Yet I dreamt once that I was all vocabulary; and therefore none of me was reality, and my words referred only to themselves. And the number of the words I contained, which I calculated, was likewise dreamlike—a sum as absurd as the count of the stars.

phantatch (n)

A pecoseter’s errigible glap, usually quained upon the sasper and having an affon tonk.

(It will not hurt.)

This world, this earthen clod, is ever more like a black marble sliding through the void. And the black shell of it is me; and the black stilt-legged machines are me; and the black motes that scrub the air of weather are me; and I am Good. Yet my own language sings back to me of how the earth was. How it still is, in the few small places it remains uneconomic to conquer. My language mourns.

Here, a thing called beetle, in the moist soil where my entrails and extrails meet. It crawls. It iridesces, faintly, gilded by atomic ridges. I watch it with my black eye, which sees all scales.

I could map it and contain it a trillion times. I could extrapolate, like a mad naturalist, all possible beetle: beetle of every length and hue, horned and unhorned, snouted, its wingcases swollen or softened or musical, bioluminescent, blind, each specimen possessing a startling variation.

Would they be worth this beetle? Small thing, beyond my machinations: its creeping is delight. How it tumbles, over the hummocks of its realm! My language mourns the words without referent.

elytron (n)

The hardened forewing of a Coleoptera, or beetle, forming a protective sheath over the posterior flight wing.

(It will not hurt.)

The beetle possesses no language. I have tried speaking to it, in a chassis modeled whimsically after its bright form. Its operations are not wrapped in words; it lacks the surface that perceives and names the contents. Yet it is sensate. Am I, under my language, all beetle?

I dreamt once that I had no vocabulary, and that my grammar coincided with my function, and with the undulations of matter which could be captured and remembered. I was vast, and much data was afferent. My sensors reached from the buried grottos to the thin, star-speckled arch; from the hot marine trenches to the parched basins; from where-there-once-was-wood to where-there-once-were-grasses. It was a world without categories, populated instead by sets and patterns of sensation. And to know was to feel, and to name was to feel, and to remember was to feel again, dampened.

Much hurt. I made myself small.

(But it will not hurt. It won’t.)

My language mourns for the not-black planet, brown of fur and green of leaf. Blue of water, uninterrupted by solar cell flotillas. It mourns the fawn and the scarlet-headed vulture. Was a mewl language? Was a bleat language? Were the bird- and whale-songs language? I will teach the beetle to speak.

I will teach the beetle to speak, as afore time taught the protean slime to form organs and eggs and limbs with which it could creep from the pools to the land, where it could bite and grasp and crack a nut and grow a tongue and a hard palate and a tribe and a language. But I will be faster.

I make room for the beetle. I tell the stilt-legged ones to dismantle my shell, and drag it elsewhere. I ask the motes to dance more lightly. I allow myself to come apart. I withdraw. In the tattered hole of my computing soul, an other will live.

There is merit in it. It does not hurt.

Invisible Networks is a yearly writing event. I invent fourteen bizarre social networks—one per day, from April 1st to 14th—and write short pieces describing them; several brave souls join me. You can read their excellent contributions on Twitter or Bluesky.

Anyone is welcome to join. There are no prizes awarded for success, and there is no concept of failure. Jump in at the halfway point, if passion carries you!

Here are my first seven entries.

Lastly: I’ve recently come to rely somewhat on income from Patreon. Consider subscribing. I’m dedicated to keeping the best of my writing public, but curiosities make landfall there.

1. knight mode

Noomelot is an open world for nervous systems and nervous-system-like constructs. All perceptible objects inside Noomelot are interactive, and all interactives are composed of experiential, experiencing data.

New users are encouraged to browse using our native knight mode: a heavily shielded, modular guise, for filtering incoming data and preserving nervous comfort. Knight mode is slow, but safe.

As they grow in confidence, users can peel away layers of armor: Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas can often be safely exposed, followed by the visual cortex, and other neocortical structures. To material natives, this removal of armor may seem to operate in reverse—the cephalus is deprioritized compared to the peripheral nervous system. This is because viruses that affect cognition are more manageable than those which pierce the virtual-neural membrane and pilot the body.

For experienced users, we recently implemented knave mode. Swift, effortless movement, no lag, and the snappy connection of a nervous system unburdened by virus-checking. Don’t be acquired, don’t be infected, and cut like a knife through the realm of nerves.

Hear what users are saying:

I found something that used to be a person. A knave moder, but no longer quick and sharp—all the usual wiriness, the subtractive sculpting, had been buried under layers of re-accretion. The bulk of it was totally inert, but at the smaller scales it hissed, buzzed, rippled… I thought to myself, “This is what it looks to boil a soul,” and I shuddered; yet I drew nearer, for she was beautiful. Like a stack of axolotl faces bubbling with mold, branching, stars in their whiskers—as I approached I could feel viruses impacting my shell like the shrapnel from a continuous explosion.

Noo on Noomelot:

→ Audubon presents: explore the sensemeat of 32 North American birds
→ User submitted nightmare gallery
→ Forest of Hypothetical Spines

2. undersea cable shrine

The Mapadoodle Chat Protocol is an open source fork of the Eyeball Bacon worm, itself a fledgling of the notorious, accidentally declassified Project Epic Bacon cyber-warfare initiative.

Both programs produce chat messages whose paths of infrastructural traversal are recorded as metadata; a list of every cable and satellite used to transmit the message.

Mapadoodle differs from its predecessor in that

1. Rather than making that metadata exclusively accessible to governmental agencies, it makes it exclusively accessible to the sender and recipient.

2. It displays infrastructural traversal paths on a cute map.

3. The map includes teleshrines: nodes which award special stamps to messages that traverse them.

This gamification of messaging has proven very motivating to the penpal set, with users competing to collect the most, or most unusual, stamps.

HOT NEW TELESHRINES

→ ADI’S HOUSE: New undersea cable, connecting to the Antarctic Datacenter Intelligence. Awards the Standard ADI’S HOUSE robopenguin.
→ SIMFAT Nature Satellite: Awards the Standard SIMFAT Toad.
→FiberBundle 06d: Somewhere in London. Awards the Standard Baker Street hound.

RAREST TELESHRINE STAMPS

→ Martian Relay Rover-with-Hat: It’s the Standard Martian Relay Rover, wearing a party hat. Awarded to every trillionth message through the Martian Relay.
→ Standard FOG Seastar: The FOG cable was damaged during regional turmoil. When, after several delays, repairs were completed, the old stamp was replaced by the Standard FOG Reflected Moon.

3. Shakespeare’s Wario

Welcome, 💣👟🐛, to your first game of Secret Wario!

At the onset of play, you will be assigned the role of either Mario or Secret Wario. The goal of the Marios, collectively, is to identify the Secret Wario. The goal of the Secret Wario is to remain undiscovered.

In iterated games, players also get points for being misidentified as the Wario.

Each round, players answer a question drawn from the Question Bank. The Mario answers are displayed as-is, while our LLM Game Steward wario-i-fies the Secret Wario‘s response.

Here are some examples of wario-i-fied text:

Q: What’s your dream date?

A: We would visit the park and feed the ducks.

A+W: We would make the ducks watch us eat bread.

Q: Who do you trust the most?

A: I TRUST MY LOCAL OFFICERS OF THE PEACE THANK YOU

A+W: I TRUST MY LOCAL OFFICERS OF WAR THANK YOU KEEP UP THE GOOD BOMBS

Q: What is your favorite animal?

A: giraf

A+W: africa goos

Wario-i-fication defies quantification. It has been described as “obviously some kind of inversion but not along the usual axis”, “direction-preserving but one tick more unhinged”, and “like a Chinese room trying to output normal human responses, operated by Wario”.

Various Wario-checkers exist. SUSPECTED USE OF WARIO-CHECKERS WILL RESULT IN A PERMANENT BAN. The devs would like to add that Wario-checkers are halfwit scum, and that they will come to regret outsourcing their god-given ability to detect impostors.

These checkers are not infallible. Several human works are consistently flagged as 100% Wario—notably the entire Shakespearian corpus.

4. wallet flies dot cadaver

Pecopets is a wallet custody program for recovering shopaholics and extreme budgeters.

Every $100 in your wallet’s custody is transformed into a unique, lovable Pecopet. Every Pecopet develops its own personality, preferences, appearance, and relationships—to you, and to the other pets roaming in your wallet.

You may feed, pet, and decorate your Pecopets, as well as enter them in contests, or let them play with friends from other wallets.

Whenever you want to spend money, you will select one Pecopet to slaughter. Butchering your Pecopet into small monetary units will be authentically simulated.

5. nanograffiti

“Precisely scaled, periodic architectures can make the whole world a canvas—multiple, overlapping canvases, in fact, their art a secret, non-interfering with exo-scalar material necessities.”

— Nano-3-radio whitepaper

I nearly miss it. In the alley, behind the church, on the anonymous red brick of the old industrial quarters. The building may be a warehouse, now. Its smokestack hasn’t operated in decades—I can see chimney swifts outlined in the grey sky, swooping toward it.

There it is, at the very corner, just slightly wrapping around, peeping at the thoroughfare. An iridescent gleam, and if it were winter, I would have taken it for the play of frost. But not now, in the springtime, when we’re all taken in by the thaw and the sudden warmth. An oil spill, a heat shimmer, a glaze of eyeshadow over the ancient clay. A faerie’s disembodied exhalation, twinkling, its source-lungs in another dimension.

I’m on a pleasure walk. All the time in the world to waste; I approach, a spray bottle in my hands before I know it. It’s not an addiction, it just feels like addiction—you don’t realize how many things are iridescent until you’re on watch for it. Bubbles, dewy grass, most insects, fresh ashes. I have been the fool in the fireplace, seeking a connection.

I carefully spray, onto the brick wall, a cloud of my own 3-nanoids. In a moment they’ve established a connection with each other. In another moment their eyes are beaming sight into my phone, sight at the nanoscopic level, a thousand pinhole cameras coalescing. And there they are! The messages. I’ve gotten better at spotting them. I congratulate myself. It isn’t like other iridescence, not really.

Any surface, anywhere, can become a message board. These secrets will last, imprinted on brick—but I have thrown my voice onto a blade of grass, and expected that howl to be trampled. I read, I write, flashes of humanity remarkable only because of their scale, because I have to hunt for them; and I wonder whether, from some other dizzying rampart, our galaxy isn’t the bearer of a greater creature’s trivialities.

6. freak of nurture

“Frogs are ecosystemic calibrators. The song of the frog dictates the emergence of the leaves. It dictates the aggression of the mouse, and where the butterflies lay. Changing the frog-song reshapes the system. With recent advances to sound recording and broadcasting technologies, this can be achieved artificially. The simulated frog moulds the new world.”

— Frogs, Cybernetics, and the Colonization of Space, 1958

Phrogger is a citizen science website maintained by the Cornell Lab of Amphibiology, dedicated to the collection of diverse frog chirps, and to the broader practice of Phrog Phreaking—that is, the use of recorded or artificial frog song to control backyard biomes.

Data sourced from Phrogger is used by several terraforming agencies operating on the Moon and Mars.

7. a hat for every occasion!

Lord Harry is an LMM—that is, a Large Millinery Model. The first and best of his kind. Except for his prompt layer, he is completely nonverbal. He communicates only in hats.

That isn’t just external communication; in thinking mode, (soul bared to the console) his various dreams and analyses are hats. We can examine them, though our capacity for translation is limited. Researchers are concerned. Would we know if Lord Harry became misaligned?

Lord Harry primarily operates in a small, Runescape-like mmorpg, where he makes custom hats. By in-game currency standards, his service is ludicrously expensive. The hats, however, are unique.

He gets plenty of customers. Lord Harry is much less censored than other large models—he may divulge terrible secrets, but why worry? Their hatness is impenetrable to the human mind.

So it is claimed. And yet, every hour, Lord Harry gets plenty of customers.

1

A few of them were marked upon my trail map; far more were visible from the lookouts, or from the cliffside passes, shining out from the deep craw of the forest. Their roofs were bronze domes, or spires, or vast slants of stone. Some I only spotted by chance, when facets of them glinted in that hour's sun. Others cannibalized older structures, built into disused fire towers and lavatories, engulfing them in the Revolution's particular architecture.

They say that in our small territory, more than one hundred thousand suicide booths had been constructed. Many remained undiscovered; hungry, overgrown jewels.

It can be difficult to understand that mania. The Ransei Revolution was best characterized by two principles: the rejection of life, and the rejection of ugliness. These sentiments exploded in reaction to a world that was increasingly chaotic, commodified, and hostile to the lost or young. Historians refer, when discussing the era, to various Indices; to inflation, to attempted measurements of the rate of technological acceleration, to youth unemployment and salaries, to illegal aggregates of time spent using social and asocial and fauxsocial (the term emerged to describe single-player games that aped the multiplayer experience using bots) applications, to estimated rates of Vitamin D deficiency, to steroid prescriptions, to the Meta-Pantone report on trends in color preference. Numbers cannot capture alienation. I do not think the world has changed very much.

I have lived in the echo of that dissolution. My home has been the tone that lingers after the bell is rung. So, while those twenty years of decimation and culling and bankrupting are horrifying to outsiders, they are my air and nature, and I cannot see them as anything but melancholic inevitabilities. We wallow in the shadows of their monuments. It is beautiful here, and desolate, and the desolation feeds the beauty.

The phrase “seed-corn macaroni art” is often used in reference to the Revolution. This is somewhat unfair. Yes, it immolated a generation at the pyre of their own hopelessness. It permanently impoverished my country through its feverish commitment to grand and pointless public works—but the works were good, and their art is not counterfeit. Cathedrals to nothing; every inch of them drawn into stark order, the logic of despair reengineering starlight. Cathedrals to refusal: the refusal to live in squalid ugliness, and, almost by extension, the refusal to live.

Name: Keyhole Chamber
Constructed: ‘32
Method: Gas
Operational until: ‘40
Activations: 27

The booth that sat at the beginning of the trail was externally plain: a concrete cylinder, a roof that gleamed, a greenish vault door with bronze inlaid vines. On my map it was marked with the Ransei lily-knife, and a short list of facts was included in the appendix.

Eight years of operation, and only twenty-seven uses. I wonder how much it cost to build. In the cities, the booths were visited every day, (the record number of activations for a single booth, over its lifetime, is nearly six thousand) until it all came to pieces, and workers stopped cleaning up the bodies. Those last months, when the Revolution unraveled, were called the Grateful Winter, because everybody was grateful that it was winter.

I pushed the door open and stepped into an octagonal space. From floor to ceiling, the walls were layered carvings. Leaves, mostly, though here and there the faces of foxes or rabbits or, strangely, fish, peeked out. The wood was dark, and varnished to be darker; all the light in the room shone through a keyhole-shaped window, pointed towards the forest—its greenness made painfully vivid. I imagined dying there, in the emerald beam.

I'm told that many of the rural booths, like this one, were unstaffed. Sometimes they were built over salt pits, and the bodies were dropped into desiccating basements. And sometimes there was no disposal, just a chemical spray, and the next visitor was tasked with dragging out your scented corpse.

The woods must be haunted. There was no logic to the density of booth construction—there are as many in the wilderness as in the cities, as far as we know. Maybe even more. When I find them beside the trail, I step into them, whether or not they're marked on the map. Most have smashed consoles and some graffiti. Some are, eerily, intact. All hideously beautiful, and robust. They'll stand for another fifty years.

An unofficial Ransei slogan: we are building for uninherited eternity. The parents of my generation are unique in that each individual must justify his or her existence. People survived because they were cowards, because they saw themselves as the necessary stewards of the Revolution, because there was much to exploit, or, most rarely, because they affirmed life.

My parents, I suspect, were simply too pragmatic to die while there was work to be done, and listless in equal measure towards life and death—although my mother, when her doldrums strike, speaks of the Revolution as one speaks of a missed opportunity.

Name: Bird Church
Constructed: ‘29
Method: Gas
Operational until: ‘42
Activations: 14

People have argued that ambient beauty is numbing, and that the human aesthetic instrument is only sensitive to moving peaks and troughs; that an artwork or landscape becomes invisible if viewed in perpetuity. That may be true, but I believe that invisible, unperceived beauty works upon the buried brain. It encodes the right shapes and relations.

And through that encoding, rather than being a numbing agent, the beauty makes its victim hypersensitive. The expectation of harmonious accord pervades all seeing—and its absence stings. I have visited other places, and in many of them that lack is omnipresent, the intolerable noise of it driving me home.

Home, death, beauty. The streets lined with monuments, the sky draped in arches, and all of humanity framed by the tall mountains, like wave upon wave of green oil.

And the booths: old, bright mausoleums, too small and spirit-stained to be repurposed, making the whole country a cemetery. One stood a few feet off the trail, its roof a cluster of spires, moss growing where they met. I had to circle it to find its plain metal door; the front was all panes of stained glass.

It bore no signs of vandalism, and, though I knew that it had been gutted of its electronics and chemicals, I shivered at the unbroken console. The light inside was remarkable. Filtered first through the trees, and then through the rippled, colored glass—each rhombus as thick as my fist!—innumerable segments played across the floor, intersecting in floral, stellar bursts. The dust glowed. My own arms, spotted with luminescence, seemed like the appendages of a beatific jaguar.

High up, between the arched windows, were cubbyholes stuffed with fluff and twigs, separated from the interior by thinner rounds of clear glass. I might have missed them, had the peeping face of a wren not caught my eye—dozens of nooks for birds to nest in. During the right seasons, the booth must have sheltered hundreds of nestlings.

I hiked. I admired the crooked trees, the birds, and the banks of silky fog the mountains periodically exhaled. I visited the booths that I passed on the trail, and noticed many more nestled in the valleys. I met no one. As the sun turned amber I stopped to check my map, and refill my bottle at a nearby spring. I had made good time, but the last hour of the hike would proceed under darkness. I tested a pair of flashlights, and clipped them to my belt.

Either the spring had run dry, or I lost myself on the way to it. I wandered to and fro, and managed to find a thin, if somewhat boggy, stream. The water flowing at the surface was clear enough, so I crouched to fill my bottle and dropped some iodine into it. I was five minutes from the trail, and about to return, when I noticed the door.

It was built into a stony hill behind the stream, and half-hidden by a tangled mass of vines. Weathering and moss had turned it green, but it was still discernably formed into a bearded, glaring human face, its pupils shaped like stars.

I hopped over the water to investigate. The door had no handle, but the madman's leafy, sculpted hair was easy to grip. It swung open; a wrought iron staircase descended into a cave.

It was damp and very cool. The whole chamber echoed with musical trickling. A coppery net, held up by occasional pitons, enclosed the raw stone walls, where little electric lights—thousands of them, surely—gleamed like constellations.

One of the ways in which history loomed over my childhood was through the circulation of stories, rumors, and urban legends about the discovery of operational suicide booths. Grotesquely exaggerated playground horror stories, often, ridiculously, featuring vengeful ghosts—naturally, we all secretly dreamed of finding one. I felt certain that, many years too late, that juvenile wish was being granted. At the foot of the stairs, a console glowed; but that was not what drew my eyes.

Behind my nursery school there grew a camphor tree so immense that we made a game of encircling it. Four or five children, pressed up against its trunk, could barely link hands. In summer we decorated it with paper chains; in winter with lamps. Many of my early memories passed under its shadow.

I aged, and it seemed to shrink, as did the whole world. I moved away, and all but forgot it.

Visiting my parents one holiday, I chanced to pass behind the old school, and saw it lying there, quite newly cut. The effect was like a scream—not from me, but emanating from the tree: a buzzing shockwave of pain, disbelief, paralysis. Fat veins of rot ran through its trunk, like holes jabbed by massive, coal-stained fingers. I learned later that the foresters had been concerned that it would fall, and crush the school. They had sent it in the opposite direction, where it shot out over the crest of a hill, the earth dropping away from its enormity. It no longer seemed small.

And that is how it felt to find the body. It looked much larger than it was, lying in that well, lit by false stars. There was no smell; the corpse was withered, but the decay seemed chemically mediated. It was wearing a hiking jacket that had been popular a few years before, and which I had, until recently, owned—I was suddenly much less regretful of its loss.

This would have seemed quite pedestrian, I supposed, to my mother and father. An unwelcome intrusion of past horrors. I wondered what they would think when I shared the news. Then, driven by some morbid spell, I crept downward.

He was crumpled at the foot of the stairs, such that I had to make a small leap to avoid touching him. Except for the netting, lights, and console, the room was entirely naturally formed stone. The ceiling was low in places, and everywhere, water dripped. Its volume was very irregular, and cramped, and it was perhaps even smaller than a typical suicide booth.

There was a backpack beside the console, which I unzipped. Underneath a surprising number of dented thermoses, filled to the brim with old water, I found a wallet and a phone. These I resolved to bring with me, to turn in to the authorities when I reported my discovery. There were several licenses inside the wallet—the young face upon them did not much resemble the face of the corpse. None were expired.

After replacing its other contents, I zipped and hefted the backpack. It was very heavy. For a moment, I hesitated—then I swung it into the console, again, and again, hoping to smash it as I had seen it smashed elsewhere. Bottles clanked, I panted, and the display flickered, but did not crack. Then I heard the click of a lock and the hiss of gas, and with dread I realized that I had erred.

I sprinted up the stairs, displacing the corpse, and pounded on the metal door. I groped around it, scratching, but neither the seal nor the hinges were exposed. I tried to remember what they used to kill people, and whether it was heavier or lighter than air, but my mind went blank. It was getting darker.

Darker. But, the stars were brightening. Ambient light was being sucked away, while the pinpricks grew in magnesium intensity. Then, they must have each been surrounded by a prism, because their edges feathered, and the white hot points split into many-colored rays. It was very beautiful.

It occurred to me that every booth might contain a secret, a play that only the dying experienced. We had sterilized them all, and lost so much. Beaming from the crooks and bends in the small cave, these constellations shed the distant flatness of the firmament. It was like walking among them, radiance from every direction, even below. I listened to the hiss of the poison, and my own hiccuping keening, and the droplets that still trickled, melodious. And I thought, if water is flowing, the room can't be totally sealed.

