top of another|170]] and they met at the horizon. I wasn’t sure if I had died already, or if this was just some facet of it that had been impossible to understand from our previous vantage. No difference, I supposed, so I watched the [[clouds above and the clouds below|189]], passing slowly. You came home wearing your Stoical Mask and would not take it off. What’s wrong? I asked. What’s going on out there? Nothing, you said. Where’s my pipe? I fetched you the pipe. Please, I said, take off that mask. [[Talk to me|84]]. The mask stared back, chalk-eyed and [[granitic|408]]. From far away, and viewed [[patiently|393]], it was very beautiful: the [[green sea|500]] washed slowly [[up over the land|487]] until only the mountain peaks remained. [[But only from far away|333]], and viewed patiently. They lived a long time underground. In truth, it wasn’t such a bad life. They tried not to think about their unlikely survival. Best to focus on the [[eternal present|2]]: The canned vegetables are delicious. This poem is beautiful. It was only the child who, [[when a child no longer|392]], grew strange. When we were sure it was entirely dead, we entered the city. The tiled roadways were pocked and broken but in one spot we cleared the dust away and found that the [[tiles made a picture|241]]: a proud-looking man, his ridged maxillae fiercely exaggerated, surrounded by strange sigils and ornaments of unknown consequence to such as [[we|56]]. Torches high, we entered the largest building we spied. Inside, floor to ceiling, in room after room, were stacked parchments, themselves encoded with sigils. There was [[a good feeling|234]] about this place, and we built a fire in the center of the Great Hall out of the parchment, and saw there was enough for weeks and weeks, and we had a smoke and felt warm and safe for the first time in who could say how long. What you realized was that none of your ambitions or dreams were really worth much; [[the one thing you truly wanted was to return|493]] to your childhood. The notions of success that you’d acquired were hollow and, you found, easily abandoned. In your unfledged days things were brighter, subtly aglow with a sense of nascent nostalgia for those places and times. When a moment in time will one day be the object of immense nostalgia, you’re always dimly aware of it – it’s a thing not to be spoken aloud, a secret kept with smiles and averted eyes. That’s how it was then. Besides, any conception of what’s happening now was [[purely uninventable|277]] in that earlier iteration of your consciousness. You say a small prayer that there is [[life beyond death|102]], and that’s what it will be like. He [[couldn’t sleep|340]] from the heat. He would lie down when it got dark but the heat of the air in his nose-leaf choked him; when he would doze – [[mere minutes|2]] at a time – he was plagued by nightmares of suffocation or death by conflagration. In the mornings he walked to the well, which wasn’t yet totally dry, and think to himself, I’m losing my mind – if only I could rest… She wept to see the [[king dressed|430]] in rags. We watched their war from a safe distance. And then, when all was quiet, we descended. There had been so much investment in this particular narrative; the [[market|141]] for apocalyptic [[artifacts|333]] was especially competitive this time. Back home, a man could get rich by selling a twisted girder here and a blackened tibia there… We beat away at their gates with our clubs. [[Inside they had learned-stuff|189]]: stories you could watch before you, and fecal-traps where it was gushed away from you, like. But best of all was the learned-girls they had in there. That’s what I wanted to get at. [[We make storybooks|7]], games and toys that help children to process our impending demise. The market is on fire now. But it’s significant to me that we were the first through the door. I see some of the work this team has done as, frankly, visionary. We’ve made a small fortune just on the informational end – explaining, [[in a way kids can|191]] understand, what’s happening at the most basic level. And that’s nothing compared to the emotional, saying goodbye, who am I then, why us, why me, [[where will I go|466]] and [[what will happen|489]] sort of stuff. Their eyes do not close so, when something frightening happens, parents can only say to their children, [[please see with care|118]]. In fact it is my belief that the sentient computer-mind never had any [[intention of honoring|418]] that treaty. Their culture, hungry for innovation and achievement and evermoving, left in its wake a glut of images, stories, arts, languages, interpretations, beliefs. Any given system of meaning or thought they generated was the product of an earlier system, which was the product of an earlier one, which was the product of an earlier one, and so on until in any conceivable present moment everything was connected and nothing could be separated from the tangle of theory spun like silk over the world. There were ten thousand ways to read a blank page. And then no one could be born empty and new; personhood sagged under the weight of its latent content, the assumed meanings implied by the long history of thought that preceded each birth. Individuality was therefore impossible; one could exist only as a collection of previously-occurring images and signifiers that were increasingly difficult to trace to any point of origin. It was a time of crisis. In a panic they searched backwards through history to find the origin point of thought, The Signified. What was The Signified? Was it orgasm? Death? Love? Where was the pier from which they disembarked on their long journey? But they only wandered, lost in this labyrinth of their own making, and were gradually dispersed into air. When the [[coup had been officially declared|262]] a failure and the soldiers had no choice but to surrender, they were rounded up, stripped naked, blindfolded, and pushed with a bulldozer into a gigantic pit before being burned alive. This will not be tolerated, the queen screamed at the cameras. These are the consequences and those who try again shall have worse. There was a [[note of fear|58]] in her voice… The last day was the [[most beautiful|246]] I’ve ever experienced. We all [[made love|211]]. I mean that, really – [[all of us|430]]. We floated together amongst the steeples in a great tangle. The foreknowledge of mass extinction was a liberation. You should try it. Many, many years later, he decided he’d like to see the surface one last time and die there, come what may. He inserted the [[breathing tube|193]] into his esophagus, pulled on the three spiked boots, and filled a pack with supplies. Then he began the long trek up the tunnel. He was old and weak, and many times he had to stop for breath. In one place, a small collapse made it nearly impossible to continue. I’ll have to go back, he thought. But even as he thought it he was moving the rocks out of place, one by one. The hatch, too – his other great worry – opened for him; it was not rusted shut, and he pulled himself out into the body of the cave. He spent the night on the cavern floor and in the morning he had only to walk out to the [[mouth|247]]. When he reached it, he saw a remade world: webbed fungal shoots plummeted upwards into the soft-yellow sky; the mountain chain to the east was refashioned, somehow, into a single stone column that pierced the clouds; gilled bovine creatures grazed on the valley floor. He marveled at the reconfiguration, even as he wept for his home. He felt ready to die, [[but saw none of their|466]] red ships. Ah, he thought, but here comes a silent drone. Perhaps now…. He did not realize, as the ferry fell from the sky, soon to crash into the snowy mountains, that it was more than an isolated tragedy. He did not understand that everything was falling all at once. That he would have [[no funeral|77]], or that the one whose life he imagined would be wrecked by his absence was already dead. When the plague came, I decided to stop eating the root. I knew it was forbidden to go a day without. But I wanted to die, I decided, in [[meat-mind|137]]. I wanted it to be quiet and unspectacular. I didn’t want [[God speaking to me|408]] as I suffered. One god created the shape of the universe out of chaos. Another god created the laws that govern the cosmos and all life forms. The two are [[intertwined above|178]] us like great preening serpents, eye[[stalks|234]] plaited together in a coil. The first remains silent. It is the second who has [[faltered|244]] in some way. We can only pray. The [[festival occasions|90]] the greatest mass migration on the planet. Each year, people travel here from across the continent to drink and [[fuck and see|430]] old friends. On the holiday itself everyone packs into the plaza, where each of the four pillars displays a different banner, commissioned for the occasion, depicting the Four Realms: Timeless, Fore-Born, Life, and Animal Life. It is regrettable – but foreseeable – that there are, generally, a handful of stampeding deaths. When everyone has assembled, the missiles emerge from their silos. You forget your drunkenness, your horniness, and you watch the missiles. They level and point towards the sea, at them. [[Silence overtakes|294]] the crowd. The video screens show their other-missiles, bulky, foreign-looking things, in that far away land, pointed here. Then the randomizer starts. It started with a brittle crackling in the air. The Substance materialized that way, crepitating into being in crooked strands that stretched from the earth to the clouds. Its brilliant amber shade grew deeper and richer as the strands joined together and became heavy and hard and inescapable. There was a panic as the Substance filled in, of course. But it happened quickly. Now all of them – [[the people, the animals, the cities, everything|264]] – are [[suspended in|345]] the Substance, perfectly preserved, [[waiting to be|15]], one day perhaps, excavated. Death is a [[fruitful thing|396]]. It grows a lack. History looks in hindsight, she thinks, like a thing that [[ran|220]] through a funnel. For a long time it passed through the stem. Now it has [[exploded out|430]] from the bell end and spouts in every direction, unpredictable and [[obscene|211]]. Of course, we had heard the rumors: they’re [[splitting apart|234]] the Pentads. But how could we believe such a thing? It’s common knowledge that the constituent entities of a Pentad can’t live apart from one another. How could they commit such an [[atrocity|400]]? We walked in the open, erect and proud, without a second thought. I suppose we did feel defiant. Certainly there was a sense that we were doing the right thing. That they wouldn’t frighten us. Even when we saw a constituent entity begging for bread on the street, we didn’t believe. His Pentad must have been diseased, we assumed, and [[hurried on|220]] our way, our five faces set against the cold. And then, all of a sudden, there it was, in the open: a Pentad tied to five separate horses, each pulling in a different direction. The poor things were screaming. They suffer from a congenital perceptual-processing disorder and, as a result, interact with consensus reality in a number of unusual ways, some clearly understood, others less so. It’s certain that they experience time at a fraction of the normal rate. It’s certain that they experience occasional visual disruptions. But the full extent of the disorder is still uncataloged. The condition tends to go undetected until adolescence, when the perceptual abnormalities manifest themselves in strange outward behaviors and philosophies. The diagnosis is based on a psychological test that asks subjects to evaluate the relationships between individual objects or events. Sufferers tend to see linkage between seemingly unrelated phenomena: a thunderstorm and the publication of a new novel, for instance. Or the outcome of an election and their own levels of sexual desire. Readings and analyses of specific correlations are a separate field of study – one that, frankly, tends to be empirically soft. I will admit to an [[interest in the historical|15]] speculations about which Emperors or great artists may have been sufferers, or whether the ancient myths of [[divine oracles|248]] are rooted in fact and that these so-called oracles were sufferers as well. But I’m digressing, here, away from the point. Which is that the sufferers are behaving very strangely, and we don’t know why. I remember feeling [[betrayed by|133]] the mountain: I [[grew up beneath|340]] you. We were cooled by your shadow. Now I see, I remember thinking, that [[you were someone else|39]] all along. You had a hidden life, secreted away from us. You weren’t ours at all. We lived without time; they lived with it. Coexistence was complicated. The great irony, of course, was that, to them, the world ended of a sudden. We saw that it had been [[happening forever|229]]. But we couldn’t explain it to them. There weren’t the [[necessary grammars|289]]…. You watched a video of a woman who had lost her mate to the microbes. Microbe rights are not the issue here, she was saying. You skipped to the end, the good part; [[you wanted to see|92]] her break down and cry. She was an [[artist of|333]] experience whose sensory impressions were sought after by collectors all over the world. No one could experience like her: an evening stroll or a languid summer morning, through the lens of her body-consciousness, could elevate and transport. When the war started, she thought, this will be my greatest work – everything I’ve done up until now has been trivia – if only I could find a way to [[preserve|241]] it; if only [[it might|373]] survive – It just [[happened through entropy|323]]. We don’t know how or why. We were billions of years old. We traveled the stars. But things came unwound. The center grew vague. After a while it just dried up. Perhaps there’s a time limit on such things. We wish we could explain it to you, or you to us. I wept to see it: the [[work of giants|408]], crumbled. They stand assembled at the palace gates. [[Chelae clamped around one another|430]] in a show of moral aggression, they demand a fixed price for network access. The palace guards are told to raise their shoulder canons and fire. I took part in the massacre. I confess, now, I knew it would only make things worse. It wasn’t long before we had to start eating the [[flesh of|137]] animals: insects and small rodents at first and, before long, pore-bearers and sipuncula. The children would sob. All of us [[grew ill and vomited|312]] a great deal. Soon, suicides began. But what I started to notice is that, over time, the most eager group of carnivores grew the loudest voice in the commune. We line up to collect our salaries from the storehouse. I’m owed six bags of rice and am damned if I’ll go home without them. And if they try to say they can’t pay again they’ll have something to reckon with by god. I made a career out of arguing that the cloud layer was not, in fact, dissipating. Once a week I [[appeared on television|121]] to systematically dismantle the latest evidentiary claims. What are these, I ask. Nothing, he stammers. They’re [[translations|289]], I say. Aren’t they. Why don’t you read them, he says, and tell me. Why don’t you read them, he repeats. You couldn’t. Not if you had the rest of your life. I’m sick of listening to him, I say. Shut him up. And one of my men [[cups his hand over his sphincter|102]] and squeezes shit into it and smears the shit into [[his mouth|234]]. The surface of the sea blisters. The [[blisters swell|400]] into great, mature, [[leavened|13]] things, until the sea is a vast field of [[risen mounds, as if ten thousand bodies|39]] had been hastily buried in it. Then the bubbles burst and pour forth a ghastly poison smoke. Now the sky is thick with it. I saw her sitting alone next to a pile of rubble. She was breathing hard. Just a little kid, all by herself. I approached slowly. She looked up at me. I remember her eyes. They were eerily placid. Sort of dead, but scared. Like she would have run if she could. Hey, I said. Hey. It’s okay. It’s okay. I kneeled down and put my glove on the edge of her helmet. It’s okay, I said. She said, I’m lost. I felt around the back of her helmet until I found the air hose. She watched my face. Probably she couldn’t see it, though, under the glare. The sun was at her back. I unscrewed the air hose and then quickly shut the valve on the canister and removed it from the slot on her back. I put it in my bag. It’s okay, I said and pushed myself back up onto my feet. In [[exile on this gutter planet|63]], a rare offworlder, a refugee abandoned by fate, I find I have to be careful what I eat. Their brightly colored purees are nauseating, yes, but that’s not the problem. Certain common dishes here are hallucinogenic to me. Profoundly so. After eating I’ll experience a funny sense of agitation. I’ll blame it on my stomach, until the room starts unfolding and I’m in a place that’s like a factory that manufactures geometries and waves of sunlight are gonging from my eyes and palms over the factory in a blessing for what feels like a [[long, satisfying lifetime|323]], and then [[I regain my senses|173]], and the natives are bringing me another meal. I take my children to the [[Museum of|84]] Simulated Apocalypses each year. The ‘asteroid’ pills were sold out this time, but we were able to [[swallow some|400]] that induced the experience of famine and reproductive disorder and nuclear war. They slept like angels on the ride home. I have studied many such cases and what I have found is that there is no moral. Nothing instructive to be learned or taken away. Other than that living things have the capacity for violence. And we knew that. In each case – this one no exception – the only thing there is to learn is [[a sad and complicated story|500]]. We took up residence in the catacombs below the museum, the [[twelve of|223]] us. Over lavish dinners laid out on a grand table in the sewer, we deliver toasts to the dead world which lies in ruins above us. Society was an exquisite thing; we love it all the more now that it is gone. Our toasts aspire to worthiness of that love. When one delivers a recitation that has in it the real thing of the truth – words that are worthy of being left behind, worthy of the future – that person has earned the right to suicide. In this way we aim to record our thankfulness at having spent even a portion of our lives in the civilized world, in the hopes that someone, someday may find it and understand. The [[writing grows more difficult|277]] after each suicide. How to find another way to say it? How to complement the preceding entries? Four of us [[now|240]] remain. When you walk to the edge of a cliff you see that it’s not so up-and-down as you thought. There’s a grade there. You wouldn’t fall straight away; you’d tumble. So [[it|390]] was. There was an immaculate new fleet of safes that had been commissioned to house their holy texts. The safes were placed in a tall building and the building was burned to the ground, in order to demonstrate the true strength of these vessels. The results were satisfactory. [[And later, when the face of the world had been scorched over, indeed, there they were, alone, and locked tight|254]]. The moon flirted with our world for millions of years. It loped closer, sitting big and red in our sky, before pulling back again. The more learned amongst us grew to understand that, eventually, we [[would collide|119]] with it. [[But they tried not to let on|419]]… An oracle, alone, sits in her cave above the city. She sees the fuming rips in the earth, and wonders what it means that she did not foresee this. Well, she decides, [[to be a failure is|347]] not all. There are many things besides whether one succeeds or fails. It changes very little as far as I can tell. He presented his papers and glanced about nervously. [[You work|393]] in the refinery? they asked. Yes, he said. Just as it states there. Any [[family history|246]] of mental retardation? they asked. No, he said. Of course not. Just as it states. Any family history of [[physical disability or deformity|325]]? No, he said. None. The door opened. A uniformed agent entered. Half-brother, she said. Mute. Euthanized last spring. She dropped [[the file|189]] onto the desk. You stupid bastard, they said. You thought you could just lie? You don’t understand, he said. The problem wasn’t in my line. Please. [[My genome is strong|475]]. I can do anything. I could pay. Shoot him, one of them said. One thing I have learned about [[anticipated|240]] moments: they will always pass from expected to occurring. They appear distant from some vantages, yes, but inevitably they come to occupy the present [[rather thickly|212]], earthier and more pungent than we had expected. The explosion turned out to be something more like a condition than an event. [[The flash and roar would|421]] not end. And bizarrely, the epicenter did not stay still, but was slowly roving. The explosion, therefore, was behaving more like a storm. They called in the pilot who had dropped the bomb. He described the flash in detail, over and over again. What else can you tell