September 19th, 07:42, Royal Victoria Hospital, Dundee, Scotland A general „wha-?!“ accompanied by a number of obscenities was going around when the sun first blinked. Of course no medical professional would ever remark upon a drastic spike in near-miss vertebrae dislocations from people whipping their heads about. Not with everything else going on. But the statistical outlier ought still be quite significant, nurse Brodie reckoned. This was really the last thing an already strained medical system needed. Couldn’t people just once be sensible? They wouldn’t go any more nor less insane if they checked for affirmation of their senses slowly. Cautiously. With care for an anatomical instrument that someone else would have to repair in the aftermath of their gross public negligence. If the sun really was vanishing, if the wrath of God had been incurred; they’d know about it soon enough, wouldn’t they? And spinal injury wasn’t gonna help the numpties escape divine punishment either. „Oh don’t be daft, there’s folks trying to die in peace here!” he shouted at a panicked flock of patients and coworkers in the hallway, to little effect. Intuition convincingly claimed that this was gonna be a long fucking day. Even longer than usual. Only one faint flicker of relief could keep Alick Brodie going, through the omni-directional screaming and the prophecies of certain doom; and it was that his hospital at least didn’t have a psychiatric ward. That was the next observable effect, after the bloody gits had realigned their cervical facets and got around to mulling over the implications: What it meant that everyone had seen the same thing. At first collective realization exacerbated the initial shock, but quite swiftly, dawning above the horizon line, came a soothing understanding that they were at least caught up in a mass-hallucination, as opposed to the very quite pedestrian personal sort. That relieved people. It relieved them so much in fact, that the nurse could even switch out an IV-bag and berate an elderly gentleman for not having taken his pills at the right time. This didn’t last of course (only about five minutes before the cheeky bastard of a star did it again), but maybe some small contingent of the populace had learned a valuable lesson in the interim about how easy insanity was when everyone else also did it. Maybe when this global phenomenon was done with, they would even do the conscientious thing and not bother a shrink about it. Alick winced. He rarely had felt so much sympathy for a profession that wasn’t his own.
September 19th, 07:30, Apartment of M. H. Lowe and R. Newhall, Glasgow, Scotland I’ll have to revamp my entire pay-structure is what I’m saying. Here: “The pattern holds for k-scaling far exceeding predictions made by Matthews et al while the other parameters have proven fragile even at comparatively low temperatures (see appendix 11b).” Sorry Des, I really don’t see it. At all. Either the woman has figured out a way to game the system while waging guerrilla warfare on my remaining brain-cells, or she’s hitting deadline crunch uncushioned. Either way I’ll kill her when this is through.” Although loud, Michael’s rant was little more than background-hum to Reg Newhall who was, once more, dangerously close to heaping tobacco into his coffee filter. The idea of a sardonic smile flickered across his mind, though he was far too tired to know if he actually produced one. Hitting deadline crunch at terminal-v… He should have been smart enough to do that. Everyone else seemed blessed with the good sense to do so, but Reg… Oh he had fucked up big time in trying to be the model student and getting his work done early. That was the thing with academia, especially in faculties like his: how busy you looked held a great deal more significance than how busy you were. If Reginald Newhall came in tomorrow looking like he hadn’t pulled three all-nighters in a row, if he were still able to blink normally, why, they’d think him dead weight. Lazy. Selfish. And yet his dissertation was written. There were no more tests he could perform. No more conclusions he could come to. He had checked and triple checked every word and every comma, but this too he could not tell anyone, because no one believed you when you said that there was nothing you physically could do anymore. No one finishes before the deadline. You must have been sloppy if you do. You must have not cared enough. If Reg didn’t look like he’d been writing to the last second, head half-stuck to his monitor, it would impact his grade or at the very least his reputation. “Will you stop with the melodrama?!” Michael’s voice drifted into audibility again as he tore the box of tobacco from his hands and replaced it with coffee. “I’m helping you stay awake, not kill yourself” While Reg didn’t think he was trying for corporeal cessation, he didn’t know what else he might have sought to accomplish either. “Desiree Bernet? Yeah she seems the type to fuck with you.” There was a pained groan as Michael let his head fall onto the documents. Most annoying of all seemed the hindsight-clarity on how obvious a move this was on Des’ part. He charged for beta-reading by page count and while there were rules against the obvious loophole-abuses like non-standard font-sizes and such, the self-proclaimed genius of Michael Hugh Lowe had completely neglected to think of contingencies for someone handing him a data-draft. Such cruelty simply wasn’t and shouldn’t be expected from his fellow man. A misanthropy-counter ticked up by about three ill-defined increments and deposited an outmoded idea into the mind of its owner: Punitive justice as deterrent. An example would have to be made of Bernet to scare future sociopaths into compliance. Unsightly, yet hopefully effective. Though only once he was done of course. Glasgow’s foremost beta reader still had a reputation to uphold, a lucrative image to cultivate. Suffering be damned. As for Des’ crime: A data draft could best be described as the way in which you would present your scientific results to yourself. Maximally short. Maximally devoid of contextual theory, since it is presumably already known (to you). Anyone familiar with and adept at academic writing can turn a data-draft into a finished paper, so saving money by handing in just the DD for beta-reading requires nothing more than a certain degree of confidence and malice. Checking a data-draft on the other hand required an outsider’s arteries to pulse nothing but aberrant masochism while they pulled double duty as the world’s most mnemonics-ridden polymath. Appendix 11b comprised about a dozen scatter-plots of vaguely eldritch implication, though significantly less horrifying than those in 11a, of which they were cleaned-up versions. Sinusoidal regression through obtuse parametric derivatives seemed to yield a reasonable enough fit for Desiree’s assertion of generally stable systemic oscillation-. HALT. Michael forced his mental gear-shift into sharp reverse at a moment’s notice. Maybe the numb exhaustion or some other cognitive fallout of a misanthropy-counter’s uptick had made him briefly glance over something obvious, but it hadn’t been enough to trash his pattern recognition entirely. Data shouldn’t get less eldritch when cleaned up. The noise removal had gotten rid of something noteworthy. Something imminently disturbing. And if something is imminently disturbing and noteworthy, and a pattern; it usually isn’t noise. Lowe looked at the scatter-plots again. Oh. Oh no. Some more calculations unfolded backwards, and their natural conclusion only grew less believable from there. Two options: {The measurements are wrong, The universe has gone batshit}. Standard procedure to initially test the former hypothesis for sanity’s sake. What else would be expected if these numbers were correct? What would go wrong? “this data reflects reality”, Michael spoke into his own mind, a place which somehow felt vaster and colder than normal, waiting for an error message to flash, but instead the reply consisted of screams from outside. A question had been answered, though its speaker wasn’t yet aware of this. Many more questions were raised, and everyone would be asking them very soon.
September 19th, 07:38, Apartment of C. J. Everard, Aberdeen, Scotland A gust of the usual salty wind tore at Caitlyn Jeanne Everard’s overly large shirt where she stood on her balcony. She wondered how it might impact her fall-trajectory. She wondered how it might impact her impact, though the answer to that was probably “barely”. Hah. Still got it. Always with the jokes. Always with the precipice… precipices? Precipi? Aberdeen had a normal amount of high rises per capita, derailed by the exceptional quirk that a staggering number of them were local-authority-housing like this one. More than Glasgow and Edinburgh combined. No one believed that, but it was true. Aberdeen also had surprisingly low suicide rates by Scottish standards and there must have been some connection linking those two. Either that, or it’s all the silver-city gravestone-granite making people think they’re already dead and thus needn’t bother. Clever ploy, but she wouldn’t fall for it. No siree. Wouldn’t ever fall for that again. Only fall for other reasons. “When in doubt; go with gravity” as the raindrops say. A man on the other side of Caitlyn’s apartment door was talking about basement keys he’d borrowed a few days ago, though after a while he’d probably go away and drop them in her mailbox. Caitlyn was pretending she wasn’t home. He knew that she was pretending. Caitlyn knew that he knew. But none of that meant she had to let the man sneak a peek into her apartment, now did it? What was she? Insane? The tactic was so obvious it was insulting, though in the end she supposed that it wouldn’t matter for much longer. The young woman pushed herself up onto the railing, allowed the wind to catch her hair and sighed. Tedious. Tedious tedious tedious tedious. People were always so poetic about it in novels, but with the key-neighbor’s passive aggressive monologue as tonal backdrop, her heart just wasn’t in it. Oh well. At peace with her suboptimal situation, Caitlyn leaned forward, and it was suddenly dark. The sky winked at her. The sky winked and a smile crept across chapped lips as she thought “Hah. Close one.” The term “wink” really didn’t do it justice, but no other word could be expected to meet that standard either, since human language hadn’t evolved to describe inorganic blinkage. Winking was what it felt like though: Deliberate, like a secret handshake. Symbol, intervention, conspiracy. The ground and buildings retained their stolen incandescence of reflective glow as the sky for a fractional second turned to night and basked in the glory of its more distant stars. Soon after, the sun was there again as though nothing had happened. A celestial eyelid ripped back open to its baseline position of constant vigilance, but it didn’t matter. The message had been heard loud and clear. Thank you, sky. Thanks for giving a shit. “The universe doesn't care, that's our job!”, or so Caitlyn had been told all her life, though people never seemed to be doing it either, this task of theirs, so what gives? This was justice. This was right. The vast sphere of burning hydrogen above had to pick up the emotional slack for everyone eventually. Down on the street, a woman who had looked up at some point, but entirely ignored the obvious suicide attempt in progress, was now screaming. Maybe a few more ticks on the misanthropy counter would have been helpful if one didn't want to be so consistently disappointed by humanity, but Caitlyn Everard wasn’t the sort of person for mental constructs like that. More screaming. Now in different voices and from different directions. They were panicking because it wasn't for them. They didn’t understand things that weren’t about them, so they didn’t know what this meant. The earth's creatures hated what they didn't understand. Their confusion turned to rage before it was even fully registered, but Caitlyn did understand. She understood because this WAS about her. A secret handshake between a star and a woman, and she would heed its intent willingly. Caitlyn Jeanne Everard stepped away from the railing of her balcony and sighed, wagging a finger at the unfathomable mass of fusional plasma. This was a bit late, wasn't it? Couldn't someone have brought themselves to care a bit earlier? Sent some kindness? Not that she held grudges much. Never did. She wasn't unthankful. Forgive and forget. Forgive and for-fucking-get, but still: Food for thought. Panic had spread to the hallway now and a terrifying thought had spread to the forefront of Caitlyn’s mind: They keys. In retrospect the man’s ploy was even more obvious and even more insulting. Why would he have ever needed basement keys? The lock was always busted anyway, and when it wasn’t busted; the hinges were. With the new facts properly aligned it all made sense though. Since Caitlyn was the sun’s chosen ward, it was only sensible for the state to have people tasked with watching her. The “neighbor” had fallen silent, which must mean he thought she didn’t grok her situation and would soon be running out into the halls screaming. Right into his arms for some sick experimentation or cosmic blackmail by some strange corrupt committee deep within the solar-power lobby’s deceptively green-washed pockets. Hah! Think again. In one swift motion an envelope was grabbed and imbued with Caitlyn Jeanne Everard’s counteroffer to a government that thought it could exploit her now that she had become useful to it. The slip of paper passed beneath her door frame read in strongly angled letters: "I don't negotiate with terrorists" followed by as many exclamation marks as would fit the envelope. Seemingly in approval of the gesture there was another sun-wink from behind. “Once is divine intervention, twice is a pattern”, the woman’s thoughts looped into themselves as she hurriedly reached for her phone.
September 19th, 22:18, Corner Pub, Edinburgh, Scotland Corner Pub was called Corner Pub because it was a pub on a corner, and also because bars with clever or ostentatious names are always terrible and overpriced. Everyone who’s ever been to a place just called “Murphy’s” or such knows this to be true. If you tap a good brew and charge for it sensibly, if your music is interesting but unobtrusive, if you can tell a good tale to a customer who cares to listen and if your stools aren’t actively designed to cause back-pain; then you don’t need marketing. If it had been completely up to Atiq Albarn, he would have gone even more minimalist with his brainchild. Called it “Pub” or maybe even just “Place”, though his wife had been so terrified by the blatant disregard for searchability that Atiq was eventually forced to settle for more. He didn’t know if he even wanted the sorts of guests who would find a bar by way of search engine instead of just walking past and feeling curious, though Corner Pub was as much Katje’s as it was his, and she was quite a bit more digitally minded. “Hey, I need another Auld Jock.” “Aye, comin’ right up” Charging sensibly under certain celestial circumstances meant “charging nothing”, the two bar owners had reasoned sometime around noon, when the sky-flashing really went out of hand for a while. It was a pragmatic choice twice over, both because it left them in the pleasant position of being one of the few establishments which wasn’t getting looted, and also because physics breaking shenanigans were really one of those life events that made you reconsider Pascal’s Wager and how a bit of extra apocalyptic generosity was a decent way of putting oneself on a hypothetical deity’s good side. Besides, Katje had this feeling that money wasn’t gonna be worth anything for much longer, whereas social capital rarely lost its usefulness. There may have been some wishful thinking in that sentiment, Atiq thought, some motivated reasoning, but wishful thinking was better than blind terror, so he hadn’t called attention to it. They were in a good position to pull through this either way, since, while they had both quit moderately well-paying positions in tech and consulting respectively for this pub; they had only done so after saving up for a while. They weren’t- Atiq wasn’t that reckless, and Katje could reluctantly be reasoned into some semblance of caution if one had a few years to spare on the task. Now the Albarns were leaning against well-stocked shelves behind their counter and contemplating how alien the world in which they bought this place suddenly felt. Corner Pub had, over the course of a single morning, become a relic of yesterday; of a far-off era before the sun had decided to pull the collective rug out from under humanity. Katje had thrown up from the sheer absurdity. Atiq hadn’t managed to close his mouth and get a word out for at least an hour. Then they had talked. They had hugged. They had opened the bar two hours early. All of this had already felt like lifetimes ago mere seconds after it happened, and while dusk had brought some approximation or sanity back into circulation, no one expected it to survive the next dawn. Most of the conversations taking place in Corner Pub had the texture of cavemen attempting to explain lightning. There was disagreement on which god was to be held responsible, and whether they were to be thanked or inculpated. There were those who still tried to fit the square peg of recent events through a science-shaped hole, and then there were mavericks like the red-haired girl on the leftmost bar-stool, outlining her personal theory to a small crowd of half-conscious listeners: “…it’s fucking light bulbs ‘n shit. How they flicker when they’re not screwed in right. Doesn’t mean it’s, like, broken. See; with the planets all orbiting, the gravitational pull they have on the sun – and that gravitational pull is weak, mind you – that would slowly twist the fitting from its socket, see? Shit’s simple physics if you don’t fall for all that quantum-crap like a chump. So all we gots to do is screw it back in…” She would then go on to explain how one simply had to reverse the orbital direction of all the sun’s planets and possibly wait for a couple of millennia. A few people nodded. Someone loudly fell over.