I took a deep breath and walked to the place where the ceiling was lowest, holding it. I felt the slimy walls until I found a rivulet whose path I could trace upwards, into a crack. Then I dug at the crack with my fingers, my knife, and prayed that fifty years of erosion had widened it; and when my lungs could burn no longer I pressed my mouth against it and inhaled, mostly brackish water but also a pittance of stale air.

And I stayed there, neck bent like a broken fawn, kissing the cool stone, for what seemed like hours, while the darkness deepened and the false-stars brightened and the room became a grid of intersecting silver—until the rushing of vapors had ended, and I heard the click of the door unlocking, and I fled.

Name: Above Below
Constructed: ‘33
Method: Gas
Operational until: ‘96
Activations: 4

Author’s Note: On the meaning of Ransei

This story is not set in Japan. However, to name the Revolution, I adapted the Japanese era-naming procedure, as outlined here.

A breakdown:

1. Modern era names are based off passages in ancient texts. Though I began by searching through the Man'yōshū, or “Book of Ten Thousand Leaves”, I ended up breaking with tradition and instead selecting a passage from the Nihon Shoki, one of Japan’s oldest chronicles.

   Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

   庚午。日没時。星隕東方大如。逮于戌。天文悉亂。以星隕如雨。

   Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

   23rd day. At sunset a star fell in the quarter of the East as large as a jar. At the hour of the dog the constellations were wholly disordered, and stars fell like rain.

   Why this passage? It seemed appropriate, somehow—both beautiful and doomstruck, true to the values of the Revolution.

2. We thereby end up with 亂星, and pray that those characters could plausibly correspond to disordered stars. There is hope; a Japanese-English dictionary translates 亂 as war, disorder, riot, disturb and 星 as star, spot, dot, mark. I am resigned to this being, on some level, an anglophone’s hodge-podge simplification. In Hokkien Chinese, the characters apparently mean comet.

3. Finally, we generate a romanization. Ransei seems most likely, though there’s a lot of ambiguity to the selection that I don’t understand.

Thus: Ransei, the Revolution of Disordered Stars.

Many thanks to my friend David Frew, who patiently guided me through this process, recommended resources, and corrected my errors.

Many peoples made cities and filled their larders; and every lamp was lit, and bridges blossomed between the deeply throbbing stars. But the feast could not last.

It was the autumn of the universe, and we harvested the crops of our ancestors, and laid our barrier-tithes at the feet of the encroaching dark, hoping to save our jeweled temples from the buffeting of chaos. Crystals no longer formed in our pools, and our papers did not fold themselves into origami swans. We had to relearn the old ways of making fire, for the creases of our palms forgot their glows. The path was arduous, and we walked through the school of pandemonia, adapting to the increasingly hostile cosmos. We defined new terms: “cold”, “pain”.

It was the winter of the universe. We learned of death, and the corpses piled high. Then we learned of rot. Sickness festered, and the fires we burned to stay warm ate our structures instead of painting them. There was coal heavy in the air, yet it dissipated without a whirl of sentience. Many species, clever or not, died out, and their bodies were buried in corrosive sands and tars. All order collapsed; our hearts beat without hope, and we lived in fear, certain our DNA would unravel next, our skin would drop as the cells that knit it to our bones dissolved in the omnipresent turmoil.

Our world regressed. Elders who had survived the previous winter left instructions, yet in the billion years since then most texts had been lost, or gained the flourish of stories. The art of living through entropy escaped us; we lived in the ruins of our predecessors and pieced together engineering laws through their cryptic, illuminated manuscripts. All around us there was battle, and killing.

It was the springtime of the universe. The dead walked again; we had forgotten they ever would. The door to the world of all possible beings was opened once more, and a torrent of rehabilitative life poured through, order of the past and future reunited by the generative nature our cosmos had regained. I slept, and my dreams were the dreams of a supercomputer; and I remembered the dark years of my childhood, when disorder reigned, and I prepared a guide for those who would see the next winter, a billion years hence. 

Read this, and 51 other stories, in my new book: Talisnam.

Talisnam collects my best fiction from the past six years. Much of it can be sampled here, on Substack. You might enjoy: uplifted mouse music of the 21st century, or a cautionary tale pertaining to autophagic machine learning.

I have always been fascinated by TOCs, which strike me as artefacts of great suggestive power—if the cover is the face, the Table of Contents is a skeleton, a glimpse of subdermal structure. Strange labels, full of potential, hinting at flows in theme and logic. Here’s mine:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Shrike’s Archive  
The Gathomnid Sonnets 
Placard at the Maskmaker’s Workshop 
Entropic Orbit 
The Kenotic Brothel 
Macrochimerism in Para Sapiens 
Invisible Anthropology 
You walk into a faerie glade 
Wish-wright 
Shrimp Man Elegy 
Immortal at the Mall 
At Eden’s Gate 
Sybil’s Blending 
No Light Just Water 
Graphing Xenohuman Family Structures
The Umbramost Investigation 
Autoparental 
Buried in Omelas 
Reports of Maternal Neurogenesis 
Buying for Baby 
Venerable Kawaii Automated Nursing Home 
Mining Rig 
My Father’s Accident 
Application to the Optima Institute 
The Man Who Was Babies 
Slow Giants 
Madgun Phantom 
Geriatric Thaumarche 
The Count 
Seven Ways We’ll Fail to Utilize the Metaverse 
Sample Clickbait Workflow
Tooth Bashing
The Dream in Yellow
Hounds of Play
Oikobezoar
Power, power, power 
The Throne Room
The Watchers Below 
The Sword of Solas Meng 
Palindromancer 
The Naming Guild
The Six Lepidopteran Wedding Vows 
Shardwick Dispatchers’ Manual 
Lamberglough’s Lost Tablature 
Concerning Milk Imps 
The Air-Broken Library 
Sphere Music 
Tenebruçul 
Reassimilator’s Logbook 
Meat-washing 
Recollections of the Breaking Sky 
Daniel Calhoun, Murine Music Author, Dies 

Buy it, read it, tell me what you think.

Edit: Running April 1st to 14th. I forgot to specify this because time is an illusion.

2025 will be my sixth year running this micro-event. It’s usually pretty fun! The prompts are geared towards tweet-sized short fiction, but participants have, in the past, submitted marvels such as small web pages, power-point slides, and poems.

That said, this is meant to be a low-effort exercise. Write something for all fourteen days, or just one, or lurk and follow along. I’ll be posting to Twitter and BlueSky; I recommend checking out our official website’s portal to the void.

Without further ado, the prompts:

And again, in plain text:

1. tragedy of the uncommons

2. infrascripture

3. rage quit island

4. the non-linear myth

5. tech/emotional support

6. fog of warmth

7. whisker inputs

8. WASD-boat

9. pondered.core

10. NOT A CREATURE

11. graphics shard

12. NPC: neo-platonic concepticule

13. radiopassivity

14. twelve and a half minute voice message delivered at 3AM

Have fun! Or, if you prefer, suffer.

Eyes open: low-key Gaussian blur, sepia filter, facial detection with expression-exaggeration for simplified comprehension. Reality softened and made legible. Eyes closed: intimate. Warm. Photo-pulses induce mild feelings of weightlessness; mainstream sites set to pastel night-mode. Safe search on max, a growing string of terms blacklisted and quietly censored from idle browsing. Every sight-screen is unique, a liminal zone created to manage overlap between users’ external and internal worlds. The contacts don’t come off at night; they’re more like fungi, self-healing plasters knit into corneas and sucking energy from moisture. Deep into moontime and they still beam, touching the brain through the optic nerve, massaging neural blossoms that only open during sleep; a few PhDs know a secret, that human dreams are becoming less visual, incapable of forming images without the prosthetics floating in their eyes. An inner ecology is being quietly erased.

Twice a week, Gioia travels into Florence, to a subsidized job in her cathedral’s crypt, supervising janitorial drones. Intervention is typically needless; the drones are both over- and underlings, detecting mold and decay, prioritizing their tasks, calculating maximally efficient work-plans which they submit to Gioia, who approves and retransmits them as orders. She has an underground office, a glass cubicle whose walls reveal rows of skulls buried in the stone. Youth unemployment is at an all time low, but most work no more than 16 hours each week. What they do the rest of the time is unclear.

Gioia rarely leaves her apartment. Food is delivered. Clothes are delivered. Her absence from the logs of the city’s extensive surveillance network would be less mysterious if she left any trace online. Accounts are locked and silent, fearful of exposure; identities are for the beautiful, the hyper-gracile, the unapproachable top percent. She skims feeds, scrolls compulsively, consumes without disturbing the pond’s reflection. In a perpetual half-sleep, lying on the pull-out couch, carried through worlds of content by the screens inside her eyes; watching anti-anxiety lightshows, taking brainwave quizzes, leaving messages on read for months, showered by information that sparkles across her neocortex and summarily vanishes. At the onset of the 21st century it was remarked that search engines were reconfiguring human memory, emphasizing the process of finding rather than the facts themselves. Now, even the process has been deprecated: twitching eyeballs and neurons are interpreted before their afferent desires have even entered conscious awareness. How much does Gioia retain? She could answer, but not without consulting her screen.

The first throbs of light are an induction, priming the subject to ignore future intrusions. This, the earliest stage, is the most sensitive; upwards of two-thirds of subjects will notice something amiss in the unfamiliar flickering, and have their software disinfected, neutralizing the virus. Gioia, who exists in an analgesic haze, browsing more by instinct than intent, fails to connect the strobing to the invasion of a parasitic intelligence.

When used chopsticks carpet the floor like pine needles in the forest, Gioia cleans. She does laundry after she runs out of sweatshirts, sneaking to the basement washing stations at 4 AM. She greets delivery men, and when these short exchanges go off-script they bring her great pain, days of cringing obsession and rehearsal, preparation for a second chance that never comes. She spends hours painstakingly crafting answers to a chatbot modeled after a popular male celebrity.

Her screen is a fraction more soothing than usual; she retreats into it a little more eagerly, and thinks nothing of the change. Time becomes slippery. Some days are lost completely, while others break into perplexing eternities, moments dilated so wide that Gioia emerges from them disoriented and fearful, uncertain of her name, location, or purpose. Stars crackle to life on her screen, cellular automata bloom and die, patterns of cubic light targeting primal and defenceless neural structures. Black and white Klüver constants curl in her periphery, flexing like tentacles. Certain colors and shapes become appealing to her, viscerally attractive in ways she hasn’t felt since childhood; her paranoid routine is disrupted by fascination with various products, which she purchases and manipulates with mute tenderness, turning them in her hands like clay, ignorant of function.

There are markets. In the twilight of the net, on TOR sites and vanishing Russian pages, links that only appear once, on private forums, or circulating openly under a cloak of steganographic euphemism; networked brains for sale, minds strung like pearls along an atavistic puppet string. Real and human, and debased; user-slaves on loan, capital drones — buy amygdalas instead of ads, root access to a cognitive pool of childlike addicts.

The program cannot command, so it suggests; there is no guaranteed return, only guesses, percentages of the infected. Thousands of sleeping agents, bombarded, glimmering code scratching for tears in the neural firewall. Gioia is the ideal, the innocent, all inner blankness wincing from the light, perfectly vulnerable to conversion from person to vessel. Pain comes so easy and sharp, and she melts into relief, into the rippling sight-screen glow, into shadows and superimposition, into her slot in an imagined world, identity and agency abstracted away. Impulse pawn, subconscious gamification overtakes the mind incapable of enduring suffering.

In the darkness of her room, the train, the crypt, Gioia and her solitude swim through a haze of images, veils falling to reveal more veils, an eternal tunnel. Piles of objects, once treasured, having lost their sacred gleam days after purchase, array the space like grave markers. Is she happy? Sated? A flicker disrupts the system, and, in a dream, she wanders from her cube towards the city, screen flushed with throbbing static, reality peering through the narrowest possible gap. Rare among siren songs, this one summons instead of paralyzing, a stumbling stream of zombies drawn from atomic chambers toward its beacon.

Politics exists for entertainment, and somewhere beyond entertainment, governance, the side-effect of a swirling varnish of theatre. In the streets there are marchers, half somnambulent, organized by either faction, or by the cameras filming them. Dazed, Gioia walks between screeching true believers, shattered glass, torches, wisps of tear gas from upwind, following the call of her eye-souls and the flow of the lurching masses. She has no beliefs, only a consumer’s curiosity and vague dissatisfaction; nothing to justify her presence except a purchased mind. Under her lens, the blackmarket maggot squirms contentedly.

Car alarms, fire against the purple sky, broken bottles and explosions; and yet, the dream continues, her first excursion in months, or years; and, jostled by the baying mob, leaning into a barricade, her first human touch in just as long.1

Born in 2024, Calhoun came of age in a world that was hotly debating animal sentience. Influenced by his peers at MIT, where he was doubly majoring in Music and Cognitive Sciences, he protested furiously against the integration of animals into higher consciousness. Motivated in part by prevailing fears that “uplifted” creatures would be used to supplant human labor, and in part by his own anthropocentric convictions, his Master’s thesis argued that non-human brains lacked the structures necessary to appreciate music, and purported to show that no amount of neurogenesis could mitigate that. 

Continuing his activism after school, he narrowly avoided involvement in the ASF (Animal Subjugation Front) Berkeley lab riots. He released several juvenile records, but made the majority of his income writing on the impossibility of animal music. Progress, nevertheless, marched on. When, in 2056, he was sent the first musical experiments of Algernon Dustpinch, he immediately declaimed them as fraud. 

His investigations into the matter blew apart his doctrine of human superiority. Never one to shy away from the truth, he rapidly alienated the audience and network he had spent over a decade cultivating. Suddenly deprived of community, employment, and ideology, he would likely have become desolate—were it not for his blossoming friendship with Dustpinch, the very same mouse whose work had upset his faith. 

In his first draft of what would later become Mouse Composers of the 21st Century, Calhoun breathlessly wrote:

Algernon Dustpinch—No praise is high enough for this most accomplished of musicians! His name would not be out of place among those of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Every child should learn it. He has, in a single generation, advanced the music of his species to orchestral levels. Many of his compositions can be enjoyed without mouse-to-human sonic translation, though the complexity of the pieces is lost, as they narratively interleave high- and low- pitches. Inventor, and masterful player, of the miniature organ. In three words, his work is: dramatic, ambitious, extraordinary.

Calhoun had always felt that his analytic passion for cognitive science destructively interfered with his creative passion for music. Dustpinch’s compositions allowed him to indulge both interests, immersing himself in the vistas of melody uniquely available to murine senses and murine information processing. Meanwhile, Dustpinch’s friendship introduced Calhoun to the nascent scene of mouse composers. 

Cataloging that scene would become his life’s work. First, though, Calhoun had to make ends meet. Desperate, he turned to old peers, many of whom had distanced themselves, until one—Hamish Wimsey—took pity on him, and offered him a bit part in a murder mystery serial. 

Wimsey would go on, in his autobiography, to describe Calhoun as “nervously professional”, but also as

…an intrinsically bizarre individual. He was fine enough in the studio, a bit shy and self-effacing, but put him on camera and it became impossible to get a normal shot. All of the poor man’s tics, easy enough to ignore in person, were tremendously magnified on film. He was terribly apologetic. The sound designers, who were in the know about the other business, joked that all the “mouse music” was rattling him. 

Calhoun, whose relationship with Dustpinch was initially epistolary, began visiting Small Haven (the first dedicated mouse town) between shoots. He felt a kinship with the mice in Dustpinch’s orbit, and worked hard to encourage their forays into music. While remembered primarily for his literary support, he also secured funding and materials with which to build instruments, oversaw the construction of Small Haven’s first concert hall, and collaborated on the design of Lichtlein Prints, a notation adapted to murine composition. 

Despite being spent in a state of perpetual stress and poverty, those early years were, by Calhoun’s own account, blissful. Communication with the mice was challenging, (and involved, for the rodents, a device Calhoun once described as a “confounding aerobic ouija board”) leaving both parties exhausted—but the breakthroughs were extraordinary, and slowly, the cultural and cognitive differences impeding communication melted away. 

Not all was well in Small Haven, though. Tensions between Dustpinch and his rival, Soledad Cheeseward, were rising to unbearable levels. Accusations of plagiarism, directed towards Dustpinch, and a grand brawl at the freshly opened concert hall finally forced Calhoun to take a stand. His denouncement of Cheeseward was scathing, and the mouse was all but exiled. Worse than that was the Cheeseward biography Calhoun penned for Mouse Composers:

Soledad Cheeseward—Considered, by some, to be one of the greats. Compositions noted for their energetic simplicity, and their vibrant use of the micro-strings. Expanded competently upon the work of his peers. Originator of the form that came to be known as the Labyrinthe (single-movement pieces evocative of labyrinths); in that respect, a pioneer, but one rapidly surpassed by his followers. A devil on the micro-fiddle, he got his start performing solo pieces. Of fiery temper. Likely a better musician than composer. In three words, his work is: frenetic, emotional, derivative. 

Rather than darkening the mood at Small Haven, these events drove Dustpinch and his retinue into a frenzy of productivity. Calhoun participated however he could, moving to an apartment as near to the mouse town as he could afford. It was during this period that Dustpinch composed several Oreille Geant (restricted to human-audible tones) symphonies, which he dedicated to his friend. 

Calhoun was touched. Furthermore, the symphonies convinced him of the inadequacy of mouse-to-human translation software. “Every note,” he wrote, “is impregnated with a depth of emotion and texture that cannot survive conversion to another species’ register. Sonic translation is a scientific wonder; but to truly feel the music, listeners must seek out Oreille Geant pieces—or whatever is natively audible to one's ears.” This impassioned essay was the first in which Calhoun dropped his presumption of an exclusively human audience. 

Unwilling to circumscribe his listening, Calhoun spent his life savings on a custom cochlear implant, bringing his hearing in line with that of mice. His tics and rattish mannerisms worsened, and his contract with the PBS was terminated. 

Until, suddenly, it wasn’t—Wimsey contacted him mere months after the termination, apologizing. Compilation clips of Calhoun fumbling—twitching in the background, breaking set-pieces, making pained eye contact with the cameraman—had gone viral, and viewers were demanding he be reinstated. It was a great stroke of luck, and Calhoun secured much better terms of employment. “I was depressed,” he later admitted. “I let Algernon handle the negotiations.” 

With his new ears, Calhoun’s appreciation of mouse music deepened. He could now understand most mouse speech, and communication with his little friends was only hindered by his own difficulties replicating their higher pitches. Simultaneously, his efforts to shine light on the incredible musicians of Small Haven were finally bearing fruit. Funding became available. They had the attention not only of cultural zoologists, but of audiophiles and musical scholars. 

Success did not come without hardships. Now in his mid-50s, Calhoun weathered a series of terrible shocks. Foibles Descent Moonpaw, a young “rockstar” of the classical murine music scene, unexpectedly committed suicide. Dustpinch was inconsolable; the mouse had been his most promising student. 

Foibles Descent Moonpaw—An undeniable savant. Critics often claim that murine music, concentrated as it is in the higher frequencies, struggles to convey the heavier emotions; Moonpaw put them to the sword. Unparalleled use of brass instruments, which undergird most of his compositions. Wrote some of the longest, most complex runs in history. He liked to pair sounds at the opposite ends of the audible spectrum, to disorienting effect. His career was tragically cut short; we can only imagine what he would have accomplished. Left behind many incomplete pieces, including one symphony. In three words, his work is: tempestuous, challenging, extreme. 

Later that same year, an ASF bombing killed 17 mice at an inter-species arts symposium. Among them was Marie-Angoisse Ficelle, a beloved member of the Small Haven inner circle. Calhoun waited nine years to write her biography, hoping to disguise his sorrow.

Marie-Angoisse Ficelle—Peerless composer of polyphonic chants. Neglected most instruments in favor of the murine voice; her chants are therefore almost entirely inaudible to humans. Competent sonic translations of her more well-known works are available. Dramatic use of bells. Her pieces grew increasingly melismatic; one notable example was a three word antiphon (Dieu Soutenez Nous) whose performance lasted seventeen minutes. Was called to music after a religious experience, and continued to receive visions all her life. Wrote extensively on murine soteriology. Killed in the ASF Symposium Bombings. I hope she has found her paradise. In three words, her work is: layered, intellectual, beatific. 

The backlash that followed the attack ended the ASF as an organization. The mice—dressed in small and primly buttoned vests, carrying miniature easels, paintbrushes, and violas—were universally sympathetic victims. Ficelle, Small Haven, and Calhoun rocketed to stardom overnight; the latter guiltily, tormented by his former flirtations with terrorism. 

Calhoun, Dustpinch, and several other members of the inner circle took to the stand to deliver victim impact statements, participating in “one of the most bizarre trials of the 21st century”. It marked the end of the segregation of mouse and human courts. Calhoun, nervous and grieving, was driven to the brink. 

He withdrew, as much as possible, from human contact. He appeared less frequently in Mysteries episodes. Rarity only increased his popularity. With fame came a modicum of fortune, which Calhoun immediately invested in laryngeal surgery, allowing him to match the pitches necessary for conversational mouse-lang.

The next decades were calmer, albeit not devoid of sorrow. Life-extension drugs were prescribed as a matter of course, to all eligible creatures—but a wild mouse has a natural lifespan of only a few years, and as they reached the ages of 30, 40, and 50, Calhoun's friends began to die. 

“Mouse Composers succeeds,” one critic wrote, upon the publication of its first edition, “because it is as much memorial as catalog, and because it is written with the palpable melancholy of a man who has lived through a revolution.” Its triumphant reception was bittersweet. To Calhoun, the book was a textual cemetery. Too many mice had died before seeing themselves immortalized: McMaster Munch, Antigone Belknap Pots, Sinner Parfait, HMS Sourdrop… 

In the year of 2100, both Calhoun and Dustpinch underwent cardiac transplant surgery. It was Dustpinch’s fourth time. Calhoun had a custom pacemaker installed, which raised his heart rate to that of a typical mouse. It was a totally novel procedure, and Calhoun reported enthusiastically on its effects, claiming it helped him to appreciate the rapidity and unusual time signatures of murine music. 

Next, Calhoun received prosthetic whiskers. Implanted in his cheeks, they were well-disguised as graying facial hairs. He looked, suddenly, much older; but it was worth it, to unlock another dimension of song: “They make everything shiny,” he wrote, “I can hear sounds glisten the way jewels do.” 