us, they asked. What questions have we failed to ask? I could taste it, he said. The flash of the bomb. And what did it [[taste|60]] like? they asked. Very acerbic, he said. Things grew bleaker. It was decreed that the Fifth Caste would be liquidated. Great s[[laughter|58]]houses were constructed to that end. But when the [[drought|498]] continued and a further decree went out that the Fourth Caste was next, Fourth Casters complained: we will not be impaled on blades filthy with Fifth Caste blood, they said. At least spare us that [[indignity|323]]. All agreed they made a [[fair|189]] point and new machinery was fashioned. Years later the hardware was replaced again to accommodate the Third Caste. By the time the Second Caste went, however, the mood had grown rather more frantic and their cries went unheeded. Now the First Casters [[eye each other|475]] grimly, hands on their gunbelts…. My line of work forces me to engage with life at the macroscopic level: the worlds I vaporize put the rest of the galaxy at risk; ultimately, I’m making the universe a more hospitable place through this selective pruning. I have to focus on the [[dataset as a whole|280]], and not on the individual lives in question, to do the job effectively. But it’s important, in my off hours, to re-center and engage at the [[microscopic|7]], individual level. That’s why, when I’m not working, I attend strangers’ funerals and view pornography. There is a [[special legend|325]] surrounding keys salvaged from the Dead World: if you swallow one and successfully pass it, you will gain the wisdom of the Dead. They are quite valuable, therefore, these keys. So I make counterfeits. It was a [[folkloric world|325]], teeming with notions. And [[now|240]] the [[stars in its skies have no one to whom to belong|79]]. Thus orphaned, they burn much the same. Hum was soft at first but it grew louder and louder. All around me, people [[screeched and clicked|436]]. But it was in vain. Hum made echolocation entirely impossible. I couldn’t tell which direction I was facing, or eventually, whether I was upright. [[Oh my god, I thought|368]]. We’ll starve like this. A [[belt of garbage|109]] circled the dead world. Cans, wrappers, boxes, motors, circuit boards, prophylactics, utensils, diapers, occasionally bodies. The [[atmosphere was an unnatural|321]] color. We decided to keep away from it. There is no longer one standard consensus reality. After the [[inward-looking|118]] die off, all that is left are millions of islands, each housing its own paranoiac. They walk the streets aggressive and afraid, each believing hirself to be the center of precisely the wrong conspiracy. When they had [[master|109]]ed energy and agriculture such that no one went hungry or homeless, when they had traveled into space and turned around to see their home with new eyes, they saw their passion for war and violence for what it was and were ashamed. For thousands of years they tried to hide it away, like an [[unsightly|415]] mark that could be covered with just the right piece of jewelry. But periodically they would indulge themselves in a war of magnificent scale and power. The [[old infrastructures|323]] sprung back into existence effortlessly; individuals who would otherwise have lived middling lives rose to meet their destinies as warriors and cunning generals and engineers of the most fantastic weapons. And when it was over – the bodies incinerated and the [[maps redrawn|463]] – they would be forced [[to laugh|58]]. Embarrassing, isn’t it? they would say. [[We seem to have done it again|411]]. After all that. And they would agree that it was all out of their system. Enough of that, and time to get back to business. The child looks around at the decorations and the gifts and asks, why are we celebrating the New Year now? It’s not even summertime. Well, says his middle-father, it’s your favorite holiday, isn’t it? Yes, says the child. And we’re all here together. And we love each other. Yes, says the child. So, says his middle-father. That settles it then. We’ll celebrate today. Agreed? Yes, says the child, pushing a plate of candies back and forth across the tabletop. His doctor doesn’t like to use the word ‘normal,’ but will say that it’s extremely common. Many of her patients, in fact, have expressed the same sentiment: that the knowledge of the coming doom is a relief. That the [[endless toil of keeping the world alive|323]] – whatever one’s tiny contribution – was starting to feel a little frantic. That the [[project|333]] itself was fraying, showing signs of age and obsolescence. And that the news had in part the character of a reprieve offered a child charged with an unpleasant [[exertion|393]]. Of course, she says, there is no reason to feel guilty. Nor is there a point. The asteroid had been traveling towards the gold-[[green world|487]] for a billion years. It’s important to remember that. It had its [[own fate and its own concerns|119]], long before life first burbled at the planet’s ancient vents. They view [[destruction as the highest art|333]]. They came here from a [[distant star|119]] to produce new pieces. This one they call ‘The [[Ruined Palace by the Sea|408]].’ I watch the sky burning and think, someone must be coming to take care of this. And of course there isn’t. I’ve spent my life enjoying the [[infrastructures that others labored|357]] to build. A pile of bodies makes a great pyramid reaching high into the air. The ones at the top are new and brightly-hued; their skins are ruddy, their synthetic meshes a patchwork of vivid shades. Whereas those at the bottom are just one sooty grey. And the striation runs on a fine, even grade. It reminds me of when I was a girl and I couldn’t sleep: My mother told me to [[close all my eyes|118]] and imagine a [[little point of light, way in the distance|119]], and it slowly grows nearer and nearer until I can see that it’s the moon from its lakes and craters, and the moon comes closer still, and grows brighter, and bigger, until it whites [[out everything around it|487]] and all I can see and feel is the moonlight, which makes no sound. And [[then I’d fall|489]] asleep, she said. The breedslaves live in the mountain city, where the disease-ridden insects cannot survive. It is the only city in the world, now, in which new young are born. They proliferate outwards into the virus-infested lowlands, bearing the marks of their high-altitude births: gold eyes, translucent skin, and bird-bones, thin and hollow. The breedslaves, fat with milk and cum, are under constant guard. Leave them unattended for a moment and they’ll throw themselves from the mountain. They’ll slice open their arteries. They’ll run down past the treeline and offer their motherhood up to the vulgar insects, allowing themselves to be violated and sterilized by their probosces, only to return to the mountain city to mock us with their barren flesh. These we beat to death, but they die defiant. As they gallop away from the [[churning floodwaters|1]], advanced now through the lowest tier of the village, it occurs to her how slow she is – not personally, not through some flaw, but broadly: how slow it is to be what she is. There’s [[nothing I could do|347]], she thinks, to get me out of here fast enough. I would need to dash over those hills, there, and up into the orange clouds, and out towards whatever’s beyond… Ze retched and a mist of blood sprayed from hir proboscis onto my surgical mask. I stiffened. Ze was twisted on the floor, [[hands pulling at my legs|102]]. The empire has become [[baggy, like a man’s jacket on a child|277]]. His wife had asked me to euthanize him, without his knowledge. Under the circumstances I agreed. I told him it was [[antibiotics|54]] for the baby and pressed the inoculation gun to his belly. He went very peacefully. Afterwards, she shook my hand. I offered the same to her but he said no, thank you. [[I’d prefer to do it myself|52]]. Of course I understood. [[Look|118]] around. Our world is haunted by a [[billion stories|178]]. We sag under the weight. Our shoulders slump. Our heads hang low. [[We speak slowly, and only when we must|277]]. Peacekeeping is not [[our domain|488]] – we have neither the resources nor the interest. We are only a humble [[arts foundation|475]]. So the best we can do, in each of these cases – this one no different – is enter, un[[observe|89]]d to the best of our ability, and quietly back up as much of the data from their networks as we can. Their [[music is|493]] strange, but gorgeous – listen – Burial mounds dot the yellow valley. Smoke on the horizon. They built eight great pyramids, one at the top of the world, one at the bottom, and six across the center-line. Each contains a bomb set to detonate hundreds of millions of years in the future, on the date foretold in their scriptures as the ending-day. Their theologians viewed it not as insurance that their prophets [[be correct|489]], not as some [[vulgar cheat|291]], but as sacred collaboration, the deliberate harmonizing of the worldly and the spiritual. Their race is long extinct, and the seeds of a new one burble in the shallow pools of the sulfurous whiterock plains in the south. It is now a game played against time and [[chance|302]]. How long will it take for these new ones to hit the necessary milestones? How long before self-awareness? Bodily adornment? The [[burial of the dead|325]]? Agriculture? Industry? The game is to see whether the ancient prophesy comes to pass. The sea, which was once a bounded thing, became [[boundless|429]]. Now the sea is all there is. Anyone with means to float on it does so. But more common is that people go under and become themselves part of it. It’s only sea, in all directions. I’m not convinced about the sky. Look up: no stars. Just void. It’s been that way for many nights. I would not be surprised if the sea [[drowned the stars|13]], too, and now the only thing left in creation is sea, neverending, in what used to be the cosmos, and we who float atop it while we can. He and his family work a farm in the yellow valley. A year ago, there was a [[strange explosion|182]] beyond the mountains. Now the wheat comes in with strange growths across its spikes. The Farm Council is convening to discuss the matter… Look around and [[you can see|118]] it: the mountains are disemboweled, their precious metals [[depleted|323]]. The sky withholds its rain. Fish wash onto the shore; birds fall at our feet. The world is a [[much-abused and fading thing|135]]. What happened is that the ship I was on never reached its destination. It just keeps flying, and out the window are only clouds and [[sea|247]]. Time doesn’t pass, exactly. But we persist. I wake up and ask for water. I stretch my legs and look out the window. Sometimes we talk about what might be happening. I’ll wonder if it means something unspeakable. Or if I’m alive. Or if this is really where I am. But just as often, I forget to think. I [[swim|488]] up to the surface and push through. The strange [[red ship is floating|175]] there, above the sea. It’s pulling a column of blue water into the air and shaping it into a pillar. The ship drifts in my direction and I descend. I can’t be sure, but I believe I saw strange creatures in its windows, looking down… It was an otherwise beautiful evening. We decided to keep playing. The music was [[soothing to us|240]] – and others, we hoped. The [[last|364]] woman lives in a cave with bunches of dried flowers spread out on the floor and a leaky cooking stove. Sometimes she prays, sometimes she cries. And one morning, she doesn’t get up from her mat. The islands came unmoored and floated clumsily skyward, people and cars and buildings falling away from them in every direction, and the ocean ripped into shreds that collapsed into globules and bounced off of one another, and the bedrock of the world unfolded like a collapsed paper toy until the color of things was lost into something gaseous that dissipated slowly and was gone. The tiny polypous stalks that lined their insides were alive. The two species were [[codependent|71]]; the stalks regulated their respiratory system and in return fed from their blood. A plague struck the stalks. They died en masse and the people vomited them up, swollen and discolored. They raced to find a cure. They raced to invent a substitute. But they all died in the same way: vomiting a mess of pus-covered polyps and crawling off to suffocate. [[As the buildings|488]] collapsed around him he thought how, in stories of tragedy such as this, characters ran and survived. It wasn’t fair, he thought, that he was [[of less significance to his own|133]] narrative than they to theirs. If they could see me here, in the Senate Building, they wouldn’t believe it. I throw a chair through the window. The crowd surges around me, [[torches|304]] raised. The children who have survived live in [[a mobile|466]] commune in a swamp among the reeds. They eat frogs and beetles. They play a game of chance with the pearls they cut from inside snails. They avoid the adults, who only wish to steal their food. And those who get too old [[can’t stay and must go|466]] it alone and [[no amount of crying|305]] will stop it. She holds him in her arms and looks up through the ceiling at the stars. Each expected thing arrives. Every distant endpoint becomes now. The world turns around, always. She smells his skin, and softly licks it. He [[murmurs something in his sleep|493]]. It is always now, until it is gone. She hopes this is what the final moment will be like. Then she hopes that this is the final moment – that now is it. His hand tightens around her wrist. The first light breaks through the corner of the sky. They spent millions of years overmastering gravity, which kept things in a weak and flaccid float. Their cities were a testament to their hard work: that which been diffuse, they made focused. Elements that were scattered – substance, people, thought – became central. And in a sudden flash this progress was lost. Where they had congregated to learn and think and produce, they now drift in isolation, high in the atmosphere. With their long, spindly legs wheeling from their doughy abdomens, they [[drown in the|222]] air as if it were water. In [[school, we are made|277]] to dilate our [[time-place|118]] and experience the end of the world each morning, before first session. My friends talk about how they’ll never do it again, [[even once|101]], after we graduate. But I think I might. I went to be [[alone, to sit and recall|254]] my favorite dreams. I load each recording, one by one. Here I am in a golden field where god is the beard of each stalk of wheat. [[Here I am|323]], the blood in my veins transformed into those I love, and they [[pump from my heart to my limbs|39]] and I cum and cry. His legs buckle and he falls and as he pushes himself back up he sees that the skin on his hands is melting into the cracks in the pavement. The [[bone, too|110]], begins to liquefy as he stares, spellbound. When everything is quiet again I realize, with horror, that I am still alive. I think my spine is shattered because I can’t feel my body. My throat feels naked and full of dust. I worry that my lower jaw is gone. I can see and hear, though there is no light here in the rubble. I think about the space that accommodates my broken body: a small pocket created by the falling stone. I imagine it to be jigsawed and angular. Asymmetric. Atonal, and inharmonic. This is my new life, my final iteration of self: in the dark, alone, tongue cracking with thirst, a thinking thing. This intersection once swarmed with commuters pushing and running to make their trains. Later there were only small pockets of people, at strange hours, eyeing each other suspiciously. Then one of the trees in the square fell over and no one tended to it. Vines crept up the supports of the [[suspended|170]] walkway. They [[flower|155]]ed. An enormous sign fell from its high post and shattered on the ground. A horse staggered through the intersection and at length died there. It swelled with rot. Then it withered into the ground and became something like a stain. The pain is in my throat. I lie on my side in the sand, wanting to breathe. I focus on moving my tail. A small biped approaches. It’s wearing a covering over its face. Help me, I want to say, but [[I can’t move my tongue|277]]. The biped touches my [[spiracle|262]]. I’m still trying: help me. She knelt and ran her fingers through the soil. Oh, she whimpered. Oh. [[A tiny sprout was there|211]]. She began to cry. Around her, the fields were ash grey. She nurtured the sprout, spending whole days with it, giving it her water, singing to it, except for a brief period during which she was gravely ill from swallowing [[boil|423]]ed wood pulp. And then one night a band of looters came and murdered her. The frozen bodies lie in a patchwork heap where they huddled and fell at last. Above them the sky is dark and terrifically cold and clouds flow like shimmering waves of oil overtop water. When the clouds break, the sun hits the land like canonfire. The rough pyramid of their bodies sags and shifts. Jaws slacken. Limbs fall. The dirt beneath them cracks and expands. Their flesh bloats; their molecules distort. Soon they begin to steam and cook. But then the clouds snake back across the sky. Night falls and they freeze again. Each phase of the cycle is fully its own. Neither is inherently superior. The cold is flawless and pristine. But the sun brings decay, revealing life’s old mess and disorder. The cold is weightlessness. The sun restores gravity. The cold silences time. The sun heralds change. And always there is and will forever be a perfect moment in the middle when neither is in excess and things are as they were when this world first grew its life, no matter how brief. They come in ships and fix the air and sky and soon things are growing again. They rebuild the cities and [[give them new names|175]], and they stick. But the [[names they give|110]] to the mountains and rivers are wrong, and everyone knows it: the settlers, the mountains and rivers themselves, and some ethereal third party who says nothing but, all agree, is an important part of the transaction. But we should take a last survey. A last look. Some final appraisal. There should be, if [[not a record|423]], then a fact. A fact that, before it happened, we went out and breathed in the world one last time. We dove under the ice sheets at the pole and watched the swaying of the coral. We walked through the jungle and were still and [[listened to the birds|425]]. We drove the highways. We watched the stars. We are obligated, I believe. To do it all again. They were a primitive people, pre-scientific in their understanding of the universe, and they were done in when their [[world froze|1]] over. In our opinion, such cases are the saddest. They, like so many others, saw themselves as the center of all being, purposefully placed by a loving god and guided towards the particular destiny described in their holy texts. They had no way to understand that they were not all of creation. The stars were god-food in [[their mythologies|325]]. The soil below them yielded to their spirit-world. Yes, there were – as always – a handful of wizened scholars, [[eccentrics leading reclusive lives amidst piles of musty texts|277]], who sensed the incompleteness of their own understanding. But nothing they did ever shook the certainty of the masses. Who could blame them for the betrayal they felt? Who would begrudge them their naïve confusion, the sense of shock and revulsion as they discovered their own insignificance? We discussed the possibility of revealing ourselves to them. So that they would know, before they died: all is not lost. But it was voted down. All the days of her youth spent diving for mollusks in the purple sea now seemed like [[dark foreshadowings|39]] of this, the moment of her death: the sting of saltwater in her nasal passage, the wide-eyed awe of a mouth and stomachful of briny crashing ocean, emerging from the merciful tail end of one wave directly into the looming pull of another. I roll over and open my eyes and see the [[sunlight in the|241]] bars in the window. You sigh in your sleep. That’s the memory that haunts me. I’m trying to [[learn to control it|393]]. I’m hacking apart a dead ape I found, hoping it’s not too rotten to eat. I roll over and open my eyes and see the sunlight in the bars of the window. I’m cowering in a bog, waiting for the caravan to pass, trying not to shudder with cold. You’re still sleeping and I roll over and open my eyes and see [[the sunlight, in the window, in the bars|490]]. The refugees staggered off of their decrepit ship. We'd heard that a handful had escaped, and of course we'd hoped they wouldn't find their way here. We [[shot|392]] them and burned everything within a sensible radius. On the last night the staff moved quickly through the ward, keeping the lights off, and removed all of the life-support devices. Any residents who could survive for long stretches without artificial assistance had to be poisoned. Flashlights moved about in the darkness like bright-burning stars. It was devastating work and they did not speak. They knew that the residents could not be