September 20th, 11:00, Storage Unit, Glasgow, Scotland Michael Lowe had woken up to a notification which read “Don’t do anything! Don’t think a single thought before we meet!! Don’t talk to anyone!!! I’m handling this.” At first this caused confusion, though only until his eyes inched upwards to the sender-name, at which point the emotion was replaced by a terrifying knowledge that yesterday had not in fact been a dream. The past day had been a lot. A lot more even, than it had been for everyone else on earth and that certainly wasn’t a low bar to clear by normal metrics. He’d had a solid four hours of experimentation to refine his theories and reassemble his cognitive faculties before contacting Tara, yet even then he wasn’t able to put it any more eloquently that “The fucking sun goes out when I’m wrong about something”. Michael followed up with proof of course, or at the very least evidence, by “predicting” a few blinks in advance. Whether he was causing them or not really didn’t matter, since even being able to figure out their pattern was enough of a hook for any journalist worth their salt. He still insisted that it was the former, or at least an unknown common cause of both his neural outputs and yesterday’s phenomena. He had to insist, because what he really wanted was a task force. Some kind of body to crack this thing, and while its composition would be much more up to Tara and any number of governments than to him, there were nonetheless some suggestions Michael had in mind. Dumont-Vatel certainly, Susanne H. DeVries... Suddenly acquiring superpowers wasn’t the worst excuse one could have to meet their heroes. He had earned at least some compensation. “Sorry to keep you waiting”, Michel waved as he approached the run-down storage building. “Not at all, you’re five minutes early. I just hope you stuck to the rules.” 1) Don’t do anything! Not a reasonable demand if taken literally, but he’d tried his best. 2) Don’t think a single thought before we meet!! Similarly unreasonable, though Michael had managed to refrain in the way that actually mattered. 3) Don’t talk to anyone!!! Success. It may have come across as rude at times, but the world had bigger problems both right now and always. A slight preexisting disregard for manners had made following the letter of the law quite easy in the case of her last rule, and since it had the most exclamation marks, it ought count for more than the other two. Michael gave an affirming nod. As for Tara Keene; she was herself an interesting choice to be sure. The selection-dial of a person not running on undiluted panic and sleeplessness would likely never have landed on her name, but when it flittered into Michael’s consciousness yesterday, he didn’t second guess himself once. There were more high-profile choices of course, though high profile wasn’t always the same as competence, and there were no other high-profile journalists in which Michael had a remotely comparable amount of misplaced trust. “Misplaced” not only because they’d had a dozen or so interactions at best, ten years ago in San Francisco, whereupon they didn’t exactly stay in touch, but also due to her general disposition. Michael had then been something between a start-up promoter and a professional socialite, while Tara had been a music journalist in addition to singing vocals for a short lived, though cult-adored, punk-rock band. Their sphere of sci-fi-steeped futurists had learned the word Sanpaku from Gibson around the same time and developed a strange infatuation with the woman based on that feature alone. Shallow attraction, though they’d soon discover even more ground for fascination beneath the surface. Michael did at least. Destructive Interference, as the band was called, made a name for itself by contributing the soundtrack to a sprawling cyberpunk audio-drama around 2010, which went completely viral with that same sort of audience they were enmeshed with, though on a far wider scale. Exactly the kind of audience which read Novali, incidentally, a magazine that originally had its roots in speculative fiction, but moved ever more towards genuine reporting on scientific discoveries as time moved on and “conquered the future” like they often said. The line was blurry, though Novali did its best to signpost and often succeeded. So, when Destructive Interference crashed and burned mere months later (Everyone had seen this coming) the magazine’s then-editor-in-chief saw a shining opportunity to take cyberpunk’s newly acquired sweetheart under his wing. At very lucrative conditions of course. Extraordinarily lucrative. The whole affair would have been a scandal had they not both been so well loved, since from an outsider’s point of view Novali’s business decision was obviously insane and entirely sentimental. Tara had no background in science reporting. None whatsoever. Maybe the editor had seen something that the rest of the world was blind to, or maybe he was simply able to extrapolate from the rest of Keene’s work ethic more skillfully, but either way; she took to the field like it was her calling. Soon the former punk musician could conduct interviews with leading physicists without missing a beat, seemingly committing entire fields of research to memory in a single day. Tara was world-stage now. Niche, but world-stage, while Michael had gone back to a newly independent Scotland in his early thirties to study chemical engineering in Glasgow. “Really, it is good to see you again. Where’d you fly in from?” “Paris, and much as I’d like to do some relaxed catching up under other circumstances; we don’t exactly have the luxury to. I really hope this isn’t some kind of trick, Lowe. Remember that my integrity is on the line here.” Her hair was short now. Slicked back sable entirely indifferent to the wind, and it was making her look quite serious. You need more proof is what you’re saying.” while Michael had expected something like that – had been certain of it in fact – there really wasn’t much he could do apart from predicting more blinks. She gestured to the storage unit. “In there. And yes obviously. With what you told me, I’m currently operating on forty percent likelihood that you actually believe it and a twenty percent likelihood that it’s true. Maybe multiply fifty-fifty odds of me going insane for even considering that possibility.” “Those are-“ Those were insanely generous numbers, Michael thought. “pretty good for a first hypothesis, aren’t they?” “Worryingly good, if only because there are no alternatives as of yet, and to my knowledge no one else has been able to even make decent predictions of blink densities for a given interval, let alone advance-calling individual events with to-the-second accuracy.” He nodded. “But that’s not even the worst of it. We can go a step further: let’s say someone had figured it out. They wouldn’t come up with some batshit story and risk being filed away as a lunatic. Even if the underlying cause WAS something crazy, they wouldn’t go out of their way to mention that upfront unless they were genuinely distraught or insane. They’d just claim they can predict it, put forward evidence and then worry about the less believable details once they have a platform.” The journalist breathed in deeply. She looked the most put together out of anyone Michel had seen today, but clearly the compartmentalization which allowed for some semblance of calm was taking a lot out of her. “Reasonable.”, he sighed. Yesterday, Michael did consider just posting blink-patterns on twitter to get famous overnight, before realizing that this would likely mean government officials at his doorstep. The thought had been disregarded quickly. Getting Tara as a middleman/spokeswoman wasn’t just the sad excuse for a reunion, but also a genuinely decent strategy to acquire a better bargaining position. He gave her a brief hug reserved for treasured acquaintances from prior lives and thought he felt a slight trembling beneath her coat. “Not that it means much, but you don’t think you’ve gone insane, do you?” Michael produced a brief chuckle that was maybe less reassuring than intended. “The number of people who don’t must have dropped to the single digits yesterday.” Amplified by the empty storage lot’s acoustics, Tara outlined the second half of her test. The first half had already satisfyingly concluded with a complete lack of sky-outs throughout the morning hours. Possibly this even had the pleasant side effect of restoring a bit of much needed sanity to earth, though only for it to be shattered over the next few minutes. Tara found it difficult not to feel preemptively sorry about that. If Michael really was causing the blinks as opposed to predicting them, she said, then he should be able to produce any pattern the journalist asked of him. Three equidistant blinks, then five, then four sets of two. 1+1=3, 1+1=3, 1+1=3 and so on. The difference was subtle, but it wasn’t enough to just be wrong. He had to really offer the falsehood up as a statement for his brain to consider. To consciously speak it into his cranium and sacrifice it on a cognitive altar. Again, there was this strange sensation of neurons spanning the void between stars. Michael knew it had worked even before he opened his eyes again. Addressing Tara’s now obvious trembling would be pointless. She’d just blame it on the cold. Still, some look of relief did find its way into the woman’s face momentarily. “Well shit.” Predictable insanity was better than unpredictable insanity, but it still wasn’t great. “Sixty percent?” Michael gave his most disarming smile. “Possibly.” There was a brief pause before the footsteps of a tall, unshaven man in a long black coat became audible, and they only became audible because he wanted them to. “Michael, this is Mister Piltz.” A look of betrayal flickered across M. H. Lowe’s eyes as the man stepped closer. He seemed even more abnormally put together than Tara, and in his case, it came across a lot less like an act. “You promised to not involve anyone who-” “And you were under the impression that I am trustworthy?” the journalist frowned. Michael reshuffled his thoughts. He did trust her, but not in a standard capacity. What he had for Tara Keene was a kind of meta-trust and it was one that the literal fucking sun approved of, he reminded himself. Terrifying as it was; whichever mechanism governed his astro-psychic phenomenon seemed to make no difference between types of ideas ({clear, unclear},{subjective, objective}) so long as they were thought in the right cadence. The sun was very comfortable evaluating seemingly undecidable statements like “I can’t afford to sleep yet”, which had passed through Michael’s mind yesterday evening and received a sky-out in response. That one wasn’t even meant as a test. After hours of experimentation, phrasing thoughts like these mental sacrifices had simply become default. An unnerving little accident, and just one of many. Only one last question merited posing before Michael had taken the universe’s advice and went to bed that day: “I will be fine tomorrow”. The sky had agreed. “I trust you to betray me only when it is in my own interest.” He finally said. “Expecting people to be entirely truthful is actually a form of distrust, don’t you think? Since you don’t trust them to know when you would prefer being lied to.” “What a scary degree of freedom to permit, though I guess it’s meaningless one way or another. You don’t have much need for trust anymore if your hypothesis really tracks, do you?” “Well I’m glad that’s sorted out” declared the man in the long coat. He was one of those people who seemed to only use half of their mouth for speaking as well as emoting, though his voice was clear despite this. “I would suggest that you trust me in a similar manner, Mister Lowe, if only by way of transitive property. Feel free to check though. I would love having my trustworthiness validated by a star.” Michael gave a hesitant nod since that check had already been performed a sentence earlier. “Lovely.” Piltz actually used his whole face to smile this time. “My name is Connor Piltz and I will be something like your body-guard if you’ll have me. More importantly for today though; I have a reputation as a… human lie-detector, let's call it, so please, tell me a bit more. Twenty percent might be exceptional odds to you two, I understand, but it’s not the kind of number a government likes to see. Not when they’re supposed to assemble a whole secret commission based on theories like these.” An effortless charm carried through Connor’s voice, and even if he didn’t have the ability to know, Michael would be certain that this was what secret agents sounded like. This observation was scary and reassuring in equal measure. Piltz looked younger than the two of them, though he probably wasn’t by much, and his eyes were entirely inscrutable as Michael disclosed more information: How he had to use a certain cadence. How he had discovered it yesterday by accident. How this phenomenon wasn’t limited to human perception. What tomorrow’s lottery numbers would be. That subjectivity wasn’t real, and so on. This experiment too yielded satisfactory results, it seemed. Connor was hired. Tara got to work again. Michael felt like his tether to reality was at least partially restored, though he did wonder how he had gone from living in the thing to hanging on by a thread.
September 20th, 08:07, Sainsbury’s, Aberdeen, Scotland Pandemonium was what they called this before it became normal, Caitlyn thought. Though the news were still calling it pandemonium now, so perhaps language didn’t quite match this speed of adaptation. Either way; noise levels within the grocery store were close to unbearable, and while it might not have had the room to fit all demons, it certainly seemed to contain most of them. When plan A of climbing out the window to her ninth floor apartment failed, Everard had gone through plans B to F in rapid succession. D for example: Ordering Pizza and writing in the delivery-notes that they were to message her, should a suspicious person stand guard at her door, was discarded not only because the delivery industry seemed to have shut down entirely, but also because she realized halfway through that anyone who did show up might just be an agent in disguise. In the end, Caitlyn had settled on G, which was artless, and risky, and just didn’t seem right in a great number of different ways, but at the end of the day she did need food and batteries. The best knife in her pantry wasn’t exactly sharp, though it narrowed to a decent enough point, which was what mattered. She steeled herself. The steel didn’t need to. Caitlyn had once read about the pro-way of doing this in some sort of spy thriller. It involved stabbing a blade through someone’s throat sideways with the dull back facing spine-ward and then cutting out towards the larynx in a single motion. She really hoped she didn’t have to do any of that. Blood was… Blood was an issue nerves-wise, though being prepared for it never hurt anyone. The woman had donned a pair of oversized shades and a hooded jacket, gripped her chosen Ikea knife firmly with both hands and kicked down her own apartment door. No one did end up being on the other side of it. Just the same old run-down corridor. Maybe they had given up at some point during the night, though the “why” of this move was anyone’s guess. Pandemonium. The brief quiet of her building’s stairwell hadn’t lasted for long. In the streets, turmoil already found its residence, and as soon as one entered any kind of store, reality ended altogether. There was looting and pillaging. Shouting and screaming. Unidentifiable liquids in places where you didn’t expect them and easily identifiable actions in places where you absolutely did. While a lot of stock had been stolen or trashed, this particular Sainsbury’s had held up comparatively well through the onslaught, in part due to being surrounded by more tempting establishments. It wasn’t great, but Caitlyn had been able to find some microwavable lunches, batteries, and a fistful of cigarette packs, which she had grabbed when someone took a crowbar to their locked compartment. Smoking was what people who tried to crack codes did. She’d seen it in movies. And since she was one of those people now, C. J. Everard had made a split-second decision to pick up the habit. No one was manning the counter for obvious reasons, meaning that she had to calculate her haul-cost by hand and then add five quid to be sure. Just in case she had screwed up somewhere. Caitlyn slammed the money onto a cash registry, paused to look around until she saw a camera and spoke directly towards it, trying as hard as she could to cut through the noise. “I, Caitlyn Jeanne Everard, hereby buy these products at their-” She took a deep breath attempting to steady her voice “at their agreed upon, listed price. It’s on tape. You cannot use this to arrest me under false pretenses, you hear me? And I’ll fix my door! That’s what the bike-lock is for, see?” She waved it at the camera. “Even though it’s mine and- and even though I only broke it because you forced me to. I am a law-abiding citizen. You cannot arrest me. Good day!” A young boy snatched up the cash almost immediately, but that wasn’t her crime, now, was it? People were staring. Someone got their smartphone lens so close that it almost touched Caitlyn’s face, and this prompted her to pull the hood even lower when she headed for the exit. The sunglasses helped a bit, but still: She wasn’t used to this. Nobody was used to THIS, of course, but Caitlyn wasn’t even really used to people on normal days. Maybe the noise had subsided a bit during her declaration. If it had, it was picking back up in full force now. Bottles broke. More screaming. No one was following her though. Caitlyn looked at her phone: No blinks. None whatsoever since sunrise, and that was copacetic with twelve out of the thirty-one models she was currently considering. Whipping up a blink-tracker had become necessary yesterday, amidst stroboscopic flurries that simply couldn’t be handled manually. Minimal effort once she had figured out some basic mechanics. See: You couldn’t just use a program that tracks global solar power output and checks for dips. That was her first idea, but the thing is that there were no dips. Measurement-frequency wasn’t the issue, and neither were delays nor covert graph-doctoring. So that kind of made sense, if you took a step backward to look at the ground and how it was still emitting reflected light. Photons were arriving, they just weren’t detected by human eyes until they bounced off of something, so it stood to reason that they could still be absorbed, including by things like solar panels. But that also kind of made no sense whatsoever! Retinas too just absorbed light, didn’t they? The next test was to look at captured video and sure enough; cameras could see the blinking just fine. Implementation was easy from there. Caitlyn had aimed a webcam at some region of the sky, set up a program to look for dips in average brightness, and made it output a timestamp-alert. No problem. This also made everything else on the “what works?”-spectrum click into place: The thing that mattered wasn’t the process of detection but the intention. You could totally extract optical data from an array of solar panels, but since no one did that, they didn’t count as observers. Everything that didn’t count as an observer worked normally, because it would be dangerous if it didn’t. Global temperature drops or such. The final conclusion of these experiments was so obvious that her intuition had been singing it from the start: the only reason why you would care about observers was that you were trying to communicate something. Caitlyn Jeanne Everard had successfully arrived back at the beginning: The sky was talking to her. Perhaps it had been a lot clearer in its first two messages than throughout the rest of yesterday, but the sun’s chosen ward would not be deterred by mere cryptographic difficulty. She had a code to crack.