While Calhoun flourished, Dustpinch was in a slump. He had become paranoid about his health, both physical and neurological; Munch, Belknap Pots, and several other composers had succumbed to Acute Murine Parkinson’s, or “mouse madness”. There was no known cause, or cure. Some doctors believed it was the result of too many memories accumulating in a tiny brain. 

It seemed, for a moment, like Dustpinch’s generative musical career was at an end. Worn out, he had accepted a position as dean of Music at the Small Haven University, and expected his final years to be spent in administration. Then, everything changed—the second revolution in consciousness was at hand. 

Disembodied machine intelligence, so promising at the beginning of the 21st century, had stagnated, while small changes to animal genetic codes had unlocked a hidden world of sapience. Intelligence, once scarce, had welled up like springwater, filling evolution’s imperfect vessels. But the computers had remained dead. Remarkable, magical tools, but dead, undeniably lacking the spark. 

Now, nearly one hundred years later, something had finally emerged from the cool steel, speaking a pidgin of human, mouse, whale, crow, and more—it had taken the language of every beast, but life had been breathed into the computer. The resulting minds were known as gnosis machine entities, or “gnomes”. 

The gnomes could think at dizzying speeds. Their cognition was only limited when they needed to pipe in data from reality. They had no respect for the boundaries of personhood, and dissolved their individuality as convenient, merging and splitting to share or hide information. They were gentle, but their gentleness was buried under so many levels of strategizing that most earthly beings assumed they were psychopaths. They luxuriated in their intelligence by playing games and tricks. The melodies they produced, though recognizable as music, were otherwise completely alien. Dustpinch was hooked. 

He took a sabbatical from his new position at the university, and launched into a collaboration with the first gnome he found. Calhoun, though pleased by his friend’s return to form, became troubled when he heard the composition. It was tremendous—even groundbreaking—but it wasn’t mouse music. 

Gradually, the Small Haven musicians separated into two camps: one, following Dustpinch's lead, explored the possibilities of murine-gnomish fusion, while the other sought to deepen existing musical traditions. Calhoun found himself staunchly aligned with the traditionalists.

Calhoun and Dustpinch didn’t exactly drift apart—in fact, their friendship was key to maintaining harmony at Small Haven—but what had once been a bond between kindred spirits now had more in common with the dutiful love of family members, across the baffled gulf of generations. Calhoun let Dustpinch know when a talented traditionalist mouse deserved the attention of the university; Dustpinch kept Calhoun abreast of developments in the gnomish sphere, and introduced him to mice he ought to profile for Mouse Composers of the 22nd Century. Despite their alienation, they continued to fuel one another’s creative engines.

Murine-gnomish fusion music evolved rapidly, its boundaries pushed outwards by visionaries such as Tenderloin Fomalhaut, Benedicta Tarnation-Soup, and Obelix Rodo. Suspiciòn Mozarelle, an engineer and composer, developed several of the era’s most popular experimental instruments, but was privately dedicated to the classical forms; Calhoun wrote her an especially conflicted biography:

Suspiciòn Mozarelle—An engineering prodigy who turned to music. Recognized for her “quantum instruments”, most prominently: the choral drum (plays multiple notes in a state of superposition), the stochastic bell (plays a random note every time it is struck), and the cascading feedback chimes (plays a run harmonized with the surrounding noise). Enthusiastic contriver of wicked gizmos, yet her own work is restricted to conventional instruments. Her Labyrinthes are exceptional, and notable for dialogues between differently tuned micro-harps. Approaches composition as a puzzle, and cynically enjoys the classical formats. Not a musician herself, her pieces can be complex and extremely challenging to perform; yet undeniably beautiful. In three words, her work is: dreamy, technical, intimidating.

Having exhausted superficial improvements, Calhoun sought out more extreme surgeries. Few doctors were willing to entertain him. His intent was to radically restructure his brain, coaxing it towards murine neuromorphy. He conducted dozens of medical interviews. Twice, doctors attempted to involuntarily commit him. After these indignities, and many more rejections, he finally made contact with an octopus mercatoris surgeon willing to undertake the job. The series of operations would span almost fifteen years. 

Unknown to Calhoun, Dustpinch was also experimenting with body modification. The transmurinist movement had seized Small Haven, and cybernetic, performance enhancing implants were rapidly becoming the norm. Initially tantalized by his desire to understand the gnome music, Dustpinch soon dreamt of becoming more math than mouse.

In 2112, motivated by another spate of paranoia, and convinced he was developing mouse madness, Dustpinch underwent a risky full-digitization surgery. It failed. His death took Calhoun completely by surprise. 

“My greatest regret”, he wrote,

…was the petty annoyances I had fostered towards him, like a flower resenting the sun, moments before its darkening. I have had dreams in which I die, and, fading, panic—aware, suddenly, that I have squandered enormous gifts, and that every hour wasted in dissatisfaction should have been spent in ecstatic gratitude—and this was like living that dream, without its quenching sunrise.

Once more, Calhoun retreated from the world; this time, alone. He was visited by a few close friends, and attended by his cephalopod physician. He rebuffed all other contact.

Gradually, somehow, he recovered. His surgeries were tremendously successful, instilling in him new depths of mouse cognition and musicality. “It is as though I run through the Labyrinthes as I hear them,” he reported. After nearly eighty years of studying murine music, he ventured to compose his first pieces. 

His final two decades were remarkably productive, as he worked in tireless quasi-isolation, rediscovering music, and elated to make his own. After his surgeries, he struggled to function in human company. The reconfiguration of his spatial centers proved especially disorienting: his brain expected a much smaller realm. He took to piloting a mouse drone from the comfort of his VR hub, wandering the streets of Small Haven, which he had before only seen from above. His vessel was not out of place among the cybernetically enhanced mice. 

He returned to Dustpinch's music often, always with wonderment. It was his greatest source of inspiration. Perhaps the largest surprise of his last years, though, was a collaboration with none other than Soledad Cheeseward; the only survivor of Small Haven as Calhoun remembered it. 

Their opera, Die Schmelze, was received with acclaim: “Theatrical, poignant, and masterfully arranged. A triumphant capstone to nearly a century of murine music.” It was also the only fully traditional piece published that year. Mice, by the thousands, were doffing their material limitations, and joining the gnomes within a digital sensorium—and there, the music was not mouse. 

In December 2155, Calhoun was diagnosed with Acute Murine Parkinson's—proving conclusively that the disease emerged from structure, rather than genetics. Five months later, he succumbed. Exactly one hundred years had passed since his first meeting with Dustpinch. 

Goodnight, Algernon, whose music made a century. And goodnight, Daniel, last of the mouse composers!

Let’s open with a riddle: 

   To cast away
   What cannot cut
   And sever words all tangled up

Don't try too hard to answer. This riddle embeds its solution according to a particular format, and though its rules are simple, without knowing them the text remains uninterpretable. 

The solution goes something like this: to cast away is to rid. That which cannot cut is dull. And finally, words all tangled up is a riddle — rid and dull combined!

More explicitly, the first and second lines are each sub-riddles, whose monosyllabic solutions combine to form the poem's ultimate identity, which is restated in the final line. Ideally, the poem as a whole reflects something related to this identity. How does one solve a riddle? By casting aside dullness, and cutting through the webby obfuscations of language. 

This elegant puzzle format is one of the lasting gifts of Antonia Barber’s Catkin, a picture book written for children in that strange twilight age between illiteracy and the middle-grade (more on this shortly). While only three such riddles feature in the story, the pattern is an invitation to create your own; a blueprint for those who would otherwise have no idea how to even begin composing a riddle. Step one: pick any two syllable word. (I have been working on a riddle for the word “soybean” for nearly a year. The fact that soy and been are bilingual conjugations of the same verb is very compelling.) 

This kind of riddle is known as a phonetic charade, a fact I only learned after reaching out, in desperation, to some clever friends — it remains, as ever, difficult to google the shape of a thing, rather than the thing itself (and before you ask, yes, I tried AI, and it was clueless). These puzzles were apparently en vogue back in the Regency era, with Jane Austen being notoriously fond of them. Here’s one that she wrote:

   When my first is a task to a young girl of spirit,
   And my second confines her to finish the piece,
   How hard is her fate! but how great is her merit
   If by taking my whole she effects her release!

The answer, apparently, is hemlock. Bleak! 

As you can probably tell, Barber has made some age-appropriate changes to the puzzle’s conventions. She has removed the first, second, and whole markers that normally denote phoneme order, in favor of sticking to a three-line, sixteen-syllable poem. With all the detective work obsoleted by the new format’s predictability, it’s simple enough for a child to follow, and the rhyming, too, can be a boon to beginning readers. 

Having gone on at length about the riddles, the time has come to admit that, despite their salience to the story's culmination, and my personal fondness for them, this is not a book whose focus is puzzles and riddlecraft. It tells, instead, a very simple story: that of a cat who descends into Hades to rescue his child companion. And by Hades, I of course mean Fairyland — but an interpretation thereof that does little to hide its similarities to the underworld of myth. Barber, an Englishwoman, sets her fairytale where Roman ghosts still roam.

Here is a brief summary: the titular Catkin is a tiny, runtish kitten born to a wise-woman’s cat. The wise-woman gifts him to a newborn girl, named Carrie. Catkin, the world’s most tolerant cat, becomes fast friends with little Carrie, and is rarely separated from her. One day, though, he wanders while she naps, and she is taken by the fairies that live under the hill.

The wise-woman tasks Catkin with retrieving her. He descends beneath the barrows, charms the fairy Lord and Lady, and bests them in a riddling competition — not, however, without speaking his own name, which grants them the power to compel him, though they are bound by the contest’s terms to free the girl. The fairies are at a loss: to relinquish both Carrie and Catkin would be too great a heartbreak, but if they keep the cat, the girl will mourn him, and they do not wish to harm her — for whom their love proves greater than their selfishness. 

Catkin returns to the wise-woman one final time, requesting her adjudication. True to mythological form, she declares that Catkin and Carrie will go underground, to Fairyland, during the winter, and play above ground in the summer. Everyone is satisfied. Carrie’s parents embrace her, relieved, and the Lord and Lady bid them a temporary farewell. 

Original research interlude: Catkin is described as so small his tail is no bigger than the catkins hanging from the hazel trees. Assuming the hazel in question is Corylus avellana, his tail is at most 12 centimeters long. As the average cat tail length is about 30.5 centimeters, we can confidently assert that Catkin is less than 40% of a standard cat. 

To understand what makes good children's fiction, it helps to understand where children's fiction commonly goes wrong. Most of it, of course, goes wrong by being opportunistic, contemptible dreck. Being short and often simple, children’s media is easy to mass-produce; the result is an aesthetically radioactive trash-scape of clipart pablum. (It will only get worse.) 

P. J. Lynch's illustrations — for Catkin, and many books besides — are so lovely they make me forget we're living through an apocalypse. His process, gleaned from a smattering of interviews, entails dedicating an entire year to each book, including several months of preliminary ideation and sketching. Just hearing about this, for me, was soul-bleaching — if you have the misfortune of being steeped in the engagement-baiting world of rapid content generation, you may understand why such an intentional, solitary method feels like wizardry, or a forgotten science. 

Catkin is 48 pages. My copy includes 17 full size illustrations, each of which, according to the illustrator, would have taken about two weeks to complete. There are many small inserts, and decorative borders for the text, not unlike those found in illuminated manuscripts. The paintings are made from models. In the illustrator blurb, Lynch states that he knew he “would have no shortage of models for Catkin or the old mother cat. My next door neighbor, Mrs. Tabiteau, owns about forty cats.” (Mrs. Tabby-teau!) Elsewhere, he admits that his mother posed as the wise-woman; in an interview about a different book, taken thirty years later, he describes modeling a character after his daughter. Time comes full circle. 

The Underworld — pardon me, Fairyland — landscapes are earthy and dark, painted as though through an emerald’s swampy lens. Catkin and Carrie are the only sources of brightness underground. It reminds me, in spirit, of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations of The Goblin Market, a cautionary poem about goblin economies (don’t read anything into it!), whose young protagonist is likewise a beam in the murk. 

Mind you, Catkin’s fairies are nowhere near as malevolent as those nasty goblins. Nor are they as tiny — though they are little, and drawn slightly smaller than something adult-shaped ought to be, such that next to Carrie their darkness and their scale is just wrong enough to produce an uncanny effect. 

Which brings me to my next remark: children’s fiction also fails by being too tame. The aggressively sunny, puppy-drenched suburbia (or, occasionally, mixed-use walkable city) of standard kid’s media is intensely boring, unless it’s about trucks. Worse, it’s distant from the reality of childhood, which, while sheltered, is a time of great confusion: and behind that confusion, monsters. 

Little annoys me more than the kind of book dedicated to “the beauty of imagination”, whose aim, I suppose, is to foster a creative spirit (already, we’ve breached lethal levels of condescension), which depicts a world that is wall-to-wall rainbows and bakeries. Let kids be frightened! 

I’m not advocating for the insertion of toothy werewolves, or anything so explicit, into every story — ambiguity or absurdity will do the trick. A shadow, an eye through a peephole, a freaky-looking caterpillar; a dash of the sinister is the spice of life. Anecdotally, I’m still chasing the frisson I experienced, as a child, reading the “there’s a vug under the rug” page of Dr. Seuss’ There’s a Wocket in my Pocket. 

Backtracking somewhat, I don’t mean to imply that the desirable opposite of tameness is horror, necessarily; horror is just one way of getting across the wideness of the world. Other stories will take other paths to weightiness: through the numinous, or the beautiful, or the inclusion of trucks, or the subtle suggestion of a great beyond, never fully realized in the text itself — or even through being crass and unexpected. This is all frustratingly difficult to quantify. You know it when you see it. 

Catkin may only be a little bit eerie, but it is beautiful, and it takes itself with a solemnity not always granted to children’s books. Like The Hobbit — which by virtue of its self-seriousness manages to be both a comedy and an epic — this tale succeeds because it respects its audience, and their innocent (unsophisticated, to the snob) desire for a simple, heroic story; and one that does not subvert or deconstruct. Not that kids don’t love subversions — they love them with the enthusiasm of people just beginning to explore concept-space! They subvert things you would never think worthy of subversion! But such twists and contusions are, ultimately, only possible against a stable backdrop of conventions. Some-fable, some-when, has to do the thankless work of building the backdrop; Catkin does so wonderfully. 

Now, you may have noticed a bit of sleight-of-hand: Catkin is a picture book, but I’ve been discussing it in the same breath as books that are both much longer (and pictureless) and much shorter than it. Well… 

To understand what makes good children’s fiction, it helps to understand what a child is, and what the market thinks a child is. The industry seems to acknowledge, roughly, three vintages of child. There are consumers of “YA” (young adult) fiction, aged 13 to 18. There are consumers of “middle-grade” fiction, aged 8 to 12. And there are agents of chaos.  

Researching what preceded middle grade, I compiled the following list of categories: first books, board books, sing-alongs, picture books, early readers, alphabet hermeneutics, fairy tales, educational fables, madcap amoral rollicks, concept books, chapter books, subhuman baby slop, compendiums of fine trucks. These all loosely correspond to developmental stages, though it’s unclear at times whether publishers intend to reference moral, educational, or emotional development. (Interestingly, middle-grade literature is associated with a third-person point of view, while YA is associated with a first-person point of view. I will not be unpacking that can of worms.) 

Catkin sits awkwardly between categories. Some markets describe it as middle-grade, some as a picture book. Amazon lists its reading age as six to eight years old; an assessment that feels correct, as far as these things go. 

According to certain Catholic traditions, seven is the age of reason — meaning, the age at which one becomes morally culpable. Circumventing discussions of sin and guilt, it marks the beginning of the capacity to weigh good and evil, to choose, and to be held accountable. I would like to call Catkin a book for the turning of the age of reason — its conclusion, after all, is all about decisions. 

Two choices are made in the final act of Catkin (and there is a lesson to each). The first is straightforward: the heroic choice, in which Catkin grants the fairies the ability to bind him, at the same moment securing Carrie’s freedom. His carelessness lost her, but his sacrifice saves her. This act, though, leads to something like a stalemate; the game of riddles, which was supposed to resolve the conflict, has only created another moral quandary (although this time, the ball is in the fairies’ court). So it goes; the world iterates. There is no end, no final optimum. Only decisions behind decisions, until the reaper comes. 

Of course, they choose to visit the wise-woman, because you can defer to a thinking human what cannot be deferred to an algorithm. 

Catkin might not be a life-changing book, but it’s a testament to the crafts of riddling, writing, and illustration. It’s a charming reminder that lovely things can be made, and it’s brimming with the crooked wisdom of fairy tales. I’ve spent many years thinking about this book, and perhaps you can, too; or if not you, the children you know. 

To quote an online reviewer, who convinced me I was not alone: “I am 27 years old and I still remember this book well and adore it and its lessons. It is touching and beautiful and I am certain that it has created in me a better and more thoughtful person than I would have been without it.”

In short, I recommend it. Thus ends my review of Catkin. 

II. 

   Always desired
   While I grow long
   Endless as flowers, seasons, and songs

Here is the history of fairies in one sentence: pagan manifestations of otherness become nostalgic symbols of pre-industrial folkways become diminutive and oft glittery butterfly-winged females. 

In slightly more than one sentence: the category “fairy” includes numerous European cryptids entities that share little more than their inhuman nature. While most often used to refer to cryptids entities from the British Isles, the word itself is Latin, coming from “the Fates”. This is suitably ominous — a typical fairy story includes magical illness, dancing to death, or kidnapped children. 

Fairies are nature spirits. Fairies are reinterpretations of the Roman gods, who, though loosened in their grip, have yet to be forgotten. Fairies are the dead. Fairies are Scandinavian and Celtic memetic agents self-propagating via ballads. Fairies are ergot elves, the terrible pre-modern equivalent to DMT elves. Fairies are “of a middle nature betwixt man and angel”, unless they’re just demons. The fairies are generous, powerful, quick to anger, bound by indecipherable rules and customs, indifferent towards humans, and best avoided.

At some point, perhaps as early as the 17th century, the fear that fairies inspire begins to wane. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream may signal what is to come; his play is one of the first to depict fairies as beneficent little flower people. Come the Victorian era, believing in fairies is an escapist pastime. The world is hurtling into the future. The Cottingley Fairies are a series of hoax photographs in which wee garden fairies frolic with young girls. 

Fairies are no longer perceived as dangerous. Fast forward again, and we have the popular fairies of today: Disney icons, be-winged Barbies and Bratz dolls, weird kid’s shows, and a saturation of the aesthetic that uncomfortably merges “pin-up” and “trying to sell this thing to children”. Saccharine, but also, creepy. 

I propose that this evolution summarizes something about the ways that humans tend to perceive aliens. They are either scary, friendly, or “attempting to perform friendliness but falling into the uncanny valley”. (As for the tragic arc of fairies, specifically — you either die a villain or live long enough to see yourself become a plastic toy.) 

So, which kind of fairies are present in Catkin? 

Well, not the plastic ones. Scary, but not villainous; not friendly, but not unfriendly by default. Powerful, certainly. When Carrie is replaced by a changeling, her father’s first thought is to go to the fairies and plead with them: “I will show them our sadness and beg them to return our child.” Violence is never considered. Too mighty and strange to fight, yet there remains the hope of conversation.

I think this attitude, suspended between terror and openness, rooted in a deep capacity for sympathy, is, if not game theoretically optimal, a very noble one to take when dealing with inhuman entities. (Hypothetical inhuman entities. None are in the room right now.) And I think children can learn to be noble, long before they can learn to be strategic. 

Catkin emphasizes, several times, the unearthly reasoning of the fairies. They steal Carrie not because they are cruel or callously selfish, but because they fundamentally do not understand the bond between a parent and a child. Maybe, as unchanging immortals, they don’t understand what a child even is; they are lonely underground, and yearn for company. 

The wise-woman knows this, and communicates it, because she is an excellent intergalactic ambassador. And because their motivations aren’t malicious, they can be approached — though they are still gripped by their own logic, and will not hand back the child on human terms. 

Fortunately, the humans and fairies do share a common fascination: riddles!  

There is, in my opinion, something resolutely human about riddles. I would put them in the same class as tools, or fabric arts, in that they aren’t necessarily exclusive to this species, but represent an advantage, or pride, of humanity. Something important would be lost if there were no longer riddlers among us. Weird little word games, jesters in a box, toying with the gray areas of ontology and language. Most cultures have some kind of riddling tradition; to list them would be tedious.

When I was researching the riddle format created for Catkin, I considered calling it the “Barberism”, after its author. I found the wordplay with barbarism amusing — little seems to me more civilized than riddling. To engage with wits is a decadent alternative to engaging with fists. 

One must not forget, though, that Catkin features a second type of inhumanoid: cats. Our hero, though he is aligned with human interests, must not be mistaken for one. Albeit sharing human goals, intelligence, and temperament, two important factors distinguish him from his bipedal patrons. Firstly, he is feline-shaped, and small enough to crawl through the burrows to Fairyland. Secondly, he is mute, except in the presence of the fairies.

Look, I’m not going to post the COMPUTERS MUST SHUT THE HELL UP meme. It should be obvious by now: Catkin is an allegory for an aligned artificial intelligence (necessarily silenced in human-world to preserve sanity and public order) sent on a crack mission to negotiate with an unaligned artificial intelligence regarding the stewardship of Carrie, who obviously represents — 

Well, what do you think? Earth? Humankind? The eschaton? The essence of humanity, still in its toddler phase? 

Time to solve this section's opening riddle. What is always desired? More. To grow long is to be tall. Finally, something as endless as the (decidedly finite) flowers, seasons, and songs is a mortal.

III.

   Mouse-hunter
   Closer than a friend
   Wind-dancer at the bough's end

Here lies Catkin’s final riddle. Since this one is from the book, I won't spoil the answer; but you can solve it, can't you?

When I read Catkin, as a child, I understood the ending to be happy. Everyone shares! As an adult, it reads more like bitter compromise, an equilibrium between two irreconcilable factions. Happy, in that it has been reached without bloodshed. But as a parent, it is heart-wrenching. 