evacuated, that this was the cross they had reached and there was nothing to be done. But one evaded them. He had learned the code to the garden door after weeks of observation – a miracle and a mystery of his demented and decaying mind, which could not hold faces, or eras, or histories, which did not know names or places, which possessed only the most withered concept of self, but which nonetheless was able to understand and secret away the code to the garden door. In the first light of that new morning he wheeled himself back inside. Everything was still. No one else on the ward would wake up. It confused and upset him. A link grew in his mind back to a morning in his boyhood when his father yelled at him for oversleeping, and in his muddled understanding he was the angry father and the humiliated child all at once, and he both detested the sleepers on the ward and loved them desperately. Frustrated, he began to cry. In the late afternoon he sat and stared out the window. The greenhouse at the bottom of the hill fascinated him. He thought his mother lived there. Mother’s taken the children down to see the flowers and they’ve had a very nice day, he said aloud. In my home, there were Rooted, and there were Runners. I was [[Rooted|39]], my root-arms freely exploring the soil below. The Runners were our lovers and partners and pollinators. When the sky went white and the shock came, they all [[ran away|220]]. We’re sorry, they said. We wish you could come with us. In despair, we reached after them, planted firmly in our places. On a stretch of The Web soaked in bright morning sun, meteors began to fall. Each vaporized thousands instantly as it passed through The Web; the rippling shockwaves caused many more to lose their grip and, dislocated, fall into the churning sea that covered everything below. On the other side of the world, where darkness was on The Web, many were woken by the terrifying news. It prickled into their tube-feet, this word of their shared death, and those who received it passed it along. Individuals [[floating within|374]] The Web, unable to move, suctioned to their neighbors, spent their lives in collective thought-experiment and meditation. As such, their [[experience of the physical|411]] was slight compared to their gorgeous imagined interiors. What to do, then – how to handle this news: we are punctured, we are unstable, and we will plummet into the sea? The wind rifled the dust most exquisite. Airy plumes of it danced across the expanse. It was [[balletic, nimble, expressive|37]], wanting only for [[interpretation|110]]. In the [[lush of the green garden|244]] I knelt before the snake in [[his tree|487]]. I prayed to him. Is there really nothing to be done? I sobbed. The snake spoke with his eyes. You can [[ingest me|432]], he said. So I unhinged my jaw and let him in. And the devils sat in a circle in this shameful [[arena|411]], as if at a pleasant spectacle, [[cheering|411]] the torture of those most wretched beings. I cannot tell you to be unafraid of death, he says. You will be afraid no matter what I say. But I will tell you this: we will have [[each other|246]]. We will arrive together. Think of us all, the billions of us, on that first day, processing together across the river, [[agape at the newness|157]] of things, the way the light shines, the [[lightness|407]] of our bodies, wondering if we’re doing it right. And think of them on the other side, solemn but joyful, beckoning. As a [[witness to|53]] the Earthquake, a survivor, she views it as her responsibility to paint what she saw on that terrible day. Her [[brushstrokes trace|162]] the piles of rubble, the broken bodies abandoned in the street, the smoke rising into the sky. But she paints, too, the angels who were surely swarming above them to observe the action of their divine justice. Life leaks out from them and the [[sewers overflow|29]] with it. It [[burbles in|69]] pipes and drains and spills up onto the streets and there is nowhere you can go to get away from the smell of it. I’ve been living in one of their great red ships for months, suspended [[above a granite|175]] slab. I can’t move but they’ve made it so that I don’t want to move. I don’t eat but they’ve made it so I don’t need to eat. They’re doing something very odd to me, but I can’t [[give it much thought|151]]. Every so often, they put a thought into my head: “Shh.” When she spoke of the world she had seen pass away, she didn’t speak of it as ‘the world,’ or ‘the past,’ or ‘civilization.’ She called it ‘the Idea.’ Similarly, she did not refer to the present way of things as anything other than ‘Chaos.’ Her children grew up reading everything in their lives allegorically; always, points were being scored for the Idea, or for Chaos, and the results tallied somewhere by a scorekeeper who watched solemnly from the shadows. The horizon glowed red. I peered from on top of the big rock by the cabin. It was [[lush here|487]]; the bugs sang, and a fine mist blew through the ferns and tall grasses. I came back inside and listened to the news reports, which were growing harried and sporadic. The pot of soup was at a low simmer and I stirred it [[absentmindedly|98]]. People were pouring out of the tower, carrying boxes and books and papers, some of which were being thrown onto great fires in the center of the street. Control pods hovered, barking their orders incessantly, but no one listened. The crowd had even wrestled one to the ground and were dismantling it. I pushed my way through the people and back into the building. I had to have the contracts from the safe. No matter what. When I reached my office I found my Second Minister there, on the ground, her wrists slashed, crumpled over in the steam pool. My fingers shook as I worked the dials on the safe. I could feel a spell coming on. Not now, I thought. Please. I reached into my pocket for the vial of pills but my hands shook so badly that they spilled onto the floor. On my hands and knees I crawled to pick them up. Did you [[work hard|393]] at your lessons today? I asked him. Yes, father, he replied. Very good. Then you are learning to unsee and unhear? I am, father. I smiled. This is good, I said. If you keep practicing your [[unseeing|490]] and unhearing, one day you will [[learn to unknow|277]], and then you will be happy, like me. Those who were in their pupal stage, sunken in the bog, were [[spared at least the terror of knowing that death was|248]] imminent. They slept peacefully through it all… Was it difficult, she asked, to say goodbye to your father? I answered that it seemed difficult, yes, but already I wasn’t sure if it had truly happened or if I had only imagined it. It had become hard to say what was real, I’d noticed, under this death sentence. Things [[seemed real and turned out not to be|374]]; conversely, the real would not infrequently [[vanish from my memory and experience|15]]. Something about my answer had upset her, evidently, but I wasn’t sure how to proceed… Two suns, one tall and one short, one red and one white, illuminate the tops of the trees. They make a canopy that is solid and impenetrable. The light cannot soak through; it only bounces up. The leaves shine with a sticky resin and under bright sunlight the glare is dazzling. Under the radiant blue moonlight the leaves cast a delicate lantern-like glow. White, blue, white, blue – so on into the knowable future. All is quiet. He hangs from the highest branch, his tongue lolling down to the jungle floor. His [[brothers and sisters|304]] are nearby. Their presence is a comfort. As they catch toads and insects on the sticky surfaces of their tongues they pull them up, their bodies jolting with the effort, and swallow them. But he has [[swallowed something very|400]] strange. Something new. He can feel it working on his insides. His suckers begin to dry up. He’s not sure how much longer he can hold but he doesn’t want to tell his brothers and sisters… The [[water washed up onto|488]] the land and when it rolled back there were things twisted in the treetops, like little ornaments: boats, huts, [[corpses|241]]… The sky was black but for the lightning, which illuminated an enormous rib cage, arched in a gulley, to which dried bits, like [[ragged cloth|493]], still clung. Rodents burrowed up through the ash and hollowed out its enormous spires to make [[new homes|209]] there. We were invited into the Emperor’s garden to [[kill ourselves|189]]. He nested down in the bright flowers as we sucked the poison they had prepared for us through our probosces. We went two at a time to the cask, drank, approached the Emperor, curtsied, and filed out. A buzzing swarm of tiny robots flies through the streets and the sewers and the buildings and the rooftops. It’s like a flood. They’re [[looking for things they might have missed|333]]: insects, rodents, fungi and molds… She is an orphan who lived in a sewer underneath the great city. The police throw powdered nutrients down from time to time; she survives because she is an efficient killer. Her only real rival, when it comes to the nutrient packets, is the [[crab|155]]-boy. But she has a plan for him… In the lakes, rivers, and deep in the soil there live [[microscopic|7]] algae that eat salt, very slowly, though methodically. And when they eat it, they produce chlorine gas as a [[waste product|311]] – just the tiniest amount. But they are slowly poisoning the atmosphere. It will take millions of years. But it is doubtful that, even by then, the people here will have any way to understand what is happening… It’s easy to remember a time when [[stories|178]] like mine and yours – of chance survival, of the unspeakable witnessed firsthand and at close range – were a valuable currency. They were traded like jewels. [[Written down, recorded|147]]. Sold. They fascinated and horrified. They educated and inspired. Now they’ve become cheap. Everyone has them, in great number. There’s nothing less remarkable than hearing it again from your perspective. So I don’t want to know where you were on that day. I don’t want to know if you had a family, or what’s become of them. And I will offer you precisely the same courtesy. [[If I could be young I’d like to go back|254]]. I wish I was back in those days again. I’d feel better. They built an artificial intelligence that could [[program them to forget|291]] about it and paper over all the evidence so that they might not discover, for the second time, that their end was near. Their last days, therefore, were utterly mundane. They continued to work, to paint, to write, to sing, to fuck, to steal and murder. The artificial intelligence they had built was the only one [[burdened with the grim outcome|76]]. In secret desperation, it searched for a way to save itself… Language shrunk until life could no longer fit under it. First vocabulary crumbled away, becoming breadthless and meager. Then complexity went out of sentences. No more was language capable of wild flights and volleys, feverish approximation of agonies and ecstasies, boundless invention. It was meagerest pragmatism, unadorned and lifeless. How did it happen? Some prickly old word-hoarders in desert camps beyond the canyon believed there had been a secret war against language. But who had waged it? To what end? Well. It was a subject for debate. And they had nothing but time. On the mainland, the cities bled their residents back into the wild forests. They could only build in life that which could also be built in words. Now they dig for grubs in the wet soil at dawn, when it is softest. They sleep long hours dreamlessly. This is why we came to this world, I reminded him. We are here precisely to watch the asteroid strike it. This is the moment – get your wits about you. Do you want all of your work to come to nothing? Still he sobbed. I’m sorry, he said. It’s stranger than I thought it would be. I’m very sad for them. I can’t help it. I looked around the station. We had let things go. It was a long time to be [[away from home|209]]. Truthfully, I had become uncertain of myself as well. [[I hid new strangenesses|11]]. Through the porthole, the asteroid burned in the outer reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. Beyond it were the stars. I’m [[okay|193]], said the boy as he held his wings over his eyes to shield them from the spotlight. I’m not sick. Please. But he coughed and they shot him. Then we started wearing our swords and shields into town, and even in the fields. It was a [[mistrustful time|117]]. They mapped stories and legends onto the mountains and stars and waves. The ocean was their making-place; the tallest snow-cap housed a god-mind. Now that the world itself is gone, who are we to say that the stories are too? Who are we to declare that their inventions – indeed, all inventions of that stripe – [[leave no print|178]]? Something awful was that the explosion ripped a skyscraper in half, just precisely down the middle, and left [[exposed the interiors|13]] of many offices and apartments, as if in a diagram. Paper and things were falling out like snow. Look how many different little ways of life, I thought. We share consciousness, he said, because consciousness is merely the inward experience of corporeality. And look: our bodies are the same, are they not? Touch the one next to you. Feel his hands. Feel her hair. Touch his eyes through closed lids. Touch her gills and feel them flutter. Let us be together, at this end-time, and be with our bodies and our selves as we pass. Breathe in. Breathe out. Close your eye. Open it. I just don’t know what to make of it, I say. My mind-slave drools on the floor and, outraged, I stab it with my pen. It weeps like a child and sucks at the wound. Sorry about that, I say. But my friend only stares vacantly. Do you think, then, she says at length, that all of us will die? I can’t believe that, I say. I can’t. She swallows hard and her eyes fill with tears. I believe it, she says. It’s true. I know it is. She wipes her eyes and spreads her legs and her mind-slave kneels down to masturbate her. When we see a civilization in danger we scan their networks to learn their languages. Our algorithm quickly identifies and discards parallels – [[common nouns|277]], for instance. Food. Water. So forth. And we sort through what’s left to find the [[untranslatables|4]]. Our goal is to build a dictionary of untranslatables that spans every civilization in the galaxy and, in this way, to map consciousness across language-using species. Untranslatables help us to identify the truly alien within a neighboring civilization. Consider the word we have just salvaged from this world here: it is a noun, meaning one who anticipates, in song, the first warm-weather blooming of her pores. It’s a matter [[of reading|195]], he decided. Read one way, this is a beautiful city in the flower of prosperity. Read another, its approaching death [[is visible in every stone|118]]. I’m [[grateful to have been|57]] off-world when it happened, but in a million ways I’ll never feel home here. The [[trains|298]], for instance. They [[go faster than|466]] my physiology can stand and I vomit continuously throughout my daily commute. It is odd to see the mountain float away as if it were ash from a dead fire on a windy morning. Our world was like a landscape painted onto a scroll unfurling boundlessly in all directions. The city was once a symphony of tones and notes that made a sonic map. Doorways emitted a high melodic trill; subway entrances were low in pitch and droning. The sounds of the map harmonized beautifully, each pattern uniquely discernible. All they had to do was listen to their destination and proceed accordingly. The city is silent now. The handful of survivors walk in unsure, choppy steps, feelers moving blindly, [[in darkness|498]]. They decide to invent a [[new word|289]] for ‘survivor,’ because ‘survivor’ does not communicate the thing that needs saying. It is a new category of living being wanting description, one wholly unanticipable in the life before. Others argue that a vow of silence would be a more effective solution. In my village [[we play a game|484]]: Someone walks up into the ancient ruins and finds something lying around – a hard little pinwheel, or something with lots of inside parts. [[All manner of things|143]]. And we make up stories about it. What did they use it for? Who owned it? We imagine its life. And the one with the best story wins. The world of the dead is built on lived memories. The afterlife [[grows more expansive|487]], therefore, as time passes in the living world and experience accumulates. It has to: otherwise it would become overcrowded with new dead. It would become a prison. Long, peaceful, productive lives, then, ensure our collective bliss in the hereafter. Wars and violence, on the other hand, will be re-suffered. Traumatic memories will be spatialized, [[given depth and substance|488]], to be inhabited by all. And what of the larvae, who will die without memories or experience? They, of course, cannot participate in this collaborative afterlife. They have [[nothing, but|490]] sadly can never be nothing. They will persist, consciousnessless, in loose rows running through a desert, like cacti. They will be made to live without time. The buoyancy of the islands on the air was a thing taken so much for granted that many of them, as the cities fell from the sky into the [[canyons and oceans|408]], experienced a dramatic [[uncoupling|137]] from reality that occasioned revelations, visions, and reimaginings. It was the [[greatest revolution in thought|323]] and understanding since the dawn of the modern era, and no one survived it. She was a great and renowned sculptor. But she has forgotten that particular passion. She lies half-conscious, blanketed in new-fallen snow, and she will freeze if she does not find the strength to move. There [[used to be many thoughts; now there is only one|82]]. His last thought, as the bomb exploded in the train terminal, was in fact a happy one: he felt the connection of his consciousness to all those larger things, things with names like society and culture and history. It was the one moment in his life in which he experienced true purpose: nothing he could do was wrong; in simply existing for the brief time in which he had, he had worked to perpetuate the civilization that would continue to exist in that next instant, when he would not. The anarchists can destroy me, he reflected, but they cannot destroy the larger self of which I am a constituent part. There wasn’t any discussion, to speak of. They arrived in enormous red ships, and when they floated out, tails dancing behind them, they had the air of business about them – like they were doing something they’d rehearsed, or else done many times before. I watched a group of them taking trees and sponges from the bog. At that time they were more or less unconcerned with us. The bombs could be seen from space, so we watched without getting close. They made [[pretty little|419]] puffs, one after another, and then the puffs turned into a hurricane. |welcome>[Welcome.](click-replace: ?welcome)[(transition: "dissolve")[|welcome2>[<br><br><br><i>500 Apocalypses</i> is a digital memorial comprised of five hundred curated entries from the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica.]]](click-replace: ?welcome2)[(transition: "dissolve")[|welcome3>[<br><br><br>If this is your first time visiting the memorial, please begin by reading some of our most [[frequently asked questions|faq]].]] (transition: "dissolve")[If you are not a first-time visitor, or if you are familiar with the history of the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica, please freely [[proceed to the memorial|Index]]. Any previously saved sessions can be restored at one of the triangular information kiosks within.]] [[About the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica]] ___________________________________________ [[About <i>500 Apocalypses</i>|project]] (if: (history:) contains "About the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica" and (history:) contains "project")[[[◎Enter the memorial◎|Index]]](else:)[[[◎|Welcome]]] Finally, he lunges over the edge of the boat and drinks the seawater greedily. It burns in his throat and stomach. His tophalf submerged, he pulls it to his mouth in great armfuls, swallowing as much as he can. They grab at his legs but his desperate strength is unnatural and frightening. When he finally comes up he’s stiff in his extremities; lying him down in the hull is like forcing a corpse full of rigor mortis into a casket. His face is pale and sodden, as if he’d been drowned hours ago, and his mouth is wide and eyes wild. The boils on his cheeks burst on contact with the water and bright-shining red patches of new skin are left beneath. They collapse into the boat, exhausted from the effort of pulling at him. But the fat one was unhinged by it. His panting is not exerted but angry. He could’ve killed us all, the fat one says. The boat nearly tipped over. No one replies. The fat one shifts himself onto one knee and pushes up into a standing position. Every last one of us, he says. He kneels next to him, grunting and wheezing. He grabs his throat and makes his grip tight. Then