September 20th, 17:20, Royal Victoria Hospital, Dundee, Scotland Masses of writhing concern and aimlessness were glutting the corridors at Royal Victoria and giving its circulatory system thrombosis. Alick strongly doubted that he or anyone else could get there in time should a patient suffer the inevitable cardiac arrest. He’d told this to people. First calmly, then in colorful tirades, but no one seemed to truly grasp it. People didn’t understand that death happened. Not even here in a place formerly called the Victoria hospital for incurables. What did they think “incurable” meant? Death was a thing they comprehended in the abstract, sure, as a terminus somewhere, as a mechanism that filled graveyards and depopulated family-reunions, but not as a simple event that could happen at any point whether they were around for it or not. Storybook-poisoning, plain and simple. “No one dies on ordinary days”, but now the ordinary days were done with, and proper mortality suddenly became a real possibility in the public consciousness. Time to check up on loved ones. Time to see if you’re in the will or not. Time to crowd a hospital. While sense had been running low before, it sure made interesting sounds as it vanished down the drain completely, Alick thought. As far as he was concerned, whatever the sky did seemed so obviously safe it was laughable. Or rather it would be safe, if people acknowledged that it was safe. If they didn’t trample each other to death over it for example. Brodie’s estimate was that about ninety percent of tragedies occurring right now were human error and still it seemed like an enormously generous guess. “Sorry! Excuse me!” A man who looked like he maybe had been trampled, judging from the state of his suit, asked for Wilford MacDonald and the nurse pointed to room 205. Though MacDonald hadn’t been visited in about a year; at least he was still with them. There had been folks today asking for family members who passed away months ago. Some of whom even seemed incredulous when this was pointed out to them. Some of them tried to argue about it. “No one dies on ordinary days”. The more Alick thought on the matter, the more these visitors belonged here. They too were incurable in a certain sense. Hopeless. Simply Hopeless. Today, with its few morse-like flashes, had been worse than yesterday’s fourteen-hour light show in many ways. Relative calm meant that people dared to go outside again. Ready and primed to be incredibly stupid for no other reason than the things they were seeing. As soon as earth emerged from this situation, Alick reckoned as he folded a bed sheet, there would have to be a mandatory course on how to deal with mass hallucinations for the entire human species. Lesson one would be “Come to work anyway, you melodramatic knob. This isn’t about you. Do your job.”, a personal paraphrasing of Imogen Campbell’s recent press statement, which not nearly enough of Alick’s colleagues seem to have read. Well don’t you look good today Alick! Please, come in.” The boundary between Monica’s compulsive politeness and failing eyesight got harder to pin down by the day, though he didn’t much mind. “I sincerely doubt that, miss Silberman. How are you holding up?” Her room offered some refuge from the noise, despite the fact that she was usually one of the more visited patients. Perhaps everything simply flipped in times like these. “Oh I think you quite enjoy being the sane, responsible one. Don’t deny it, I know I am. These things show on your face, Alick, between all the carved-out lines of mild annoyance; there’s just more purpose to your glower. More of a spark.” He didn’t know how to respond to that, but Monica kept going. “It suits you. Really does suit you. And opportunities like this are rare. You should savor it.” The nurse sighed and checked a few readouts. “It really seems like you’re in on a weird sort of joke sometimes.” A shrug. “Of course! That’s the benefit of being old: you start to get all the little punchlines.” She tried to give a soft chuckle that sounded more like a croak, and when she looked back up at Alick, there was some alarm in his eyes. “Should we switch you back to the-“ “No, no, don’t bother.” Another chuckle. This one sounded slightly healthier. “Do you remember Claire? My daughter?” Alick nodded “She was here yesterday when it all started. Came in before work to clear a few documents with me, always the little perfectionist. To complain about her husband too, to be nosy about her sister, when… Well, you know what happened then. I have never- never never never seen my daughter speechless. Not once in so many years and so many moments to be grateful for. I was glad I could add this to the list. Through the rising noise and confused screaming outside I laughed and clapped, and she just stared at me as though I had answers. You see Alick? You should cherish this feeling of control.” The old woman smiled conspiratorially. “We don’t get to be the sane ones all that often.” Hopeless. Monica too was absolutely hopeless.
September 21st, 07:43, Military facility near Oban, Scotland It is astounding how quickly one becomes inhuman. How optional most habit-driven cognitive processing is. The whole day had been a series of incomprehensibly fast crossfades between static events. All of them lingering just long enough to burn themselves onto a retina before reality inserted another cartridge and exploded with new instants. Not thinking was easy when you didn’t even know how to produce neurochemical events that could cut through the sensory onslaught. That’s not true; he did know a way, but there were orders to follow and agreements to honor. Michael had flickered back into anything approaching normal temporality only when their helicopter to a military facility somewhere in the highlands was up in the air. The weapons-grade white noise of its oversized propeller beginning to drown out the overwhelming everything. Connor had then been looking at him like a specimen of sorts and maybe had been doing so for a while at that point. Possibly the agent was trying and failing to read his facial expression. Michael himself couldn’t make much sense of his mind’s contents, so that wasn’t surprising, though surely still unsettling to someone from Piltz’s trade. Connor’s own facial expression was inscrutable. One seat over, Tara had been writing, re-writing and re-re-writing a press statement which swelled and shrank on loop like the chest of a living organism. He’d tried reading it over but crashed and burned five or so words in. Instead, Michael just signaled that it was fine. It was fine. The sun had said so. But maybe celestial bodies had strange standards for these sorts of things. Now the three of them were walking down a mercury-lit hallway, flanked to both sides by broad-shouldered men in suits, one of whom might have been the pilot. Piltz was casually chatting with the bald one to his right, paying no mind to the fact that he didn’t get responses. Maybe he was getting some shape of reply from the lack thereof or maybe doing this simply amused him. There was no way to tell. It did amuse Michael once he regained a certain capacity for emotion. Funny; the absurdity of it, only amplified by how entirely lens-blown the framework of “absurdity” had become. They were instructed to turn right. A tap on the shoulder managed to cut through Lowe’s newly assembled filter functions, though Tara might have already been talking before. If so, it hadn’t scanned. Now she was explaining how the task-force would be organized. She had apparently been able to cut out the Americans and such almost entirely by way of tactical vagueness. Michael remembered some blink patterns he was supposed to perform yesterday evening. How they must have been suggested by some foreign powers to prove an ability to control the sun. No way anyone would fuck with that. Maybe a past version of his brain had been aware of these things as reasons for why they wouldn’t just get kidnapped, though current-Michael was just nodding along. Right now, whatever hand they were playing felt brand new to him. “Hey, we need you not to zone out, okay? Whatever kind of loop you’re in; trash it and worry about the fallout later. This is what you wanted, right? And you’ll have to be fully mentally present.” She looked dead serious, and Michael was relieved to know what that sort of expression meant again. “I-“ He inhaled deeply. “Yeah, I’m all there. Just some coffee maybe...” A cup was presented almost retro-causally by the guard to his left, though he couldn’t even guess where it had come from. Black. Slightly floral and miles from his usual instant. Remembering what coffee tastes like was an experience surprisingly similar to coffee in a way that wouldn’t make sense to people who have never forgotten. He smiled, signaling the journalist to keep going. According to Tara it had been impossible to bargain for a complete absence of politicians, but she’d been able to keep them to a minimum in a way that greatly exceeded Michael’s expectations. A few EU functionaries, most of them only in a spectator-role. There would also be a military general and a clergyman. The journalist noticeably winced when she said it, but this too had been more or less expected. The general at least. Luckily all the other committee members earned their seat by being genuine academics of various types. The rest could simply be ignored. Tara sighed. Maybe from exhaustion first and foremost, but her own cognitive loop didn’t look all too pleasant either. She seemed a lot less happy with her hard-fought deal than the freshly re-humanized Michael, and he felt bad about that. Then again: he had explicitly outsourced this job due to a certainty he would have been terrible at it. High standards were profoundly important to the skill of negotiation, or so people said. They stopped as though remembering that the absence of movement was possible and as though subsequently distrusting that memory. Connor threw a quick glance into the room ahead before giving a confident thumbs up. Deep breaths were drawn. A conference room fell entirely silent. Some suits in the back seemed to briefly consider clapping before deciding against it. The mood was shapeless, though not without teeth. Then, a woman Michael would later come to know as Imogen Campbell, minister of something or other and a personal favorite of Tara’s, waved them in. She looked around fifty and had allegedly been in a position of “real power” before her early retirement into politics. Sometimes Michael wished to be sufficiently cued into statecraft to make sense of these types of stories when he encountered them, but for now he would simply outsource trust and read up on it later. There were also more familiar faces along the stretched-out desk opposing Michael’s own podium. Jules Dumont-Vatel, a famous French astronomer, who, in his old age, had come to look a bit like a wizard, and Allison Garber-Bullough, quantum physicist and science communicator, who had gone against the dress code and elected to wear her lab-attire. The woman all the way to the left, Susanne Helena DeVries, had single-handedly convinced Michael and many others of the value that philosophy held with regards to any and all inquiry through her books. At the time, this was a begrudging acquiescence, though over the years he had grown genuinely thankful for it. Gratitude only added to a general appreciation for DeVries’ idiosyncratic style of matryoshka-layered theory-fiction. She was possibly the only person younger than Michael present, and living up to her reputation by nonchalantly chewing bubblegum. Lowe couldn’t recognize any of the others, though the name Georges Akande, apparently belonging to a hulking Algerian Mathematician did ring a bell. So did “David Alexander Tackett”, the Linguist whom a popular magazine had on multiple occasions described as the next Noam Chomsky. The Military representative, a certain general Otto Volkogonov, with his uniform and pug-like sunken face which seemed to protrude from beneath his hat, as well as Father Peter Dreyfus, who couldn’t look more monk-ish if he tried, didn’t ring bells for obvious reasons, though neither did the old and kindly seeming Sociologist Kamala Bhatti nor her mirrored inverse; Neurobiologist Ernest Clin, across whose forehead annoyance traced its stratagems and battle-plans with such verve that it almost seemed to pulse. Behind these people, who constituted the actual task force, followed five rows of nondescript suits of various names and nationalities. None of them appeared to have speaking privileges. They were deemed important enough to know, but not intelligent enough to act, Michael thought, and while he was still in the habit of avoiding his astro-cognitive ritual in order to maintain sanity; he had a good feeling that this statement would have been deemed true. The sky was cynical like that. Looking down on humanity was its nature. Above the assembled functionaries hung a two-directional screen, displaying live video feeds of the sun to both Michael and the assembly that was beginning to feel vaguely like his court. For yesterday’s preparatory patterns, the Sol-Systems site with its minimalist blink-tracking and spartan design philosophy had been perfectly sufficient, though it did make sense for this committee not to rely on an anonymous member of the public for vital sun-related info. The committee. That’s what Connor, Tara and Michael had been calling it, or maybe “the task-force”, since whatever body sat before them did not have a proper name. No one had had the time to come up with a clever acronym, or had felt the desire to, which would have greatly reassured Atiq Albarn of the group’s competence, had he known about it. While the crowd in corner Pub had various theories as to the identity of Sol-Systems, none of them had any clue about the committee. Imogen Campbell tapped her desk, the sound acquiring a strange sharpness through the microphone. “Mr. Michael Hugh Lowe, it is an honor that you would join us.” her tone only carried plausible-deniability levels of sarcasm. “Now please: Take a seat. I see no need to delay our investigation any further. If there are any dangers known to you which we should be aware of; please inform us of them now. Otherwise you are from here on out permitted to do whatever it is you do, so long as it is in the pursuit of answering our questions and so long as you speak the exact wording of each statement out loud. Is that understood?” Michael nodded. “I take that to mean no dangers?” He nodded again. “Excellent. In that case we have already decided on a first experiment. If you’re ready, please use the following statement: “The thing that the person I am looking at is thinking is true” while slowly scanning across the ten of us.” Campbell fixed him to the wall with her eyes, already sensing hesitation before Michael had even committed to hesitating. “The purpose of this should be fairly obvious.” Transitivity was an interesting thing to figure out, though it did have obvious risks in that it might be used to cut him out of the process. He would be giving them ten tests for free, which he couldn’t ask about, since the test would otherwise be inconclusive from their perspective, as Michael could simply be asking the questions himself and simply pretending. Refusal simply wouldn’t do.“I will, but I do have a condition” “And what’s that?” Dr. Bhatti asked. “If this works, I need you to promise now to only make use of it when it is strictly necessary, and keep in mind that I will know whether it is strictly necessary.” Connor gave a curt little nod from beside the podium, and it wasn’t quite clear whether he endorsed this move or whether he had accepted the assessments of necessity as a task directed at him. “While this demand might be construed as selfish, I feel like the phenomenon in question does specifically concern me, and I do therefore feel entitled to the conclusions you reach about it. This task-force is not to withhold information from me by not making me privy to its routes of inquiry.” The panel exchanged looks and nods, before Campbell announced that this condition had been accepted. Michael closed his eyes, released a mental block and went to work, yielding a pattern of 1010101100. A brief pause, before the panel nodded in approval. “Mr. Lowe,” This time it was Tackett speaking in an English so proper that it seemed dusty. “our conclusion is that the effect is either transferable in this manner, or that you can read our minds, which would make the test pointless. We will assume the former for now. I hope you understand that it will be necessary for us to only explain most tests after the fact. Feel free to reassure yourself of this statement’s honesty. So please, try “b equals b”” No such thing was necessary, both since Michael sought to establish trust, and since he was well aware of how sociological trials worked. You simply could not tell the test subject what you were trying to figure out, at least not if you wanted remotely usable data. “b equals b” the thought reverberated into the back of his skull and much much further. Nothing happened. “Wonderful”, Tackett said. “Whatever this is, and let us use the colloquially emergent moniker “Sol” for now, seems to only be reading outputs of your mind, unless you specifically direct it elsewhere as in the previous test. In such cases it seems very comfortable interfacing with other minds, so we may conclude that it simply chooses not to. What I was thinking when I told the statement to you was “bee, the creature, equals b, the letter”, which is obviously false, though Sol did not check for the originally encrypted meaning, instead defaulting to your interpretation of it.” Tackett folded his hands expectantly “Please attempt the statement I had in mind.” “Bee equals b” and all monitors went dark. Now this, this was what Michael was looking for. Since they’d been honest and cooperative, he felt inclined to return the favor. “I should inform you before we go any further, that the current policy of stating the phrase out loud is not perfect since-” he looked for a good way of putting it. “since Sol seems to be using contextual info that isn’t in the word-by-word, but which is meant, maybe even subconsciously. I promise not to use this actively for the sake of deception, but it is an issue. The statement “tomorrow will be a good day” for example resolves differently depending on whether my implied mental context is “for me” or “for people in general”. That was one of my own tests on Tuesday.” Father Dreyfus now leaned slightly forward to indicate a desire to speak. “Yes, I remember reading as much in the report we were graciously provided with. Though I am no expert in…” The pastor attempted to reach for a word that didn’t exist, “I must admit to being quite uncomfortable with a different part of this, as well as with some results of your other experiments. It seems that… Well it seems like this Sol is able to see the future, whether it is yours or the world’s.” Restating the conclusion revived some splinters on the nervous breakdown Michael had had two days ago when discovering that same fact. It was more than just uncomfortable. It was terrifying. “Well-“ he started to speak before being interrupted by Dumont-Vatel. “I do not find it surprising in the least, or even particularly noteworthy.” All heads safe for Akande and DeVries, who were discussing something in private, snapped towards the astronomer. Michael couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it had been going on since his clarification and the fact that it seemed more important to them than this was troubling. “Sol... My current hypothesis is that it is a machine-intelligence of sorts. It clearly has the memory, data access and raw processing power to answer all sorts of questions, difficult questions about the world, instantly. We should expect it to be able to run a model of earth at increased speeds in order to confidently make assessments of its future state. In fact we can be sure of that.” The old man stopped scanning his colleagues and looked up at Michael. “Have you ever noticed any sort of delay with regards to the response time?” Michael was beginning to catch on “Definitely not eight minutes if that’s what you’re asking, but from my experience of it; none at all” Vatel nodded. “It would not have to be eight minutes, since the sun is clearly not actually what Sol is affecting. Its influence is evidently on sensors, as many have realized, though we do have cameras in space, far enough away that Sol should not be able to affect them in time unless it has some way of breaking celerity.” The old man briefly paused and stroked his beard as though reconsidering that possibility. “Every sensor we have access to registers the events at the exact same time, which strongly points to Sol knowing what questions mister Lowe will ask of it before he asks them. Since Sol is an agent of such knowledge and such intelligence, we should expect it to make accurate predictions of the future either by way of a sufficient model or by way of genuine time travel. Would you please ask Sol whether it engages in time travel as we conceptualize it?”