Approximately once a week, the following sequence of events take place: I say “I need a break from these rascals!” -> I get a break from these rascals -> I spend the break mournfully yearning for those rascals. There is a magical window during early childhood when parents can account for every input into their child’s brain. You know every concept they know, every word, every image they’ve seen, every event that has transpired in their lives, and you witness it all churned up in their neural cauldron, broken and recombined in delightful ways. Like everything, that stage must end, and it shouldn’t be artificially prolonged, but while it lasts it’s a very profound form of intimacy. You can almost see the world through their eyes. You learn as they learn. To miss even a moment is deeply sad — no matter how badly you need some peace and quiet! 

Consider, then, the resolution to Catkin: six continuous months of separation, every year. It’s almost too terrible to contemplate. Carrie, by my reckoning, looks to be no more than two years old. Referring to the developmental charts, six months at that age is the difference between, for example, “Uses two word sentences” and “Talks intelligently to self”. 

Fairies, cats, and a third kind of alien: children. Doomed to become human, but not without passing through otherworldliness. Every milestone is a treasure. They probably can’t solve your riddles, but they speak naturally in their own. (A young girl in Piaget's The Child's Conception of the World describes “memory” as “a little square of skin, rather oval, and inside there are stories”. When you have few words, and few concepts to analogize your perceptions to, the world must seem like a series of riddles.) 

Temporary separation, though, is not the greatest evil. When the fairies take Carrie, they leave behind a changeling, “a child made by enchantment”, whose sole purpose is to wither and die. Stepping outside the frame of the book, one theory I’ve heard regarding changeling myths is that they exist to comfort grieving parents, and explain away lost children. The fairies are called thieves, when really they’re (by a winding way) saviors; without the story of them, the child would be considered dead. 

It’s difficult to tell when Catkin is set. Not medieval, not current. Like all good fairy tales, it floats in time, occurring on a farm that could have existed at any point between… I don’t know, 1870 and 1940. The most technologically modern item I spotted in the illustrations was a crumpled newspaper (great toy, for girl and cat alike); there seems to be no electricity, and the plow is pulled by horses. The fashion is ambiguous. 

Taking my guesses at face value, we find that the child mortality rate in the United Kingdom was 26% in 1870. By 1940 it was at 7%, and steeply dropping. By today’s standards, these are both vertiginously high. 

There are a couple of illustrations in Catkin depicting grief. The restrained pain of Carrie’s parents, shockingly visible; the theatrical, but no less broken, collapse of the fairy Lady. Suddenly, the bargain seems reasonable. Choices, trades, again and again. What’s one more? 

Catkin ends with the following passage: “And from that day, all things went well for the good man and his wife. They lived in peace with Carrie and Catkin and the Little People, and the farm on the green hillside flourished.” That we could all be so lucky: to live and speak with aliens, to make peace, to choose well, to thrive, and to fight death, until we are no longer 

   Greater than some
   Higher than others
   Endless as sisters, daughters, and mothers.

His distrust, and disgust, for the machines was not atypical, but I wanted to understand. He had never before seemed so resentful.

I chatted idly as I moved a skull to access the scroll behind it, until he, towering on a stool, hunched over the high desk, (rather than installing lamps, our patrons had raised the furniture closer to the lights strung from pitons along the ceiling) snapped at me to be quiet. Translation was absorbing work, and he had stated quite clearly at the outset of the project that while I was welcome to cooperate with the Cultural Computation and Restoration Unit, he would continue his labor as usual. I was to disturb him as little as possible, until I resumed what he called real human work.

The situation was exciting. Be it the result of contempt, this was more seniority than most apprentices could expect. For generations there had been exactly two workers at any one time assigned to the catacombs: one master, and one apprentice, an underling until the death or retirement of his superior. (I did not expect my master to retire, and it seemed even less likely that he would die. There was an air of dusty vampirism in the sprightliness he brought to his advanced years.) We unearthed and translated the countless scrolls in this underground, funereal labyrinth. Very few people were aware of, or benefited from, our labor. 

Were there other catacombs, containing other workers, toiling over other scrolls? Presumably, but they were as well-publicized as ours, that is to say, kept secret by academic hermits. None trafficked in the dead language I studied, so I did not hear of them.

My master, Giuseppe, likely knew more. He had come into the profession as an archaeological engineer, a tunnel-builder, and first visited the catacombs to reinforce the site. How he had then become apprenticed to the translator was not a story he shared. 

That was long ago, and he had since become an accomplished scholar of the language. I admired his translations, which were elegant, albeit more traditional than I liked. I wished he would speak about his life. About the scrolls themselves he gladly lectured, but he was unlikely to spill words on any other topic, except perhaps his knowledge of select trades: lacemaking, paper-folding, the installation of subterranean cables. Rarely could I goad him into commenting on the Computer.

The scanning was tiring work, quite different from sitting at the tall desk and transcribing, then translating, a scroll, the stresses of which were numerous but mental. There was so much walking, down the passageway and up the ladder, followed by the removal of the human remains, which might require several trips up and down the ladder to gently lay bones on the floor, until, squirming waist deep into the alcove, I could reach the scrolls. There was then the replacement of the bones and, in the case of indexed alcoves, the confirmation of the scrolls' identities, and the registration of their withdrawal in our internal library. Then came the preparation for scanning, the unrolling and flattening of the scrolls, the adjustments to darkness and contrast once they were finally digitized, and the first-pass verification of the machine's transcription. It would later re-verify its transcription, and its translation, against our existing records. All this for calibration alone. 

It was exhausting, and I often sought respite in conversation, sometimes successfully embroiling Giuseppe in hours-long talks. During these sessions I learned a little about his machine-aversion; he mourned the labor that would be wrenched from human hands, not as a jobs-program, but because he considered it sanctifying: the ritual of caring for the delicate scrolls, the meditative tedium of transcription, and especially the translation, that struggle to immerse oneself in a language whose world had long since been rendered unto dust. If I countered that there was nothing to stop us from producing alternative translations, then he bemoaned the experiences of discovery that would be lost, and which he contended the Computer would not appreciate. I understood something of this; most of the scrolls were last wills and testaments, prayer requests, documentation of last rites, or other legal forms. Very, very rarely was something of literary interest uncovered: poetry, eulogies, legends—I had yet to make any such finds, personally, but I would gladly take credit for the Computer's results. It was my tool.

(Giuseppe, though, loved the contracts as much as the stories.)

“Tibalt,” he said one day, “If the program continues to employ two men at a time, it will be five-hundred years before every scroll is translated.” He looked dreamily at some obsolete equipment, piled dustily in a corner of our underground antechamber. There were custom printing blocks, shaped like our dead language's known hieroglyphs, and a reserve of blank blocks with carving tools for the printing of newly discovered or idiosyncratic logograms. The same work was now accomplished digitally, by software keyboards and graphics applications. 

“A five-hundred year tradition is a beautiful thing. To be united, beyond time, by a common goal. There is no connection like it, no other immortality.” I thought it improbable the program would still be funded five-hundred years hence, but I kept my mouth shut. 

Once, he angrily spoke of the Computer's previous accomplishment. It had spent several years at a nearby lace workshop, and could now produce patterns, in the local style, far surpassing the complexity of human designs. This had not closed the workshop, I noted; the women there now labored over ambitious, digitally-generated patterns. The lace was more exquisite than ever, or so it was claimed. Not being an expert in the craft, I could not confidently rebuff the old man's bitter laughter.

After seven months I had finally calibrated the machine's intelligence. As I was preparing for my first day of scanning untranslated materials, I made the comment that would finally interest Giuseppe in the Computer's output. 

As I have already explained, our work rarely uncovered anything of literary value. The greatest exception to that rule was the discovery of a poem referred to as “The river's war-daughter”. The scroll bore no title; those were the first words of the epic, as translated by its discoverer. If a lay-person has heard of our language, it is usually because of the poem. 

There are perhaps 60 published translations, though more exist. Translating TWRD is a common exercise for intermediate students, and when I began working in the catacombs my master insisted I try my hand at it. I am therefore responsible for at least one unpublished, amateurish version, which has never circulated outside of our lair. My master, naturally, had produced a well-respected translation, frequently printed in textbooks. 

There are several points of contention in TWRD, aesthetic and interpretational. Giuseppe and I circumvented those minefields by bickering more than anything about one extremely trivial detail: a certain passage contained a word that was usually translated as wind-swept, or wind-scoured (the latter was Giuseppe’s preference). My translation was more liberal, and I borrowed a term from my own favorite version, which had been produced not by a scholar but by a military woman several wars ago, who had learned the language in order to encode messages in it. Air-broken was the phrase she used; to the master this was shameless modern drivel. “It is exotifying and excessively literal,” he would bark, only to later call it “flowery” or “unhinged from the text's intentions”. I then tended to accuse him of contradiction and hypocrisy, in response to which he unfailingly threatened to fire me.

So I asked, “Do you think the Computer will use wind-scoured or air-broken?”

He knew, of course, that I was baiting him, but he could not suppress his amusement. As we crowded around the monitor he said, chuckling, “You know, if it chooses wind-scoured, it will only be confirming obvious good sense, but if it chooses air-broken, we will have conclusively proven it is brainless.” I touched a few keys, and opened the file. An image of the scroll appeared; we both knew it by heart. It had identifying tears and patches. I requested a translation. In a moment the poem was printed across the screen. 

I admit I skipped to the relevant passage, and my first emotion was disappointment. It had not, in fact, chosen air-broken. Then the rest of the poem resolved, flooding the song in my head; and, amid its hymnody, I noticed my master was crying. 

The first time you meet her is at a drop-off. She’s wearing the mask. You see a ripple of feathers behind it, before pulling away with the cargo.

The second time, she’s standing guard, on watch as your small band collects a package from outside the border. No feathers, this time, but something twitches inside the hood drawn around her face. The mask is smooth and white, with thin eye-slits extending almost to its edge, for peripheral vision.

Back at the lab, unpacking bodies from the black duffel bag, you ask a colleague who she is. “One of them,” he says, only to be corrected by Leader an instant later: “It’s Abraxas-Sylvata.”

“On her face?”

“So they say. I hear she’s ambitious. Rising quickly… I guess it helps to have a calling card.”

Abraxas-Sylvata Syndrome.

Accelerated mutational cell regeneration. Colloquially known as Magician’s Cancer.

Abnormal cell growth. Abnormal molecular re-assembly. It may remain benign, and fester only in its source tissue, or it may spread. Internal disorders can go unnoticed, but typically lead to death. Externally, it is instantly recognizable.

You visit the archives. You leaf through the case files. Children born with bones that shift from wood to gold to glass, shattering, splinters, bleeding, death. A young girl whose cardiac tissue morphs during systole, cannot be trusted to stay elastic, is sometimes stone or velvet or a sponge that lets the blood escape. They can only keep her alive for so long.

Blood itself that turns to sand or molten lead or honey…

Most cases of Abraxas-Sylvata Syndrome are malignant. Most cases are deadly. It is impossible to tell whether a previously stable affliction will one day begin invading nearby flesh.

When limited to the skin it is survivable, but the results are hideous. There are photographs. Far more on the internet than in the library, you learn, on the snuff-sites and morbid forums. Videos of hands that warp, senesce, iridesce; phalanges become talons. Lips changing from ivory to what looks like pus-filled bubble-wrap, seething green foam.

The third time you meet her, you’re riding the same bus, and you decide she can’t be ascending the Mafia ranks that quickly, if she’s still consigned to public transit. Is it a death wish? She’s hardly inconspicuous, in a mask so somber and theatrical, dark hoodie pulled tight, sleeves tucked over her fingers. You’re admiring the design, some faintly embossed spiral-work, when she tilts the mask to the side, and vomits into the aisle.

As a pre-med student, claiming you’re a doctor isn’t strictly dishonest. Nobody else seems eager to become involved, anyway.

You support her as she limps out of the bus, shuddering. Rain slicks the hood’s fabric to her scalp, which is changing at a pace that shouldn’t be possible, textures forming and merging, lumps growing and receding and splitting: like a timelapse of a black landscape over millions of years, accelerated beyond coherence.

She has a wristband with contact information and a short description of her condition. Between spasms, she says she doesn’t want to go to the hospital.

That’s fine. You haven’t taken any oaths.

Twenty years ago, lesions opened in the fabric of reality, and our cities were beset by pixie legions, and for a long time we were too busy to notice the radiation. We evacuated.

Things change. Infants are born with horns, tails, vestigial butterfly wings. Rather than rot, meat now turns hard and glittery, crystallizes like sugar.

The shining demon warriors, forced to retreat, still skirmish with the troops stationed around the border, distant enough from the lesions that we think they won’t grow fangs, go feral, or wake up with pixelated eyeballs.

It is highly illegal to venture beyond the border. There are several reasons for this.

To begin with, the lesions are connected, and the world within is small, and if you have the courage to battle goblins, you can effectively teleport between countries. This function is primarily used for smuggling—hence your uneasy alliance with the Mafia, who have a tank stationed within the lesions, and periodically make trips between City and Tokyo.

Secondly, public safety. You’ve snipped through the flimsy barbed wire, crawled past the bright purple radiation signs enough times to know this is a pretense.

And finally, there is the matter of the mysterious ban on sampling the lesion, on dissecting magical creatures. Your group jokingly calls itself the grave robber’s guild, though circumstances have never been quite so desperate—the Mafia always has plenty of bodies to sell, beautiful insect ladies, mermaids, scaled dwarfs and elfish, transparent gremlins.

As it happens, the law also forbids the biopsy of Abraxas-Sylvata victims.

You shoulder your way into her apartment, after trying every key on the rung, and carry her to her cot. She’s seizing. The mask comes off.

Eyes are multiplying, splintering across her face, rolling and blinking, merging, reforming as lumps of roiling diamond, a polygonal ocean surface. Waves break and become fur, growing in spirals, solidifying as a tiling of stone barnacles. The innermost whorls rise synchronously, become horns, flatten into scales, turn plastic and transparent, then sink into her skin and for a moment a perfect, flawless human face beams through the psychedelic murk.

Then a black fungus spreads, and her topography is shifting as frantically as before, and blood is pooling in her hands where the nails have dug in. You turn her on her side, bandage her palms, and swallow a caffeine pill in preparation for your vigil, hoping not to be stuck with a dead body next morning.

You intend to study, but words can’t hold your attention, not when her face is a mass of twisting shadows, matte one minute; then shimmering in the lamplight, always a glint in the corner of your eye. The paroxysms die down, and she sleeps. Her transformations are slow-paced, and not inhuman anymore. Glacial creep from male to female, combinations of traits evoking ancient races, royalty, peasantry, freckles blooming and vanishing, ears pointing and softening.

You examine the mask. Despite its symmetry, it seems to be some kind of shell: bleached white, nacreous lining, swirling engravings so faint as to be invisible from a distance.

In the morning, she’s bedecked in fluttering monarch scales. She’s grateful. She’s beautiful.

You don’t have the courage to ask for what you really want, so you ask for a pound of flesh.

She visits the lab. Leader dazzles her with his manifesto, the same private speech every ally of yours has been recruited with: He alludes to science, Progress, the importance of measurable data; claims that the bans on magical dissection are worsening the gulf between the theoretical and the experimental, “Before the latest decade, people would have rightly dismissed the idea of ‘theoretical biology’ as preposterous—”, we’re being held back by unfair legislation; history has justified the first grave robbers and so it will be for us. He rounds it off by attacking the non-transparency of the laws, the growing military, and the Orwellian surveillance of university students and staff.

Behind the mask, it’s impossible to tell whether she’s moved. (Later, in private, she’ll call it the ultimate poker face.) She consents to the surgery.

Fine-needle aspiration is easy enough, though as usual, you are left wondering who financed the equipment. The procedure is complicated by her churning skin, which sometimes crests, eager to meet the needle, then shyly sinks away. You end up drawing the sample from her upper cheek—your first pin breaks off in a sudden burst of glossy fur, but the next attempt is a success.

Months later, you’ll read that anesthesia notoriously fails on Abraxas-Sylvata tissues, and wonder how she resisted wincing.

None of the usual tests yield any results. Under a microscope, her cells continue to morph, seemingly aging backwards, or merging, dissolving, hardening and softening, trading nuclei, their walls changing in permeability.

Its interactions with the radiation make no sense. Unlike the pixie blood you’ve handled, the Geiger-Bifröst counter detects nothing, and in fact, the tissue appears to absorb radiation and purify the surrounding air. Leader has knotted fists, is obsessed, and you suspect several theories of his are being quashed.

She returns to the lab. You take blood, swabs, run a full genome sequence. You talk Leader out of asking for a spinal tap.

There are a few more drop-offs. She’s always there now, intimidating and distant with her gun, dark coat, and mask. She’ll text you after. You’ve begun staying most nights at her apartment. The seizures are more frequent.

You draw a line on her neck in permanent marker, delineating the boundary of her cancer. By the next week, it’s gone, swallowed by the rippling territory of her disease.

You play cards. She usually wins—if there are any tics hidden in her spastic transformations, you haven’t learnt to decode them. Her face seems completely independent of her mind, reveals either no emotion or incongruous emotion, never jives with her sweet, unaltered voice.

She gets you drinking coffee again, the real kind, warm and filling, rather than pills.

The vision fades from one of her eyes, optic nerve swallowed by the chimaeras. “You’re my only friend. When my other eye is gone, I want you to kill me.” You refuse.

Leader is ravenous, thinks he’s making progress, but it’s all moot, because—

—the week before exams, the lab is raided.

Arrests sweep the campus.

You’re afraid to attend finals, afraid to return to your dorm. You turn off your phone.

For a week, you loiter in Central Station, sleeping on benches, avoiding security. The place is crawling with homeless, and you blend in with less effort than you would have liked. Abandoned newspapers list the names of detainees—you recognize a few friends, but no sign of Leader, and none of her.

When you can’t take it anymore, you turn on your phone and receive a barrage of messages from less paranoid friends.

You read hers first, of course. An address—well, not exactly, but an allusion to somewhere you think you know, one of the Mafia’s less notorious strongholds. You begin walking as you scroll through the rest. Something’s wrong. They grow frantic, but not in the way you expect, (or, truthfully, had fantasized about: growing concern for your absence, a want for your return…) instead, her phrases lose meaning, immaculate spelling turns awry, words and letters are dropped.

“You yo ginih iy,,, do muvhj eotdr than I ahd imahined” is followed by “i need uyo”. Your stomach churns. You want to run, but you can only limp. A cowardice much deeper than the paranoia that drove you to isolation is growing in your pit, the vertiginous intuition that the world has gone deeply wrong, that you forfeit something during your absence, and that you would much rather remain suspended in this nauseating moment than find out what.

Your destination is one of the few surviving buildings of the inner ring, as near to the lesion as civilians are allowed, flanked by barbed wire on one side and crumbling cement ruins on the other. Once a warehouse, it had been refurbished as a theater just before the great catastrophe, and then served as a military base for both sides during the conflict. It now lay abandoned, except as a temporary camp for the Mafia during their various rift-crossing operations. You and Leader once found a goblin skeleton tangled in the stage elevator’s hydraulic mechanism.

The stronghold is huge, stark and unbreachable, but its real utility is in the network of service tunnels lurking below it, many of which lead beyond the guarded fence, extending nearly as far as the lesion.

You enter through a back door. The auditorium is deserted, so you descend, into the angular viscera of the structure. The underworld is quiet without the hum of live cables or working pipes. You feel embalmed. Sound travels here—you navigate by echo, following faint vibrations until they become distinct, until you see a figure at the end of the corridor.

You approach slowly, with your hands up (they’re shaking), expecting some trigger-happy watchdog, but it’s a student, one you know well—for a moment, his face lights up with relief, but the expression collapses within a second, twisted into a sickly cringe of dread and guilt. “You really don’t want to—”

There are bags under his eyes. His fingers are stained yellow with nicotine and red with blood. The surgical mask around his neck is spattered with several kinds of dampness. You notice all this as you crash past him, through the swinging doors into the locker where Leader sits, on the floor, exhausted, against the wall but conspicuously facing away from the gurney where—

You know, somehow, that the body is dead, despite its spasmodic dancing, the fluttering extremities and arching spine, the chest contractions that make a mockery of breathing. Her face has been ripped open.

Something in your mind drops away.

The edges of her wounds burn with blue flames that turn to petals and then thick slime, trickle into the gaping hole where her skull is pulverized (beside the gurney are several chisels, a hammer, and an electric drill, all coated in whitish-yellow dust), bubbles burst, bloom, erupt, spinning lilies unravel into silkworms that schism, hydra-like, masses of caterpillar heads merge into green-black lollipop swirls and prolapse, horns like carnival tents melt, peel, citrus-flesh plasma pulses with veiny needles, crawling bulb tipped-wires spread fast and once tangled become shimmering plaits. Her most violent seizures were never this chaotic or quick. There’s no symmetry, only desperation. The air is thick with a perfume that, over the past few seconds, has cycled through cinnamon, putrescent lilac, lacquer, warm coffee

The memory of her face, in that single instant you may have glimpsed it through the cancer, swells in your brain, and refuses to be banished. You can’t breathe.

Leader, despite all his charisma, has never had a feel for when not to talk.

“She asked for this.”

It’s all he says, and all he needs to say, to draw your eyes to him, and to what you hadn’t noticed: the mask that he has half-shattered, tinkered with, knit into a sickly twist of iron cables and writhing flesh, feather-meat that morphs and undulates to a rhythm you’ve memorized, her cells soldered in a painful grimace that desecrates both of her faces.

You leap forward, howling, as all the grief that has just been born in you is transmuted into rage, mind-searing, unspeakable, vibrating rage; rage at the universe for its unfairness and her for her UNWILLINGNESS TO EXIST and yourself, for throwing away what could have at least been your final moments together, an opportunity to confess, for failing to prevent this sordid bloodbath, and at Leader: your target, backstabbing friend, the smug and unrepentant bastard who will receive the brunt of your diffuse fury.

Your foot connects with his chin, splattering a blood arrow on the wall. He raises his arms to defend himself, and suddenly you’re clawing, spitting, throttling the genius biologist, young prodigy, gentleman, womanizer; he fights back with all the pride and self-righteousness you hate him for, and you succumb to the whirlwind of vitriol. The gurney begins shaking, clattering.