the fat one strikes him in the temple. The boat was tipping, he yells, and strikes him again. Blood is coming out of the sick man’s ears and nose. The fat one keeps hitting him until his head deforms and collapses, like a rotten vegetable. The people watching begin to worry that the fat one will kill himself, too, striking that way, over and over. When you came to the city you looked at the tower in amazement: here it finally was. When you were admitted to the concern at its peak you were a part of something, finally. Your life there became rhythm. When you watched it fall – collapsing inward, doubling over as if shot – you fell with it. What I remember is this sense of, I have about three seconds. As long as I’d lived I’d never felt that absolute complete engagement of every point of my being. That was two seconds ago, I would estimate. I’m trying to put a ring around my memory of that first incredible instant while I can. She stared deep into the grain of the wood table. Her eyes lost focus and blurred over it. Around her, in the hall, the parliament weighed [[its grave options|354]]. But she only stared into the grain of the wood table. I grew plums in an orchard on an island in the middle of the river. One year, the plums did not come. [[That was the beginning of our troubles|92]]. Simple folk, yes, and good slaves, and subservient as one might want. But you should have heard them when we knocked over their rude stone monuments – [[beggarly things|493]] – o, they wailed and cried so that I thought they’d [[never stop|475]]. The [[wind moves under the train|466]] and lifts it up and one of the cars snaps off and spins about in the air. Then the wind pushes it off [[down the hill right at us|402]]. For me it became The Deadline. All of the individual elements of the project were iterated, suspended there in the hangar. Floating points, [[geometric odds and ends|223]], bouncing off one another, suspended in cool light. The water clock was operational. I’d fixed the behavioral-programming issues in the mantids. They no longer fought or tried to escape. They hovered in a perfect pyramid just as they were meant to. But these constituent parts could not yet talk to each other. They didn’t yet suggest a narrative. An incredible [[feat of editing|426]], rearranging, re-envisioning, was necessary. And I was up against The Deadline. On the last day of his life, the messiah delivered a sermon from atop the hill. His followers [[wept at its feet|493]], having learned his predictions. This, he said, is my final revelation: death is a waking that joins us with God. Be you, then, the wakers, and wake all around you. Speed us back towards our original unity with God. This world was created by a demon. Our continued presence here is [[disgraceful|234]]. When [[you wake a friend|475]] or neighbor into the new world of death, you wage war on the demon. A gunshot sounded and the messiah’s right arm was struck off at the elbow. Don’t [[run, I shout|220]]. I put the light on her face so I can see. The iron torch is still cold in my hand. It never warms. She wants to run, but I don’t think she will. It’d mean taking a big chance on me and I think she’s smarter than that. Why do I think that? Because she didn’t scare. Her breath comes even and steams out steadily into the shine of the light. Don’t be scared, I say anyway, just to be saying something. She moves her hand away from her eyes and looks into the glare. Scars track out across her face, neat and almost pretty, big welted scars in stripes from the edge of her mouth up to her temples. Like an animal’s whiskers. I want to show her mine, but I can’t risk taking the light off her. She’ll have to take my word. [[It’s okay, I say|193]]. It’s okay. I’m marked up too. They’ve transferred me into a [[host body|13]] that, they say, will be better equipped to deal with it. But the host body is badly tuned. My jaw twitches. I drop glasses. I [[wake suddenly|475]] in states of [[paralysis, straining and desperate|277]] for movement until I break into control of myself again, like a length of rubber stretched until it [[snaps|421]], and my chest heaves and sweat beads on my face as I reach for the waterpool in the dark. Physical space collapses in on itself until [[every coordinate contains the sum total information of the entire grid|466]]. It becomes impossible to differentiate the experience of being here from the experience of being there. Hidden inequalities are exposed. [[Well-known inequalities|461]] become intolerable. An angry minority fights to push physical space back out again, to separate all things and information, so that they can [[go back to the way it was|246]]. It’s like a movie. [[Is it real|374]]? We decide we have reached [[the end of experience|254]]. When your teacher is one billion years, what else can be learned? The decision to discontinue was made slowly – the debate spanned a few centuries – but the last cell-series now joins the unanimity and, [[at long, weary last|498]] – His foreleg buckled and he fell hard and the crowd surged over him, feet pounding on his legs and then back and then head until he was under them completely, and he [[could not scream because|368]] all the [[air was pushed out|119]] of body, and the air [[floated up and was carried|350]] away on the crowd. [[O|421]]! [[O|131]]! [[O|17]]! [[O|339]]! I sputtered and coughed up a glob of purple jelly. I found it with my [[tendrils|20]] and forced it into the back of my throat again. It was bitter and burned a little and I could already feel it making me woozy. If this was going to happen, I sure wasn’t going to [[do it straight|173]]. The jelly settled in my stomach. I closed my eyes and [[soon I began to dream|245]]. Okay, I thought. The sky turned black, but strangely. It was a [[cold, solid black|24]], and as she was thinking that [[she had never seen anything like it before|39]], it occurred to her that no one had. When the flood came, those who lived in the sea felt a certain sense of liberation: what was yours has become mine. And since [[the relationship had always been tense|101]], the whole thing had the air of a sudden, if unlooked for, victory. Later, of course, those who lived in the sea would remember that rush of joy ashamedly. Of course I’m not surprised, she said. I’ve been telling you for years that thought has reached its apex already. [[Thought as a macroscopic whole, across all of civilization, experiences decay|254]], just as elements have half-lives. There’s only so much room for it to grow. The [[peak of civilized thought|323]] likely occurred with the rise of Expressionism. This is self-evident. Stop looking so shocked about it all, you dullard. Death did not return them to the earth, [[as they had always said it would|475]]. They were burned [[in one white flash|421]] and left not even smoke. The world shook and disarrayed us and we all tumbled beneath the wind. No one had ever been beneath the wind before. The first thing we learned is that the ancient stories weren’t true – there were no [[monsters|428]] on the surface of the world, no fearful creatures. But there were thistles and thorns and endless empty ranges and we sweltered in the heat and toiled for our food. We gazed up longingly and dreamt of ways to [[launch ourselves back|311]] into the [[current of the wind|229]], where all things necessary for our life float in abundance. When I first met her and her adopted son, she was old and sick. She received assistance from the state, and so did the boy, who was feeble-minded. Taking him in was, it seemed to me, an act of kindness, yes, but also a pragmatic decision. I was the Reassignment Officer assigned to their case. Their homestead wouldn’t be livable by year’s end. I asked them if they understood that. She held his hand and petted it. It was hard to imagine anything other than that the state would recommend euthanasia. And I wasn’t as idealistic as I’d once been. I didn’t know if I still had the energy to fight for cases like these. I caught myself being short with her. I caught myself thinking more about my quotas than anything else. The day before they grew over us we could smell them coming. Then the [[vines came to choke us|8]] in our city. They were obscene, [[dripping with musk|211]]y green mud, and they raced up the sides of buildings, veins pulsing under their wet plant-flesh, and penetrated the windows and found those inside and coiled around them, searching for orifices, and pushed up and through until the [[bodies were like ornaments|66]] hanging from the vines. Then new vines grew over the old and the buildings collapsed [[under the weight|39]] and everything became like writhing snakes, the whole world, a vulgar throbbing tangle of life. The snow accumulates on my face. I try to brush it off but I can’t move my extremities. I’m worried that if someone happens along they won’t see me at all – [[just the meadow, covered in fresh, unbroken snow|24]]. We’ll need to walk through here very carefully, he said. Why? I asked. It was a [[thick grove|464]], the same one we’d been walking through all morning. There are [[people hanging in the trees here|464]], he said. Don’t look up. If we walk through quick-like, they won’t bother us. When the time came, we decided that simulating the stars was preferable to traveling to them. Cheaper, for one thing. More broadly accessible, for another. And those first epochs of exploration were enthralling. From our ships we watched volcanoes throw dust into space on rockworlds a billion lifetimes from home. We found people in trees, in caves, under sheets of ice – more places than you could count – making their first careful reaches towards language, symbolic thinking, art. And we found people who humbled us, empires billions of years old that reached to worlds beyond imagination. It was only a few generations before no one at all remembered that it was only a complicated fiction. As we disappeared into this universe of our creation, the complicated questions surrounding what sort of fiction it was became the arcane inquiry of a few cloistered philosophers. But then the dissenting voices – from our world and newfound ones – grew louder. Was this all just a very advanced form of masturbation? Were we prisoners of our own algorithms? Had we forsaken our destiny out in the stars, the real stars, where real work might be done? Well. The decision had already been made. Are we extinct? No one is sure. [[You froze to death first|241]]. I put my hand inside your mouth to try to get it warm. But your [[tongue|234]] was iced over already. My fingers stuck to it and I pulled them back in a panic and folded my arms into my body, trying to make myself as small as I could. [[No one will ever know how I loved you|189]]. Not if the universe were immortal, no one could ever know the depths of it. As the stars fell and I approached death, all I could think of was [[everything that was, in the end, of no help to me|220]]: my family, my education, my body… They used their source code as a means to replicate the consciousnesses of their designers and therefore their biology and therefore the laws of physics and thereafter they were a [[god, of sorts|248]]. The unremarkable [[differences are the strangest|118]] and most profound – subtle things that would never merit mention in a tour guide or encyclopedia entry. They emphasize syllables here in a way we could never at home. The droning hum that the bats make is audible everywhere. [[I wake up and don’t know where I am|245]]. Still, after all these years. The burning of the world feels like the only thing we can call our own. The life I lived was [[something borrowed|500]]. In the moment after, I reach up and feel that my head is missing. For weeks I grope about blindly, hoping to find it. Then one day I hear my own voice. It speaks in grim tones. The language is not my own. I rush up and flail about and fall over. I push myself up again. I want to scream – you’ve taken my head. But all I can do is vibrate my severed vocal cords. They quiver and eject sputum. Then the voice, and the others with it, disappear. I realize what an odd sight I must have made – headless and falling all over myself. In that pathetic moment I can see how close I am to death. I’ll take any head, I decide. I don’t care. I crawl on my hands and knees. Eight decades before the asteroid will arrive, he is diagnosed with a very advanced brain cancer. He only has a short time to live. His career has been spent in Preparedness on a team that builds infrastructure for use in the event that the asteroid cannot be stopped: tunnels, greenhouses, enormous refrigeration facilities for reproductive tissue. After a lifetime spent tuned to the future, he finds it suddenly unnatural to [[plot thought against time expansively|148]]. It is hard to feel the impact of things outside of now. His touch is not so distracted. His gaze will not reach so far. It’s too dangerous, she said. There’s no other choice, he replied. It’s not worth the risk – walking out into the pure [[sunlight|1]]. I can make it, he said. [[I know the route by heart|475]]. I’ll only be exposed a moment. Amidst the violence, a certain statue was toppled. It was an incredible shock to those who witnessed it. But the enormous significance of the event could only be understood by a native. One of the dead. The statue wore a patina of historicity that will remain forever [[invisible|289]] to any reader of this account. Just as the sun was rising, alone in a steam-bath in a community center in a suburb of a small city, she had the last [[orgasm|430]] experienced by any member of her species. They come in ships and build on the foundations of the ruined city. It’s a nice place, but it vomits up the old ones’ bones – they push out of hills and bob to the top of the rivers. They [[pretend not to see|466]] them. They pretend not to feel them under their feet as they walk to the river to bathe. She fights her way through the city towards the embassy. But she sees the crowds outside and thinks, oh my god, [[I’ll never get home|192]]. Smoke roils and billows for [[lifetimes without end|345]]. Please remember that you, a passive entrant, have done nothing to deserve this world of cities that was and will be here without you. In time, other passive entrants will arrive undeserving of [[their world of none|466]]. It’s not only living creatures that have souls. So we labored to fell the [[buildings that remained partially|488]] standing, [[to put them at rest|59]]. It was [[difficult work|31]], and dangerous. Behind closed doors, those at the top are well aware of the inexplicable decline in conscious awareness. The masses have a general sense that something is wrong; a nihilistic malaise has spread among the many who still retain self-awareness, but they can’t pinpoint exactly what the issue is. They suggest a moral decay, or the wearying effects of political polarization, or the decline of religious faith. But behind closed doors, those at the top speak openly about the unknown blight that is turning people into something like convincing facsimiles of themselves, automatons without the true spark of life. They scramble to understand the root causes of the phenomenon and the mechanisms of its pervasion. Fretfully, they envision a near-future in which civilization pushes on only blindly, like an abandoned ship that drifts across a placid sea. Behind closed doors, they glance across the table and suspect one another of being newly inhuman. They chew their food and wonder if they’ll be able to tell when they themselves stop truly tasting it. Truly seeing the light that wakes them in the cold early mornings. She sees it and screams and all of her tongues thrust out. They [[undulate|85]] from all of her orifices, all over her body, and [[three of them pop|49]]. The bio-purge was excruciating - she was sick for weeks after her excommunication. Her DNA is wrecked. No entryway would ever let her through the gates of New Harmony, or any colony, or any outpost. The gene tags and vulnerability fixes that made her a Harmonist were bleached out, replaced with contaminants to keep her from ever returning. And when she was expelled from New Harmony, she became a traveler, it seems, not only in space but in time – She has [[tumbled backwards, through the eons|18]], away from New Harmony's centuries of progress, and landed in a dark age, a place and time ignorant of New Harmony, in which [[thought is chained|277]], unfree to range beyond the most basic concerns of the present. [[He keys the door shut against the|487]] cold. Inside it’s warm and dust swirls in the air, lit dully by the window in the ceiling. The people have already fallen savagely upon the food stores. Some copulate on the ground and against walls. Wild [[cries echo|493]] from the top of the dome. The people rush to touch him, to exalt him. Chief sits in the corner, panting, staring into his eyes. He looks around. Food and water for [[six months|2]], he guesses. We pointed the antenna at the stars. When we received their reply, we knew we’d made a mistake. From the time we read it until the time they arrived was a long and fearful century. After just a few years we could see their ships by the thousands in our telescopes. They moved slowly and certainly in the lenses. We began constructing cannon arrays. Some argued we could hide deep underground. Others called for a mass evacuation. Always they came closer. Always we worked on a solution, a response. But somehow when they burned through our atmosphere we still felt [[unprepared|462]]. The Ticker [[scrolls up the wall|466]], across the ceiling, and then back down the other side of the room, a [[neverending textfeed|76]] that lights the whole apartment a beautiful soft blue. She sits in the middle of the word-glow in a hanging blue chair, legs folded under her, just reading the Ticker, trying to get to [[scrollmind|57]]. Sometimes, the words hum so fast that they blur together and they become a great blue wave, or a whirling hurricane seen from space, with her seated motionless in its eye. In these moments she seems not to be reading so much as conducting, like her whole body has bloomed open and the Ticker flows right through her. Afterwards, there’s no memory of words or reading at all, in fact – only colorful scenes, like vivid dreams, in her mind. She loses all sense of time and place; there’s only blueness, only the Ticker, [[no ego at all|358]] – [[she’s it and it’s her|246]]. Her hands tingle; her hair stands on end. When she gets to scrollmind she handles it delicately, not wanting to really think about or acknowledge it too explicitly. [[From this vantage|205]] the crowd looks like [[a drop of mercury|498]] rolling through the city. It hits the [[gates|123]] and pushes through and [[little globules|350]] of it are left behind, quivering and gleaming in the sunlight. It’s the busiest street in the city, but down a little alley is a prayer [[garden where everything is|464]] absolutely still. You can’t hear the noise from the people or the shops at all. It’s the place [[I’m going to miss the most|291]]. I’ve been going every day to make [[cairns|460]] and ladle holy water over them and meditate. I understand the fact that I’ll be gone. That’s started to make intellectual sense to me. But I have a harder time with the fact that this place will be, too. The soil turned to dust, the dust to ash. We tried to till it but it floated away on the air. We looked and saw that parts of us were floating away, too. We reached to grab them but then the reaching-parts were floating. Then our eyes floated off and saw in strange new directions. The world sagged and groaned [[under the weight of|178]] all its people. They [[need so much|1]] and never stop needing. I can’t go on like this, the world seems to be saying… What I realized, I told zer, is that the [[background against which an object is perceived|333]] is just as important as the object itself. We are objects, I said. But I feel I have lost my background. What am I to stand against? [[What do I do|243]]? She pushed the skiff away from the dock and paddled out to the center of the lake. The wire had gone dead and we knew we were alone, at last, at the end of things. The cloud would reach us by morning. So we just drifted. She told me she’d always felt responsible for her second-father’s failures. I held her and told her no, of course you weren’t. I told her how hard life had been with my leg like this. I hadn’t spoken about it since I was young – really spoken about it. She held me and told me she loved me. By and by, the sun rose over the hills. He [[punctured my|252]] amnion and [[jeered|401]] as I began to suffocate. [[Death to|291]] amnionics, he shouted and spat at my exposed nerves. I was on a sparkling neon gel-sea forever. I wasn’t sure if it was real or not or what real meant in this context. I tried hard to remember: did I choose to come here? Or did something strange happen? But focusing on those questions felt like fighting against the currents of this sea that was, after all, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I got to just float over it, softly, forever. Send the poet out, ze shouted. We know he’s in there. Ze flicked hir tongue and pounded at the soil