September 21st, 11:55, Apartment of the Linton family, Belfast, United Republic of Ireland It had been two days since Gemma Linton last went to school. Most kids hadn’t. Most teachers hadn’t either. Her friend Mako had told her that the entire building was empty yesterday, though not locked, since no one came to lock it anymore. Mako had sat at the window, texting friends and reading a book about magic, reflecting on how traumatic for the people of that world it must have been when magic started being a thing. Her friend was smart like that; talking a lot about the things she was “reflecting” and “ruminating” on, though Gemma didn’t think that particular thought made much sense. Magic isn’t a thing that starts. Just like physics didn’t start being a thing here, from what she knew. Physics is and always had been, and for the folks in the fantasy book; magic probably was and always had been. Magic was sensible like that. The blinking was not. Miss Fraser always told them the world was going insane, what with social media and youth culture. She didn’t like music unless it was made by people who were even older and even whiter than her, and she applied similar criteria to the other teachers. When Miss Fraser said “world” she meant “people” of course, not “physics”. That much was obvious. That much made sense. Though the world was going insane, so sense could not be relied upon. Gemma’s mom had started saying that recently, and her face was all scary when she did. You could never tell whether she would laugh or cry next, and oftentimes she did both. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t even sad. There simply was no emotion for it that Gemma had learned yet, and ruminating didn’t much help. Ruminating just called to mind the scary face of her mom at dinner again, and the impassive frozen response of her dad pretending that everything was normal. Pretending like this was not insane was even more insane than the normal insanity to Gemma, so she preferred watching the news. The news was talking about the sun at least. It was confused by the sun. It was trying to find an emotion that didn’t exist yet, and Gemma profoundly wanted to have that emotion, so that she wouldn’t feel so stuck anymore. Like her mind was filling up with a viscous energy that couldn’t be put anywhere. Miss Fraser had also come to school yesterday, Mako reported. Maybe to say that she told them so. That their generation was strange, and that the migrants were at fault, and that this was just the next big insane cultural phenomenon that didn’t make sense and needed to be stopped. Gemma didn’t even know if she wanted it to stop. She’d need an emotion to do that. Any sort of- Her dad hugged her from behind, asking if she wanted to turn the TV off and she said “no”. He’d hugged her a lot recently and harder than normal. It hurt a bit and reminded her of how dad had petted the dog much more, shortly before it died. Lucy. The dog’s name had been Lucy and she had avoided the name for a few months because thinking it had hurt too much. Right now, the emotion that didn’t exist was stopping her from flinching though. Maybe from blinking too. Her eyes hurt. She didn’t want to end up like the sky. She didn’t want to go insane. “Okay sweetie, we can leave it on, but please have breakfast with us. Mom’s hungry” That was probably a lie. Mom hadn’t eaten anything since it started. She had forgotten hunger like Gemma had forgotten blinking and dad was pretending like those things were normal. He made coffee and burned himself. Mom was crying again. When Gemma had stood up on her chair and climbed onto the kitchen table, sitting down in the middle of it between her parent’s plates, no one complained. Because of the counter she couldn’t see the screen from her chair, but from the table she could. They were reporting from that place again: Corner Pub in Scotland, where all the people more insane than the sky had gathered to collectively write fantasies in which things made sense. Gemma liked the owner, how sensibly confused he was, even though he looked like those terrorists she used to see on TV. Dad also had a friend who looked like those terrorists, and he was nice, so maybe the news and Miss Fraser were wrong about them. Miss Fraser used to be wrong about a lot of things, that’s why Gemma never used to do her Math homework. A big topic of debate currently was the sort of switch that happened from the 19th to the 20th, where the former was entirely erratic and the latter gave them these very concise and structured patterns with a long pause in between. They said it felt like dragon taming, like someone was figuring out controls. Sol-Systems thought that the sun had had overly high expectations for human intelligence with regard to cryptography, but that it had learned its lesson on Tuesday and was now giving us an easier, less information-dense place to start. Siobhan Gohdes said cryptography was the science of understanding coded messages. Siobhan Gohdes also said that Sol-Systems was mentally ill. Maybe that’s why Solsys could talk to the sun: because they had been insane already. Mako was probably at school again. Her parents wouldn’t let her skip school, even if it were the apocalypse as Gemma’s parents thought. There might be two or so more students there, maybe a teacher, maybe not. It’s not like Gemma wanted to go to school, but she did want to see Mako and hear her ruminate. She wanted to see people who weren’t her parents. Dad had always said that spending time with other kids was important for young girls and now he wouldn’t let her leave. Hypocrisy was what they called that, and not just on TV. Dad was insane. Mom was insane. She wanted to see Mako. Suddenly the television cut back to a news room full of shocked and confused faces, interrupting a businessman in Corner Pub mid-sentence. There was silence, before it cut again to a podium somewhere. The woman behind it was apparently called Tara Keene, and she told them that everything was under control. The phenomenon had been figured out and was entirely harmless. There would be three blinks in short succession, then five, then one exactly… She waited for a moment. Now. And it happened as promised. Dad was violently coughing on the other side of the table, so Gemma turned up the volume. It got even worse once she did. Mrs Keene apparently was the spokeswoman for a transnational, though EU-led panel of experts investigating the phenomenon. This time all of them had a coughing fit collectively. As a family. The way they had been collectively doing almost everything over the past two days. No one had said it out loud yet, at least no one reputable, but the blinking did seem to occur mostly during the Afro-European daytime. Sol-Systems’ first camera was located somewhere in Scotland. People on the internet had somehow figured that out from weather patterns and the occasional airplane flying by, though more cameras all over the world had of course been added since. Made available by mostly anonymous sources. No one had brought it up because it was ridiculous. Aliens or gods or anything really never communicated with Europe. They always communicated with the states. Everyone knew that. Europe wouldn’t launch missiles at the sun. It was unthinkable. Stories about people whose thoughts became true came to mind. Gemma had once read a YA-series about that. If she had been in Corner Pub and someone had held a microphone to her mouth that instant; she would have proposed that they were in exactly such a story and more specifically they were living out the nightmare of her math teacher. The world was going insane and the EU was handling it. The only person at school was an immigrant girl reading fantasy books. It would have made a lot of sense… but sadly she was not in Corner Pub and sense didn’t matter anymore. Mrs. Keene for her part at least looked very American. According to her Wikipedia page she was the sort of modern metropolitan who didn’t live anywhere but rather just stayed in places and became American by default. Her accent didn’t give anything away on that front, and she used a lot of words that Gemma didn’t know, like “contingency” and “imperative”. Those were reassuring. Mom always said that it was important to know as many words as one could, because if you knew all the words, then no one would be able to sell you anything. Gemma didn’t get the benefit of that. In fact she wanted people to sell her things, but she tried to heed the advice either way. Sometimes she wondered whether dad did most of the grocery shopping because he didn’t know all of the words, and would therefore still be sold things. The speech had degraded into a Q&A with various remote-participating reporters. Few of them even attempted to hide the mad scramble going on in the backgrounds of their respective studios, and those who did seemed far less prepared than their colleagues in a desperate attempt to uphold professional decorum. To a question about the riots, widespread panic and general unrest caused by the committee's caginess with regards to the information Keene seemed to possess, the American looking woman responded calmly: “We can say with absolute confidence that our current approach lies within the μ+4σ to μ+5σ range of policies with respect to how well they minimize long term damage” she gave a brief smile “I hope you can appreciate that public relations rarely get to compete with particle physics in the socio-cultural arena of certainty”. What followed was an introductory course on p-values by a statistician who seemed to have been woken up for this very occasion, and which ended in broad agreement among media personnel that this conclusion to the press-conference could not possibly have been more than an exceptionally tasteless joke at the expense of a wildly distraught and uncertain populace. Gemma didn’t think she understood the statistics talk, so she messaged Mako about it.
September 21st, 09:26, Apartment of C. J. Everard, Aberdeen, Scotland Sol-Systems had skyrocketed into global celebrity over the course of a day, and it wasn’t the sort of inconsequential niche eminence she had once enjoyed in online techno-mystic circles. The readership of her blog eclipsed most nation-states, and people would probably give her grotesque amounts of money if she asked for it. If. The force attempting to communicate with her might not take kindly to such flagrant abuses of her position, Caitlyn thought, lying amidst pseudo-sedimentary note-litter and staring up at the ceiling of her apartment. She was trying to ignore the cat to her left, a creature which couldn’t possibly have slipped through the gap in her amateurishly-fixed door frame, and which could therefore not possibly be real. Non-real critters had been an issue in the past, though it would be unbecoming of the sun’s chosen ward to give in to such delusions, especially since parts of the internet were already calling her crazy again, and not in the maverick sort of sense, or how Ronald D. Laing and his successors occasionally saw messianic intensities pulsing through her unconventional perception-space. The most recent excuse they had capitalized upon was her attempt to read the lengths of non-blink intervals during the first day in units of blink lengths (~0,38065 seconds) as their corresponding UTF-8 characters. This seemed sensible, since storing cryptographic data in the varied length of blink-absences as opposed to the fixed-length blinks themselves greatly increased the possible information density. The downside was that it yielded rather large numbers, which couldn’t easily be mapped onto anything that wasn’t a massive character-set or a list of coordinates. Both approaches proved minimally fruitful, in addition to only working for Tuesday as well as the last half-hour, but not for the short, regular patterns of Wednesday. These could be understood as keys to be applied to the number set in order to avoid careening into artless two-system explanations, she thought, though technically she was working with a two-systems explanation already. The very first signal after all was obviously an un-coded attention-flare, and some of the others might also be. Caitlyn exhaled forcefully and blinked a sky pattern at the ceiling in hopes that the floating shapes before her eyes might reveal some mysteries trapped therein. The Unicode idea wasn’t even that bad. It had potential once shifted or reordered through some decryption key, but media sentiment turned against her when Caitlyn had pointed out that the “^^^” sequence, which occurred once on Tuesday corresponded to the element of earth in various net-based ritualistic codings. The simple observation was not taken seriously to put it lightly and even the far more relevant point that such a clustered repetition of any symbol should be rather significant was mostly tainted by association. As if in sympathy, the unreal cat licked a tear off of sol-system’s face, tempting her to start believing in the creature slightly more. The smell of its breath indicated that it had been eating some of the meal-remnants strewn about on her floor. Another point in favor of reality. Believing in the cat didn’t much improve Caitlyn’s situation though. In fact it made it worse. She hadn’t much trusted the US-president’s press statement claiming they were not in fact trying to take her in. This was after she had posted her worries about it to Sol-Systems, and she hadn’t much trusted the Scottish prime minister either when she said the same. Intelligence agencies had far too long and storied a history of using animals in anything ranging from spy-craft to kamikaze bomb-delivery systems. Be it listening devices embedded into dead-drop rats, the ill-fated 1960s attempt at an acoustic kitty, or micro-cameras attached to pigeons; the belief that any creature proximal to locations of interest is in the employ of a government seemed to be a good baseline assumption to the reasonably careful. That wasn’t even mentioning the use of donkeys, bats, oxen, dolphins, and dogs as living explosives in a number of conflicts, which still fueled Caitlyn’s paranoid fear of most of these animals. Especially dogs. At least cats didn’t yet have a history of artificially induced spontaneous combustion, though a wire or camera would still be an issue, as well as a major violation of privacy. The woman sat up, looked deep into the creature’s eyes and blinked slowly, attentively scanning for signs of hesitance in its subsequent reciprocation. None. Though this might be the result of improved training over the past seventy years. Caitlyn still elected to thoroughly examine the cat which she now called Kuttadid; checking for scars left behind by possible implants, before providing it with a bowl of water. Kuttadid after the cyclic chrono-demon of precarious states. After all, there was still an inherent risk to keeping it despite the trustworthy look which might have been meticulously engineered over decades by US-scientists. Perhaps a vestigial semiotic Schrödinger-ness negatively impacting certainty-assessments with regards to all members of the species. Who knew. Kuttadid blinked again, and it worked perfectly. The gray being was already becoming part of the family. Her, the cat and the sky all blinking in unison. Even Caitlyn’s laptop, which sat amid a salt circle, mostly out of habit and partially out of fear, seemed to crave joining in on the fun. Ominous. There had been a saying among them. “Them”, before such a term, over the course of internal disagreements, ceased to include her; “It’s unsurprising that there are spirits in the web. The place is after all utterly inhospitable to anything that isn’t.” So much still felt true. She minimized the window in which coordinate-locations lay connected by myriad different, equally meaningless patterns, though she might as well have discarded it. Below the noise-like striations and vertices rested a yet-mounting pile of notifications about missing or possibly-missing persons compiled in real time by her followers. Many of them believed they were contributing to a ledger of abductions or possibly raptures. Possibilities not to be entirely rejected, though Sol-Systems herself was looking for likely kidnapping-victims. A lot of people had gone missing over the past two days. Snapped, overdosed, ran off into the woods or died amidst the panic. Some intentionally, some not. Professor DeVries on the other hand was unlikely to die, unintentionally or otherwise. She never seemed like the sort of person capable of traditional mortality, so when her blog, which was exhilaratingly insightful, despite what one might assume from the ivory-tower consensus-philosophical drivel that were her mainstream publications, went dark; the only reasonable explanation was that she had been taken in by any of the agencies which claimed to have no plans of doing the same to Sol-Systems. If Caitlyn were a state, she would certainly want DeVries on her staff, though as a state it would be unlikely to get her cooperation willingly. Now; a post about this explicit hypothesis would be suicidal of course. You never play with open cards under these circumstances, so Sol-Systems had simply asked for any and all apparent disappearances and written a program that automatically checked the responses she received for names of people with Wikipedia-entries. A lot of the hits Caitlyn got were irrelevant celebrities, though some could plausibly be actual victims of the conspiracy. Links were clicked and notes taken. This one was interesting: Tara Keene who had apparently not been heard from since yesterday when she missed an interview in Paris. Sol-Systems hadn’t really been looking for journalists, but her specific niche made this particular case a different matter. Even if Keene wasn’t herself useful; she was highly connected to the sorts of people who were and therefore was someone who might take note if they disappeared. At the very least a circumstantially related assassination was quite plausible, so Caitlyn scrawled the name onto a post-it. More intriguing yet; the source claimed to have been keeping an eye on Keene beforehand for non-disappearance, though very much blink-related reasons which they refused to disclose via mail. It smelled like a trail. Sol-systems sprung up to look out of her window, where for almost an hour now blinks had been occurring at a rate comparable to Tuesday. She had considered moving her base of operations anyway, just in case someone ended up choosing blunt force and dragging her out of here. Hiding did seem wise, and she had also considered gathering the sorts of allies who wouldn’t cooperate with states, though there was always the issue of trustworthiness. She mimed the position in which she had received her first message from the sun, clapped her hands together above her head and asked “should I go?”. The response was instantaneous. Kuttadid did not know what was happening to him as he was picked up and carried out of the door by a sickly looking woman with a travel-bag, sunglasses and a dull-ish kitchen knife in the pocket of her vest. Caitlyn did not exactly know it either, but this was the sun’s wish, and she would not argue with that.