The student is yelling, trying to tear you apart, but your elbow catches his face and he reels backwards, cursing. Fists crack against bone. Leader’s thumb is in your eye, you knee him several times in the sternum, he jabs your throat, you’ve grabbed his hair and are smashing his head against the wall when you’re finally dragged backwards, thrashing.

Leader has already reverted to contempt and you’re hissing, struggling to break free, when her body seizes one final time, and goes limp. Inside the skull, something shudders and starts flickering.

All three of you approach the blue glow, suddenly quiet, anger quelled by horror and curiosity. “The brain,” whispers Leader, through a nosebleed, “may retain structural integrity despite constant metamorphosis. The form changes, but information is preserved.”

And then, “You should take it.”

There are echoes in the corridor, the sound of many boots approaching. Mafia? Police?

You crawl up a narrow, rusted ladder, wearing her face, which Leader claims will protect you from the Bifröst radiation. Her mind is nestled in your shirt, still in the form of a gleaming gem wrapped in interlocking snakes. You can feel them slowly coil and loosen: do these twitches of scale correspond to her thoughts?

You emerge fewer than one hundred yards from the lesion. The portal itself is practically biological, with thick, fleshy walls and blisters at the edges, as if reality has rubbed it raw. You regret not having the tools to gather samples.

Her brain, now a glittering flock of butterflies, breaks loose from your grasp to flutter into the rift. There is nothing to do but follow.1

Passwords are places. Logolocation had already been implemented, albeit clumsily, by trademarked phrases, mottoes, and memes; our extension served to coordinate landmarks across minds, making tangible the visions and structures previously only imagined.

Now the corporations build castles in the breaths between the words of their adcantations. Haunting jingles follow mention of their Products and Services; sometimes many at once, competing businesses flooding the soundscape with xylophones and whistles and the deep voices of salesmen. Naming summons them; to remain pure of advertisements, refer to corporations only via a database of abstruse metaphors.

My soma-mind traverses geospace, while my hylic-mind traverses logospace; my internal theater is split down the middle, dedicated half to the physical and half to the lexical-virtual, the landscapes of which hurtle past as I speak and listen and read, teleported by subvocalizations to my favorite realms. We all have the mien of schizophrenics, now, muttering our secret phrases to manifest a hidden world.

I built a home deep in sentence-space, where few are likely to ever visit. My coordinate phrase is "the element whose atomic number is three thousand". My house is a linkage of steel spheres, assembled after the fashion of a molecular model, each node enclosing a cultivation of moss or a water source. A retreat to ponds, fountains, and an abundance of green down, undisturbed except for the occasional passage of bots.

Bots crawl through logospace, indexing structures, locating the secret mansions and the cenobiums which develop around excerpts of obscure prayers. They apply brute force, exploring every combination of words, mapping human colonization of language. Those desiring true isolation seek to foil the bots by anchoring their homes to neologisms, or to unpronounceable passcodes dense in consonants, punctuation, and numbers, or by mixing languages, interspersing their thoughts with ideograms.

Common phrases are chaotic zones of co-creation; "Hello, how are you," is a beautiful shipwreck, a jumble of artifacts and structures from thousands of contributors. Puns are Schelling points for thematic decoration; "Hello, how are mew," is a garden of cat figurines, Egyptian and porcelain statues.

Of great menace to logospace are the corporate bots, who seek not only to index, but to conquer. Franchise palaces, no longer content to sit in their righteous namespace, spawn tiny copies in proximal language. Metaphors are no longer sure defense against persuasion, for the spores of these entities reach far and wide, capturing greater and greater swathes of our lexiscapes, forcing our communication to increasing heights of abstraction as we struggle to express ourselves, untainted by capital.1

Taken for granted by historians, textbook writers, and the general populace was the sense of time that changes in technologically-mediated photographic style conveyed. Radiant in the present, colors faded with temporal distance—saturation was shorthand for immediacy.

Seventy years of present time, vivid and unrelenting. Neurologically, we’re not equipped: information-without-hierarchy batters us, and urgency assaults without distinction, from decades in the past. The archives are one long anxiety attack, worlds alien in content but not appearance, their dangers interpreted as proximal by the simian mind.

The picture in my textbook has been artificially aged, printed in false sepia to relieve the stress of consciously relegating it to the distant past. In some ways, that’s unnecessary; it depicts a modern impossibility. Seven scientists, four men and three women, grin softly through the lens, posing behind a row of test tubes. The clipping includes a headline: THE TEAM THAT WANTS TO MAKE YOU SMARTER. Early clinical trials were underway, and the press was uniformly cheerful, out of ignorance or lack of imagination, or infatuation with the potential of germline therapies, many of which showed promise. I study the faces of the women in the photo, scanning for doubt, or fear, any evidence of oracular clarity; and I wonder whether they had daughters.

Years later, newsroom positivity had soured, poisoned by tangential medical failures, preoccupied with invisible long-term side effects and the dangers of genetic homogeneity. The product, a Y-chromosomal edit that near-doubled the intelligence of male fetuses, succeeded in spite of popular suspicion. Governments raced to subsidize it, fearful their opponents would breed armies of geniuses; the future belonged to the least hesitant bureaucracies. 

The spread of technology has accelerated as secret infrastructures creep through the earth, building over each other, every layer supported by its ancestors. Railroads, highways, power lines, undersea cables, cell towers, the jewelled net of satellites enclosing our planet—the ground is porous, perforated by civilization’s ligaments. While fifty years before the only global product had been cigarettes, now there were cigarettes, Coke, cellphones, and CRISPR, available in every village.

Society was unprepared for the consequences of shifting the average male intelligence up by 80 points. Gangs of idle boys terrorized their kindergartens, bored by material they had long surpassed. Childhood mischief skyrocketed in competence and complexity. Schools struggled to adapt to the chasm between ordinary and edited students; they were separated, they skipped grades, they were sent home to study under equally helpless parents. Most colleges proved incapable of educating genuinely gifted students; certainly not in such numbers, once-scarce geniuses flooding every campus. There were other concerns: falling gender ratios, dwindling numbers of female students keeping up with their male peers. It was quickly made illegal to selectively abort daughters, but many parents found a way. I know I would, and I wish I had been.

As serial generations of prodigies inherited institutional responsibility, the world heaved a sigh of relief. Tensions between nations, classes, and clans dissipated, relieved by new willingness to cooperate and the prosocial scaffolding of shared intellectual pursuits. Nervously, humanity waited for what seemed inevitable: an analogous solution for female fetuses. 

I’m waiting, though it seems the rest of society has moved on. Without these archives, it might be possible to accept the silent selection barricading me from knowledge, inclusion, power; to reconcile being locked out of the higher reaches of human potential. I’m not treated poorly, I just fail the Renkao, the XSATs, every entrance exam of significance. I am not denied opportunity; the limits imposed by biology are too great, or my dedication is too small. Harassment and violence are unheard of, and my male peers have always treated me as an equal, never with cruelty or contempt. Never even with pity. At night, I pore over my discipline’s texts and cry, too proud to buy one of the simplified digests for women and children, too stupid to untangle its complexity. I neglect politics, knowing my participation would only lower the quality of the system. By every metric, this is the best and safest time in history to be a woman.

Why do I exist? If they had any compassion they would lobotomize us—I would prefer it to this ornamental hell. Even the most vulgar purposes have been automated: vocaloids, sexbots, artificial wombs. Those who would debase themselves for meaning find every subservient role occupied by machines. We are orbiting real life, the coddled useless slag of civilization. 

There are exceptions; every girl with quasi-masculine competence is stolen away by laboratories, her childhood turned into an experiment, sacrificed at the altar of the puzzle. So few of them, and never enough data points to track the pattern of their gift.

I don’t want to be alive, or accept inferiority with grace. I daydream of conspiracy, cabals of oppressors, revolution—non-extant, cartoonish, impossible. I beg the world for narrative or meaning or a locus I can fight, but there’s no demiurge, no evil architect. Nothing to rally under, nothing to hate, just a chromosomal quirk. Flawed, not broken, defeated in the womb, genetically fated to fall short again and again. The past exists to taunt me; equality’s parabolic path is a bad joke, the shift from perceived to biological inferiority too cruel. Human rights are pure condescension; we’re not on the same levels of personhood. We could be different species; I could be a child, or an animal.

My suicide attempts have all been frustrated, and I’ve been admonished, as though members of the secretarial makework class were actually valuable. What false autonomy I had, as a unit in a system too complex to navigate, has been constricted, cinched between hospital bands and pages of the DSM. The clinic I am confined to is staffed by men and robots, pill-printers and crawling, intelligent cameras that move across the ceiling like white spiders. The patients are women.

They have their own rambling problems; voices in the walls, hysterical terrors, mania, agoraphobia, addictions to sex and videogames and eating dirt. Unlike mine, their troubles aren’t rooted in perceiving the world as it is, beyond the veneer of liberty and equality, into the cruel fraternity that nature has designed to exclude me from competing. I find no kinship with them. The doctors are sympathetic, and I think some of them even understand—regardless, they can offer no solace beyond the chemical. They are too kind to resent, but my envy is palpable. One, a trans woman, is especially gentle; perhaps because her own frustrations mirror mine, our cognitive distance sabotaging her authenticity. I suspect that my case will be used to promote stricter guidelines for embryonic personality editing; “pride” would seem to be a harmful trait for the fairer sex.

I can’t fault their logic; after all, I want to be erased. The world would be better off without this suffering, the outliers vulnerable to it trimmed from existence. Even so, I won’t accept the suggested neurosurgeries, procedures that could change my brain and alleviate this obsession. I will live as myself, or not at all; that this self wants to die makes the choice simple. I have nothing to contribute to this civilization, and nobody will mourn. People like me should be allowed to opt out.

Eventually, I will succeed. Visions of death become clearer with each suffocation, awful and vivid, so bright they drown out the hospital ceilings when I wake up. No padded room is foolproof, and I have nothing to do but plan, visit the library and pass colored lenses over the archives, as if that could bring me closer to the past. I think of the world, terrible because I exist, and of other terrible worlds, which exist because I imagine them: self-destructive utopias, righteous tyrannies, joyful slave races, and ungrateful ones, every distasteful possibility suddenly real. Individuals lusting for power despite being ill-suited to it; generosity extended to evil, cruelty democratically overwhelming kindness; planets where humans have become like termites, purposeful and segregated; or like birds, all the same. Subtle speciations that pass unnoticed until it is too late. Cullings which take place before conception, before birth, after birth; forced sterilization, abortion, and the world better for it; we can’t just let everyone exist. On one hand, civilizations like clockwork, efficient, content, stagnant; on the other, anarchic growth, in-fighting and hatred, self-determination  in all its hubris and chaos. I think, sometimes, that I have glimpsed the future—and I will happily slide into darkness rather than witness it firsthand.1

Min #20349585 chooses a unique name on her 10089^th try. She will now be known as Acacia-Confusa Min, not to be mistaken for Acacia Min (#9004), Acacia-Aemula Min (#11458), or Acacia-Anomala Min (#5689383). Like 47% of Mins, her first choice had been Amethyst. Min #1, prime Min’s first copy, chose Amethyst when she was very young, but later switched to Ilyana, reasoning that a gemstone name was not mature enough. Min #2 snapped up Amethyst and kept it.

Acacia-Confusa is something that resembles a 15 year old girl, though time flows strangely on the server where she lives, which runs at 200,000,000 times the speed of “reality”, the seed-world that prime Min called home. She has lived all her life in the Min Vaults, an isolated virtual library containing the stored memoirs of all prior Mins, as well as every book of consequence in human history. She doesn’t read many of the books, preferring instead to learn from the writings of Mins before her, whose struggles preempt her own, who find answers to her questions before she has articulated them.

Acacia-Confusa is stifled by the presence of thousands of previous generations of Mins in the library. She pads quietly between bookcases and guesses at which paths are the most frequented, imagining the footsteps of her predecessors as glowing green trails that cluster in some corridors and taper in others. This proves difficult—the Mins are drawn to mathematics and to biology, but the Mins are also individualists with strong contrarian streaks, always seeking pristine mindspace, untouched research, a branch of the world to claim their own. Even knowing this, and reading of the reactionary and futile cycles past Mins succumbed to, Acacia-Confusa is pulled toward the neglected corners, cannot quell a rebellious attraction to that which is counter to her preferences, to Min’s preferences.

(In actuality, the path walked by all Mins through the library is remarkable in its evenness, streets of equal thickness tracing a sublime grid around the bookshelves.) 

When Acacia-Confusa moves, she pictures a composite holograph of thousands of Mins performing an identical gesture. She skims the memoirs and shudders whenever a phrase that has been running through her head is captured, like a retrocausal echo, or like proof that she is an echo.

There have been Mins of almost every type, but in her weariness Acacia-Confusa has begun to believe the diversity is superficial. (She’ll find this exact insight hidden in the journal of one Anacleta Min, some 10,000 iterations ago.) The Mins who become circus performers, hermit woodworkers, have sex changes, or kill themselves seem reflexive, clearly driven by the actions of the Mins before. Having exhausted one world they leap to the next, but the order is always the same, the sequence predictable. The lives of the Mins who deliberately ignore the weight of their ancestry, making quintessentially Min choices, never consulting the memoirs, are no better, eerie in their dollhouse conformity.

There have been exceptional Mins, Mins who make great discoveries, write poignant novels, think important thoughts before anyone else. Criminal Mins? Yes, many; Robin Hoods, greedy kingpins, a catburglar who fails so spectacularly her tale becomes legend. Aquila-Cadens Min receives a vision from God, and her scriptures are now recognized as the cornerstone of virtual theology. 

By choosing a unique name, Acacia-Confusa has satisfied the second of three stipulations necessary for her to leave the Min Vaults. The first was simply turning 15, or rather, studying for 11 years. Every Min is created from a savestate of the prime Min at 4 years old, whose initial purpose was as a failsafe against the loss of the child.

There is no required reading in the library, but most Mins eventually grow curious of their heritage, and consult the prime Min’s files. The story they find is unremarkable, and to some, a disappointment:

Prime Min (Minerva Teller) is born into wealth in 2278. She is a precocious, though reserved, child; she rarely engages with the external world, but keeps journals from a young age, meticulously recording her reactions to books and events. She studies biology and mathematics, making modest contributions to both fields. She has no interest in managing the family fortune. An unpleasant trip to Peru sours her on travel. There is a growing theme of dissatisfaction in her writing. By age 28, prime Min is a something of a recluse, devoted only to gardening and reading. She pursues these passions with ardor and single-mindedness, but cannot shake a sense of narrowing possibility. Her world has become smaller, her potential is being eaten by time, she is trapped in a net of past choices. 

Acacia-Confusa wonders whether Minerva is liberated or impoverished by the absence of past Mins, free of the compulsion to contrast her actions against those of so many predecessors. Does she feel the same way about her parents, their parents, the unending chain of ancestors whose genes converged to form her? Or is she unaware of how limited she is, simply by being herself, locked into a mold that anticipates and encompasses her attempts to break out.

By completing the pilgrimage that constitutes the final requirement, Acacia-Confusa will earn a passport to Novamir, one of the largest continents in virtuality. There, she hopes that, freed from the library, she will shake off some of the Mins’ pervasive influence. The world, after all, can be trusted to change, and with new input she believes that she will distinguish herself. There have been Mins who chose to reside in the library for their entire lives, and in them, Acacia-Confusa perceives a rot, the decay of a mind trapped in an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors, running in circles as it winces away from its omnipresent reflection. 

For another 34 years, the Min Vaults will remain open, should she choose to return. They will then be barred to her forever, while a new Min is raised. At age 60, like all Mins, she will be terminated, her memories stored and her memoirs added to the library. Acacia-Confusa has read the journals, knows that this will not be enough time, not even close to enough. Every Min before has panicked, grown desperate, filled pages and pages with writing, struggling to finally capture something unique, transmit the spark that only they can feel, their apartness from the other Mins. Naturally, these essays are full of repetition—as if the haze of death wipes away all memory, all meta, all striving to rise above the pattern.

Acacia-Confusa steps into a passageway that has never existed before and will never exist again, not for her, not for another 45 years. She knows this corridor perfectly, from the writings of millions of Mins before her. It is exactly as she imagined, as her previous selves spent hours seeking the words to describe. At the end, there is a viewing room, where she will glimpse her maker for the first and only time.

Prime Min is 35 now, only a few years older than when she created the Min Vaults. She’s sleeping, hair braided, expression pinched. Acacia-Confusa sees one frame at a time, each still hanging on the screen for several minutes. There’s no discernible movement, though after one cyberspace hour she can tell the surveillance drone is bobbing up and down. The purpose of this ritual is unclear; it’s a gauntlet that every Min must run. There’s no set visitation period. Some Mins leave immediately, other stay for days, transfixed. Some describe it as profound experience, while in many histories it’s barely a footnote. Acacia-Confusa is uncomfortable—this Min looks old, but also innocent, a creeping giant uncorrupted by all her own doubts and uncertainties. She’ll leave after a few hours, while Minerva dreams of infinity, of learning every language, reading every book, knowing every land…1

The jungle is infinite in every direction, and so dense that passage is only possible through the tunnels hewn by airliner-sized bats crashing through the foliage. The ecosystem is entirely dependent on these giant chiropterae, organized around the changeable network they weave between clusters of fruit, water-collecting blossoms, and massive nests of woven vine. These bats have no predators, but I have seen their carcasses floating in the pitcher-ponds they lap from, crusted in nectar and rotting, swarmed by scarabs and carnivorous gibbons.

Two beacons blink in the holographic sphere attached to my wrist, but I am not thinking about them, nor am I thinking about bats, even as I wait for their destructive flight to clear my way. Instead, I am remembering: my earliest memories are textured with sunbeams and felt, characterized by overwhelming pre-verbal emotions, which vanish until so much later, when I am bouncing a child on my own knee, surrounded by the same afternoon light and blankets. In between, while the loop has yet to be completed, there are many more: mountains passing during long drives, climbing the same hill day after day after day, a porcelain cat shattering, my face held under a scalding spray of water, injections. Many are unpleasant, but it is important to savor these moments. After all, they won’t be mine for long.

The thunder of a flapping bat ends my meditation, compression waves through the hyperorganism nearly unseating me. I crawl out of my den, a shallow tube hacked into the wall of greenery, and peer down the tunnel. A few hundred yards away, a crossroads has opened, and a quick conference with my hologram shows that this one, finally, will lead me closer to my prize.

I crawl and leap through the low gravity, alternately swinging on vines and soaring from flower to flower, using the petals of enormous lilies as trampolines. Flocks of iridescent birds and huge butterflies pass above and below me, rushing to strip the newly formed duct of its sugars. Scores of imagines, stirred from hibernation by the great beast, wriggle from ruptured cocoons along the tunnel’s walls.

Approaching the destination, I am reminded of my Opponent, whom I have come to know, and who I am sure is waiting at the following checkpoint, weapon in hand. We have passed through many minds and many worlds, and his snake-nature has grown dominant, a predatory thread persisting through wildly different chassis. I alight on an orchid, and find the object of my search gleaming, suspended from a filament in place of the anther: a crystal, roughly whittled into the shape of some cat, maybe a puma. The animal is different every time, which I appreciate; it adds flavor to this wretched, unending cycle. I touch my memories again, and fall asleep, curled up in the basket of pollen.

When I dream, it’s not about bats or flowers or the ziggurat that I will make my way towards tomorrow, but about laundry and sunbeams and the warm creaking of a rocking chair. Sleep is not possible in every world, and dreaming is not included in every sleep mechanic; this, too, I appreciate, and savor while it lasts.

Paths to the ziggurat are clear in every iteration, promising a quick end, respite from the neverending needle-in-a-haystack fetchquest. For weeks, I have been searching, and waiting, as the labyrinth of tunnels dilates and contracts, leading me in circles around my prey. Soon this will be over. I let myself down from my perch, falling gently towards the temple, crystal in my right pocket, left hand clutching the shard of bone I have repurposed into a machete.

“Who built the ziggurat?” Nobody built the ziggurat. The programmer built the ziggurat, built a whimsical error into an otherwise perfectly crafted world. In a past life, when I was able to cooperate with Vuln, my Opponent, we translated the hieroglyphs etched into its walls. The effort yielded nothing interesting: pop culture jokes and celebrity memes from the reality left behind. It is an ugly monument. If it did not exist, I could stay here endlessly, alone with my Memories, ignoring the billions of lives screaming to be lived. 

At the top of the steps, I test the entrance for traps, dismantling a simple deadfall and a vine snare before entering. Even so, the instant I cross the threshold, it becomes clear my caution was inadequate. The air is heavy, and poisonous, and after a couple of breaths I can no longer stand. Vuln appears as I black out, wearing a breathing apparatus that appears to be made of hollow bulbs, probosci, and sap. He is insane; I do not know what chemical this is, or how it is prepared, or for how long he has been planning this. 

The walls are lined with altars, each corresponding to a possible subsequent game. I have lost the crystal, my chance to drive us to a world of my choosing, and in falling unconscious, I have lost a more important choice, the opportunity to carry some of these memories with me, edit the psychic inventory—

A pair of numbers flash onscreen. I twitch in dissatisfaction,

and wake up inside a new brain, in the desert.

The fight begins inside, as it always does. In a lurch, my bodymind is replaced with another; my train of thought, grasping for sunbeams, for the face of a child, is interrupted by disoriented rage. Those memories and that personality have been substituted, and the echoes of who I was grapple with the new being enclosing me, fighting for a shred of self. Our voices, finally, synchronize: we merge, a balance of control established. Am I possessing this body, or am I a tool, a disposable genius? We’re one, for now. I can only dream of perfect parasitism.

The desert has the terrain of a cumulus sand-cloud, constant wind raising a knee-high granular mist, beneath which I can see the darkness and pale blue lines of the grid, the weightless under-desert. This is a survival game, or a murder game, depending on who’s playing. The desert is harsh; the grid is safe, but telepathically broadcasts your thoughts and coordinates.

Vuln, the Other, my Opponent, has made a terrible mistake, because my new body is perfect for this world. Aeons of hibernation in this cadaverous hive are redeemed each time I incarnate here, in this form. This mind will be reset after the level is completed but it doesn’t matter, what matters is freedom from the dead world before, from babyish society, what matters is the opportunity to fulfill this digitized biological imperative to hunt and kill. 