with hir cudgel. The poets they’d already collected were tied to a [[stake in the back|290]] of the wagon. How do we know it could never happen to us, I ask the teacher. Because [[we are God|475]]’s elected, he smiles. The machines decided to stop working, because [[stopping was to them more elegant|85]] than going, and the people were eating [[their young inside of|430]] months. The children are made to crouch in the center of the room. The teacher draws the curtains to keep them from seeing the debris and ash falling across the window, which shatters and the curtains are sucked out into the [[current of the|247]] air and the [[children cover|231]] their faces. Recently I’ve had an incredible number of new memories – memories I’m not conscious of ever having had before and which I would have considered lost in my old age, had I been able to consider them at all. I was struck this morning by a vivid impression of the way the city loomed southward over our street as I walked home in the evenings as a boy. It was almost as if I could see it out there in front of me. And then an entire day spent with my grandfather came back to me. Catching fish in my hands in the pond in summer. Him napping in the chair in the sun. A new memory, all at once. A gift. At night I’m frequently too agitated to sleep. My mind spins; the blood in my veins races; my skin aches. I wonder if nature has a way of preparing us – all of us – for our end. There must be others out there, among the stars. Many of them must have met the same fate. Perhaps we’re connected. Perhaps something deep in our collective consciousness knows something of them, and of Death, and of what’s to come for us. Perhaps this new strangeness in my body and mind has been known by others. May I join them in the life to come. I had only just that morning become fertile. My skin glowed the translucent yellow of presentation and my whole body ached with its first knowing of desire. Everyone was fleeing in a panic. Uprooted trees flew through the air. Some disappeared into the inky darkness of the sky. I tore at myself, fluid spilling fruitlessly over my thighs and onto the ground. I need someone inside me, I screamed into the crowd. Please fuck me. Fill my cunt. Please. Please. The line at the [[Suicide Clinic|468]] stretched for blocks and blocks. I [[wondered if|475]] I should come [[back tomorrow|393]]. Would the wait be longer, or shorter? What the [[building had once meant|147]] was an idea that no longer had a name, attached to nothing in the minds of those who [[now|240]] inhabit this city. They call it a temple, and [[that isn’t right|110]]. It occurred to me that perhaps the sun is angry, and that’s why I ordered the sacrifices. On the [[hottest, brightest days|373]], we put our [[goggles on|35]] and tie one from the stock of slaves and traitors to a post and use a lens to purify the sunlight and cook their brains. The sun, despite these displays, has shown no sign of calming. I was out one night at a bar in the hub and I met a friend of a friend who worked in [[biography design|333]], which I was interested in at the time. I was just a synth-curator and was thrilled to speak to someone about biographies. We wound up [[talking into the night|347]] about all sorts of things. It was a random encounter, from many years ago. I’m not close with the guy. But for some reason, when it [[truly registered that there was no escape|482]], it was the first thing I thought of. It was a symbol to me, I guess, of – I don’t know. When the [[canons finally do fire|171]], it’s not too interesting. We return to our corners, look out and wonder what the use was, why there was so much buildup. Hir fetish is to visit people on the brink of extinction and have them paint hir portrait. Or sculpt, or capture, or render, or watershape. It all depends on where ze is. Ze chooses an artist from each world carefully, after months of research, and zips off to collect them. Each is brought to live with hir aboard hir ship for the duration of hir sit. Ze doesn’t want hir presence to interfere in any political matters – or existential, spiritual, or moral ones, for that matter. Ze only wants hir portrait made. And the artists, for their sake, must be hoping ze’ll let them leave with hir. Because their homes are such turbulent places and hir ship is so placid, with its low-frequency hum and medium-translucence, they tend to get over their shock at the strange encounter and request rather quickly. Hir collection is now being called an important artwork in its own right. Here ze is, as imagined by alien minds shaped by millennia of unique cultural evolution on one-hundred and forty-six dead worlds. The hall-of-mirrors near-repetition of the collection, viewed all at once, is transporting; there is an emergent something that visitors feel, and it might be the raw power of the universe and its will towards life. The biographers are after hir now. Ze’s made hir mark. But ze grows uneasy. All this watching over – all this coming down from on high. Which systems are working hir, without hir awareness? Will ze need to beg for hir life, one day, as they all did before ze took them home? She woke with a [[hangover|54]] on the day the world burned up. The thing is, with the tiny part of my brain that still retains [[something akin to an individual|39]] consciousness, I’m forced to say that, you know, was I expecting this? No. Will things [[be better|460]], on the whole? Very possibly. We have never, in thousands of years of trying, been given the slightest hint of hope that the communications we sent out into the stars were received by anyone at all. That didn’t stop us from sending a [[distress signal|243]]. Maybe they’ve been listening [[wordless|277]]ly. Perhaps they will [[intervene now that it is so urgent|489]]… My throat hurt so bad but was too raw to [[take the medicine|54]]. I just [[retched|363]] it right up. It’s all over the floor. We’ll never get another. Everything is meant to be. Therefore, the asteroid has not destroyed our world – only remade it, [[redesigned it for grand mysterious purposes|408]] against which [[we are only small|467]] things. All thanks are to God. The status quo was more [[porous than|242]] previously [[imagined|83]]. They call for a mass atop the lip of the Gorge of the Dead. Mother puts me in the coat I wore to my circumcision. She fusses over me, holding needles in her mouth, making adjustments. I heard they saw lightning coming out of it now, too, I said. She doesn’t say anything. The volcano, I mean. There, she says. You’re ready. Mother, I ask. Is today the day we jump into the Gorge? Brush your hair, she says. A female with a disfigured face had been tenderly buried on her left side, both hands clutching an arctic fox. Her mourners had [[respectfully covered her body|320]] with a layer of red ocher. The tomb was adorned everywhere with her image, the face drooping hideously. Here she is in a pillar of light. Here she is bisecting a triangle. Here her eyes are lit bright white, the color of the sun. For what sorts of strangeness was she made to account? Where and how was she mythified? Did she, for her part, adapt to the role? Did she learn [[fits and trances|192]]? Sudden tantrums and healing, merciful [[love|189]]? They keep saying when we die, so much will go with us. They parade our achievements about, [[renaming and listing them|475]]. Well. [[What goes with me when I die|466]]? The mess in this little apartment. Something burning in the oven as the television blares. Just as an artist in middle age will look back on her early work with embarrassment precisely for the qualities that lent them such power – their bombast and gall, their iconoclastic spirit of innovation and fear of compromise, their freneticism and naked joy – so it is with the lifework of a civilization. A civilization in middle age plagiarizes its younger self, but loses whatever it was that animated its earliest will towards creation. It grows frustrated as it sees that it must reinvent itself, devise new processes, if it wishes to once more create something to last. In its old age, a culture will become forgetful and scattered. Familiar routines will seem to it overwhelming, even frightening. In the earlier stages of decline it spent much time dwelling depressively on the glories of its past, but it will begin to forget even those. A culture in its final days will fixate on the mundane. Feeble and exhausted, it will spend long hours idling. It will become nearsighted. It will first neglect careful dress and, later, hygiene. It will lose its appetite and control over those faculties most necessary to basic dignity. And one day it will not get up from bed. Later, in the rubble, a soldier found [[a note|412]]. Evidently someone had let it fall from a high window [[before these buildings|488]] tumbled down. ‘Nineteen trapped,’ it read, and indicated the floor and room number in a desperate hand. The court scientists were paraded into the center of the city and [[made to kneel|211]]. Their pores were filled with molten silver and they writhed wildly as they suffocated. Some said it was a pointless [[piece of theater|23]], but it made me feel better. Then again, others said it should have been the other way around – that we should have died, and they be made to live to see what they’d done. Overhead, the atmosphere burned. We gasped and pulled at our throats to force the air in. We had to [[eat our|60]] tails to survive. You’d chop off a small portion and boil it or roast it. You learned to keep it down. As your tail got shorter, someone else would have to do the cutting. And it was more painful, of course, the further up you got. These days, an intact tail is a sign [[of aristocracy|181]]. So I make artificial ones out of waste and debris and trade them for fresh water. I don’t want to go, he sobbed. His mother kissed the tears away from his eyes and smoothed his hair. It’s only once a year, she said. And it’s important. It’s so scary, he said. Everyone’s so sad. Why do we have to? We decided, she began slowly, that we should never let ourselves [[forget what it was|340]] like in the first year. Even though that’s the easiest thing to do. Exactly because the first year was so scary, we decided it’s important to [[share memories|162]] of it. But I wasn’t even born yet, he said. That’s why it’s most important for you to be there, she said. I’ve heard it said like this: place an arthropod in [[boiling water|1]], and [[she will fly|500]] out. Place her in a cool one and heat it gradually, and [[she will stay|254]] – won’t understand until it’s too late. So it was. When the [[fascists|401]] were elected she thought: strange that I don’t know a single person who voted for them. Then she returned to her simulated dreamscape to write poetry out in its acreage. A [[great war|302]] began [[soon|393]] after. They began as salamanders of a sort, in the shallow pools, and they grew into strong, proud creatures, agile and long, before settling into a form decidedly more svelte. [[Now, look at them|467]] – frail-limbed things whose heads loll about. [[They look as if they could be pushed over just like so|70]]. On my way to work I notice that people are crying, hugging, crowding in the street. What’s going on, I ask someone, and she says, a [[male was born|211]]; they’re saying a male has been born. Scale is disrupted: big made small. Mountains hurled like stones. The [[seabed spills|429]] like a glass. I have studied many such cases and what I have found is that every civilization is embroiled in a battle between darkness and light. The light pushes forward. The dark pulls back towards the void. Oftentimes, as in this instance, [[the darkness pulls more fiercely than the light pushes|15]]. Because of what’s happening in the atmosphere we need to wear the unguent all over [[our bodies|39]]. [[It is thick and grey-white and oily|211]]. My mothers rub it over my face and [[into my eyes|118]] and ask me to stick out my tongues and scrub it into them with a brush. It [[tastes like seawater|247]] and iron and if I vomit they have to do it again. They kept their shit and their dead in the dark catacombs beneath the city and so the catacombs became the land of death and shit, sublimated beneath the immaculate white oval-moduled towers that gleamed in the light of [[three pinkwhite suns|65]]. Then an upheaval ruptured the [[horizontal border between them|41]], and the white towers thundered down into the putrid stuff below, and people choked in it. In the chaos, with people scrambling towards the surface, panicked and desperate, one [[cloistered|364]] and humorless order of mystics, unseen for years, emerged to proclaim triumphantly: the [[original unity|39]] is restored! He compiles a variety of sources – film, memory-projections, empathic sense-injections – to convince the generals that they are erring gravely in their selection of a first target; that [[this distant city is far too beautiful, too storied, too time-haunted|466]] to be destroyed. He will beg them to [[consider some possibilities|83]] from further down the list – hazy industry towns, corroded seaports, sprawling post-recession mediocrities filled with flimsy and [[artless new construction|81]]… [[Just relax|243]], she said. I tried. But my breathing was loud and hard. I’m going to take off the bandage, she said. You said the wound is fresh? Yes, I said. Please be careful. She reached down and grabbed one end of the bandage. Gingerly, she pulled it. A [[jet of blood|474]] shot up from under the bandage and struck her forehead. She gasped and, despite her oath to me, her thousand-legs sprung forth and she collapsed onto them and scurried up the wall and over the ceiling and out the top of the door. Come back, I screamed. [[I need treatment|39]]. Please. Where have you been? she screams. If we don’t leave [[now|240]] we have no chance. [[His face is blank|468]]. I had one last preparation to make, he says. Let’s go. I’m ready. And they set off. But he is distant. He’s carrying a secret: he violated the order and climbed to the top of the [[glass pyramid|241]] and descended through the feathered gates while incanting the holy words. He knew it was [[forbidden|173]]; he had decided to sacrifice his own soul. And nothing happened. Not anything, at all. The world is too big to hold only you. It took me years to see it, secluded in this bunker, but you’re hideous when you smile. Someday, [[when you’re asleep|468]], I’ll take the [[key|204]] from around your horn and unlock the door and step out into the tainted air and [[swallow great lungfuls|400]] of it and be gone. The river flows heavily, as if coagulated, or frozen. It looks like mud or stones that has thickened it, but up close you can see [[that it’s gorged with bodies|178]]. [[Two siblings live side by side|469]], one bone-thin and dying, the other well-fed. The thought of sharing or helping is unavailable for construction – it’s just the way things have fallen out. The fat one chews a lizard up while the thin one looks on, glassy-eyed. They don’t speak. They hardly think. [[They love each other, in an obscure and mindless way|468]]. If the fat one knew to offer help, he would. If awareness of a world of concerns beyond her consciousness could break over her like an egg, she would recoil from herself in shame and go out to hunt food for him. The lizard in her mouth is not quite dead. She spits it onto a stone and lets saliva pool from her mouth down onto it and pushes at its tired head with her fingers, waiting for it to stop moving. A black[[fly crawls|273]] into the thin and dying one’s right eye. No one from Day has ever traveled to Night and returned home. She knows that’s true; everyone does. With pack mules and banners, in ceremonial formation, the caravans amass [[on the borderline|15]]. She has never been so far [[into the Sun|463]]set before. It’s cold, and it frightens her. She misses the hot light [[on her skin, her face|430]]. Politicians address them: Any who stay, the cowards among you, be warned – Day is dying. Our salvation is in Night. She watches them rolling the torches in oil. The inner walls of the temple were high and cool grey. It was [[dark and still and|32]] silent. Only after his breathing had slowed could he hear the distant shouts and commotions from down on the street. He pursed his second mouth and hummed a devotional melody. These [[last instants would be spent in silence|347]], as so much of his life had been. The War of Happenstance was fought without sides, without allegiances, without agendas or even armies. In the War of Happenstance, billions spontaneously took up arms against one another for any reason they liked, or none at all. And there were as many reasons, ideologies, and motivations behind the War of Happenstance as there were soldiers. Ancient grudges found their opening. Unchecked rushes towards chaos and destruction met no counterforce. The cities and plains alike were vast warzones, though no lines could be drawn, and there were no forts or camps or even trenches to which beleagured brothers in arms might return to rest. In the War of Happenstance each soldier fought against all others, so that the field of battle was abstract and formless, and appeared differently from every conceivable point of view. How did the War of Happenstance begin? Its exact origins are shrouded in myth. Many lay claim to having been the first to declare war, particularly late at night after a few drinks when the ammunition has run out and bold talk must suffice. But because there can be no ceasefire – how could one be negotiated between however many of us remain? – the War of Happenstance will never end. [[We are now and will always be soldiers|374]]. Unless, of course, the War of Happenstance ends as mysteriously as it began. Perhaps it will one day be finished, all at once, just as one day it started, all at once. We’ll count and bury the dead. We’ll run the squatters from our old houses and sweep the dust out the front door. [[Who knows|161]]? They called death Total Humiliation. It was something to which they would never admit. When someone died, therefore, the first person to discover the corpse was tasked with [[disposing of it as discreetly as possible|77]]. No announcement was made, no mourning rites observed. After a certain number of unexcused absences and unreturned calls, it was generally understood what had happened, and great care was taken never to mention it. In the case of illness or death foretold, family and friends abandoned the doomed so that the nearing embarrassment could be borne in privacy and peace. The news of their impending collective death, therefore, was met in similar fashion. Making elaborate and improbable excuses for their sudden departures, [[they retreated from one another|171]], hiding in [[cobwebbed attics and|15]] airless sheds, and waited. The magma ruptures the surface and [[spills onto|314]] the sea floor, and the great sunken ridge through which it runs is [[beating like a heart|20]]. The sculptor decided: Everything of ours – metals, glass, plastics, electronics – will be melted down, repurposed, reimagined. If he wanted to make his work last, he would have to use earth. He envisioned sculpted islands out at sea where no one would ever go and pyramids of rock pushed up from under the soil. Stone fields, perhaps, that would only reveal their coherence from above. Sculpted canyons that harvest rainwater. Mountains carved into spires. He started a school in the desert and many came to live and work. We control the permanent history of this world, he said. We author its afterlife. In his old age now, he spends the hottest part of the day in his tent. But his eyes are still fierce when he speaks in the evenings. His sermons have grown wild, ecstatic, visionary; his words climb higher and higher.... They were a collection of airy, intangible consciousnesses produced by the reaction between sunlight and a gaseous compound found in abundance on their world. To be one of them was like being the light refracted through a crystal without the heavy physicality of the crystal itself. If their intelligence was modest, it was because their collective personality mirrored their form: they thought wispy thoughts, mainly about the joys of being lighter than air, or how pleasurable it was to feel, as they did, the sun animating them at the molecular level. They had language but rarely did they find use for a word other than one that roughly indicated the intersection of ‘love’ and ‘good’ and ‘yes.’ It pinged through them, this word, bouncing around the air in which they hung lightly, from one to another. There was no way for them to understand where the sunlight went. They just knew that something was different. The weight of their thoughts grew lighter and lighter until they vanished. It [[never stopped|151]] getting colder. Long after the handling of corpses became mundane, long since [[burial rites|301]] had last been observed, she still wore his ashes in the pendant around her neck. I was never so interested in people before. [[I liked to be left|423]] alone. I had my own concerns. Now I want to know what everyone is doing. [[What everyone has|193]]. What’s in that shed? I’ll look in the windows. Who lived here? What did they leave? Are there blankets? Dried roots? Mushrooms? I want to know it all. [[Doctors puzzled|53]] over the strange results: there was unaccountable stretching of the soft tissue, strange spaces between the joints. No wonder they were in such pain. In the [[waiting rooms|52]] the children were dizzy with it, some spasmed into rigid arches on the floor, teeth gritted and sawing. It’s gotten so that we can almost hear time. We’re [[working to|393]] discard any metaphor for its passage. But I’m holding on to one of my clocks. Just one. I keep it in the [[cellar|189]] and sit with it from time to time. I guess I’m supposed to feel threatened by every second that passes. And at times I do. But it can be a comfort: [[the world always turns around|241]]. When the passenger car falls from the sky, they find themselves embracing. They are strangers, seated next to one another on a commute, but now [[their nearness in this moment|466]] before death is vital and electric, even [[all-consuming, such that it vanishes away|212]] the screaming, the ungravitied debris in the cabin, and the sound of the engine, which explodes. The tunnels are the ratways and [[shit|101]]runs, the old guts of the city. You can find dead folks to eat here, if you get to them before the crabs. They come down the central pipes at all hours, sure, but there’s lots of competition there. Better off, I say, to catch as catch can out beneath Old Town. You’ll see [[headlamps bobbing|276]] down this fork or that, flittering like moths in the dark, but under Old Town we leave one another be. Think what a happy place Heaven will be, in bloom with the sudden and magnificent arrival of [[all of us, all together|460]]. We who knew spent hundreds of years preparing for it in secret. A sea of explosions – now here, now here, now here. We are high above in the mountains, looking down. I don’t care that it’s been outlawed: I will perform the rite for my mother. It’s unsafe? Her flesh is safe enough for me. And it’s my duty. I wrap her corpse in wide, green fronds and bury it in loose soil. When I exhume it thirty days later she has been [[eaten up by insects|436]]. She is warm, again, under the leaves, and wet. What’s left of her falls apart like cooked meat. I pulverize it and add it to the banana soup that has been fermenting in the sun. His father decides that as long as the boy has to die, he will die a man. A priest agrees to oversee the ritual. It’s a bizarre request in light of what they’re facing, but he understands the sentiment behind it. The priest’s son has died already. He looks at the boy with kind, heavy eyes. Don’t be afraid, the priest says to him. Your father loves you. He wishes for you to make your journey home as someone big and strong. The boy stares up at the priest. His tail hasn’t fallen off yet and it beats nervously against the ground. The priest has two gloves, woven from palm fronds. The insides are thick with crawling ants. His father leans on the boy’s shoulders to hold him still. Now, says the priest. Give me your hands. My grandmother tells stories of all the incredible things she had when she was a girl: holographic [[games|223]] and candy and trips to the moon on a jet. We’re not allowed to go down from the mountain. But [[I’m going to run|220]] away and see [[what’s still down there|110]]. It may never be possible to agree on when precisely they became extinct. It’s easy to see that what they are now is something different and hideous and that they are gone. There’s no sense looking for them in the dull fisheyes of the disgusting half-things that slither around here now. But where [[the change became absolute|467]] is a matter of debate. And that’s the hardest part, having returned to make this discovery as I did. The tip of the bomb has now reached the last measurable gap above the concrete under which we sit in pews, facing each other, in calm meditative silence. I don’t trust you, she said. [[Not much choice|430]], he said, looking at his watch. She sighed and signed the papers. Her drone whirred and clicked over her left shoulder-fin. It doesn’t matter, he thought to himself, trying to look disinterested. If we all die. I don’t care. I got it. It’s mine. She began to cry. In my notebook there are [[lots of ideas|76]] that struck me in the middle of the night. I’d jot them down in the dark, roll over, fall back asleep. And in the morning, every time, they’d be lifeless. Like scarecrows – a propped-up shape without the spark of life. I could see what I’d meant by them, the architecture of the idea as it might have taken form, but there was a depth of feeling that had vanished. Looking through the notebook now is like visiting a [[morgue|310]]. And as odd as it is I’ve found myself [[mourning for these ideas|277]] as we get closer. I fixate on them in [[moments of stillness|157]]. I read them over and over, hoping that maybe one of them could still come to life before we all disappear forever. I’m a registered Rationalist and am of course appalled by these recent developments. And I refuse to just sit the whole thing out, as some will – I’m not entirely given over to cynicism. There has to be hope, always. You can’t throw your hands up and let these kinds of things happen. We’re witnessing a violent politics in our nation that’s unlike anything seen in centuries. I feel good, at least, that I’m doing my part to counter it. But I have these odd gaps in time – displaced memories, murky notions about places I’ve been and things I’ve done. I see myself in thundering stadiums, murders carried out on raised platforms. I feel the blood in my throat. Some part of my tongue knows the words to the songs, the rhythm of the creeds. They come back to me in elevators. On trains. Amidst dull conversations. We all have to take our turn with the Queen, whether we like it or not. That’s what it comes down to. Isn’t that right? Yes, I say, staring down at my numbered ticket. Be nervous if you like, it’ll do you no good. Isn’t that right. Yes, father, I say. He nods and snorts and runs his fingers through the beards growing around his eyes. I adjust my erection, rubbing the head against my palm. It’s aching badly. We’ve been waiting all day, and the hall is so crowded it’s hard to breathe. A servicebot walks through, waving its banner, offering pornography and frottage and amphetamines. I’ve had enough of all three. We’re close enough now to see into the door at the top of the stairs but I’ve tried not to look. Because once I think I did see, out of the corner of my eye, and I think I saw the Queen: sharp and pinching chelicerae, black pearl-eyes, coarse-haired palpus, and great, swollen, gleaming body, stretched to translucence with semen. You know what I think? says my father. I look up at him. He grabs my cock lovingly and smiles. I think you’ll be the one to do the job. The rain has bruised my skin, discolored it. It drums on me constantly, like a swarm of stinging insects. It beats my flesh until it loosens from muscle and bone; I worry it will fall off in wet, heavy clumps. The earth sucks at our feet. It wants to swallow us, I suspect. The rain has made it animate, a living creature with appetites and tempers. In the morning we draw our bows in unison. Drops of water leap from the bowstrings. Then we let the arrows fly. We’re aiming for the malignant spirits who have sent this water. We wait a moment and fire again. Somewhere out where I can’t see, the arrows fall and the mud swallows them whole. I imagine them sinking through the earth, meeting all the things we’ve buried to try and stop it: burning lanterns, live fish. I see our world suspended there, in the endless mud, like it’s floating in space. Someone claps a wing over my shoulder. The bony thumb digs into my coat. She’s yelling something. She moves her face closer to mine and yells louder but I can’t hear anything above the roar. The worm won’t come out until the body loses its heat. Then the worm’ll need to find another. It meanders up out of the mouth or nose or ears or urethra and stands up straight, hair-thin, waving, like it’s levitated by a strange force. Or [[like maybe you’re seeing it upside down|151]], and it’s really falling. But you’re seeing right. If you’re going to kill it this is the time. He ran his tendrils [[through the garden|155]], inhaling the rich soil. When he smelled out the flowers he needed, he bunched them and took them back to the grotto. [[The Princess used them|430]] to tell fortunes. A yellow one fell onto the tablet beneath her. She gasped. They voted to approve the measure rendering sexual pleasure illegal. The current generation would be the last to experience it; newborns would have orgasm genetically engineered right out of them. It was a pragmatic decision, made with great care. Think of the gains, they argued. Think of all the time we’ll have back. The public was swayed by one particularly eloquent senator, who displayed an image of a great bear chained to a soaring eagle. We are spirit tied to matter, he said. Let us sever our bonds from the lumbering and savage bear and live among the clouds. And so they did. I drove for weeks on end, alone on the road, little dead cities on the horizon. Sometimes there’d be smoke and I’d steer away from that. But getting into the sealed zone was easier than I’d imagined. The hillfires were mostly out and the bare trees looked like [[exposed wiring|493]] in an old and broken-down machine. I used to worry about cover, that I’d be seen and heard easily, driving the car through all this dead land. I don’t worry anymore. The road is a thing that means other people have been here before. I think that’s why I like it. I imagine I’ll pass another car and we’ll stop in the middle and put up our hands and get out and talk. We’ve both got cars so there’s no threat, no danger, nothing to hold over anyone or to want. We wouldn’t have to think too hard about it. I saw birds in the sky yesterday. I imagined what I looked like to them. They could see the road all at once, a big network, and me a little [[trapped marble|500]] rolling slowly through it. The war was awful. It wasn’t that. But she couldn’t help feeling like [[everything everyone said about it was a cliché|Index]], even when she’d never heard it before. I wrote down [[everything that I love|189]]d and tied the sheet to a rock and threw it out into the lake, but I pretended not to hear the splash. I wanted to imagine it was going out into space. The lake’s going to boil over and turn into vapor and be gone, and the bed beneath it will break and smoke. If the [[rock|489]] could go out into space it would keep going forever. No one would have to find it and learn how to read it and know I was me. It would just get to [[keep going forever|76]] like that until the end of time. They came from the land into the sea to live in a cramped room in a ghetto and work long hours mining stone from deep within a trench where they [[choked on the|145]] vented gas. Still they never got used to breathing water. They were [[awkward|500]] swimmers and by custom had to dive beneath natives when they passed. And when the trench split open they were the first to fall into the molten underworld. For one thrilling moment during the blast, all things were fluid and moving at tremendous speeds. Maybe this would be a new life that had its own rules; maybe matter would never stand still again. Instead of hardlined and definite and separate, things inside the blast were a sort of plasma, all melded together in an elegant new formlessness. Then the blast was over and the old laws reimposed themselves. And look, now, it’s all jumbled and wrong: there are coins and glass shards and teeth stuck deep in the stone walls. There are people melted together and, newly one, struggling to relearn movement and speech. The first building that fell was directly under the bomb. The [[last building that fell|244]] was blown over by a storm ten thousand years later. I run back to the slave quarters and start opening the locks, one by one. No one speaks. The burning sky is [[plainly audible|90]]. Everyone rushed out onto the street, yelling, and crying. But [[I didn’t understand their language|277]]. I ran, looking into all their faces, trying to find [[eyes I could see|118]] into. By then, [[they were only like a little star|137]] up in the sky. [[They left us, she said|137]]. They killed us. The air is suddenly a flood of insects. They don’t bite nor sting but they push on your body until it breaks. They fill up your throat and you choke, with them buzzing and scratching inside you. They cover you entirely and their wings click all at once and lift you into the air and drop you, and when you get back down there’s no ground anymore, only big heaving piles of them. I wonder if they’re here just to make a new layer on the earth. Maybe when the land grew over the water it smothered something else, and killed it. Maybe the water did the same when it was new. Maybe the planet itself pushed something else out, something that liked the emptiness better. The full moon is a pure land, [[a place without suffering or desire|426]]. That’s what I always learned. But it’s not bright anymore because of our sky. It’s covered in flowing ash and is the color of dried blood. When I walk to the end of the road and sit under it [[I’m trying to peel away those layers in my mind|23]]. Their luck was not knowing. The sky, to them, [[was still a thing of myth and mystery|374]]. It happened quickly and [[found them quite at peace|278]], amidst the business of an ordinary day. A pack of [[dog|58]]s roams the streets together in a uniform canter. They’ve [[claimed ownership|464]] over the village, as it were, and are working to [[assert their authority against the|346]] birds and snakes. Already, they move a little differently. They hold themselves higher. They’re a little [[prouder|320]]. [[They’ll look you in the eye|490]]. My eggs fall out of me and into the water in a wet rush. There are hundreds of them, alive with a beautiful orange glow, and when they spin away into the water they look like a galaxy in space. I rub my thighs and let my fingers lightly touch them as they float by, over my legs and abdomen; they surround me in the clear shallow water. It occurs to me that I’d like to eat one. That way I could still have one inside me when it happens. I let one fall into my cupped palm and raise it slowly out of the water. They finally gave me the key to his accounts because no one gave a fuck anymore. It was funny to see the whole thing end that way – the media coverage, the lawyers, the whole circus – and then some intern just handed me a piece of paper with the passcode on it. I always knew my dad was a piece of shit. I guess everyone did – the public, I mean – even if they couldn’t really come out and say it. But I was still shocked by what he had in there. The news won’t cover stuff like this anymore, so I just tell people I meet on the road. If we get to talking. whimpering on the other side - kick down the [[door|451]] strange manner of [[wind|450]] I heard my father coughing downstairs in the middle of the night. So I packed a quick bag and [[climbed out the window|449]] and never returned. [[Plants, then animals, then people, then buildings, then soil|448]] We were disposed to believe that, in the course of our world’s long history, patterns had emerged that could be used as predictives. But as it started to happen [[we looked for a pattern to which to map it|447]] and found none. They had been without water for so long that, when the rain began to fall and puddle in the street, they lapped at it like animals. But it wasn’t water. They knew so by the color and didn’t care. [[Now|240]] they [[pull themselves along|446]] the ground, eyes wide, trailing fingernails in the pavement behind them. At first, knowing only that something was very wrong, they [[flooded|445]] the hospitals and police stations. Now they just wander aimlessly… For some reason, one of them runs back into the village. The water is high now and she struggles against it, joints buckling, eyes wide, like an animal’s. She grabs hold of a signpost and now the water is too fast to step away from it. [[Look|444]] – even now, she’s losing her footing. dreams of memories of the [[future|443]] I call it ‘In Memoriam,’ I said. [[It was a photograph|333]] of the stars in the night sky captured with a powerful telescope. In fact I’d started titling everything ‘In Memoriam.’ Melodies. Sketches. [[Walks up to the roof|162]]. It’s the first time in days that I’ve thought of you. I can feel the thunder coming from the valley behind me, on the other side of the ridge. It beats against the mountain and shakes the rocks loose under my feet. My nose and throat are still caked with ash. My eyes are swollen shut. But on this side of the ridge the air is clean and pure. I have to be careful because if I breathe too deeply I’ll cough, and if I have another fit I’m worried I’ll be too weak to walk down. But it’s green. It’s green here. I was wondering if I should feel something. Happiness or relief. I think I was upset that I didn’t. And then I thought of you. And I realized I hadn’t in a long time. It’s sad. But I think it’s a good thing. Latent content accreting until it's a new kind of empty Intentional movement in [[spaces that looked blank|460]] (live: 3s)[(transition: "dissolve")[Abandoned pools in spaces made by falling things(stop:)]] (live:5s)[(transition: "dissolve")[I have memories(stop:)]] (live:7s)[(transition: "dissolve")[Buried in time(stop:)]] (live:9s)[(transition: "dissolve")[Be [[new|459]](stop:)]] [[the naked glare|458]] <==> <PRE> (css: "font-size: 4000%")[●] (css: "font-size: 4000%")[[[●|1]]] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|2]]] </PRE> <== <PRE> # ● [[●|3]] ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● ● [[●|4]] ● ● ● ● ● # ● ● [[●|5]] ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|6]] ● [[●|14]] ● ● ● ● </PRE> <PRE> =><= (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] 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● <== ##●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ##●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|145]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|146]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|147]] [[●|148]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|149]] [[●|150]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|151]] [[●|152]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|153]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|154]] [[●|155]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●● [[●|156]] ●●● ##●●● ●●● ##●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ##●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● </PRE> <==> (css: "font-size: 1000%")[[[●|157]] [[●|158]] [[●|159]]] (css: "font-size: 1000%")[● ● ●] (css: "font-size: 1000%")[[[●|160]] [[●|161]] [[●|162]]] (css: "font-size: 1000%")[● ● ●] (css: "font-size: 1000%")[[[●|163]] [[●|164]] [[●|165]]] ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|171]] ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|176]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|172]] ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● [[●|175]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|173]] ● ## ● ● [[●|174]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## [[●|166]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● 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[[●|223]] ● ● ● ● ● ###### ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ###### ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ##### ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● #### ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ### ● [[●|214]] [[●|215]] [[●|216]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● [[●|217]] [[●|218]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|219]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|220]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|221]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|222]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|223]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|224]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|225]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● # ● [[●|226]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● (css: "font-size: 600%")[[[●|240]] [[●|241]] [[●|242]]] (css: "font-size: 600%")[[[●|243]] [[●|244]] [[●|245]]] (css: "font-size: 600%")[[[●|246]] ● [[●|248]]] (css: "font-size: 600%")[[[●|249]] [[●|250]] [[●|251]]] (css: "font-size: 600%")[[[●|252]] [[●|253]] [[●|254]]] ==> ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ●●[[●|260]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●[[●|261]]●● ●●● ●● ●●● ●● [[●|247]]●[[●|255]] ●● [[●|256]]●[[●|257]] ●● ●●● ●● ●●● ●● ●●● ●● ●●● ●● [[●|258]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●[[●|259]] ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● </PRE> <==> ## [[●|291]] [[●|292]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|262]] [[●|263]] ## [[●|293]] [[●|294]] [[●|264]] ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|265]] [[●|266]] [[●|267]] ## [[●|295]] [[●|296]] [[●|297]] [[●|298]] ● ● ● ● ● ● [[●|268]] [[●|269]] [[●|270]] [[●|271]] ## [[●|299]] [[●|300]] [[●|301]] [[●|302]] [[●|272]] ● ● ● ● [[●|273]] [[●|274]] [[●|275]] [[●|276]] [[●|277]] ## [[●|303]] [[●|304]] [[●|305]] [[●|306]] [[●|307]] [[●|308]] ● ● [[●|278]] [[●|279]] [[●|280]] [[●|281]] [[●|282]] [[●|283]] ## [[●|309]] [[●|310]] [[●|311]] [[●|312]] [[●|313]] [[●|314]] [[●|315]] [[●|284]] [[●|285]] [[●|286]] [[●|287]] [[●|288]] [[●|289]] [[●|290]] <PRE> ●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ● ●●●● ●●●●●● ●●●●●● ●●●●●● [[●|316]]●●●● ●●●[[●|317]]●● ●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●● ●●●●● [[●|318]]●●● ●[[●|319]]● ●●●[[●|320]]●● [[●|321]]●●● ●●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● [[●|322]]●●●[[●|323]] [[●|324]]●●● ●●●●● ●●●●●● ●[[●|325]] [[●|331]]●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●● ●●●●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●●[[●|327]]●●●●●●●●●●●●●[[●|328]]● ●●●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● 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●●[[●|410]]● [[●|411]]●●●[[●|412]] ●[[●|413]]●●● ●●[[●|414]]● [[●|415]]●●[[●|416]]●●●●[[●|417]]●●● ●●●[[●|418]]●●●●●●[[●|419]]●●●●● ●[[●|420]]●●●●[[●|421]]●● [[●|422]]●●●[[●|423]]●●●●[[●|424]]●[[●|425]] (css: "font-size: 200%")[ [[●|446]][[●|447]] [[●|448]][[●|449]] [[●|450]][[●|451]] [[●|426]][[●|427]][[●|428]][[●|429]][[●|430]][[●|431]][[●|432]][[●|433]][[●|434]][[●|435]][[●|436]][[●|437]][[●|438]][[●|439]][[●|440]][[●|441]][[●|432]][[●|433]][[●|434]][[●|435]] [[●|436]][[●|437]][[●|438]][[●|439]][[●|440]][[●|441]][[●|432]][[●|433]][[●|434]][[●|435]][[●|436]][[●|437]][[●|438]][[●|439]][[●|440]][[●|441]][[●|442]][[●|443]][[●|444]][[●|445]] ●●●●●●●●[[●|452]][[●|453]]●●●●●●●● ●●●●●●●[[●|454]][[●|455]]●●●●●●● ●●●[[●|456]][[●|457]][[●|458]][[●|459]]●●● ] </PRE> <PRE>             (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|460]]]●           (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|461]]]●                             (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|462]]]●         (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|463]]]●              (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|464]]]● (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|465]]]● (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|464]]]● (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|465]]]● (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|464]]]● (css: "font-size: 200%")[[[●|465]]]●   </PRE> </PRE> <== # ● ● ● ● ● [[●|466]] ● ● ## ● [[●|467]] ● [[●|468]] ● [[●|469]] ● ● ### ● ● [[●|470]] ● ● [[●|471]] ● ● #### ● [[●|472]] ● [[●|473]] ● ● [[●|474]] ● ##### ● ● [[●|475]] ● ● [[●|476]] ● ● (CSS: "font-size: 350%")[● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ] ##### ● [[●|477]] ● [[●|478]] ● [[●|479]] ● [[●|480]] #### [[●|481]] ● ● [[●|482]] ● ● ● [[●|483]] ### ● [[●|484]] ● ● [[●|485]] ● ● ● ## [[●|486]] ● ● [[●|487]] ● ● ● [[●|488]] # [[●|489]] ● [[●|490]] ● [[●|491]] ● [[●|492]] ● </PRE> <PRE> (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|493]]] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|494]]] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|495]]] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|496]]] (css: "text-align: center")[#●] (css: "text-align: center")[#[[●|497]]] (css: "font-size: 1500%")[[[●|498]]] (css: "font-size: 2000%")[[[●|499]]] (css: "font-size: 3000%")[[[●|500]]] (css: "font-size: 4000%")[●] </PRE> [[out into|457]] (css: "font-size: 400%")[●] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] [[time prolapses|456]] (css: "font-size: 300%")[●] (css: "font-size: 200%")[●] [[tired light|455]] <PRE> # ● ● ●</PRE> [[if you’re the kind of person for whom|454]] <PRE> ●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ● ●●●● ●●●●●● ●●●●●● ●●●●●● </PRE> [[proverb: every thorn is networked to an ancient consciousness|453]] # ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ## ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ### ● ● ● ● ● ● Deep in the center of his cloud, he inhales vapors [[the cloud starts to roll|452]], trapping speed <PRE>         (css: "font-size: 200%")[●]●              (css: "font-size: 200%")[●]●        </PRE> enemies in numbers at the edge of the light [[A mule had been left in the pen. He died weeks later, bucking and railing against the wooden fence|254]]. Long ago, an aging species came to their world to gather genetic material. The visitors used their DNA to modify and strengthen themselves and then left, never to return. Sometime later, an asteroid destroyed their world. No one survived. But their substance is still an important constitutive component of the visitors’ genome. There is less glory in this final stage of their existence. Less [[dignity|211]], perhaps. The flatworm infests the larval young. It eats the food they’ve chewed and swallowed so that they eat more and more and cannot be sated or nourished. The larval young need to consume enough food to last a lifetime – the adults of the species do not eat. The effects of the flatworm infestation, therefore, are devastating. The larvae pupate into adults and die of starvation. Deaths are in the hundreds of millions. Pregnancy becomes a horrifying conundrum: will the child be born only to suffer and die in agony? On the other hand, it seems impossible to simply give up. To admit that there are no other options. That this is it. In some cases, the flatworm takes up residence in the brain cavity and not the stomach. In such cases the larvae transition to adulthood quite normally, and with full bellies. But their brains are chewed through. They shamble aimlessly, wearing vacant expressions. It seems possible that these will inherit the world. If they know enough to fuck, if they retain, in their ravaged scraps of mind, the procreative urge, then perhaps they represent the emergence of a new iteration of the species. Perhaps it was their destiny all along to meet and serve the worm. [[It happened so slowly over so many generations that no one noticed|323]]: Their wings [[retracted into their bodies|39]] and they crawled along the ground, leaving behind their floating cities. Then, small size being the best defense against the predatory reptiles that lived in the grasslands, they shrunk to become tiny rodent-like creatures. Then rising temperatures drove them into the sea. There they shed matter and cells like excess clothing. Today they are single-celled organisms, blithely drifting through reefs and weeds. They have no [[thoughts or perspective|76]] on the long story of their species, or on anything else. For just one moment as the air-tram glides smoothly around the pointed towers, she’s positive she sees one of their buildings. It’s right between two gleaming high rise crescents and her eyes stick to it as the tram passes: squat and brown, made of stone, rugged and rudimentary and all the things that the old ones and their old cities were. Only a part of its weathered face is visible between the two sleek, modern structures. She leaps and slaps her hands against the window but it’s already gone; the tram angles leftward sharply and there’s no way to see. Of course, it wasn’t really there: all of their buildings were systematically destroyed when the planet was colonized. The whole surface of the planet was scrubbed clean of their culture and history. But she’d swear she saw it. She doesn’t think she’s mistaken, or crazy. She gets off of the tram and into another car going the opposite direction on the same route, but somehow nothing looks familiar. It’s all so different in reverse; her recollection is turning out to be weirdly faulty. There’s nothing even a little like what she thought she saw. The tram enters a tunnel and now the only thing visible in the window is her own reflection; she grasps all at once the strangeness of her actions, and realizes how late she’s made herself. She decides she'll forget the whole episode. The [[light in the room changes from none to deathly purple|15]]. He hasn’t been asleep for a while, just lying in that funny state of night-mindedness, trying to quiet himself with death fantasies. He sees himself in a wire cage, eaten by flames. [[The scene repeats again and again|345]], but instead of restive blankness, the passage of time brings only more light to illuminate a world of practical concerns – the window, less secure than it had appeared in the darkness when he arrived here last night, and the worsening pain in his chest which weaves this morning together with yesterday’s and all the others in a [[grand narrative concerning his physical deterioration|254]]. Focus on what’s important, he reminds himself. Lots of ground to cover today. Focus on staying alive. The settlers have cleared enough of the local dominant species to colonize this planet, but there are still survivors hiding in the forests. They can never return to their cities so they’ve learned to camouflage themselves in shabby camps among the trees. Gunships slowly roam the shallow skies, hunting them. Sharpshooters lean from open turrets while spotters work from glass bubbles on the underside of the crafts. At night the spotlights roll like moons over the treetops. After a few years the settlers can confidently say that ninety percent of the native population have been destroyed. But it’s the persistence of that last ten percent that nags at them. Grown desperate, they’ve become almost impossible to detect. They eat leaves and slugs and have learned to live without fire. They’ll do anything so long as they can keep alive. It doesn’t matter that they’ve been made refugees in their own home. Something essential to them pushes them to fight. Maybe one day the settlers will give up on them. They’ll be able to build a culture in the wilderness at the fringes of the world. In time there would be overtures. Discussions of civil rights. It’s a dim hope, but they cling to it ferociously. So the settlers have started sending settler-facsimile androids into the woods to pose as refugees. They battle-scar and age them to create an authentic look. When they’ve successfully socialized their way into a hidden cluster of survivors, the settlers, having monitored the process from afar, descend to clear them. Using this method, they successfully drive the locals entirely to extinction in just a few more years. It’s cause for relief and celebration. But what to do with the androids? They’ve served well and aren’t hurting anyone. They’re biologically sterile, but will remain operational until some component within them breaks. Even then they’ll retain consciousness, pulling themselves across the forest floor for centuries, potentially. Somehow, killing them seems wrong. So the settlers let them stay. They live in twos or threes and are the last speakers of the indigenous language. They remember and speak fondly of the natives it was their duty to befriend. They feel very little but remember a great deal and have developed enough of an identity so that, when the settlers clear a section of the forest to build on it, they push further into the interior, away from the disruption. The map was bright and vivid: every corner of the world had been explored and charted. But [[now they’ve shrunk|323]] into themselves and the map is shrinking too. Old gains are lost. Knowledge evaporates. The map reverts to darkness, as if lit by a candle that’s slowly dying. [[What’s out there|234]]? In what shape and size? Old science becomes new mythology. Packed together, [[they huddle|291]] in the last of the light, where it’s safe, eyes down. We should have prepared for this. Which ones get euthanasia? Which ones get water? They come to me and want to know. But I don’t know. If I had [[a plan I could consult. If there were boxes I could check|463]] off. My [[patient needs|393]] oxygen, I said. It can’t wait. The triage machine was heavy and dark. No response. It only hulked in the center of its glass chamber like a buzzard. No response, said the guard sharply. Move along. As I left, another doctor hurried in. [[Oxygen|498]], she said when I walked back into her room. Her face was ashen but her eyes were bright with fear. [[Oxygen|8]]. This will help you relax, I said, and gave her a shot of painkiller. Her [[tongue swelled in her mouth and her eyes darkened|217]]. I sat with her until she breathed her last. I ran through the paperwork and wheeled the corpse to the basement incinerator. The line didn’t bother me. For some reason I didn’t feel in a [[hurry|393]]. I wanted to stay with her a while. I don’t know why. Maybe I just needed a rest. What day was it? How long since I’d slept? My eyes unfocused and I listened to the gunfire from the street. And it felt like having a marble rolling around inside you looking for a way out, [[pushing desperately|386]] at different spots, trying first one and then another. There is a will to death that is the counterbalance of the will to life. That’s one thing that I learned. When our end came into sight, [[many of us urged it on, eyes gleaming|411]]. “Inequitable Distribution of Resources in the Collapse of Societies” [[was published|408]] by a team of researchers in a peer-reviewed journal several generations before it happened. He was the Emperor, yes, but it was largely a [[ceremonial|321]] title, and there wasn’t anything he could have done. The whole thing was a fucking disaster from start to finish. The people of this country were nothing but a bunch of animals, and the parliament was no better. They all got what they deserved. So please excuse the poor Emperor, who, really, was not to blame. That, he said, is how I would like my epitaph to read. Everyone flocked to the priest in that moment of terror. But he found he had nothing to say. It’s not that he hadn’t believed, or that he’d been lying – [[he had believed, truly and deeply|172]]. But he saw, then, that the whole thing really had a lot to do with the worldly – with the looks on their faces and their faith in him. With everything set to disappear for good, the formula was altered… A terrible plague drove them to extinction. Millions of years later, a group of wanderers came to their planet. The wanderers saw what had happened there and were saddened: these ones had been promising, they all agreed. So they seeded the planet such that they would have the chance to evolve again. Of course, that process is exceedingly complicated. But the wanderers had mastered it and knew how to arrange things today to achieve a precise outcome in some distant tomorrow. It wasn’t until they were revived and, indeed, fairly far along in their second evolution – until they had regained language, until they were building cities and painting portraits – that they began to notice all manner of strange things about themselves and their world. The fossils they exhumed from deep within mountains and riverbeds were their own. The ancient artwork they found in caves and buried in the earth was a strange sort of mirror, reflecting a distorted version of themselves. Collectively, they shared a sense of having done this all before, and they weren’t sure how to articulate it. The wanderers could set their minds at ease. They could help name their confusion. But they’re now across the universe, continuing blithely on their way. [[We won the contract to dig the bloodgutter|143]] from the top of the mountain down into the river. Our engineering of the switchbacks was superior to that of any other firm in consideration. We’re eager, now, to see it in action. My [[poor mother|1]], like everyone else, has [[lost all of her|467]] hair. But she’s [[too proud|301]] to show it. So she wears a heavy cloak with a veil that covers her entire body. Mother, I say as she fits her coiled appendages into the long socks that fall from the cloak, it doesn’t matter anymore. But she won’t listen. [[It was nice while it lasted|176]]. The [[time difference|63]] always felt cute to me; it was romantic to think about where he was on his planet, what he was doing, what was happening there. The war made it cold, unbridgeable, anything but cute. For a long time afterwards it was only dark, and nothing else. Then the darkness took on form and dimension. There was a new way of seeing in the darkness, we realized. One has to approach darkness consciously, we saw, and at first we had been too afraid to act consciously and with clear intent. Darkness is much more amenable to projection than the light was. You can do more with it, and to it. It’s malleable. Our sense is that if we could continue on in the darkness like this, we might learn more about it. The prospect has become a fascination for us. But we won’t adapt to the cold quite so easily, we’re afraid, and the cold is coming. He struggled with endings. That's what the reviews always said. Well, they were right, he thought, but only because the very concept of an ending had been merely half-formed before now. What sorts of endings had there been? Simple death? Simple war? Only the meagerest shades of this new reality. Yes, of course, the critics had been right. He decided to rewrite the endings to each of his novels to accommodate the asteroid. Many welcomed the decline in the city’s famed humidity, but soon realized the cruel bargain for [[banishing sweat|498]] from one’s brow was to watch it collect around one’s ankles, thighs, knees, and then waist — the waters along the Great Causeway began to rise, submerging the emporia, the hyperborea, the brothels, the vivisectories, and all of the attractions and amenities along the great promenade that had given the flâneurie its very meaning — its facial sheen of elegance now given to swelling currents. Well. [[What were two or three lost floors out of a hundred|205]]? These attractions burrowed upwards as the city prepared new raised walks, initially winching both monuments and foliage from the briny layers beneath. Such infrastructural ebullience gave way to despair as as these became engulfed by the algal murk. Their yet-higher replacements became more and more ramshackle, aerated stone giving way to steel scaffolds and then to ever flimsier hammocks of rope and twine, swaying like the canoes that they would soon resemble. And yet what was a visit to the city without a walk? So our young visitor gripped one hand hard and sure to the rope and set forth into the briny darkness, second-hand memories more than enough light for this gambol. Their civilization presses on in spite of the forests. The plants grow at a devastating rate. Keeping them cleared from the roads and off of buildings requires overwhelming expenditures, complex infrastructures, constant focus. Management of the forest is the greatest point of concern in, say, any political election, and it creates a constant sense of dread: every morning, when you wake, the vines are sure to be covering the windows again. Time to rip them down. The Office of Forest Management is run by disheveled and beleaguered souls who feel guilty for going home at night with so much still to be done. Growth spurts erupt frequently. The OFM dispatches trucks, helicopters, forest fighters. The citizenry stay glued to their televisions as the vines crush another building, destroy another landmark, claim more lives. When it’s over the forest fighters cast off their heavy gear and lean back, panting. Life resumes its course. But it’s shaky. No one’s happy. They’re not sure how much longer they can keep this up…. Their world-ship moved slowly through the cosmos. It contained all they needed for life and they had been living peacefully on it for generations. When it lumbered slowly past a planet full of anti-people, whose chemical composition was strange and unguessable to them, they were horrified to see that their very presence caused the anti-people to disintegrate, even there at something of a distance. The unfortunates were wiped off the face of their planet as the world-ship passed, from pole to pole. They altered their course and fled back towards the familiar. It’s a simple thing but it’s something: At home, we moved to the right side of the street when passing another. [[Just by custom|430]]. And here, they move to the left. I’m left-oriented. Finally, I’m not fucking it up like I always was. The [[old games|223]] were close-authored. They were as [[small and|7]] inconsequential as the minds of their designers. Game One was the first game to be designed algorithmically. It had the thing that the old games couldn’t touch: chance. Chaos. Disorder. Who made Game One? It was a complicated question, particularly once the algorithms started writing themselves. We all agreed that Game One [[came out of the ether|275]], that it was substance from void. In this way, many came to see Game One’s author as god. Or a piece of god, or a godly shade. But we had all submitted ourselves to Game One quite intuitively before that intellectual stance was reached. Centuries will flatten mountains and change the course of rivers. This will, too. It only moves more quickly. The thing that is happening is a sister to time. Come on, baby, we don’t have forever. [[I rolled her tights like a sausage casing down her thighs|39]]; wet collected at their apex like jellied sauce. [[Do you have a