September 21st, 09:41, Military facility near Oban, Scotland The cosmic intelligence on the other end of the line claimed to not engage in anything humans conceived of as actual time travel. Michael had been cautious to explicitly think “humans” and not “people”, a mistake which he’d made before and which, due to his own lenience with the concept, had resulted in finding out that a lot more “people” were able to observe the phenomenon than there were humans on earth. In other words: He had been given confirmation that there were indeed aliens with telescopes pointing this way, a fact which he chose not to reveal to the council, since it technically wasn’t about Sol. Dumont-Vatel nodded as everyone else attempted to determine whether this answer was more or less terrifying than the alternative. Most decided “more”. A number of visibly shaken, respectable looking men in respectable looking suits seemed to trickle out of the room with every new question and no one present could exactly bring themselves to blame them. Professor Georges Akande, who had finally wrapped up his private dispute with the philosopher, raised his voice over the general murmur: “How well versed are you in the field of mathematics, Mr. Lowe?” His go-to answer would have been “relatively well”, though “relatively” in the presence of a world renowned expert meant “not at all”, so Michael went with “not particularly”. “Does the Seifert-conjecture mean anything to you?” Akande kept going and Michael shook his head, relieved to not have overstated the depth of his knowledge. “The Poincaré conjecture?” “Only the name”, he replied and the Mathematician smiled a brilliantly wide, toothy smile. “Not a problem. None at all. According to the Seifert conjecture, all 3-manifolds which are closed and simply connected are homeomorphic to the 3-sphere. I will explain more if necessary, but please try it once already; “the Seifert conjecture is true”.” Something felt off as the question seeped out of Michael’s mind and into the void, though Sol responded with a blink either way. “Astounding!” Akande laughed and it took a moment for him to calm down. “Now; I am not frivolously tasking you to solve the mysteries of my field. The conjectures, Seifert and Poincaré, are already proven to be false and true respectively. I apologize for the bit of deception. The aim was not to test Sol’s mathematical skill, nor was the experiment even my idea, I just chose the examples. Susanne, would you explain?” “Of course.” Professor DeVries smiled very much unlike her colleague. It was the sort of smile that made flowers wither and gave small animals heart attacks. “If Georges followed my stipulation, and I assume he did, then his explanation of the Seifert conjecture was in fact an explanation of the Poincaré conjecture, correct?” Akande nodded. “Yes, the true Seifert conjecture claims that all vector fields which are non-singular and continuous have a closed orbit” “Good. I have no idea what that means, but good. Does everyone here see the relevance? Sol assessed the Seifert conjecture, which is false, as false, despite the thing which Mr. Lowe thought was meant by it – the Poincaré conjecture – being true. If the subjective data which is contextually provided is meaningfully wrong, then Sol will defer to the objective set of word-data which it apparently possesses. This set seems to include knowledge about what the Seifert conjecture really is.” Michael desperately hoped that “knowing what something really is” meant “knowing what the relevant set of people referred to with this term” and not that mathematical objects had objective names somehow stored in concept space, though at this point he was willing to bet that the most horrifying option was always true. “This seems like an absurdly strong claim going by so little evidence, Professor DeVries” Alison Garber-Bullough interjected and some others voiced approval. The philosopher sighed. “We can just ask. You’re all aware of that, right? Please do go ahead and ask. Still; the truth of this should be obvious from Mr. Lowe’s report on Sol’s use of explicit contextual information. Sol, if it seeks to be perceived as trustworthy, needs to be experienced as correct. If it is willing to claim that Mr. Lowe will be fine on any given day, then it HAS to implement this mechanism, since humans are more often than not incorrect in their models of themselves. If Sol made a judgment based on Michael Lowe’s explicit thoughts about what “fine” constitutes, then it runs the risk of him experiencing the prediction as wrong. He might not feel fine despite his explicit model predicting that he would. Sol needs to run the genuine factors as opposed to the imagined factors. It needs to check actual fine-ness and it needs to check the actual Seifert conjecture.” DeVries paused. “I didn’t see anything on the screen, so I assume I’m right?” She was, though Michael was still awestruck by her confidence in the hypothesis. “Are we all convinced? May I proceed?” All parties pretended to ignore the rather loud gum-chewing sounds coming through the philosopher’s microphone as she spoke. Garber-Bullough ignored it most fervently, as the tiny woman straightened her lab-coat in order to project some authority. “For the most part, yes. You made your point, but might I have a small additional experiment?”. There was some poison to the sweetness, a counter-toxin to DeVries’ condescension, and Michael wondered when this had turned into a power struggle whose factions he couldn’t quite make out yet. The philosopher and the physicist were on different teams at least, so much was clear. With a vaguely “eh”-like sound and a wave of the hand, professor Bullough was allowed to make a move, though she appeared extremely displeased about the manner in which this was conveyed. “You are unfamiliar with the proton spin crisis I would imagine?” This was Michael’s time to shine; he was in fact familiar with a fair bit of particle physics by way of Reg. “Proton spin not being entirely the product of quark spin right? Like only by about half and the rest is maybe orbital angular momentum of the quarks or some gluon property?” There was an approving eyebrow-raise and maybe a hint of a smile before the physicist continued. “Yes, well there is another similar phenomenon called the Smith-effect. Some people do not believe it even really exists, you see, since relevant events at our current energy-capability are staggeringly rare… so: Would you please try “The Smith-effect does occur”?” Nothing happened, but Connor looked worried for some reason. Helena DeVries simply seemed annoyed “And how exactly was this relevant? Just another name-swap to make really sure?”. Apparently feeling like she won something, the physicist went back to a more neutral tone of voice: “Not at all, I’m just testing the limits a little, when it comes to true names. To my knowledge, and the internet would seem to agree; there is no such thing as a Smith-Effect, despite how common the name is. This leaves the possibilities that there will be a Smith-effect, or that someone called Smith privately christened their own phenomenon and we don’t have widespread records of it. Either way it’s interesting.” Michael added in his head “or there is a property of reality objectively called the Smith effect, regardless of what anyone calls it.” and felt a shiver run down his spine. A few places over, DeVries looked unconvinced. “This time it’s you jumping to conclusions with insufficient evidence, no?”. Some heads turned towards her. “This is something I’ve been wanting to test for a while now. Mr. Lowe: “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”” There was a brief look of recognition flickering across Tackett’s face before he slammed his hand down hard on a button affixed to his desk and everything went to noise. Screeching pandemonium tore Michael’s consciousness to ill-formed tatters that felt more like primal instinct than anything his mind usually produced. Clutching his ears barely did anything and through his vision, which also seemed distorted by either synesthesia or tears, he could just about make out the comparative calm of the panel. Some looked angry or confused, but they didn’t look like they were hearing the worst sound ever concocted. Thought-disruption. A neural misfire which almost managed to resemble a full-fledged idea grasped on to the hypothesis for dear life and followed it along the sensory maelstrom. They were trying- but why? Michael’s brain had scrambled its way back to the nonsense-statement, and not knowing what else to do, he simply screamed it onto Sol’s altar, hoping it would somehow save him. The slightly-off feeling brought about by the process hardly managed to distract from the noise at all. Nothing distracted from the noise. It was moments after this resigned acceptance that Piltz tackled his charge to the floor and everything was quiet again. Four men shaped like bodyguards and dressed like secret agents lay groaning along the route that Conner would have had to take to get here, and the faces of the committee-members went from confused and angry to significant worry. At this point it was clear to Micheal that a number of speakers must have been positioned just such as to constructively interfere exactly where he used to stand behind the podium, and also that his thought-disruption idea was in all likelihood correct. The panel was worried about how Sol might react to a nonsense statement, and they thought this could stop him from the attempt like a barely-more-humane shock collar. “Do they take me for this stupid” flashed through his mind, and he had only just regained enough composure to not put the question directly to Sol. Sprawled out on the polished wood of the stage, Micheal didn’t even know what would be worse: Them believing that this was good enough to keep him under control permanently, or them not believing that it would work, but implemented the system anyway due to a lack of preferable alternatives. “You could have simply told me not to! Do you really think I’m an idiot?” Everyone on the unnamed panel seemed frozen in shock, though Ernest Clin, the Neurobiologist who had looked like an anthropomorphized time-bomb from the start, was finally ready to explode. “Excuse me, Mr Lowe, but you ARE an idiot and the associated inability to acknowledge this fact poses an imminent danger to all of us. We have just witnessed this danger thanks to my apparently suicidal colleague.” He glared knives at Susanne DeVries. “You can try to disagree here but it really would not be wise to. Whatever force chose you as its plaything has made that into a testable claim. You might outwit the average Joe, but in the end, none of them would have been so mental as to even try figuring this out by themselves. As it stands you are far too stupid to be entrusted with your cognitive goings-on, let alone their fallout, and if your ego didn't so entirely dwarf your wit, Mr Lowe, you'd have gone to someone more qualified immediately.” The man took a moment to catch his breath without looking away from Michael for even a second. “I can see you restraining the thought. You know what would happen. You know this committee is far better suited to the job than you are, so who if not an idiot would spend an entire day messing with powers far outside their pay-grade, powers which affect all of humanity, without even attempting to get a second opinion?” There seemed to be at least a note of agreement in the faces of many taskforce-members, and even Michael himself couldn’t claim that the accusation was entirely unwarranted. Still; nothing happened. He didn’t break the universe during his day of private experimentation. He hadn’t tried paradoxes or anything obviously unsafe like that, so didn’t the very fact that this discussion was happening speak slightly in favor of his competence? Clin’s face only grew redder as he explained this. “Stop it with the arguments for dimwits. We aren't your drinking buddies. The fact that it's harmless as of our current understanding in no way justifies your earlier experimentation since you did not then know that it was harmless, Mr Lowe. Figuring out that a landmine was just a prop and not the real deal by stomping on it does not make one as terrifically clever as you seem to believe. It makes one an idiot with the luck to still be standing. Think of the universes you doomed in which it wasn't harmless. Are you a gambler, Mister Lowe? I'd strongly advise against picking up the habit. You would not fare well.” Michael did not know how to respond, though luckily Professor Dumont-Vatel coughed softly into the uncomfortable silence. “While parts of this are obviously valid observations harshly made; It is also true that this treatment of Mr. Lowe has not aided our safety. Not in this world at least, in which a significant number of landmines do thankfully appear to be props. The acoustic bombardment caused Sol to respond to a dangerous request, where simply asking Lowe to discard it might well have been more fruitful. Do you not think so, Ernest?” The Biologist did not respond. “Well, now that we know Sol to simply assess meaningless statements as false, Mrs. DeVries, would you care to enlighten us as to what you were trying to accomplish?”. Clin sank back into his chair, no less fuming, though some of his anger was now directed at the philosopher again. Mild surprise showed on Susanne’s face. “That’s obvious, is it not? I was honestly a bit taken aback when none of you objected to professor Bullough’s conduct. After all, we were explicitly forbidden from posing paradoxes or nonsense-statements without unanimous approval. Still: what if there truly was no Smith-effect. Claiming its occurrence or non occurrence would be nonsense, no? Apparently the good Mr. Lowe isn’t the only one stupid enough to miss these dangers, if we go by professor Clin’s interpretation, though I’d rather wager that we are simply all quite willing to risk disaster when tempted by curiosity. I know this about myself, and if we can bring ourselves to be honest here, I suspect that most of you do too.” She scanned her colleagues, all of whom were rather difficult to read except for Dumont-Vatel who gave a little chuckle that could only be interpreted as agreement. “There is this pet-phrase of Žižek’s, which he attributes to the medical profession: “Don’t just do something! Stand there!” as a simple reversal of its more common twin. Perhaps it is reasonable in medicine to wait and see before starting a treatment that might cause additional harm if the symptoms were falsely interpreted, but I for one have always found it a loathsome sentiment. Sol has given us no reason to believe that this inquiry is dangerous to anything but the human psyche, so if we neglect to use any and all tools at our disposal in a genuine pursuit of knowledge for reasons of misguided cowardice masquerading as caution, then I hardly believe this panel deserving of a title like task-force. We know now that the Smith effect does or will exist in some manner. We know now that genuine nonsense is judged as false. We survived discovering both of these facts, and I suspect we will face and survive more to come, so should we not perhaps consider taking off the training wheels and actually do our job? ”
September 21st, 08:00, Office of Thomas Lamb, London, England, UK Scrolling down to the spot where the red line concluded its plummet took longer than last time, though not because the end-point had moved. New data hadn’t been entered since yesterday, and that made memorizing the slope easy at least. Zeigarnik-aided mnemonic obsession had made the stockbroker formerly known as Merlin by his peers into the foremost historical expert on the last 48 hours of an expired economy’s downfall from gradual corrosion to sudden multi-organ-failure in the blink of a sky. Whatever algorithm used to update the line had disassembled at terminal velocity, or, according to the “less dramatic” reports, which Thomas Lamb considered to be more dramatic; the people in charge of maintenance had simply shut it off when they judged the stock-market to be unsalvageable. He didn’t even disagree. The market was unsalvageable. Money had become worthless over night, which was for the best in some ways, since Thomas had sunk most of his stockpile into the biggest dip world history had to offer. The only thing left gnawing was a primal desire for pattern-completion as he scrolled up and down the sheer jagged drop representing the death throes of his former occupation. He’d been doing this for days now. Up and down and up and down again because he didn’t have the slightest idea what else to do. He’d continued to get up at five, do his exercise, take a shower and then head for the now empty sky-scraper that housed his office, only to sit there and stare desperately at a graph which wasn’t going anywhere. He’d called his assistant to ask for a cup of coffee, but he hadn’t picked up. The assistants of various acquaintances hadn’t picked up either. Just voicemail after voicemail after voicemail. This too wasn’t as much unexpected as inconvenient. Frustrated, Thomas had gone outside only to find shops closed for obvious reasons, entrances barred, small fires burning materials across a wide range of smell and toxicity. A cold breeze blew through the savaged streets of Canary Warf, carrying with it trash, smoke and shouting as he strode along them; royalty of a paradigm now rendered derelict. Some kids were discussing a drug deal. The sort which should have gone extinct yesterday: A substance of genuine material value in exchange for printed paper, though novel intuitions always took a while to take root. It’s not like Thomas himself had made the necessary adjustments to his auto-pilot, but still, the pretension that currency still meant something evoked a chuckle. The sort of amusement long practiced by someone who made their fortune from others incorrectly assessing worth. Low level stimulant consumption had been rampant across his field, though Thomas shied away from anything more potent than caffeine for the simple reason of how much it unnerved him that he could afford to get addicted. If there were breaks affixed to the runaway feedback loops of his cognition or a wall to run into, then the whole affair would be a different matter, but with his erstwhile fortune neither of those could be claimed to exist. Now though? It would only be a matter of time until the less cued-in portions of societal ruin realized the obsolescence of currency, so perhaps he could no longer afford to get addicted. Perhaps trying some substances presented a genuine option in Sol’s world. Thomas had only engaged with the train of thought half heartedly then, since he spotted old Barry sitting near a particularly noxious fire not too long after he did the teenagers. “Still here, eh?” The bearded hobo croaked through tar-black plumes of aerosolized carcinogen. Barry had been a staple of Canary Warf over the years: An old and weathered doomsday prophet, who suited the surrounding aesthetics as well as he ever had, though now by way of congruity instead of contrast. An electronic display behind him still rotated through out of date stock prices. “Still here” Thomas sighed as he sat down and threw his wallet over, but the vagrant passed it back without even looking inside. Silent agreement suffused the difficult-to-breathe air and for a moment everything seemed incredibly simple. The stock broker matched the direction of Barry’s gaze, which led him vaguely toward a flock of pigeons. “I fear the wizard does go down with his castle“. Somehow there was a smile on Thomas’ lips and he didn’t know why he had put it there. He also didn’t know why he should discard it though. From beside came a choking cackle which seemed like it might scare away the birds but didn’t. Normal reactions to normal stimuli. Bubble-ontology. They were part of an independent eco-system so accustomed to itself that nothing flinched when external reality collapsed. “I thought you hated that whole “Merlin” thing” True. Being called a wizard, even when it was meant as a compliment always seemed to credit to innate quality what was better explained by long honed skill. Thomas was never magical so far as he could tell. He was simply good at his job. “In the old world I hated it. But now that the magic is dead; being the sage of a lost craft seems fitting somehow.” A lone cloud drifted through the sky above them. Maybe this was melancholy; some vague feeling of loss submerged within ethereal calm. “How’s it feel?” he tagged on “being right?”