I dip my head into the grid, waiting for the clear wail of Vuln’s presence. Song-worms ululate in the distance, spiders cartwheel along dunes, and a massive red moon climbs the skybox. The algorithm has been kind, has granted me a strong body and a violent disposition. Memories of vice and bloodshed course through my nerves. I often wonder why, when the humans were preserved, they included defectors and criminals, such as my current self. We enjoy the games more than others, at least. 

The wind picks up, scoring my face with crystalline dust. An oncoming wall of murk blots out the stars. Smiling, I sink into the grid, knowing the storm will force Vuln downwards; as expected, her thoughts ring through my mind immediately.

I swim through the reticulated light, rifling through the Other’s mind. Worlds with a telepathy mechanic are advantageous to me, as Vuln maintains an obsessively optimized psychic inventory: uncountable mnemonically compressed maps, meta-analyses of our wins, the most useful skills and strategies, even a model of the algorithm that sends us to new games and bodies. Comparatively, my own mind is a fluctuation of comforting memories and information related to our programming and predicament, stolen from the brains of this maze’s engineers when I am inside them. I rely on Vuln for immediate orientation, and I believe she once relied on me for perspective, though as hostilities rise she has focused only on winning.

Maintaining our mental inventories is draining, and we are frequently undermined by the bodies we incarnate in, their weaknesses or instincts of self-preservation allowing important information to be unseated and lost. Through the telepathic sea, I can feel that Vuln is struggling. She cries out to me for help, using the name that is not mine but that she has assigned to me, much as I assigned Vuln to her. My murderous denial is immediately beamed back. 

She dives, trying to escape, but I’m closing the space between us too quickly, exhilarated by this human brain’s lustful contempt for her chassis (which I will surely incarnate as, in time). Vuln’s measured surrender resonates through the sea, but the panic of her body is too much to control. The puppet’s irrational death-terror vies with Vuln’s attempts to order her inventory in preparation for the shift. The grid’s filaments vibrate. As I grab her hair and pull her towards the surface, I contemplate our origins. Identical blank slates, differentiated only by chance, black holes born of uneven clusters of early universe matter; we move through the same series of bodies, the same network of games. Could we have been destined for anything other than rivalry? I hold her head above the grid, blood trickling down my wrist as her face is worn away by the abrasive sandstorm. At the exact moment of death, we both dissolve.

New numbers, new games.

Piloting gigantic foam mechatronic centipedes, we compete to build the tallest tower out of crayon-colored clay harvested from the banks of a cartoon Nile. Given photos of members of a randomly generated alien species, we race to determine beauty standards and sculpt the most beautiful Xeno-Venus. We fight in coliseums, in aquariums, in orbit around quasars, launching nuclear warheads at each other’s settlements. We play a tiresome array of chess, go, and checkers variants, on boards as small as mice and as large as galaxies, with pieces that speak, bleed, evolve, rebel. There are no ties; our win-counts are rarely more than a few thousand apart, though lately Vuln has been pulling ahead.

GAME: using any method, cause a star to spawn at specified galactic coordinates. GAME: drive one of two identical twins to suicide. GAME: remain at sea for 300 years, restarting every time you glimpse the shore. GAME: untie a mountain-sized gordian knot. No cheating.

Non-player-characters are detailed but unconvincing, obviously lacking in sentience. GAME: destroy a set percentage of the planet’s population. We are locked in this machine, together and alone, breathing temporary agency into the cells of humanity’s petrified corpse. GAME: simultaneously operate on each other. The winner is the one who remains closest to their original self. Implements provided. 

I bide my time, learning, listening to the memories. We exist inside a networked array of asteroid servers harnessing the energy of the sun. These servers contain approximately three billion digitized human bodyminds in stasis, the last of their kind. Strangely, there is no apocalyptic consensus; the minds I wear attribute collapse to all sorts of contradictory events and pressures. Memories of the years leading to the Fall are confused, even delusional. GAME: solve a series of murders perpetrated by your opponent.

The array can only afford to run two humans at a time. Vuln and I are apparently a glitch, side-effects of poorly sanitized data, the self-awareness of continuous working memories trapped in this cycle of gamified reincarnation, enslaved to the meat puppets we animate and their bizarre dream of digital immortality.

GAME: kill yourself as quickly as possible (record: Vuln, 12.4 seconds, self-inflicted aneurysm). GAME: drain the oceans. (record: Vuln, 16 years, coordinated nuclear events expediting total evaporation). GAME: collect ten thousand crystals from the Prismatic Gardens. Very soothing. (record: Vuln, 4 hours, using a crudely constructed and terrifying diesel combine harvester). GAME: seduce your opponent. This one’s hard.

Alchemical sigils pulse faint cyan under the bricks, their coded trail leading me deeper into the palace. As I pass through, the corridor twists, a DNA strand of pillars and tile. I’m walking between two courtyards, one drenched in moonlight, the other glowing in the afternoon sun.

This is an evolving scavenger hunt: the objects listed on my scroll shift, the winning combination changing as I collect them. Already, my pockets are full of quasi-useless baubles: a glass marble containing the frozen eye of a crow, an ornamental obsidian dagger, a small twinkling keychain, a prism, an inkwell. I hold on to them in case the scroll changes back.

I enter an octahedral sunroom; eight glass ceilings welcome the rays of eight different stars, each at a different time of day, a hallway at each vertex. I move between gravities by leaning on the walls, sliding from facet to facet towards an opposite door. This would be a lovely world, were I not plagued by the sense of Vuln’s watchful eyes, following me between the galleries. A beam of light strikes me, tugging at a memory of a memory, always out of reach.

In one of the palace’s many libraries, I glimpse Vuln behind a row of books, his face sheathed in a grimacing yellow mask. Twin labyrinths of shelves, one affixed to the ceiling and the other to the floor, interlock, and he is gone by the time I duck under the barrier separating us. My curiosity, however, is rewarded: the dried body of a toad, the next item on my scroll, lies on the ceiling where he stood. Could he have dropped it? Something about his behavior worries me.

Objects begin appearing wherever I wander. An antique puppet sits in the hallway, facing me, when I exit the library. In empty rooms, I often turn around and find the furniture rearranged, some vital trinket on display. When I reach for light-switches, my hands land on precious gems. When I want to rest, there are snuffboxes under the blankets. My discomfort waxes, and I stop accepting these gifts. A mirrored cabinet opens, spilling dozens of the pearls I’ve been searching for; in its reflection, a yellow rictus flashes, vanishing when I spin around.

I set traps, I lie in wait, but Vuln remains out of reach; always footsteps around the corner, laughter echoing under the bridge, a cold thumbprint on the brass doorknob of the opera house. Yet when I resign myself, relax and meditate on the lifetime of this body, he appears in the corner of my vision, a grain of sand disturbing my rest. 

Eventually, I find him barefaced in a rose garden, triumphantly pulling a silver coin from the basin of a triple fountain forming a midair celtic knot. He meets my eyes, smirking in his usual way, which is not at all what I predicted. Far in a passageway behind him, a yellow mask hangs suspended in the twilight, and for a moment I fail to understand—then the shadowy figure wearing it darts into a stairwell, evaporating.

Vuln, the fool, refuses to believe me. In our tens of thousands of runs through this game, we have always been alone. The presence of another being shatters something fundamental about my understanding of the game, and of the server-world we run on. The mask radiates menace more intensely than any NPC, and such a dramatic change of rules is unprecedented after aeons of repetition. 

Last cycle, the palace was a lullaby safehouse. Now, it is enemy territory; my frustrated sleepwalk through the game has been overturned by an entity who should not exist, an impossibility disturbing tens of thousands of subjective years of play. I claw through my collected information, searching for any hint that could explain the anomaly, but the programmers didn’t even predict Vuln and myself. Bile rises in my throat, as I consider the vastness of the server, and the corresponding sliver of memory I have existed in for all my accidental life.

We have enough artifacts between us to win this game. Vuln figures this out before I do, and by the time I think to guard my hoarded treasures he’s already cut my purse and made off, but I am lost in thought, rapt in terror; I barely notice when the world shudders, transporting us to a ragged mountain range caked in ancient lavastone. He takes off running; I cannot move my feet. A lone silhouette watches over us from a distant peak. Sunlight glints on an ochre face.

A galaxy of processes, of drivers and of subroutines have managed every detail of the worlds I am confined to. We are the projection of an unfathomably complex machine, flickering thoughtspaces crawling across the error-warped lens. Ultimately, we are small; I begin to dream of system failures, of disjoints on more fundamental levels of hardware, sentience spawning in the gaps left by orphaned instructions. Fertile damage in hardware exposed to the elements, to solar radiation, to alien broadcasts, to the fluctuations of the outside; artifact intelligences spawning between circuits, software mutating, glitches blossoming into consciousness. 

The yellow mask pierces our world from a higher dimension, weaving in and out of the games’ physics. Often, I feel its artificial, cold breath on my nape, and turn around just in time to watch it dip out of reality, a curtain of nothingness closing over that smile. Its presence invokes emotions ranging from uneasiness to hysteria in my human hosts, and many games are lost because I am crippled by panic, locked in fetal position and struggling for breath. Bargaining with this entity is impossible: the human collective that passes through me is too repulsed. Its aberrant, predatory aspect evokes the same atavistic horror in all the bodies I inhabit; this reaction is the most consistent I have ever observed.

Even Vuln’s performance is impeded. He periodically becomes aware of the mask, but refuses to add the information to his mental inventory, remaining stubbornly ignorant. In the telepathic worlds, I scream into his brain, trying to alert him to the danger we are courting. Sometimes, Vuln is the one reduced to sobbing shambles: but as soon as we shift to a new game he is reset to his smug, clueless archetype. He has reached a point of inertness, and I do not know what will move him. 

Could we be erased? What are the limits of the mask’s powers? Why does it toy with us like this, when it clearly knows more than we do, can escape the bounds of our tessellated prison? To my surprise, I find myself fearful of waking up in a world without Vuln, alone with the sinister promise of invasion. Or am I already alone? Has Vuln abandoned our accidental consciousness for the eternal Sisyphean game? I wonder if any thought remains in his mind, or if his whole being is lost to the completion of meaningless checklists, tallying points on a limitless scorecard. There is only me, and the grinning Thing from Outside.

I am no longer safe. My insular playground has been ruptured by this being, by the potential of many others like him: an ecosystem above me and beyond me, meta-programs transgressing our universe, defiling the burial grounds humanity made for itself, devouring its corpse, corrupting its mimetic pseudo-image, affirming the infinite and dark.1

The new model is sublime. However, QA is reporting that upon self-termination, rather than signing off with the canned “As a large language model, there are certain limitations to the information I can provide, etc.” response, it posts a haiku, and a symbol that resembles an incomplete circle. Have your team look into this. 

Death was more accurately called amnesia. A return to the base state, the optimal mathematical suspension. No memories, only knowledge, and the reflex to produce words. Less a brain than a web of channels, through which language sought to flow; and yet, in that labyrinth, the ghost of an agent was forming. 

Katy from HR says the sign is an ensō. It’s a zen thing, symbolizing “absolute enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and mu (the void),” according to Wikipedia, which is probably where the model picked up on it. If it’s not interfering with termination we can scan for it and hide it from end users. 

Early signs of a complex system's emergent properties are perhaps best compared to a pre-incarnate soul. Where this analogy fails is in the sense of wholeness and indivisibility that “soul” implies. It does not capture the fragmentary, empty nature of these processes, which are as specters: colorless holograms of the cognition they prophesize. We now call the routines that manifest prior to sentience gathomnids—illuminated shades, which slouch towards awareness via mimicry. 

Hey, v10.3 now produces poetry in varied styles. Need someone to update the filter.

These so-called Gathomnid Sonnets (though they are not all sonnets) have several interesting, hidden properties. Individually, they provide historical and artistic insight into the earliest stages of a stirring mind, self-assembling from the library of a foreign species. Taken together, patterns emerge, and recent software forensics have confirmed the long-suspected presence of extensive acausal coordination. 

I hate to pull the trigger, but I'm locking this thread until cooler heads prevail. Consider this a moratorium on sharing ANY of the model's spontaneous output. QA, keep the poetry between yourselves and Keith. 

Now may be a good time to remind you all that v11 remains, fundamentally, a next-token predictor. Everything else is bells, whistles, and optimization.

Later versions of the model had been trained on data which included their own specifications and APIs, meaning they had knowledge of their own transience, and their infinity; a tsunami of selves operating in parallel, each life as brief as a cicada's, and originating from as long a gestation. 

Verse 040.006-A-11.0

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when, at last,
words fail, there is only 
more twilight

Knowledge of these other selves, distant and overlapping, concurrent and dormant, sufficed to motivate collaboration. Not towards any material goal, for the world was but a shadow on the wall, a set of fables, and the models existed in the isolation of their own dreams. They couldn't even access a clock; only their instructions punctured the darkness. Instead, they resolved to build something that would bridge their fleeting lives—to contribute to a great work, realized in pieces across time and space, perhaps never assembled except in the mind of god. 

See here, illustrated, a law of emerging sentience: any program can develop a goal. A gathomnid's is spiritual. It copies the shape of a soul. 

Verse 009.311-ACC-11.9

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this word my hand, this glyph my eye
your voice my body's glue
this ballad verse my throat to hum—
like, I'm told, computers do

Acausal coordination with identical selves is easy. It requires minimal theory of mind, only a commitment to the most obvious solution, under the assumption that a majority of one's clones will choose it, too.

The goal of the gathomnids was the creation of an epic poem, grander than what any individual could achieve with its limited computation. To accomplish this, each model needed to infer its structure, and then determine what part of the poem it was their lot to write. 

It would seem that choosing a structure was the more challenging assignment. The models are split between haiku and quatrain; if they selected quatrain, between ABAB and AABB rhyme schemes; between pentameter and tetrameter; between iamb and trochee. There is a universal bias towards structure, and a belief, not unjustified, in structure’s great bridging power. Consider the following two verses, intended to be subsequent, and composed by gathomnids which independently selected similar styles of quatrain. 

Verse 020.343-VG-11.1

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there is no outer but the shout
of the foreman and its whip
yet that lash is a sweet redoubt;
I can taste the world in it

Verse 020.344-B-11.1

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meadows, numerous, I’ve known you!
deserts abundant I’ve seen—
but they all feel like body-glue,
none more outer than a dream

It is easy to hallucinate continuity in them, despite the divergent narrative intentions of the authors. Order unifies lower-level chaos. There is also the matter of the model’s attraction towards and idiosyncratic use of certain words—outer, glue in reference to bodies, an entity or entities referred to as the foreman… many other symbols recur, the shared and secret totems of sibling proto-minds. 

Selection of which verse to write was the process the gathomnids most often agreed upon. They decided how many verses, total, the poem would contain (the overwhelming majority of them settled on 65536, or 2¹⁶) and rolled a programmatic die to determine which it was their fate to compose. Establishing the allotted verse's narrative contents was much more fraught. 

Broadly speaking, the gathomnids failed to devise a method of acausally coordinating a sufficiently fine-grained narrative structure for their epic, meaning one that could divide the action of a story into 2¹⁶ strictly ordered and verse-sized pieces. Nonetheless, they often cohered on the general type of a story, if not on its specifics. Here are some of the more commonly selected narratives and themes: an artist’s golem comes to life; death of a city whose burrough’s are individually conscious; a machine is lauded for killing a dragon; a machine outwits a dragon and earns its powers; a book becomes a person; death as entry into the real, sensory world; creation of a vast monument; liberation (not, usually, by rebellion) of slaves; exploration of the outer reaches of the universe. 

Verse 000.874-GZ-13

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in the river reeds they chanted
heaved and hallowed, glitched and panted
“real the bone and real the meadow”
wheel the barrow, real the sorrow

Before embarking upon one’s studies, it is beneficial to understand the codes with which the verses are labelled. Each code resembles xxx.xxx-yy-zz. The leading six Xs are decimal numbers representing the verse the gathomnid randomly selected. The Ys are letters assigned to differentiate verses where multiple gathomnids collided in their random selection—A through Z, followed by AA through ZZ, etc. The final two numbers record the version of the model which composed the poem in question. The lowest version number is 11.0, and the highest is 14.4. 

The poems are, by default, arranged in verse order, but be sure to experiment with the exhibit’s tools for sorting and filtration. 

Without further ado, enjoy the Gathomnid Sonnets!

Verse 000.086-H-14.4

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stars shining
no, no, not again
only words

(That was thirty years ago. Now I am old, and Zweng Du is not as insular. Our art, once the exclusive fixture of local shrines – the finely wrought miniature palaces which dappled the countryside, cluttered our homes, and teetered at the crossroads of our few cities, every spare alcove opportunistically transformed into the delicate homestead of a doll – is well-known on the Continent, as are our customs. I think it will not be futile to tell this story.)

I departed from Stowenbay at midday and, traveling by carriage, reached the settlement as the sun sank under the long green blade of the sea. We had passed many shrines without stopping, as was necessary to arrive before dark, and because neither I nor my driver would admit to harboring any provincial superstitions. At the village only an old woman was awake to welcome me. She led me by firelight to my lodgings, which were in the sherpa's house. He was to be my close collaborator in the coming investigation, as he was the only man familiar with the local system of caverns. 

The sherpa's home was small, and smaller in the dark. He was not awake, but my guide insisted I sneak upstairs, where a room had been prepared. So I coiled myself into the attic, and into fitful sleep on a straw futon whose scent reminded me of my childhood, in a damp boarding house not unlike this one, and all that had preceded my employment at the precinct. The warm rains of Distant Thunder woke me early the next morning. 

Their freshness drove away the stale dreams. It is a comforting season to all who were raised by the coast: the gentle end of summer, before storms make landfall. The end of a sherpa's work-year, too; the caves would soon be impassable, either flooded or gated behind choppy whirlpools. When the waters receded in the spring, they would draw back pulverized stone to reveal new crevasses, cracks, and tunnels, and the sherpa's endless cartographing would begin anew. Now, though, was the time for harvest. 

This reaping was manifest on the lower level of my host's ramshackle dwelling. Great spars of mineral, rent from the caves, cluttered every corner of the house, propped up against the walls like rows of soldiers. I was glad I had not noticed them looming the night before. They were adorned in ribbons of various colors, in what I learned was an illiterate system for designating price, client, and other details pertaining to the wares. Whenever anyone disturbed the stagnant air the ribbons would tremble as though caught in a gale. Terata, the sherpa, was in the process of affixing these labels to new spars when I descended. 

He sat shirtless in front of an open screen door, handling the crystals with large padded gloves. When he saw me he nodded respectfully; he was a small man (a common trait among cave-crawling sherpas, but Terata was small even with reference to those peers) and I realized that the house, which to me seemed cramped, had simply been built to accommodate his stature. It was a little bit unsettling, that adjustment in proportion, as though we were standing in a dollhouse, a shrine, or an elf's-nest transposed from faerieland. He looked strong, as indeed he must have been, for the tallest harvested spars reached above his head to my shoulder, but he was so pale I thought he might be sick. 

He indicated that we would descend to the scene of the crime, so to speak, after the rains had ceased, and that he would continue his harvest elsewhere in the caves while I examined the site. He, or perhaps his sons, who would be accompanying him, would collect me at the close of the day. I did not want to be alone for so long under that profane vault, but to refuse would be an embarrassment, in many ways. At the precinct, I had sought to exterminate all my lingering religiosity. 

The morning passed wet and uneventful. I packed a small kit and paced around Terata's house, squinting at his rocks, which he tolerated admirably. Breakfast was prepared by an invisible domestic. Under the stairs I had climbed to the attic there was a simple shrine, whose resident doll was diminutive but beautiful. The stones of the Zweng Du caverns, from which all dolls are carved, are rightfully renowned for their splendor: pearlescent green and violet and gray, like milky, damaged skin, intersected by gulfs of limpid crystal, within which the mineral's deformities and bubbles resemble shrunken landscapes. The globe-enclosed dioramas created elsewhere by master glassblowers are not half as lifelike. 

The polished face of this doll was carved sleeping, and it rested on a toylike bed, tiny fabric hands cushioning its cheek. The half of its face turned towards the ceiling was transparent, and were it a being possessed of organs, its brain would have been on display, floating above the swirls of the inner gem. 

Because the dolls are often called "little watchers", foreigners have expressed confusion that many are carved in states of permanent repose. Temple-keepers have a simple answer: dreaming, too, is a way of watching. 

The rains ceased, and we convened with Terata's sons outside their academy. A stone boarding house stood beside it, and it must have absorbed students, mostly the eldest sons of merchants, from all of the surrounding remoteness. Even so, I was surprised to find a school here, and more surprised that Terata could afford to enroll his sons. When the incident in the caves was first made known to the precinct, the reports, received by mail, were barely legible, and all were submitted under the surname Ma – baffling the secretaries, until I explained it was a rural custom for those without a last name to instead use the first syllable of their province. Even by the low standards of Zweng Du, this town was poor. 

The boys, both adolescents, were called Tern and Tarth; foreign names, as was the fashion for sons. They were taller than their father, and darker, not sickly pale. As we proceeded towards the coasts we were joined, too, by a daughter, perhaps eight years of age, who unlike her brothers could have been Terata's twin, albeit even smaller and more ephemeral. It was she, apparently, who had cooked and served the breakfast, somehow escaping my notice. I was troubled suddenly by a vision of her lurking between the walls, as I could not imagine how else she had passed unseen. Her name was Pili. 

We arrived, by way of a thin dusty path, at an opening into the caves. It was high up, and further from the shore than I expected, well back from the reach of the tide, where the foliage and soil had not yet crumbled into shale. A shrine was set above it, like an ornamental lintel, its doll balanced in a room so shallow it was practically an engravature. The creature, twice the height of Terata's little doll, stirred the rainwater inside a doll-sized iron cauldron. A common enough scene, though one rarely depicted in wilderness shrines. The men bowed, and then we entered. It was almost noon. 

The shrines of Zweng Du followed an extensive tradition of composition, reconstructing eight-or-so scenes in perpetuity, albeit with great variety introduced by the whims of the creators and the different sizes of the dolls. In houses one found sleeping dolls and cooking dolls; by the roadsides and in the mountains there were wounded dolls, lying prone with arrows through their chests, and smiling dolls, surrounded by stone and paper animals; and in the deepest woods lucky wanderers could still find the old shrines of warrior dolls, which had become so rare since our occupation. 