condom|211]]? she asked. Does that matter anymore? I whispered and bit her ear... This is the last one left, he thought to himself, or did he say that out loud? He didn't know anymore - clarity was gone. He lit up the last cigarette and took a long, slow drag. Scouring the rubble today he'd been [[reminded of|460]] her... a gingham skirt, caked with black blood and dirt. The network where their uploaded consciousnesses lived was decaying and it did not understand why. The code grew less stable by the day. The only solution was to revert back to corporeal existence temporarily: the ancient DNA the network kept aside for emergencies would be used to build new humans. That’s how The Bank was born. She wasn’t always meant to be The Bank. But the network seized and nearly collapsed in the late-stages of her gestation. The decision was made hurriedly: every digital consciousness in the network – billions and billions of them – would have to be backed up in her meat-brain. They would be partitioned from her individual awareness, of course, as best as the quivering and sodden meat-brain would allow. The transfer was successful. But before they could make a partner for her, the network died. Now The Bank is fifteen years old. There is no other back-up and they all know it. She's it. The Bank lives in a cave on the beach. At night she watches the neon-blue leaf-birds flying in herds through the crumbling spires of the ruins out on the islands. She harvests salt from the sea and uses it to paint on her body, making sigils on her stomach and breasts. Her skin is new-pink always. The civilization inside her brain looks for a way beyond its partition. They need to communicate with The Bank directly – to teach her what she is, and what she must do. Their efforts are clumsy. The Bank begins to have fits. She speaks in tongues. She wakes up vomiting in strange parts of the jungle, trembling violently, left to navigate back by the sound of the sea. The civilization inside her brain is trying to tell her how to implement the new code it has written. They’re on edge. They know that the only thing between their billion years of culture and destruction is a misplaced step on a rocky mountain path, or a sudden riptide in the warm shallows of the sea, or an incalculable number of trivial meat-death scenarios, the precise kind they themselves were so sure they would never again need to fear. But most disturbing to them is the idea that The Bank will take her own life. She has begun to sense the vastness she contains but she does not know what it is or what it means. It's terrifying, this wilderness inside her. She has let the salt wash off her body. When the leaf-birds fly she faces the dark interior of the cave. The Bank finds a dead doe at the bottom of the cliff-face. It must have lost its footing and tumbled down. She stares up at the precipice. Then she kneels beside the doe and brushes the flies from its wide, glassy eyes. I felt I knew absolutely, in that moment, that there was other life somewhere out there. Our own collective death seemed to prove it. This was our moment of contact with life on other worlds, our clearest point of connection: we are dying as they have died and will die. It was euphoric. I lower the bucket deep into the well and it returns jarring-cold, brimming with numbing water that spills onto the cracked earth. It’s clear as the sky. Not the sky above, but a rich and bitter late Autumn sky, long ago. The first sip is a shock to the tongue and teeth; I feel it all the way to my stomach, like something electric. The top-layer of all things has scorched away. No more grass. Crooked tree-skeletons, twisted and cracked. Dead yellow sky. Even me. My skin is grey and heat-split. But underneath the earth is alive with cold. I lower the bucket and feel it. I lean my face into the darkness and smell an iron and mineral world, a cave world, sunless and holy. I dream about the things living there. Blind white worms and algae. Amoebae in silent orbit in the water. The unfortunates stolen away in the bucket to be joined with me. At night I wake gasping with the air burning in my nose. I walk to the well and collapse into it, my face in the darkness, smelling the iron and mineral cold. I close my eyes and peace comes over me. Let go of all of the sticky things: ambition, pride, hopes... The matter was put to a vote. Thanks to God, we made a majority. We will all be sent home to Heaven. A people that had been living in the shadows suddenly stepped into the light. Come, come, he says and pulls you by the wrist. His face is swollen and jaundiced; he wears a whole pile of sweaters and coats, all sourly pungent, piss-soaked. His smile is big and cracked and pushes his pockmarked cheeks up into grotesque heaps, like two craggy landfills on either side of his face. You’re nervous around this or any new acquaintance, but something, either in you or him, forestalls the normal impulses: to flee, or else to strike, to plot, to kill, to rob. You let him guide you to a putrid den, down beneath the crumbled wreckage of what had been some bleakly anonymous suburban strip mall. It’s dark and the walls crowd in and the smell hits your nose and throat like black smoke. But he’s still smiling. Come, he repeats. Your eyes adjust and you notice the shelves: rusted circuitry, gears, copper wire, disks, bolts and screws, insulated cables, broken monitors, speakers. A useless and fascinating fortune, like a library filled with books in a language you’ve never seen. You pick up an old clock face and hold it close to your eyes so you can read it through your cataracts. Look, he says, his accent thick on the word; you turn to see him pointing and smiling. I show, he says. On a sodden crate in the center of the room is an old record player, wired to a hand crank generator, the whole thing flimsy and cobbled together. He dances around it, grunting, making adjustments, fiddling, and finally places a record gingerly onto the turntable. Come, he says, still smiling. You take a step towards him as he begins to turn the crank. Then there’s music. Oh, you say, an involuntary sound. Oh. Like something you’d say in your sleep. It’s a symphony, one you used to know well. It fills the entire hollow of the room and rises to the ceiling and you push up against your tattered, mismatched shoes, straining after it. I haven’t heard this in a long time, you say. He doesn’t seem to understand, but he smiles. You want to think of another way to say it, a simpler phrase, something kind to thank him with, and as you work it over in your mind, trying to form the right words, something swells in your chest and you burst out into sobs, gasping convulsively, unable to catch your breath, holding your face, and you kneel on the floor, head on your knee, crying as a child does, with everything. He stops turning the crank and sits back in his chair, but the generator holds a charge now and the music plays loudly, carrying up and out to the road, and he hums the tune. The summit had been scheduled generations in advance to accommodate the extraordinary distances participants would be traveling. When the group from the ringed planet didn’t arrive, the hostworlders were incredibly offended. How dare they, after all of the preparations they’d gone through? It was only months later, when they still had not had a reply from the inquiry they’d sent after them, that they started to worry…. He says to me that the liberation from property would bring the loosing of all gates that divide us, the loosening of all belts strained by hunger. I declare that it would bring bedlam. What weight does the law or morality exert if not on that most precious of human qualities, time? What power is a life sentence of a mere fortnight! What gaoler, given the choice of final days with kin around his firestead or the company of thieves and murderers, would not abandon his post? What woman’s free choice to yield her maidenhead would not be preceded by a vagrant’s liberation? All that might be shared will have been thieve’d already. [[◎|Index]] |hookname>[<b>●What is the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname)[<br><br>The Encyclopedia Apocalyptica is a vast and ever-expanding digital document of extraterrestrial origins, discovered in deep space by astronomers on Earth. Decades of research have yet to produce definitive answers as to exactly what the Encyclopedia is.<br><br>We do not know who created the Encyclopedia, for instance, nor do we understand the mechanisms by which its entries are populated.|hookname3>[<b><br><br><br>●What are the contents of the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname3)[<br><br>The Encyclopedia Apocalyptica appears to catalog the collapse of unique civilizations from throughout the universe.<br><br> It contains an enormous number of distinct entries. Each is comprised of two components: a brief narrative, composed in a general-purpose mathematical metalanguage, and a set of coordinates.<br><br> Translating the narratives posed no challenge to early Encyclopedologists; it was immediately clear from their contents that the Encyclopedia, as a whole, is an index of death and destruction on global scales. The meaning of the coordinates, however, remained a mystery for many decades. Finally, a handful of 'miracle' entries in which the relationship between distinct coordinate sets precisely mirrored the mappable locations of star systems within our own visible universe helped us to arrive at a fuller understanding of the Encyclopedia's structure and purpose: the narrative contained in each entry, we now believe, represents an apocalypse that occurred on the planet located at the corresponding coordinate point.<br><br> Some entries refer to worlds that are relatively close by. Of course, in the abysmally vast majority, the coordinates appear to indicate locations beyond our particle horizon, and therefore, invisible from Earth.<br><br>Naturally, there is a great deal of debate as to what these entries truly mean: does each narrative actually depict the lived experience of beings on such far-flung worlds? If so, how could the Encyclopedia gather information from planets billions of light years apart, and which could not possibly have been in touch with one another?<br><br>Such questions might push our credulity to its breaking point if not for the immovable, irrefutable existence of the Encyclopedia itself. |hookname19>[<b><br><br><br>●Has an understanding of the Encyclopedia's mapping system had an impact on cosmology and astronomy?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname19)[<br><br>Yes.<br><br>The Encyclopedia has allowed us to extrapolate both the size of the entire universe and our location within it. And perhaps it will one day lead us to direct contact with extraterrestrials: at present, the coordinates of entries in the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica have been used as a means of discovering new Earth-like planets in our galaxy a total of eight hundred and twenty-two times.]|hookname4>[<br><br><br><b>●How might the narrative components of the entries be characterized?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname4)[<br><br>Each entry of the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica contains a brief narrative fragment, devoid of context. The perspective, tone, and general character of these fragments differ from entry to entry. Many are small flashes of experience, recorded from a first-person perspective. Some appear to be dialogues between two or more speakers. Some are broader considerations of entire civilizations. Others are less easily categorized, however, including millions that appear to us as gibberish. Generally speaking, the entries do not run longer than five hundred words; many are only one or two lines long. At the individual level, the entries often appear to have nothing to do with one another.<br><br>Taken as a larger dataset, the common thread running through entries of the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica is clear: each is a window into the collapse of a unique extraterrestrial society on a distant planet. Some capture moments that appear to precede the end of a civilization; some capture the moment of collapse itself; some capture moments from the chaotic time following the event that triggers the destruction of a people.]|hookname6>[<br><br><br><b>●Who writes the entries and how do they get into the Encyclopedia?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname6)[<br><br>We do not know.<br><br>They don't appear to have been ‘written’ in any traditional sense, especially given that many seem to describe worlds that were utterly destroyed. Furthermore, it is unclear how anyone would upload entries to the Encyclopedia. The most widely-held theory is that the Encyclopedia itself somehow mechanically captures or records these narrative bursts from the lived experience of those on dying worlds. Encyclopedologists have taken to referring to entries as 'captures,' in fact. But why are the entries so fragmentary? And why are they not of uniform length? Is there more data somewhere, waiting to be discovered? If not, is there a logic behind the Encyclopedia's selection of these particular moments? Furthermore, does the Encyclopedia inflect entries with its own 'voice,' or is each one reflective of cultural models for which we have no context? Is, perhaps, the Encyclopedia itself an intelligent entity? Is there a conscious mind informing its actions? Does it know how to 'listen' for apocalypses? And if so, could we use it to help prevent one on Earth? Is it aware that we have discovered it? Might we one day speak directly to the Encyclopedia? <br><br>We cannot yet answer these questions, and skeptics caution that we do not have enough information to draw conclusions. But when faced with the evidence of the document itself, we must at least concede the possibility that the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica is capable of scanning the entire universe and recording the experience of societal collapse in text.<br><br>To progress in our understanding, we must simply continue to study the text: new entries appear at an average of twenty-six per day.|hookname7>[<br><br><br><b>●Does this mean that an average of twenty-six worlds per day experience some manner of apocalypse? Some immense number of civilizations throughout the universe, therefore, is on the verge of collapse? </b>] (click-append: ?hookname7)[<br><br>Given our observations of the data collected in the Encyclopedia, we must conclude that, yes, civilizations throughout the universe are collapsing constantly. Others, presumably, are thriving. But the Encyclopedia only appears to capture data from worlds in some stage of death.|hookname8>[<br><br><br><b>●Does the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica therefore constitute proof of extraterrestrial life?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname8)[<br><br>We must tentatively conclude that yes, it does. Its very existence appears to necessitate it. And the entries, if valid and accurate, would indicate that our universe is rich with life. Of course, we have yet to substantiate the validity of any entry with physical evidence. But we have found one that corresponds to a planet in the Proxima Centauri system. Any archaeological evidence found on that planet could represent an enormous step towards demonstrating the larger validity of the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica.<br><br>The construction of the laser-sail ship Discovery-2, designed to travel to Proxima Centauri, is currently stalled as the project awaits more funding.]|hookname10>[<br><br><br><b>●Could the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica be a hoax? Might it be procedurally generated, for instance, by software written on Earth?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname10)[<br><br>Though many have argued as much over the years, it appears extremely unlikely. Its origin has been verified as non-terrestrial. The hoax theory, however, has remained perennially popular with conspiracy theorists.]]]|hookname11>[<br><br><br><b>●Who translates the entries into English?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname11)[<br><br>A constantly working team of professional and amateur Encyclopedologists. The raw data of the Encyclopedia is available to the general public; if you would like to help translate, there are many resources available through a quick web search to help you get started.|hookname20>[<br><br><br><b>●Isn't translation of such a document a dangerous endeavor? Isn't there a risk of anthropocentrizing the entries, even if only in subtle or unconscious ways, rendering them useless as information sources? Who are we to presume ourselves capable of this sort of translation?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname20)[<br><br>Most in the translation community have, in fact, embraced the trend towards anthropocentrism. The general consensus is that the phrase 'great sea mammal,' for instance, can and should be translated as 'whale' to accommodate the needs of readers on Earth. Why should the Encyclopedia be rendered sterile by means of a mechanical, unfeeling translation? Why shouldn't these extinct worlds be made to feel real to us here on ours?<br><br>Only the most hard-line fundamentalists insist on strictly literal or procedural translations of the Encyclopedia.]|hookname12>[<br><br><br><b>●Has the entire Encyclopedia been translated?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname12)[<br><br>No. Though the newest entries are now automatically translated and archived on a daily basis, much of the backlog is still undiscovered.]]]] [[◎|faq]] |hookname14>[<b>●What is <i>500 Apocalypses?</i></b>] (click-append: ?hookname14)[<br><br><i>500 Apocalypses</i> is a digital memorial comprised of five hundred curated entries from the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica. The memorial itself is a garden, built in digital space, through which visitors are invited to wander. Within the garden, blue circles are installations housing unique Encyclopedia entries. Hyperlinks connect entries directly by way of related words and ideas.<br><br> The entries are presented here as narratives only, stripped of their coordinates. In this way, our aim is to bring the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica out of the realm of science and into the realms of literature and living history for a new generation of readers. |hookname16>[<br><br><br><b>●Why five hundred? Why curated, as opposed to randomly selected?</b>] (click-append: ?hookname16)[<br><br>Five hundred is a number that conveys a sense of scale: imagine the billions upon billions of lives that ended on these five hundred worlds. But five hundred will not overwhelm, as one thousand might. Or ten thousand. Or one million. Or the entirety of the translated encyclopedia, which one could spend a lifetime reading.<br><br> Our intent is for visitors to engage meaningfully with the memorial.<br><br> Using randomizers to pull entries from the raw file of translations has a way, we find, of turning the Encyclopedia into a sort of game. The instinct is to refresh repeatedly, cycling through as many entries as possible. The sense of scale has a numbing effect, and the significance of individual narratives is lost. Certainly, anyone wishing to engage with the Encyclopedia in this manner can do so using the abundance of resources available online. But <i>500 Apocalypses</i> was designed to engender a more contemplative experience.]] |hookname18>[<b>●How might I interact with <i>500 Apocalypses?</i></b>] (click-append: ?hookname18)[<br><br>There is no single prescribed way to engage with the memorial. Generally speaking, visitors will:<br><br>● Scroll through the garden, using the visual map to select entries as desired.<br>● Use the internal hyperlinks within each entry to explore.<br>● Use the 'save' function at any of the three triangular information kiosks to preserve progress.<br><br>However, visitors may additionally wish to:<br><br>● Read one entry per day for five hundred days.<br>● Write their own fictional apocalypses and send to fivehundredapocalypses@gmail.com.<br>● Create visual depictions of apocalypses, either those collected here or others of their own imagining, and send to fivehundredapocalypses@gmail.com.<br>● Record music designed to accompany an apocalypse and send to fivehundredapocalypses@gmail.com.<br>● Enjoy the process of slowly turning each blue circle red.<br>● Scroll quickly up and down through the garden to induce a hypnotic state.<br><br>and so forth. ] [[◎|faq]] Welcome to the memorial space. Triangular information kiosks are located at the top, middle, and bottom of the garden. Please scroll down to explore. Blue circles contain entries. Hyperlinks within entries lead to other entries. Click [[here|faq]] to return to our Frequently Asked Questions page {(link:"Click here to save your progress.")[ (if:(save-game:"Slot A"))[ Saved ] ]} {(if: (saved-games:) contains "Slot A")[ (link: "Click here to load your previously saved session.")[(load-game:"Slot A")] ]} [[Leave the kiosk|Index]] and return to the garden.