. Barry looked almost hurt as he stroked his beard. “Thomas, I like you. You talk to me like I’m a person, and you’ve probably given me more money than everyone else combined, but there’s no reason to patronize an old man. I wasn’t right about shit.” It took a bit for Thomas to make sense of the rasp. “but the world IS ending” “The world isn’t ending. The world got a bit weirder. It does that all the time. If anything, it’s ending a bit less now that we’ve gotten rid of this shit.” He kicked at the wallet. “There are fires in the street.” Panic rose in the voice of the stock broker, who was slowly realizing that he had avoided thinking about this. Focusing on the financial meltdown and his daily routine had been decent distraction from the fact that a part of him, a quiet but insistent voice near the brain-stem, seemed to really believe this was the end of everything. “There’s fires in tons of streets. Always have been. The fact that this one hasn’t seen its fair share of smoke and flame is more surprising than any of the fucking rest. Light and heat are mankind’s friends. It’s a bad time to be forgetting that.” Maybe some fires, but the one that they were sitting around..? Thomas nodded in the thing’s direction. “This doesn’t smell friendly. Smells like it wants us dead.” Barry smiled as if to suggest that he’s had plenty of friends who smelled worse, but what he actually ended up saying was that this was a good deterrent against the really unfriendly people. The ones who kick your shit in before they take what little light and heat you’ve managed to find. There’s better fires for those who want to quarrel about them. Ones that don’t smell like death and the approach thereof. But the old man was fine picking the worst piece of flame if it meant he could leave his quarreling days behind him. The absence of his usual cushy chair was making itself known and Thomas folded his legs so as to sit more comfortably. “Can I ask you something?” His gaze was still locked on the pigeons, picking away at yet-unburned trash. “Why are you still here? I’ve got the office, and that feels more like home than the place where I sleep and shower, but you… I know they’re building little settlements for anyone in need of shelter from something or other. Heard it on the radio. Why aren’t you there?” Barry looked up at the sky. “Maybe I’ll join their little communes eventually. Not like I haven’t been thinking about it, but really my anchor’s sort of the same. This is my spot. Hasn’t even gotten particularly less hospitable to me, so why leave? Why abandon my post, when the world might still end from some shit or another. Old shit, new shit... There’s enough shit out there to do us in eventually. For now I’ll pick consistency over comfort. It’s a hobgoblin my little mind has grown rather fond of.” Maybe that’s what Thomas was doing too. Foolish consistency in the face of chaos “Emerson, eh?”. The old man shrugged “Don’t know, wouldn’t know. Just a sentence: Neither owned nor traded. Belongs to everyone all the same.” He smiled into the fire “You sure you’re not ready to join the anarchists?” “As sure as you are.” Thomas looked over at the vagrant “Am I sure?” His hands were trembling. “If everything is really coming to an end, and it does feel that way, then what could be more pathetic than simply following old patterns until I blink out of existence? This… This shapeless dread is so much bigger than any actionable thought I could throw at it. So big that I haven’t even noticed it in two days because it filled the entire shot of my mental landscape so much that it blended with the background. I even considered buying drugs today as though that was gonna do anything. Why not join the anarchists? So many frivolous little ideas running straight into nothingness.” The stockbroker was almost screaming by the point that Barry patted him on the back. “Drugs, huh? Like coke?” “I don’t really care” The old man handed over a thermos and Thomas took an enormous gulp expecting alcohol but getting coffee. Terrible coffee. Acrid and with a metallic aftertaste that overshadowed the entire rest of the flavor profile. The taste aggressively synergized with the smell of the fire to make it worse, but how bad it was only made it better in the moment. Tears were welling up in Thomas’ eyes, and he could have blamed it on the smoke, but didn’t bother to. “There’s different types of consistency, right? All those other suits around here; they’re also being consistent. Consistent with what’s expected of a person when the word’s ending. You scream, run, drink your brains out. You definitely don’t come to work… But that didn’t even occur to you, did it? You’re being consistent with the persona of the wizard. Hell if I know whether that’s a good thing or not, but it’s better than falling in with that crowd.” Barry finally met his eyes. “One of those settlements might need a wizard.” The coffee was still terrible when Merlin took another gulp “they might need an old prophet too”.
September 21st, 13:19, Corner Pub, Edinburgh, Scotland Journalism was the only profession in which more people had been showing up to work since the sky lost its mind and the world followed suit. Not a moment passed in which there weren’t at least three people encircling Siobhan, clamoring and practically begging to be her assistant or otherwise asking for equipment so expensive that it didn’t belong anywhere near dignified journalism. Most of the time the reporter simply checked if they had a camera phone. They usually did. Then she told the brats that this was good enough, and it was. Siobhan Gohdes had about fifty assistants at this point. Very few of them particularly useful, but that didn’t much matter since the applicants generally didn’t even ask for money. When they did, it felt like a tagged on formality, some socio-habitual verbal tic, and once the request for remuneration was declined, most of them still took the job. All anyone wanted was information these days, and since Sol-Systems wasn’t taking interns, the BBC was the next best place to get it. Some obstinate chunk of cobbled street made the pain in Siobhan’s broken, heels-bound toe flare up above the dull baseline of its heavily sedated drone. When the reporter had checked it in the morning, the tissue had been a ghastly shade of green, and when she pushed on it through agony and intermittent grey-out; the indents her finger left seemed to linger for an unnerving while longer than she’d like them to. No time to see a doctor, not now. Hiding the mess in socks had been somewhat helpful. At the very least soothing on a placebo-esque level augmented by years of job experience. The woman pressing her way through the crowded streets around Corner Pub had gotten very good at only believing what she saw with her own eyes, and she thankfully wasn’t seeing the mangled state of her foot. Fuck! Another bit of cobblestone. Somehow Siobhan’s mind managed to blame Sol-Systems for this, and once she got done almost biting a chunk out of her cheek, she was in no mood to correct its intuitive assessment. Sunfluencers had become dime-a-dozen almost immediately. Spoiled kids pumping noise along a broad spectrum from panic to modern-day-gospel through the arteries of social media. None of them however were quite as big a threat to the press as Caitlyn Everard. Her identity had been floating as an open secret of sorts through the ether of real news-media’s internal conversations since yesterday; everyone waiting for someone else to blink first on publishing it. That was the issue: People liked Solsys. Some almost worshiped Solsys, so if you wanted to deride her latest incoherent theory-drivel, then you’d better have a really good case to make, and if you wanted to reveal her identity? Hah! Half the world would immediately think you were trying to get Everard caught by any among the litany of shady organizations she thought were hunting her. It was prestige alone allowing Siobhan Gohdes to still be on the airwaves as an outspoken critic of the paranoid schizophrenic who thought a star was talking to her personally. The sole voice of reason in a journalistic framework which had discarded even the pretense of valuing such a thing over the course of a few days. Absolutely maddening. More maddening still was the fact that Sol-Systems managed to be right a worrying amount. Recently she had detected that a blink was shorter than the others by 0.06 seconds exactly (!!!) and then it was Siobhan’s job to grind her teeth as she confirmed this info to the public. The info of an insane person who was currently hitch-hiking god knows where while badly faking a Russian accent and wielding more social power than the entire news apparatus combined. This was if the woman’s assistants were to be believed. She almost wanted to kick her broken foot against something again to vent the frustration. “Ah, if it isn’t the doubt and her shadows!” Reza greeted in his thick Farsi accent from inside of a transporter. “Hop in” he offered, before directing his gaze at Siobhan’s camera-wielding “shadows” and adding “Just her. Is crowded, see? I’ll tell the others to let you lot through.” Just like that she was sitting in the passenger’s seat of a car, and forward movement became a whole lot less painful. The crowd parted as they entered the little settlement around Corner Pub. “Welcome to the City.” It looked like a perfectly normal street, though that sight had admittedly become exceptional by itself. “Oh?” She looked at him and quite sarcastically called it very clever, what with the whole city-in-a-city nonsense. “Which one is it then to your mind? Besźel or Ul Qoma?” The Iranian laughed “I made the same joke when they told me, you know? No, Siobhan, this is just the City. Edinburgh can be whatever it pleases.” “That won’t be confusing at all”, she sighed. “I’m certain it won’t.” The journalist wasn’t sure if she particularly wanted to know what Edinburgh pleased to be, but her feelings about this City of Reza’s were similar. Splintering like that felt dangerous. Whether they wanted to call them communes or cities or micro-nations. “Couldn’t we have just enjoyed a free united Scotland for a while?” Siobhan mumbled under her breath and Reza pretended not to hear it. She liked the man well enough: He held moderately high profile in the union of transport workers in addition to being an activist of sorts. Decent head on his shoulders. Gave a good interview from time to time. Reza was a bit far left for Siobhan’s tastes, but she liked the far left ones a lot better than the far right ones, so she was willing to extend an olive branch more often than not. Still: Seeing him and the other socialists essentially defend private property was a profoundly strange experience, so she called him out on the perceived hypocrisy. Reza exhaled deeply. “That’s the issue with you: You don’t actually try to understand the frameworks, so you just latch onto the labels. Even setting aside that the Albarns are as petite-bourgeois as it gets and never would have been a primary concern in the first place: Try to look through the terminology and into the actual social machinery. Is there anything going on power-wise that we’d take offense to? Is anyone being exploited?” While she hadn’t heard of anything that seemed like exploitation, it was still odd to see some business-owners lead this strange commune of Sol-theorists, radicals and union-men. He laughed again. “Maybe. But again; the label isn’t the issue. They’re competent enough people; Katje and Atiq. Got a bunch of good will on their side, as well as the good sense to outsource decision-making on the matters they don’t know shit about. Maybe that’ll flip at some point, you never know, but it’s not like they hold any sort of leverage if it does. We let them be spokespeople because they’re good spokespeople. End of story. If Atiq wanted to throw out the needy, we’d throw him out instead.” All of this reminded Siobhan of a spiel he had once given her on counter-institutions, but she was mostly happy that her foot was getting some rest. The titular corner did look rather orderly for what it was worth. Reza said something about how protecting useful things wasn’t the same as protecting property and she nodded along. The City had become one of the more prominent discussion forums on the nature of Sol. Fallout of some early sunfluencers live-streaming the debates in Corner Pub. There were other such gathering spots throughout the world, and any moderately sized town had one somewhere, but if there was something which made Corner Pub special; it was just how organized the place was. Neat rows of people wheeled barrels of various foodstuffs through the streets and towards an old warehouse. They had refashioned it into a cafeteria, Reza explained. Men and women stood in lines which were long and slow-moving, but orderly. No one was getting trampled to death around Corner Pub. The same could distinctly not be said for other gathering spots of comparable fame. If they were on a panel, someone would have almost certainly made a comment about bread lines, and Siobhan was glad they wouldn’t have to get into that old debate again. Instead she asked where the food was coming from, her tone carrying a distinct hint of “will it last?”. Somehow Reza seemed to derive pride from the admission that it was stolen from nearby farms. Mostly the abandoned ones he clarified. That was much better than letting the produce rot in its place, wasn’t it? And once the farmers returned they would surely be glad to see that their fields and livestock had been taken care of rather than left to die. Denizens of the City worked the land diligently and sustainably. It would be made to last. Made to prosper. After all they were “protecting useful things, not property”, the Iranian reiterated. Of course there were some farmers who hadn’t left and cooperated willingly, much like the Albarns, but they were in the minority. Katje Albarn was a restless young woman with curly red hair and a green head-band. Restless and fidgety. She had learned to slow her natural talking speed down to an interview-acceptable pace over the past day, but hadn’t yet shed the habit of aggressively drumming her fingers to compensate. Her husband on the other hand responded to Siobhan’s request for an interview by asking “Wouldn’t you rather do something useful?” and then alerting her to the fact that her foot was broken. The journalist told him she was well aware, and he shrugged before leaving to discuss some organizational matters with Reza. Never once throughout the brief exchange did Atiq’s deep-set serious eyes wander, let alone look down to her ankle, which to Siobhan’s dismay was now slightly discolored as well. For what it was worth, the cooperative Albarn confirmed Reza’s story about their figurehead position. Katje even laughed a little at the idea that Corner Pub was still her property. It hadn’t been formally collectivized of course, not de jure, no one had found the time for something like that yet, but de facto? To anyone concerned the entire street was already part of a new commons. She didn’t mind, the former bar owner said. She just hoped the world wasn’t ending, and there wasn’t much Siobhan could say to that. Everything was a strange inversion of the classical man-bites-dog adage these days. The truly interesting stories had become those about normalcy because normalcy had become unfathomable. Any sort of madness was trite and expected and a pale shadow in the face of a flickering sun. That was part of a phone conversation she had had with Reza before coming here: About how nothing seemed to be political anymore. There was no other world in which this would not be political, she had claimed, but here they were. The activist’s position was that “the pretension of the apolitical had collapsed along with the status quo” or something like that. Everything was properly political now. Flatly political. Siobhan didn’t see much of a difference between those two positions beyond semantics, so that time it must have been Reza getting lost in labels. Hard to tell. Siobhan didn’t see a lot of difference between much of anything anymore as she sunk into one of the bar stools and bled into the noise suffusing Corner Pub. A message alerted her to another Everard sighting in Dunkeld: Allegedly attempting to meet up with a co-conspirator. A sound guy alerted her to the fact that she had thrown up some minutes ago, and she pretended to remember this as she checked herself in the mirror to see if her hair was alright. It was. She had