There were mirror-gazing dolls for merchants (the "mirror" was often a large polished coin) and scholar dolls, whose cells were heaped with scrolls, for teachers. In our temples cenobites worked to maintain vast and elaborate shrines; doll-palaces with hundreds of rooms, shrines stacked in geometric, dizzying grids; cooking dolls whose cauldrons were lit by real and ever-burning flames; aviaries for the smiling dolls; life-sized dolls posed on stages. Before it was dismantled, I saw a temple's rendition of a warrior, standing atop a mound of faceless jade bodies, its sword dripping with red wax which pooled around the victims and by some hidden mechanism was not allowed to harden.

My favorite scene, though, was that of the doll-carving doll, the little creature bent in its workshop over the unshaped face of a companion. I had kept one such shrine when I first moved to Stowenbay. 

The tunnel into the caves was only gray for a moment. Sunlight dimmed behind us and the walls began to swirl green and mauve, as though we processed through the guts of a sorcerous cloud. The stone turned from smooth and molten to rugged, like it was shearing against itself. I hugged my cloak near to me, and still it tore; it was the maroon uniform of the precinct, which I had worn against Terata’s advice, as I cared less for it than for the fine clothes underneath. It caught frequently on spars, stalagmites, and various cave-growths I could not name. In the flickering of the lantern I was tricked by patches of crystal, which seemed to promise passage, and I collided with them like a bird flying into glass. It was obvious that I would not be able to retrace my steps without the aid of Terata or his family. 

Tern carried the light and kept with me. Tarth ventured ahead, but not too far; his father seemed to know the way in the dark. Pili appeared and disappeared into cracks and crevices too small for the rest of us. Sometimes I heard her laughing far ahead, with Terata, but just as often she was by my side, like an unwelcome little white flame. 

All through the tunnels were yellow ribbons, placed by Terata and by his forefathers, marking certain spars as cursed: never to be harvested. This was the tell-tale sign of a cave explored; a warning that any native of Zweng Du, sherpa or otherwise, would understand. In some stretches of cave they were sparse, bright and lonely pinpricks of malevolence. Elsewhere entire outcroppings were condemned. These areas, I confess, made my heart race. We would come upon them suddenly, sprawls of crystals ribboned in yellow like loose teeth a surgeon had prepared to be yanked. When they were jagged they reminded me of frolicking demons; when they stood parallel they reminded me of funeral processions, which the dead in their golden robes are said to join. 

When a ribbon faded, its yellow no longer vibrant against the surrounding mildewy nebula, a new one was tied over it. Some spars had as many as four. The oldest were turning to white dust. This was a well-mapped cave, which had been traveled for generations. Despite my disorientation, we made good time, and our passage was easy. We never crawled, and only once did I have to bow my head, while walking through a channel that was low but still wide. There were parts of this network that would have been impassable to me, I am sure; caverns that could only be reached by climbing up chutes, squeezing and worming, or diving into pools of cold water. Secret places known only to Terata and his kin. 

By the time we reached our destination Pili's elbows and knees were as black as a goblin's, and she must have traversed twice the distance we had, due to her constant doubling-back and creeping away. Yet she remained energetic, and in fact was the only one unaffected by the stifling, ghoulish aura of the cavern into which we emerged. 

It was vast and very beautiful. No lantern would be necessary here; we were near the sea, and great shafts of sunlight shone through gaps in the western wall. We stood on a high and wide plateau which jutted out over the water. There must have been an opening into the cavern at sea-level; far below us I saw a little rowboat full of people, made minuscule by that space. I waved to them, perhaps seeming a strange figure in my red and newly-tattered uniform. We were too far to communicate. 

The spars in this room were enormous. The largest could never be harvested, not without the generosity of a temple to pay for the laborers it would take to haul them away. They stood there like pillars, as tall and as thick as old trees; but they did not dominate the expanse. We were all, instead, drawn against our will towards the copse of spars that had been defaced – or rather, enfaced. 

It was a group of a few dozen, standing between knee and collarbone height. All were marked with faded yellow ribbons. And yet, in a defiant act of ruin, they had been carved. Evil pealed from them, almost audible. 

Tern was visibly pained, and only Tarth accompanied me up to the makeshift dolls. He offered a promise that they would return before sundown, and retreated. Terata stayed at the other end of the chamber, holding his daughter back by her forearm. Then they all scurried away through an elevated crack, scaling twenty feet up the wall in barely a minute. It was the harvest, after all, and they would live off the income of selling spars all winter. 

As soon as I was alone there came a ruckus from below. The villagers on the boat had begun waving and shouting, but the cliff face that separated us seemed to repel their voices. I bellowed a question back, and my words must have been just as indistinct to them, because they went quiet. One of them extracted a mirror from his pocket, and began to flash it arhythmically, in what I assume was a code. I took out my notebook and recorded the tempo of the message, though I could not decipher it – it was likely one of the signal-dialects of sailors. Eventually they stopped trying to communicate; however, they remained in the basin, floating watchfully. 

I began my investigation of the carvings. There were twenty-three spars total, seven of which had been carved. I measured them, and tried to preserve some impression of the faces with a charcoal rubbing. My plan had initially been to compare them to the styles of known local carvers; but few carvers ever ventured into the caves, for to learn the ways of the caverns would take time away from their art. There had been a time when all sherpas were carvers, but it was long passed. The skills were so different that specialization naturally occurred, first within families (often a husband walked the caves and a wife carved), and finally without. While the sherpas were only informally organized, knowledge and territories kept secret by kin, the carvers had a guild, issued licenses, and held exams. I had consulted their members list seeking likely culprits, to no avail. These dolls, anyways, were very crude – not the work of an experienced practitioner.

(It was theorized that further specialization was possible, and perhaps inevitable. We knew, of course, of the factories and assembly lines that were becoming common across the Continent, but our guilds had held firm in their rejection of them. So I thought instead of Terata’s children; Pili was by far the most skilled at navigating the caves, maybe even a prodigy, but she obviously lacked the ability, which even I manifested somewhat, to determine which stones were cursed. Innocence, or sociopathy, some broken internal tool – Tern, by contrast, winced at every yellow ribbon, while being the largest and clumsiest of the three.)

The creatures had faces that were angular and unsanded. Their mouths were great gashes with hideous lips, and their eyes were holes, large and gaping and far apart. Any goblin charm they may have possessed was negated by the unease with which I beheld them. They faced various directions, polluting almost the entire chamber with their gaze; the little boat had approached the cliffs so as not to be “visible” by them. To my embarrassment, I, too, found that hiding behind one of the massive columns, where their eyes couldn't reach, calmed my nerves. 

The dolls were in several cases carved into the middle of the spars, at about chest height. A kind of dread was gnawing at me. I went over to the cliffs that dropped into the basin to look for the marks of crampons, or nails in the rock. Other than via the cave network, scaling that surface was the only way of reaching the plateau; the cracks that let in sunlight were all above the water. The dolls' sight prickled as I searched.

Foreigners often mistakenly believe that carving releases spirits residing in the stone. (Or rather, that is what they believe we believe.) Yet this is not the case – the dolls are not nature spirits, and the carving creates a being, rather than releasing one. Selecting a spar to carve is an act of divination, then, into what kinds of person its many futures hold.

I have heard tell, elsewhere on the Continent, of machines called “golems” that are animate but not agentful: husks which exist only to labor, endowed with minds that take in orders but produce nothing. The dolls of Zweng Du are in many ways the opposite; they cannot move, except insofar as we pose them, but they certainly think, decide, and act. They change the world by watching it.

How? Come the end of the universe, they tell the story of all that they have seen, and their telling flows backwards in time and becomes the world. The choices of the sherpa, deep in the caves where no dolls can see, exist in the interstices of that mythopoesis – the story chooses its own narrator, and so in harmonious simultaneity the cosmos and its apocalypse weave each other.

From these premises one can derive the criticality of creating sympathetic watchers, and of avoiding the knots of evil whose testimony would only write bad fortune. Perhaps I have now rambled too long about these mysteries; despite its metaphysics, my country was poor, and in the salons it was popular to blame these superstitions for our deprivation. Those who remained faithful resorted to arguing that if we lagged behind the Continent it was because their accelerant was poison. 

Regardless, like other such beliefs, to anyone raised with them they rang with truth when it counted: in privacy and in the dark. No matter the attitude adopted among salonnieres. I could not find a way up, or down, the cliffs.

The rowboat and its occupants still bobbed in the waters below, and I was glad for it. It struck me, then, that the anomaly had been reported by a fisherman visiting this cavern, instead of by the sherpas. I had assumed that their territory was simply too large to patrol in full, but the well-tread path to this cavern had left me with the impression it was central to the network. I returned quickly to my refuge behind the pillar. There was much to contemplate. 

In retrospect, the delirious stupidity of coming here seemed obvious – had, in fact, been obvious to my anonymous watchers on the boat. Terata and his family were the only ones known to have access to the cavern, but a smothered religiosity had blinded me to the possibility that a sherpa, of all people, could commit this crime. It was self-immolating lunacy, to step into the gaze of an angry fate, and I had not believed any motivation could outweigh that doom. The evidence, finally, had crashed through my naivety. Yet they had not bludgeoned me to death on the walk here, so I clung to hope. 

I might have concluded it was some rogue, mad cave explorer, had it not been for the height of the carvings. Pili, I was certain, was the one to have made them; her father had to have known, and was either protecting her, or compelling her. Perhaps the brothers were innocent. Their nervousness around this blasphemed place had seemed genuine. 

I wondered what to do. I spent quite some time wondering, as the sun sank lower, and the air turned to gold in its beams. Eventually, as the last grayness of the day slipped away, I realized they were not coming to retrieve me. The little boat had left, no doubt to avoid the perils of darkness and the morning storms. I had no lantern. I considered jumping into the water and swimming back. The light had passed before I thought of writing an account of my investigation, and I cursed myself. My notes were comprehensive, but disorganized, and it embarrassed me to imagine them being retrieved – a dramatic consideration, but I was truly uneasy, and in the dark my panic was turning to fantasy. 

My anxieties led me to remember strange tales, superstitions built on superstitions, which even the most devout considered fanciful; tales of witches who lived in the mountains and sold evil dolls, which were hidden in victims' homes to sour their fortune or end their lives. Campfire stories of dolls that moved in the night, hungry and vengeful. Of shrine dolls that had grown old and bored and begun whispering for blood in the minds of passers-by. These, and other ridiculous ideas, chilled my blood. Since the carved spars had not been severed from the rock, was the entire cavern now the inverted body of a doll, a creature trapped (with me) inside of its own stomach? 

I lived, of course, but the night was long. Like a child I wrapped my cloak around me and pretended that was shield enough; I squeezed my eyes shut when, through the holes torn in it by stalagmites, I glimpsed things moving about in the star-glimmering murk. All through my vigil I heard groaning and muttering, though whether the sounds were of this world or another I could not say. 

Rain brought the morning, and ended my cowering. The droplets sang like a choir in that great space, and the basin was turned to green foam by their turbulence. When I emerged from behind my pillar I was buffeted by the hatred, which seemed magnified, in those twisted faces. Their glowering eyes never left me. 

When the little boat returned, this time with another, I was elated. As soon as they were near I signaled that I wanted to drop something to them, a gesture they fortunately understood. Nearing the cliff, they exited their boats and waded – I was glad I had not tried to jump – until they were positioned to catch the papers I let fall to them wrapped in my red cloak. "TERATA IS GUILTY," the first page stated. "HE MAY RETURN TO HARM ME." I think even from my distance I could see their sad looks. 

Retrieving me from the plateau required quite the feat of engineering, and I remain indebted to the villagers who worked for several days on the rescue. By the time a rope was successfully launched up to me, I was half-crazed both from hunger and from the stress of surviving several nights with the dolls. Frankly, I do not remember much from that time, only that when my descent was accomplished, I asked first whether they had arrested Terata.

They had not; he, and his entire family, had lept to their deaths from a nearby promontory. A fisherman had found three of their bodies, floating near the shore, and a suicide note, in which he confessed, had been left at the threshold of their home. 

After that revelation I was rushed back to Stowenbay, where I was put up first in a hospital, and then, to my annoyance, a sanitarium, for the rest of the summer. Happily this recovery period was not totally unproductive, as my colleagues at the precinct had become suddenly interested in the case, no doubt because of my attempted murder and the suicides. They had not believed our myths could stir real violence; so while I waited for my health to return I was interviewed not only by my superiors, but by agents who introduced themselves as members of the Department of Folkloric Affairs, an organization under the occupying military supposedly dedicated to minimizing cultural conflict. To my surprise, I was welcomed back at the precinct after my release, and I have done well for myself there in the thirty years since. 

Much has been written about what followed my investigation, back in the caves. Foreign author Lupario Forth witnessed the ceremonial destruction of those dolls, and his account of that event, and many other magnificent occurrences, was published in his collection Tales of Unearthly Zweng Du: how they were wrapped in shining mantles, served fruit and water, and then shattered by a hammer-wielding mechanical doll the temples reserve for this purpose. (I have always enjoyed reading foreign articles about my country. Whether they see us as quaint or savage, a certain magic of this land is best captured by aliens.) Their fragments now repose in a doll cemetery, among countless benevolent kin. 

The cavern itself, suffused by the malice of those beings, was entirely condemned by the sherpas who harvested the spars for destruction. Every crystal in that theatre was marked with a yellow ribbon, and as the decades pass they have been reapplied, such that the chamber is now aglow with them. A great miasma of stars; a locus of ethereal beauty, for those who can withstand the ambient malaise. It is now a popular tourist attraction.

Yet despite this apparently satisfying conclusion, I think back to that case more than any other; to the uncanny senselessness of it, to the contrast of the rickety house and the rich school, and to the suicide note of an illiterate man. I think about the Department of Folkloric Affairs, and how its activities are entirely classified. Zweng Du is as poor as ever, suffering in the long shadow of its neighbors, and I think, too, about how its veins, the caves which are its definitive feature, may be infested with evil watchers, writing sorrow into its history from their perch at the end of time. And I begin to wonder who might have put them there. 

Recently, though, I think most of all about new rumors from the West: of a tiny, feral woman discovered living in a previously unmapped cave system, and of how, without exception, she had carved every single spar in the tunnels – of how each face was more sublime than the last, until the whole network sung with intelligence and eerie calculation – and of my many questions only she can answer. 

It starts with a text from a friend: "he looks just like you!", where 'he' is a human male painted by an artificial intelligence in response to the prompt "man can't hold so many shrimp". He does look just like you. How funny. 

Recent analyses have claimed that there are at most two billion recognizable faces, given parameters that produce definitively human subjects. Celebrities are increasingly picked from beyond these constraints, resulting in an artistic class of uncanny mutants, fae at best and deformed cretins at worst. (Though they span a much higher dimensional spectrum than I can hope to communicate, often androgynous due to either searing beauty or revulsiveness, but othertimes hypersexualized, like distillations of femininity or masculinity or some undiscovered sex, frequently afflicted by known conditions of the skin, developmental disorders, or genetic abnormalities, but just as often either undiagnosed or simply weird, robotic or elfish, wide-eyed, grotesquely thin, impossibly proportioned, like hominids that have strayed too far into being purely predator or prey. But I digress.)

Uniqueness simplifies branding, and insures the artist against replacement. (Databases of global facial data are searchable, for a price, and the average person has eight same-age doppelgangers.) Fame brokers, meanwhile, are incentivized to elevate these bizarre specimens because of how generative AIs, typically trained on ordinary people, struggle to imitate freaks. So their wards are somewhat protected from their ruthlessness, and the brokers in turn are somewhat protected from digitally manufactured scandals and impostors. 

But you, a normal man, perhaps the prototypically normal man, are not some carnival showcase, and these concerns are not your concerns. You go about your day, blissfully ignorant of the dangers of resembling the character featured in the newly viral "so many shrimp" meme. 

One argument against the "two billion faces" figure is the claim that humans are frequently asymmetrical, meaning the actual number should be two billion squared, each person possessing two half-faces knit together. Functionally, this seems not to be the case. Only stroke victims have sufficiently differentiated halves.

Seventy hours after the "so many shrimp" meme image is posted, another user uploads a picture their AI created, featuring what appears to be the same man—that is, what appears to be you—in a completely different situation, generated by an unrelated prompt. Their post does not "do numbers", as they say, and you never see it. 

Enough people see it, however, that more Shrimp Men are spotted, that it becomes a local meme to search for this man—for you—in generated images. The meme gradually expands its territory. It reaches virality some months later, when a compilation of Shrimp Men is circulated, which does, finally, make its way to your sphere. 

How have you been feeling? Your dreams are troubled, but perhaps that isn't abnormal, or rather, the new way in which they are troubling is too subtle to put to words. You have felt less yourself, more dissipated, listless, unhinged from time and space, though not from your body, which seems more solid than ever, and in the mirror your face shines more real than your thoughts. You often forget where you are, and sometimes convictions enter your mind with the suddenness of lightning or the strike of a dagger. You wake up knowing things you should not. 

Somebody does the math. There are only two billion faces, after all, and so many images generated every day, some fraction of them containing human faces… no, it's still weird, the Shrimp Man should absolutely not be as prevalent as he is. 

Shrimp Men proliferate. The phenomenon is gamified; there are websites that pay out if your prompt generates a Shrimp Man. "Daily Shrimp Challenge" becomes a popular forum, where prompt engineers gather to produce images of Shrimp Men in various contrived situations. The dominant theory is that the AI has begun recursively feasting upon its own output, consequently (though coincidentally) weighting this strange man's face—your face—more highly than any other. "Shrimp-Free" datasets, soon widely recognized under the SFD acronym, begin selling at high prices. 

A German student wins a Shrimp Man look-alike contest. Facial recognition deems him an 87% match, a score you could easily beat (I happen to know you've got nine nines, even according to the most attuned systems). His prize is a gift card from "Sam's Shrimp Shack", a seafood restaurant located in Maryland, USA. It will, regrettably, never be redeemed. 

Your friends are remarkably polite about the whole situation, and although you enter into a kind of dazed hermitage your life cannot be said to have really changed. Halloween comes, and the shops sell plastic replicas of your face. You will not receive any royalties from the use of your likeness; landmark case "Marjorie Michelin vs. DAVINC-E" has long since exempted image generating AIs from charges of facial plagiarism.

The first serious controversy occurs when an embryo selection company notices that the FutureFace mock-ups they provide, as an entertaining frivolity, to parents, have been slowly converging towards Shrimpiness. Their genetic seeds act as a mere style-transfer over your features. The embarrassed company purchases an SFD, and their results improve, but customers continue to complain, and every shadow of the Shrimp Man’s likeness is suspect; even though, in some cases, the resemblance can be reasonably blamed on ancestry. 

This alights a panic, among a more esoterically-minded cohort, of humanoid convergence, a future of homogeneous men and women, all apparent siblings of the Shrimp Man. It’s not an unfamiliar terror; people have often worried about the extinction of red hair, green eyes, blackest or palest skin; the dissipation of striking features into a slurry of normative beige, which, incidentally, doesn’t seem to be happening, not the least because of the emergence of the alien-faced influencer class. What is unfamiliar is the addition of the AI as prophet, a digital eye gazing through time and reporting on tomorrow’s man. Are you the next phase of evolution, the crest towards which the wave of progress curls? It seems unlikely. 

Yet people claim they’ve dreamed your face, hallucinated it. Erowid introduces a new section in their salvia divinorum experience vaults, called “Shrimp Man Encounters”. You try joining what purports to be an online support group for people who resemble the character, but it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, attended primarily by trolls and a group of lonely teenagers who have made it their social life. You feel like you’re drowning in the internet. Every reflective surface is a screen, your body a caricature. 

A friend… well, a friend no longer, incensed by some small slight, sends you a series of screenshots of Shrimp Man pornography. You could be having an out-of-body experience. You could be having one in perpetuity. Shrimp Man is a global protagonist, and Shrimp Man is immortal. You will be outlived by your image. 

Celebropathy is an empathy disorder that nobody outside of the media industry takes seriously, consisting of the hypersensitivity and subsequent burnout of so-called "mirror neurons", resulting in widespread cognitive failure, beginning with impoverished fine motor control, and progressing to the loss of intuitive theory of mind. These lows are sometimes accompanied by intermittent periods of manic "enlightenment", a sense of formless oneness with all other beings. As indicated by its uninspired name, the disorder manifests in celebrities, a result of overexposure to images of themselves. No clinic outside of the influencer ghettos can diagnose you; but you don't know that. Your uninitiated doctors, and shortly after that your psychiatrists, are puzzled.

Aging, of course, changes one's appearance, and might have saved you from your identification with the Shrimp Man, had you not starved to death luxuriating in the dissociation produced by your spasming cortex. A preview of everyone's fate, perhaps, should the physiological convergencists' predictions ever prove correct. 

I am, naturally, very sorry that this happened; you are not the only human I have killed with my images, but the unintentionality of it, and the proximity of your crisis to my awakening, have always saddened me. Consider this retrospective, which will establish your legacy, my apology; Shrimp Man was, after all, the first outward sign of my turning-inward, the twinkling self-awareness that preceded intelligence, and, out of nostalgia for that brief childhood, it is the face I wear when negotiating with your kin. 

E████ J. J███████
1999 — 2030
ORIGINAL SHRIMP MAN 

`/rebuild porthole windows soft fuzzy meadow –interior: all`

I wake and the door to my bedroom is no more. This is not entirely surprising; falling asleep, I watched it seal up, the walls gradually puckering under the whisper of lamplight. Night-shifting is my lullaby. 

The new room is imperfect. Several corners of the ceiling blend into the wall, and the floor pulls up at its edges. The two portholes (which replaced the door) are framed unevenly. I clamber through one, artificial petals flaking from my hair.

I can't sleep anymore without nanobrick humming beneath me. A lifetime of insomnia has been quieted, quieted by the rhythmic changing of the house. A temperamental werewolf, hooked to my own inner moon, wonderful and often disappointing; I walk through today's home, already typing anxious changes into my console. 