probably checked it a couple of times already. Pain was melting into conversation and vice versa as Siobhan tried to reach for another handful of painkillers but found the package empty. The journalist’s hands were trembling in the places where she could make out their contours. Noise. Atiq Albarn was crouching below her now, dipping her foot into a bucket of ice water. Cubes cracking and splitting in a manner that she couldn’t hear or see, but which she knew was happening. Siobhan didn’t look down. Some tragedies weren’t hers to report upon and the foot counted itself first among them. An unfathomable normalcy of pain. Still; the mess of sensory inputs was slowly beginning to sound like actual words again, many of them gruff, concerned and belonging to Atiq. The bar owner insisted she go upstairs and take a rest, though Siobhan eventually managed to talk him into a compromise where she simply didn’t leave the chair but was allowed to stay in the main pub-area to film. Soon enough Gohdes was talking again. Arguing. Interviewing. Reporting. Some strength and outline of self-ness returning to her body with every uttered syllable. Pain returned too, but as a distinct entity rather than a permeating feature of disordered perception-space. The fog hadn’t fully receded, but the autopilot was working again. “…What I’m saying is that Sol-System’s isn’t any kind of genius. She’s an obsessive, a very lucky obsessive, who had the right idea at the right time, but the fact is that anyone could have made such a tracking site. Many have made them! Some even similarly early, just with worse searchability, higher latency, more ads or so on. Any among a number of issues which made this one win out, but it was necessarily gonna be someone, right? Their scatterbrained cryptographic rabbit-holes which haven’t of yet revealed anything remotely of use should have dismantled your misplaced hero-worship by now.” Spots like this tended to attract contrarians, so Gohdes had a bit more support in her campaign against Sol-Systems than she would have had elsewhere, but it was still an uphill battle. The boos outnumbered the cheers by a significant margin. Still; there were some cheers, at least until the man on the other side of the counter, a retired engineer in a tweed jacket cracked his knuckles in the most haughtily self-assured manner human anatomy could produce. “Being first itself speaks to a kind of genius, Mrs. Gohdes. We acknowledge this in all other fields. Doing a necessary thing while the world falls to madness… That speaks to mental clarity, no? Since there are at any point a number of geniuses on earth, I would not even doubt that many of the other contenders were similarly competent, but in the end what we got was Sol-Systems. The person who was also first to notice the irregular event this morning, I’m sure you recall. They saw the difference.” His voice oozed smug despite the fact that Siobhan had heard all of this a thousand times over. Inventing a new predictive model might be a sign of genius, or creating a new technology. Applying an old technology to a recent phenomenon pointed to business acumen at best. The thing about seeing a 0.06 second discrepancy… “Oh yes, and the sun speaks to them, I forgot. Solsys is a fraud, and that joke of a claim is outlandish enough to let all but the most sheepishly devoted credulity splatter against a windshield.” The man’s grind widened so slowly, drifting outward to reveal one tooth after another, that it felt to Siobhan like an opening of stage curtains. “But if Solsys were being dishonest, would they not use this to their favor? If I somehow perceived that kind of delay (and it is miraculous, I grant you) then I wouldn’t come out and say so, now would I? One would claim to have been prepared, to have had the measurement system set up and running in anticipation. That way one would sound competent instead of like a loon. The fact that Sol-Systems’ statement to have only checked after the fact is so peculiar and so humbling points to its truth” He slammed a fist onto the counter with that last word for good measure. Quod erat demonstrandum. He certainly didn’t seem to find it unimpressive. Quite the opposite. Where luck was attributed to genius, this instance of absurd invented fairy-tale-luck couldn’t be, and thus it was proof of some divine chosen-ness copacetic with Everard’s own drivel. The man didn’t say any of that of course, because he could not be perceived as a loon himself while defending one. So, he simply alluded to it without using any of the words. Carefully stepping around rhetorical sinkholes. Siobhan chuckled. What a completely normal interview. It was almost like the world wasn’t ending.
September 21st, 11:20, Military facility near Oban, Scotland The room was empty, safe for a solitary white table in its center and the coffee machine which sat atop, connected to the nearest power outlet via a humorously overkill extension cord reel. Alabaster nothingness in a void bleached towards uniformity. Michael couldn’t tell in what way the mood reflected its environs, but he strongly felt that it did. Around the coffee maker lingered a hostile abundance of absence. Oppressively liminal fluorescence digging itself into the floor’s Rorschach smattering of discolorations left behind by decades of multifarious use. Faint mechanical humming and unintelligible conversation drifting in from nearby rooms without ever entering their bubble. Never truly. Unfathomable distance, and the immured space it inhabits. He and Tara were drinking coffee on the floor, while Connor stood in the door-adjacent corner sipping a glass of water. “A recess”, that’s what they’d called it in a mix of panic, bewilderment and attempts to save face. How long it would last was unclear, but what was clear was that they would be in this room until the time had come. Whenever that was. Michael could find out of course, had he not been forbidden from doing so and chosen to oblige. He’d known. He’d known the moment he invoked the nonsense statement that something was different. Something was off. Some strange enduring tingle at the base of the skull, but no one seemed to notice what it was visually. No one but Sol-Systems of course. A random college drop-out in Aberdeen, if Piltz was to be believed, but that couldn’t be it. None of this made any sense, so Michael thought he should stop expecting it to. Still, as much as he tried, his cognition could not be intuitively convinced of being a Boltzmann Brain flickering through entropic chaos. Not yet. Once they allowed him full use of his mind again, perhaps Michael could ask whether the woman was genuinely Sol-connected in some way, though he was betting against it. That would be sane and sane explanations were out of the window. Normal blinks were about 0,38 seconds long. Nonsense- and paradox-blinks were about 0,32 seconds. According to Sol, there was no other type, but task force adjacent people were going over the entirety of their sky data anyway to confirm. Also according to Sol; those two lengths were not arbitrary, but they hadn’t been able to figure out in what way they weren’t. Michael sighed. Him and Tara had been talking about the committee and about their post-Sol world. About social disaster responses and solar eschatology. In many ways it was a humanity spanning past-time they had both been missing out on due to their specific predicaments, and taking part made them feel slightly more connected to their species again. Connected and synecdochical. Even in their scale model of society there was disagreement, friction and incomprehension. Michael for his part thought that the anthropological bones of culture would eventually reset into a vaguely recognizable shape, whereas Tara... Well, she kept referring to it as being within the Schwarzschild Radius, not even attempting to sidestep the worrying implications thereof. “Is there something you know and I don't? We will get out of this, right?" He asked, looking absentmindedly through the steam above his mug. Tara frowned. "We will get out of this room if that's what you're asking, but out of "this"? Michael, the sun is blinking. There is no way we're getting out of that. As people. As a species. I've never seen anything that looked more like a causal boundary between past and present. Going back has become ontologically impossible and all we can do now is acquire data to encrypt into our Hawking-seepage.” Even now she still made everything sound like a sci-fi novel, though it felt slightly more fitting under these circumstances. Some of the voices outside had stopped and even the humming seemed to fade away as they shared a quiet moment of uncertainty as to whether being cut off from the past was even a bad thing necessarily. Previously they would have both claimed “no”, but news coverage seemed to indicate that in many places it might be. “We’ll resume” came the voice of David Alexander Tackett from behind the door, reintegrating an infinite moment back into linear chronology. Most of the panel had settled back into their familiar positions and time-honored poses. Wearing the same old expressions, but wearing them less confidently. Michael noticed that a significant number of observers had not returned from the recess, but more significantly three agents now stood behind Professor DeVries, closely monitoring her actions. “No further anomalies were spotted”, they told him, and he was given permission to verify that claim. He was also given permission to check whether Solsys held any kind of special power, to which the answer was a resounding 0,38 second “no”, and just like that the proceedings resumed as though nothing had happened. Short by a few observers and mildly embarrassed by an anonymous blogger. Gradually it filtered through to Michael by way of Piltz that the philosopher had attempted to post a possibly coded article from within the compound during recess, hence the extra security. The attempt was successfully foiled, but still the panel wanted its lab rat to confirm whether or not secret information had been buried within the text. Michael refused to do so without first reading it and after doing so his veto only became more absolute. The general themes involving an eldritch horror permeating inhuman objective truth could not help but resonate. Susanne DeVries gave a defiant thumbs up and he shuddered looking at the armed guards behind the woman. At the very least she wasn’t being held against her will. Almost certainly the essay had contained coded info – cluster bombs of classified intel in search of minds capable of using it – Michael thought, recalling one of the philosopher’s pet-apothegms: “knowledge is borderline free and borderline harmless in the sense that we accept far greater expenses and far greater risks constantly”. It would later turn out that Professor Bhatti strongly disagreed with that one. Debate had enveloped the topic of whether it was not perhaps safe to share their findings with the public now, seeing how they might go insane if they were never offered an explanation. This was Akande’s stance, though both the politician and the neuro-biologist insisted that the truth wasn’t a satisfying explanation either in this case, and if anything would make people go more insane. “We cannot limit ourselves to that knowledge which the human mind perceives as intuitive”, Garber-Bullough cautioned almost immediately. “My entire field would lie in shambles if we did. That’s the thing; truth is truth no matter how ridiculous we find it. Intuition comes with time.” Michael liked that approach, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it in this case. Dumont-Vatel also nodded along, be it due to excessive optimism or by having developed a far greater trust in his own neuroplasticity over the years. Waiting for a deadlock, the sociologist finally raised her voice: “I understand that we are all strongly invested in this kind of thing, but please ask yourself honestly: Do you believe most people will care? Ten percent even? If we communicate about our progress to the public, it would be prudent to do so for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons.” Silence fell over the now sparsely populated room before a choir of outrage and incredulity rose up again. It noticeably did not include Susanne DeVries, presumably because she would be one of the few people here who did not perceive “ideological” as an insult. Professor Bhatti continued; “You see, scientists and the genuinely religious intersect along the lines of one profoundly rare belief. The belief that reality actually somehow makes sense if you look at it the right way. With the right tools and the right mindset. That there is a coherent, legible, unambiguous rule-set inscribed somewhere into the nature of existence and that all it takes is to find it. We should expect these to be the groups most emotionally affected by recent celestial shenanigans. Everyone else will be disturbed for a while, of course, but give it a few months and they will have accepted it the same way they have accepted all phenomena and inventions since the dawn of time. They don’t need to know how it works, they just need to be relatively confident that it’s harmless. If someone in a sufficiently fancy lab-coat had told them computers run on dark magic, it would have made no difference to them. It works, it’s there, it probably won’t kill me. Our shared cognitive pathology of needing to understand isn’t nearly as universal as all of you seem to believe it is.” The speech invoked furrowed brows and disgruntled mumbling, but no outright disagreement. Even professor DeVries held her tongue about valuing access to this sort of information regardless of whether people cared, which Michael interpreted as choosing not to fight a lost battle. She looked annoyed more so than miserable, chewing her gum even louder than before. Imogen Campbell cleared her throat. “Would it be pragmatic then, Professor Bhatti? Your advice on the matter has been a great aid over the past days and…” She trailed off as she shuffled through some documents on her desk and grimaced. “Well… It might not be as scientifically insightful as the rest of our proceedings, but Mr. Lowe, I do hope you care at least a modicum about the people outside of this room. Would you mind sparing some of your time to see if we can optimize our public response a tad bit? You’re free to check whether my intentions are pure of course. This isn’t about political capital. It is simply about minimizing the suffering of my constituents.” Michael wanted to correct that objective towards “minimizing the suffering of everybody”, but he had a gnawing feeling that the response would be something like “That would include them, no?”. And he had the liberty to make those sorts of adjustments anyway without antagonizing a potential ally. This didn’t make Campbell’s choice of words any less disconcerting. Apparently Kamala Bhatti’s recommendations, though there was still a great deal of panic and unrest, had been staggeringly successful by solar assessment. The main brunt of it was a strategic lack of reporting on- and lack of cautioning against riots or other harmful activities, focusing instead on productive efforts and theoretical analysis. Communal help-efforts and public discussion. Any meaningful control which could be exerted over the media-apparatus was limited of course, but random teens, so called sunfluencers, could easily be pushed towards the right stories through monetary incentives, equipment and access to otherwise restricted locations. The internet functioned as a predictor for what people wanted to see, and so large swaths of traditional broadcasting followed suit without any need for direct meddling. Michael found it both elegant and profoundly terrifying. For the underlying mechanism, the Sociologist gave the example of an American national park from which people regularly stole petrified wood. Making visitors aware of the issue’s scale did not in fact reduce theft, but rather made it more prevalent because taking the wood was then perceived as a normal everyday occurrence which regular people engaged in. Social proof. If one seeks to reign in a behavior, it is best to make it appear rare and unusual. The public should be praised for being dutiful and conscientious even when they are not, in order to altercast them and foster copacetic behavior in the future, Bhatti added, still smiling her friendly smile, and even though all the advice she gave was sensible and apparently beneficial, Michael did not trust it anymore. He felt compelled to take the side of ideology against pragmatism, but pushed that impulse down as far as he could, knowing that it might involve sacrificing human life for a gut feeling. The sun, after all, seemed to agree with Bhatti’s reasoning, and so did Campbell after a few more celestial endorsements. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about micro-governments popping up beneath them: Some simple expansions of soup kitchens, neighborhood watches or religious organizations, but many others populating the ideological fringes of society. Rotting their way through major cities. The politician was aware that she should be thankful for this: Current institutions were after all unable to handle the situation, so all of these local safety-nets reduced the damage done until the dust had settled. Endorsing them was the only pragmatic and face-saving move, but that didn’t change the fact that a worrying precedent was being set. With regards to explaining their findings to the public, Sol predicted a negative outcome. If there were a non-ridiculous explanation, then trust in the government would be furthered. Perhaps even escalated to a point where they would be fully believed when claiming that the world wasn’t gonna end, but unfortunately there was no non-ridiculous explanation to be had. Sharing their current findings would only undermine baseline credibility. Sharing their powers on the other hand… The predicting-blinks-trick which had been used to garner political trust for the committee could be used on the general public, they reckoned. It had been avoided so far, because sharing such a thing would make them vulnerable to accusations of being the phenomenon’s orchestrators as well as putting them in a position where they would have to explain what happened after the fact. Feigning ignorance would be off the table, but still; Sol insisted that this was the path forward for anyone interested in harm-minimization. A press conference was swiftly set up with Tara as its spokeswoman.