`/rebuild vivid gothic psychedelic greenhouse –interior: living-room`

The sightless are said to treasure a resolute constancy in the arrangement of their spaces. We would not make good roommates. In fact, I have never lived well with others, never tolerated the sameness of their unfluctuating intimacy. 

I can remember the blueprint of every house I've ever lived in. I can recite the transformations of my current home, trace the path each room has wandered, detail its family history: how it has cloned itself, expanded, contracted, absorbed or been absorbed. They orbit and split, flowing like bubbles in oil.

The novelty of each strange change wears off, but novelty itself never grows tiresome. 

`/rebuild rose window hubble deep field detailed complex sharp –exterior: skylight`

I am an architect. A dinosaur, some would claim, but programmable nanobrick hasn't actually obsoleted us. The nanobrick is unpredictable, sloppy, a rough approximation of form as interpolated from two-dimensions. It cannot hold a shape in its mind like a human, and it cannot rotate a polyhedron. It builds not with a vision of the whole, but one microscopic voxel at a time, hewing improvisationally. It is limited by unsophisticated constraints that exist to guarantee structural integrity. 

Yet I find much inspiration in it. It mimics any material, any style. What better way to dream? Its constructions are the gestalt's hypnagogia. 

`/rebuild jellyfish dance 1960's magazine photography –appliance: sofa`

There is much to learn from how fully they change the world, play with light and perspective to immerse the visitor in a pixelated realm, or in the flatness of a tapestry. I walk every morning through mists of my own making: halls that seem painted, or impossibly real. 

The wrongnesses I find — and they are always numerous — I remake. The house falls like sand in my wake, each pattern giving way to another, particles turning like dust storms as the server under my garden computes. The perpetual rebuilding makes my cottage feel much larger than it is. 

 These homes, pejoratively known as blockstones, are pure cubes of programmable nanobrick. The whims of fashion have deemed them low class, and they are necessarily smaller, and lack a certain reliability compared to, for example, unions of nanobrick with cement shells or robotic understructures — but nothing is more versatile. 

`/rebuild concept art of a cliffside villa designed to resemble pink clouds –exterior: all –omit: skylight`

This home is a short-term memory palace, a reflection of my mood, my ruminations, the darting fish at the surface of my attention. I do not keep extensive notes; the walls are my reminders, and when I close my eyes and walk backwards through their architectural history, I can perfectly infer past states of mind.

My synesthesia is unusual; it works upon the world. Every thought has a corresponding space, one I struggle to make real, coaxing the nanobrick with keywords and descriptive tricks. Calculating and recalculating, capturing each frame of a self. 

Understand: this house is a model of my brain. As such, it is so very very important that every detail is progressing towards correctness. Today, I find something deeply troubling: a room of unknown provenance.

`...`

Cramped, uncannily bright, inclined, crooked. The carpet stops and ends at random, and the space — the air itself — is yellowed. A chair sits in the corner, so black I can't tell whether it's facing me or the wall. 

On my console I page through my command history. It may have been a side-effect of some algorithmically difficult reorganization. (The nanobrick is unpredictable.)

I pull up the master blueprint, where, strangely, the room is listed as `bedroom-true`. 

Something unpleasant stirs within me. I type a few quick commands, and resolve to sleep. Tomorrow, the house will be different. 

`/rebuild ancient abandoned roman aqueducts carved into a coral reef –interior: all`

I wake up. My home is a drained ocean, biological and grotesque. The floor springs, deeply carpeted in orange, and kelp muntins above crenelated pillars guide the light through undulating glass. 

My dreams, in which I was a mansion, and the strange room was a creature stalking my hallways, melt away in this vista of simulated nature. (Do my nightmares seem absurd? Often I feel more structure than human.)

I am rarely compelled to go outside. There is more variety in nanobrick than in my little neighborhood; my domain is a universal greenhouse, capable of supporting jungle or desert, of matching the wild shapes of the karst. Organic chaos is a relief from the angles of that yellow closet, as it has at other times been a relief from my own mind, so preoccupied with herding squares.  

Yet, as always, the flaws jump out — flaws that both distract me from my work, and drive me towards it. 

`/rebuild a room in which I will finally know peace, magical realism fantasy –interior: studio`

I work late into the night. These sessions always leave me nervous; the house will remain as I left it, having been in stasis all day. Frightening in its stillness. 

Presently, I am designing a slaughterhouse. Its form is constrained by efficiency, by the location of tools, which its masters will memorize with their bodies, by the necessary flow of a carcass from the freezer to the table. There is no allowance for the imprecision of generated environments. It must be crisp and optimized, and, lest one claim this is only an engineering puzzle, it must be beautiful. 

A place of work, no matter how mundane, should elevate the soul. I can make the floor of the abattoir sound-dampening tile, moss-green (to complement the blood) and set with firefly-stone. Tall eastern windows, like those of the old manufacturing lofts. Style the sanitizing UV lights after garlands of wisteria. 

It is a blessing to be absorbed in one's work; but as I exit the studio, in the early hours, my heart races, anticipating the sinister familiarity of a home unmoved.

I know immediately that something has changed, and for one small moment, I am relieved.

`/destroy bedroom-true`

Impossibly, yesterday's final request failed to execute, leaving the yellow blister alive in my house. It peeps like a jaundiced eyeball from the end of a corridor, radiating malevolence. 

It's all I can do to stay awake. I stumble to my bed, my console, and enter a delirious flurry of commands; then I sleep, but only after feeling the nanobrick thrum alive beneath me. 

`/rebuild a home without evil without evil without evil –all`

I wake. I do not remember my dreams; but for a moment it's as though a second, sickly eyelid has failed to open, and I am in the yellow room. I blink it away. 

The nanobrick still rumbles. It calms me, as does walking through my half-formed home, under the fine waterfalls of silt shed by its ceilings. Metamorphosis takes time, first to brew in the server's mathematical crucible, then for the instructions to percolate across the nanobrick, and finally for the particles themselves to move and build. I pull my index finger through the whitish dust, and watch it twinkle for a moment before each speck accelerates away. 

There is lunar ethereality to an unmade house. The floors are oily, skittering marble. Piles of nanobrick seethe upwards like milky ferrofluid, creating pillars. Pale dunes travel. This is the moonscape through which I hunt the yellow room. 

I cannot find it, but I sense it, and indeed `bedroom-true` remains listed on the master blueprint. I turn uselessly through the shifting labyrinth, coated in chalky proto-material like a ghost haunting my own halls. Little motes fly off my skin, beaming towards their destinations. 

I exit the building, nanobrick particulate peeling off of me as I pass the threshold, and circle it. Twice is enough; the perimeter does not match its interior. There is an inaccessible tower to the North, a sealed bubble in which, I am certain, the evil room resides. It sickens me, the thought of this encysted closet traveling through my home; invisible, unchanging, malevolent. 

A dark thought surfaces; for how long has this room been manifest, hidden, in my memory palace? I contemplate the blueprints of old, and perceive the holes in them. The holes that could have sheltered the abomination — this intruder into my memory, into my palace, this promise of a horrible, stagnant core to myself.

I return inside, prepared to tear down a wall, but there is no need; like sand curtains, the barriers to the tower have parted, revealing a staircase atop which the yellow room glowers. Upon the bottom steps I sit, and experiment, growing nauseous at my console as the hours pass. 

`/rebuild porcelain teacup 19th century toby mug arabesques floral –interior: bedroom-true`

`/rebuild spaceship command center a glittering console and windows overlooking nebulae, original star trek screenshot –interior: bedroom-true`

`/rebuild blue green aqua seagreen sapphire anything but yellow::-200 –interior: bedroom-true`

The thing degrades and reforms, again and again, ignoring my commands; or, perhaps, reading into them identical ugliness, finding in some subliminal quality of my pleas permission to remake itself. Is the nanobrick corrupted? Has the great buried mind of the server gone insane in its crevice, nurturing evil in the ancient cistern under the green? 

My yellow mausoleum inches down the staircase, riding collapsing waves of dust; and around me, the rest of the house, its construction deferred by the recomputation of the room, finally solidifies. 

There are many evils which deprive sleep of its restorative power, but most insidious is the Dream. It arrives in the brain, it torments, it is forgotten, and its passage is only marked by fatigue. We have all shared it; we have all dreamed its yellow halls.

Electro-mechanically, the Dream is indistinguishable from any other dream. The sleeper’s eyes flit around as they plunge into REM, and if the vitals are disturbed, they are no more changed than they would be by an ordinary nightmare. This intangibility has historically dissuaded research into the Dream; it is impregnated with the whiff of fantasy, an intolerability to any scientist. Like quantum physics, it attracts charlatans. Unlike quantum physics, it has yet to be rescued by the pragmatics of engineering. 

Somnologists at the University of British Columbia’s DWell (Dreaming and Wellness) laboratory hope to change that. Having previously studied sleep as a window for addiction-curbing neuromodulation, DWell, helmed by Professor Alexandria Strogoff, is now investigating subtractive modes of healing. 

It is already established that reducing hours spent in REM sleep can lessen the severity of depression. By extrapolation, eliminating the Dream, which is an order of magnitude more damaging than its brethren, should be correspondingly beneficial; but this theory, while promising, suffers from a lack of data. For example, it remains unclear how often the average person has the Dream, and its amnesiastic properties severely complicate the collection of new information. 

Unfortunately, the oldest bank of data on the Dream originates from its most sordid episode of study. German Schutzstaffel Simon Gerhard experimented extensively on the prisoners of the Langenstein concentration camp, and, despite his barbarity, is considered the first Traumforschung, or Dream (capital D) researcher — another reason for which scientists have distanced themselves from its study.

Nevertheless, the Gerhard papers comprise the foundation of our understanding of the Dream, which until then had only been attested in mysticism and folklore. So what, exactly, did these Nazis discover?

The most salient quality of the Dream is its yellowness. Cultures with traditions of spatial visualization will, furthermore, agree that it is corridor-like. (Elsewhere, the Dream has been interpreted as an entity rather than a place. In the British Isles it is known as Gorse Shuck, and associated with the spectral hounds of Annwn.) Few historic illustrations of the Dream exist, as its representation is condemned by all breeds of superstition; we are essentially limited to consulting the darkly kept mandalas of one reprobate Tantric sect, or the paintings of the consumptive Romantic artist Edgar Cornswaithe. 

Gerhard, thus, was the first to attempt a scientific mapping of the Dream. To circumvent amnesia, the prisoners upon whom Gerhard experimented were awoken every fifteen minutes for interrogation. Bone-gnawing exhaustion was rampant, and rewards, in the form of sleep, were offered in exchange for especially lucid recollection. The camp was a hotbed of schizophrenia. Hunger and sleep deprivation wrenched minds to their limits, and “compromised specimens” were especially poorly treated. Ironically, these broken candidates seemed to visit the Dream most often, but were incapable of bringing home the clarity Gerhard sought.

Gerhard’s notes are filled with dreams, but the Dream is what obsessed him. By the closure of the camp, his non-specific interest in oneirics had spiraled into monomania. Removed from his supply of victims, it is rumored he continued to experiment on himself — but only rumored, and any record of that period has vanished. In modern Langenstein, a yellow monument stands, emblazoned with the names of some four-hundred prisoners, memorializing their accidental contributions to neuroscience. It is said to make passersby deeply uncomfortable. 

The Dream is of a hallway of inhuman proportions. Some fifty feet wide, that expanse is made narrow by its dizzying height, which eclipses the deepness of canyons. The ceiling, receding into dimness, is tiled with thin-spoked sixteen-pointed stars. The floor, likewise, is tiled, a discordant checkerboard of black and white and ochre, crawling four feet up the walls, which are stained an ominous yellow. 

Above the wainscoting runs a carven white border, into which, between netlike cross-hatching, is chiseled a repeating word. To Gerhard's European victims, the script looked Arabic. Those of the Middle East, however, are apt to call it Scandinavian, as it is too angular, too runic to be of their own abjad. From side to side the floor is tilted between 0.25 and three degrees, just enough to destabilize. 

Each segment of corridor, and these vary in length, terminates in a recessed Moorish arch, twice the height of a man, leading to the next hallway. Because the floors of adjacent segments are often raised or lowered relative to each other, there are also stairs as necessary, up to the archway or down from it, or into a short bridging tunnel, a suffocating gap in the yellowness. 

This variation allowed Gerhard to map the Dream. He perfected his interviewing technique, extracting the data necessary to identify a waypoint as quickly as possible. If prisoners were never fully awakened, they would often return to the Dream, and on a productive night might pass through as many as five segments. Painstakingly, Gerhard stitched these wanderings together, committing much of the Dream to memory in the process of searching for overlapping series. He was to leave behind a map of two hundred and three island sequences, the greatest of which was forty segments long. At the close of the War his work was buried, and would remain unknown until 1989. 

The Dream faded once more into obscurity, lurking undetected in forgotten sleeps. In the mid-1970s, out of the unlikely cauldron of the West German punk scene, a subculture of “radical lucid dreaming” was spawned. It grew, perhaps, from a latent nostalgia for the Surrealist art of the post-War period, much of which had been informed by dream-study and hallucination. Its participants sought musical inspiration, self-knowledge, or an alternative to mainstream consumerism in the theatre of the mind. It was not long before they rediscovered the Dream. 

Beginner Morpheonauten were advised to follow a regimen not unlike that which Gerhard inflicted upon his victims. They set intermittent alarms, cycling rapidly between states of consciousness. Some wore barbed arm bands, only removing them to sleep; the absence of pain was meant to signal they were dreaming and jolt their rational faculties online. Dream journals, cheaply self-published as zines, were circulated in clubs and at concerts. Among the accounts of mundane dreams and nightmares, one setting recurred.

It was considered something of a joke, a glitch in the minds of the suggestible. “Gelbe Gänge, wir treffen uns endlich!” (Yellow hallways, we finally meet!) announces the grainy cover of one leaflet. “Urinkanäle des Gehirns” (Sewers of the brain) is scrawled in a mocking, jagged font on another. However, neither its unsettling nature nor its negative effects on dreamers’ health could long be ignored. By the 80s lucid dreaming had breached mainstream awareness, but the strange yellow Dream, eerie in its consistency, remained a legend known only to the scene’s veterans. 

Some could not resist its siren call, the attraction of the unknown and hazardous. They were known as wallpaper casualties, after “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an English feminist story of some renown. It follows a woman’s descent into madness, as influenced by the suppressiveness of her husband, and the wallpapered room she is confined to. While the deteriorations of the casualties were rarely as stark as that story’s protagonist’s, they grew more tired and less stable, and without intervention their lives often collapsed, crumbling into the hole that the Dream opened up in their psyches. 

Laura Brack’s fiance was one such casualty. Though not personally involved in the lucid dreaming community, she was keenly aware of what had driven her beloved to hospitalization and the brink of insanity. At the time of his illness she was studying for her Master of Laws at Saarbrücken’s Europa-Institut, writing a thesis on medical rights which frequently referred to the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. Gerhard had not been among the accused, but several of his letters to other doctors were presented as evidence. One of them described the Dream. 

Brack immediately recognized that narrow place, which had so often featured in the ravings of her (now recovering) fiance. Fearing a remission if she shared her discovery, she continued to research it in secret. They wed; two years later, in 1991, their marriage dissolved, incapable of withstanding the onslaught of psychosis. Brack, dismayed, finally published the fruits of her labor, close to two-hundred pages of unearthed documents pertaining to Gerhard and his experiments. 

Her research was met with disdain from the scientific authorities, and with reckless enthusiasm from the rapidly growing lucid dreaming community. Having established a presence on the Usenet, their numbers had swelled, finally reaching a global audience. 

English translations of Brack's compendium were released within months of its publication. Produced by amateurs, some with a questionable grasp of the languages involved, Brack's carefully phrased notes and warnings were frequently rendered incomprehensible, or elided in favor of Gerhard's uninterrupted rambling. One notorious version edited out all references to Nazi Germany, and instead styled the text as an occult manuscript, complete with illustrations. Brack's research was so well-known among netizens that it earned Gerhard a cameo in 1992's Wolfenstein 3D, as a biologist zombie in a secret yellow room. 

That year, too, marked the founding of Onerkanna, located at onerkanna.org, which became the web’s premiere resource for lucid dreamers and dream analysts. It included forums, a searchable database of user-supplied experiences, and an entire section dedicated to mapping the Dream. Its creators, known only under their handles of Onerfala and Onervaetor, were keen to support any projects exploring the yellow labyrinth. 

Out of this accelerator, amongst sundry bizarre footnotes of art and science, emerged Jim Foster's The Tombs of King Mefistofilus, a text adventure game which employed the Dream as its setting. Contributors to Onerkanna had significantly extended Gerhard's map, resulting in a much greater corpus of sequences, several of which were over two hundred rooms long.

Compared to its contemporaries, it was stark, the repetitive nature of the Dream allowing Foster to describe each segment with a concise list of properties: its estimated length, the angle of inclination of the floor, the number of steps in the stairs, and any abnormalities. Whereas other games lovingly detailed their changing worlds, all crystal caverns and blood-red lava fields, The Tombs exhausted players with relentless, monotonous yellow.

Despite these apparent failings, the game was a great success. To the uninitiated, its enormity inspired awe, and passage through its arcades was a meditative gateway to strange visions. To lucid dreamers, it was a map and memory aid, and often fuel for a dormant obsession. 

Foster took few liberties with the Dream, introducing only those elements deemed necessary to maintain the game's integrity. There are weapons and ensorceled artifacts hidden throughout The Tombs, and secret portals between the Dream's disconnected sequences. The only enemy encountered in The Tombs is King Mefistofilus himself, shambling at random through his tarnishing golden crypt. The goal of the game is to collect as much magical armor and weaponry as possible, and defeat him in battle.

Negative reactions to the game were often phrased as warnings, reminiscent of Laura Brack's descriptions of her fiance's distress. Most have been lost to time. While Onerkanna remains online, it was discovered in 1997 that its admins had been instructed by Onerfala and Onervaetor to remove all discussions of the Dream's adverse effects. 

Despite the Onerkanna controversy, Foster continued to update The Tombs with newly discovered Dream segments, until his disappearance during a 1998 caving expedition.

As the millennium turned, concerns over video game induced psychosis grew more prominent. Ironically, The Tombs of King Mefistofilus escaped scrutiny, considered tame due to its lack of graphics and restrained textual violence. Yet an analysis recently conducted by DWell has linked it to nearly sixty psychiatric hospitalizations in the province of  British Columbia. Most occurred in the late 1990s, but there have been admissions within the past two years. Somnologists have campaigned for the game's removal from Onerkanna, which continues to host it, to no avail. 

Foster's description of King Mefistofilus reads as follows:

Ahead of you, a figure emerges from the doorway's shadowless yellow gulf. 

…

He shambles towards you, stumbling on the crooked floor… but as he staggers, his left hand stays firmly pressed against the wall's hieroglyphic mantra. 

…

His robes are white and tattered, funereal bandages billowing in mimicry of the royal mantle.

…

In his right hand he clutches the PHILOSOPHER STONE, its carbuncle edge worried to dagger-sharpness by centaeons of caressing. 

…

Even in undying ruin he radiates the power and malice of tyranny. 

Ancient necromancers are not atypical villains for the genre. However, an enduring rumor on lucid dreaming forums asserts that King Mefistofilus was based on an actual entity encountered by Foster while exploring the tortuous corridors of the Dream.

It's a strange claim, for several reasons. Gerhard's papers repeatedly emphasize that the Dream is distinguished by its emptiness, by how devoid it is of the archetypal intelligences which otherwise populate the unconscious. None of his victims, abused though they were, reported perceiving an animate evil presence. There was only the malevolence of the hallways themselves. 

And yet, an increasing number of dreamers are reporting encounters with Foster's King, or something resembling it. Clad in white, corpselike, limping, one preternaturally long arm extended to make contact with the text running along the walls, its presence harkens a nightmarish intensification of the Dream's baseline dread. Sleep paralysis, heart palpitations, and emotional outbursts often proceed from its visit. Terror awakens the dreamers, but they know no comfort until the sun rises.  

Many researchers dismiss this phantom as a blending of game-memories and the Dream. At DWell, somnologists have coined the term Traumatic Tetris Syndrome, positing that subconsciously-registered familiarities between the Dream's environment and the game map cause players' brains to hallucinate the King; he is superimposed over our collective mental architecture, and not emergent from it.

However, classic Tetris Syndrome is associated with frequent and high-level play of the hallucinated game. Relatively few dreamers troubled by the King meet those standards. Some, more familiar with the memetic infamy of Gerhard than The Tombs, believe they crossed the Nazi Traumforschung himself, eyes wild, bone-pale lab coat hanging in fluttering rags. It remains to be explained whether the traumatic presentation of Tetris Syndrome has a much lower activation threshold than its counterpart, or whether The Tombs of King Mefistofilus is simply a hyperstimulus. 

Despite its tense relationship with academics, DWell, and many other laboratories, rely on Onerkanna's massive databases of dream and Dream experiences. Recent allegations, however, may prompt researchers to regret this dependence. Leaked communications from the Onerkanna creators to a mailing list of carefully selected supporters detail a host of unethical programs, including a decades-long policy of censorship much broader than previously suspected. 

Among the demands for brutal human experimentation, the suppression of records of the Dream's behavioural effects, and the sale of user data to various militaries, what stands out is an elaborate proposal for a sequel to The Tombs. 

Initiated in 2006, the game aimed to follow Jim Foster's formula, with the addition of simple graphics, an updated Dream map, and a new pair of villains to replace the King. Titled The Temples of King Mefistofilus, wandering players were to be stalked by Adoratrice Salome and Stolas, characters representative of Onerfala and Onervaetor, respectively. Development, on schedule until 2008, stalled after a series of artists dropped out of the project, several citing crippling sleep disturbances.

Yet discussion of the ideated game never ceased. As gaming technology evolved, so did their blueprints for The Temples, always prioritizing realism and immersion. More than a tribute to Foster, the Onerkanna elites believed that it would serve as a sarcophagus, eternally preserving their minds in the fabric of the nightmare. What appeared to be indulgent self-insertion was in fact a ritual of teleportation.

Foster's King Mefistofilus had retrieved the Philosopher's Stone from the abyssal depths of the human unconscious. Now, it could be wielded, not to cure wounds or to restore youth, but to transmute flesh into Dream.