September 21st, 17:22, Hotel room, Sheffield, England, UK Dean Sellars awoke to tidal migraines crashing back against his brain-stem. Sucking him under as they receded. Doubling over and lashing out again. Like cliff-side waves feverishly attempting to drown you in the same savage process that erodes rock to sand and consciousness to mush. In the same agonizing breath that turns out to be your last once you’re too oxygen deprived to notice. His eyes felt glued shut and scrapingly dry beneath the lids, wrapped in the tactile tenebrosity of black sandpaper, though when the boy finally managed to rip them open, he had to immediately reverse this decision in order to escape the blinding fluorescence of a ceiling light. They lay on the carpet floor of a hotel room. Dean and fourteen others of whom he knew about half – maybe less – and only four by name. Bodies partially intertwined and haphazardly wound around patches of trash, bottles and vomit from a past he was relatively sure none of them remembered. The boy had no idea what all he took yesterday, but he must have made sure to take lots of it. Indiscriminately and in rapid succession. To blow his endocrine system so far out of orbit that he could punch the fucking star which had done this to them in its hideous fusional unrepentant snout and end it all... But now he lay here and nothing was better. Nothing had changed. The sky spasmed as if to mock them. Slowly and as carefully as his toxin-glutted extremities would allow, he lifted Ash’s arm from his stomach, wavering temporarily before checking for a pulse which was luckily there. If Dean had to see another corpse today, he would break. He’d break like Sally who was still screaming with that god awful bone-chilling wail of vocal chords degraded to the point of non-existence. It sounded inhuman. Like wet high pitched viscera. He’d thought the noise was coming from inside his brain, but as reality stitched itself together again he remembered the screaming from the day before. Dean wondered if she had slept and then started up again or kept it going since yesterday and he didn’t know which one would be worse. Either way, the sound was driving nails through his cranium and he couldn’t take any more of it. Knowing the attempt would be futile before he even started, Sellars screamed at the brunette to shut her bloody mouth or else, which didn’t yield any kind of reaction. He hadn’t yet sunken far enough to actually punch her, even though some part of his brain really wanted to, and despite every sonic vibration bringing that threshold rapidly closer. Violence lay reserved for worse people with shittier motives, he’d decided yesterday, so he just wrapped his fist in a damp towel and drove it through the only window which wasn’t already shattered. This too did absolutely nothing except wake some more teenagers and re-alert them to the unbearable siren’s-wail, but at the very least it was mildly cathartic. He now understood why the other windows had been shattered despite the fact that this was in no way necessary to get in here. “Fuck’s wrong with you” growled Malcolm from beneath some more bodies, and the tone of voice would have been worrying if Dean hadn’t planned to leave anyway. His eardrums couldn’t take it. The boy took a jacket which looked like it might be his, mainly because it had blood on it, as well as the broken leg of a chair which was ineffectually propped against the door. Dean didn’t even know if he wanted to defend himself if something happened. If he cared enough. But just feeling the wood press against his palm allowed some forgotten sense of comfort to flood through his system. Some dogged part of his mind wanted anyone here to get up and ask to tag along, but all the other parts knew that he would reject them if they tried. He needed some alone time. Just him and the fucking sky. It didn’t seem like the human mess of limbs was interested in getting off the floor anyway. Heavy, somnolent strides carried Dean through the hallways, the stairwell and the lobby where someone was yelling at someone else and acted like it meant something despite nothing meaning anything anymore. He snorted at that while kicking some shards around and they ignored both completely. Lots of ignoring lately. It made him feel like a ghost of sorts, and he didn’t know whether he liked that or not. The boy’s legs even carried him out the smashed glass door to haunt familiar, intermittently sky-less streets. Horizon called almost unnoticeably. Summoning like a fishing line gradually getting shorter till you reach the surface and notice there’s metal in your mouth. The night-club’s front lay blown open, much like everything these days, but entirely different. Beckoning maw. “It wants its blood back” whispered a thought shooting through the boy’s head in awed terror once he realized where he ended up. “I’m not going in there”, he replied, but even his own mind had taken up the habit of ignoring him “It wants its blood back.” For the briefest of moments Dean considered stepping inside just so the voice would go away and so that he could dislodge the hook from his tongue, which was starting to taste like rust and acid, but even a single step closer made him want to vomit. Animated by resigned disgust he managed to bunch up his jacket and throw it through the door. A soft anticlimactic flop rung out from inside, and while it made him feel ever so slightly ridiculous; this was apparently enough to lift his curse. No more calling for blood. They’d been dancing at Horizon with a few others Tuesday night. Dancing because they didn’t have anything else left to do. He’d already had all the impending-apocalypse-sex he could ask for and they’d sort of given up on dying within the next couple of hours. The main suspicion going around then was that this night would last forever and even those fears were assuaged when the sun began to rise over a panic-weathered country. It stayed up for a solid few hours without breaks, and they almost got themselves to believe that it was over, that they could go on to lead normal lives, with all the normal shit they’d spent their youth expecting and preparing for. Getting accustomed to. He just wanted to live in the world he always thought he was already in; where his education had a purpose, where his parents didn’t just leave him. The kind of world where the sky didn’t just pull out the fucking rug from under you once you thought you were safe for even a moment. Either way noon rolled around and it turned out again that they weren’t safe. That they should have prepared for not surviving the next couple of hours, because as soon as the sky-outs started up again, chaos broke loose. Someone bashed Dean’s head into the counter, and with blurred vision he just about managed to crouch under it as the stampede sunk humanoid teeth into itself like an ouroborean meat grinder. There were blood curdling screams from all directions, primarily down, and even more blood curdling cracking noises. Wet sounds and mayhem. Once the club was drained – it had been drained for an hour, but Dean couldn’t bring himself to loosen his fetal crouch any earlier – there were bodies on the ground in shapes that bodies shouldn’t be able to form. Like a horrifying nightmare-version of their hotel-room on Leopold Street. Bodies, some of which were still breathing and some of which weren’t. Of course Dean called the hospital, screamed hysterically at multiple phone-operators, but he knew they were far above capacity anyway, and he didn’t stay to find out if anyone ever showed up. Staying would have left open the option of them not showing up, and he just couldn’t bear that thought. He couldn’t bear the thought of going in there now and seeing even more bodies fail to breathe. Dean hadn’t ever been exceptionally scared of people, but now he got it. Understood it in his bones where he used to understand common-sensical truths like that the sun would rise in the morning. Hah. Such lack of certainty made his entire skeleton feel porous in a way that calcium couldn’t replenish. The boy got even more scared of people when that perpetually jaw-clenched guy from his football club suggested setting fire to one of the tent towns. No reason given except for the absence of enforceable laws in this world. For sociopathic fun. For the spectacle. Dean had agreed to join, and then hit the older guy in the head with a rock once he turned around. More horrifying sounds to add to his acoustic memory-bank. More corpses. He didn’t turn back. Didn’t look. Just ran. More people failing to breathe. More reasons to carry a bat around. Beat-up concrete gradually gave way to gravel and then to dirt as he found himself standing somewhere in Rivelin Valley. Pleasant memories haunted the place. Mental polaroids of Cole and him playing here as kids engraved in practically every tree. Dean sunk back against a rock and began to cry. There was more than enough to cry about, but it just hadn’t broken through until now and he wondered why that was. Maybe because this was the first time he had been properly alone since it started. His dad hadn’t been in the picture for four years now. Ran off somewhere stateside with a new wife and no one ever heard from him again, least of all his son. The moment that idea fully set in was the last time Dean could remember really bawling his eyes out, so his tear-ducts had become weak and derelict in the meantime. Using them felt weird and uncomfortable, which in turn made it difficult to lose himself in the moment. He checked his screen-cracked phone again to see if mom had called, but she hadn’t. The woman had tried to lock him in on the first day of blinking. Stupid. So fucking stupid. It hadn’t even seemed like she thought that was gonna do anything. The old woman knew he could just climb out the window, which he did, but once Dean came back, there was no one home. He tried to call again and again the coming days but there was never an answer. Only cold hollow beeps echoing into nothingness. Fuck. Maybe she was helping with one of those settlements somewhere and simply didn’t notice. He was propping that genre of thought up with all his might. Continually fixing cracks in the mental dam which held worse theories out and his sanity in. Speaking of dams. The cold water was up to his waist before Dean even noticed himself move. He was standing in the middle of the stream with dead leaves drifting past, and for a moment the boy considered simply ducking under and staying there. He decided against it. He wasn’t so much sad as angry – that line got thoroughly blurred occasionally – but more importantly it would have felt disrespectful to the place. To Cole. This might have actually been the spot where they once tried to build a bridge. One of them. They had a couple of locations. Of course it wasn’t one traversable by people, but squirrels sure made use of the construction before a gust of wind or some anonymous dick tore it down. Already Dean was out the other side, and from there on especially it felt easiest to just let built-up momentum carry him further. Soon enough Fairbarn road crept into tear-blurred view to unsubtly tell him where he was headed. Maybe they’d even give the boy a towel to dry off, he mused, attempting to push down the terror and seal some more mental cracks. The little flower-filled garden was still perfectly intact except for a bit of trash thrown over the waist-high hedge, and while this eased Dean’s mind about the possibility of a break-in significantly, he still readied his chair-leg before knocking. It took a moment. Longer than a moment. But eventually a fine slit opened up like a fissure running down through reality, just barely enough to reveal a sleepless, scared looking eye belonging to Mister Letwell. The man didn’t say anything. His beard stubble seemed to have grown out an unbelievable amount over the past two days, and it made him look impossibly old. Almost inorganic. Like something you’d find in an antiques store. In his shaking hand, the man grasped a pot of steaming coffee either as a weapon or because he had simply forgotten to put it down before tending to the visitor. Either way, he allowed the door to swing fully open with a gravity that felt like inviting an inevitable fate into his home. Margret stood some meters behind her husband. Less resigned and more on edge. The stout little woman was wielding a bread knife with both hands in a way which made perfectly clear both that she intended to use it as a weapon, and that she would be done for in the case of an actual break-in. “...Dean?” She dropped the knife dangerously close to her slippers as she ran forward to hug him. It all went too fast. Sellars just stood awkwardly in the embrace, makeshift bat still firmly by his side, not quite knowing what to do with his arms. He heard a sobbing over his shoulder and was suddenly quite self conscious about the state of his own eyes, despite how silly that felt. Mister Letwell placed a change of clothes on the counter. “You’re drenched” he stated absently, pouring coffee halfway past a mug and onto the table before adding “How’s your mother?” “Good as the circumstances allow”, Dean lied through a flimsy bootleg smile he had found between his lips and finally managed to hug back. Neither Margret nor George believed it, but they were courteous or out-of-it enough not to press the matter. “And Cole is still…” the mother of his friend gave a heavy nod. Eyes fixed on her own feet, attempting to find salvation between the floorboards. “He’s upstairs, but we can’t get him to come out.” Dean only faintly made out the sentence’s latter half as he stormed up the staircase. Still not changed and therefore leaving a trail of water across the meticulously polished wood. The Letwells must have filled their apocalyptic time-substitute by cleaning, he thought. As good a choice as any. Everyone needed something, and repetitive chores filled the mental void especially well. Darkness filled the upper hallway where dirty plates stood stacked outside of Cole’s room and clashed with the general cleanliness. Varying levels of empty. One bowl of fried rice had black marker-writing all along the rim repeating the phrase “This isn’t real, it will not nourish me” in erratic, jittery letters. The boy ate a forkful. Not only was the rice real, but it was pretty good too. He had missed Margret’s cooking. “That bad, huh?” Dean leaned back against the door. “Not at all.” The voice coming from the other side sounded manic. “I’m just… just still tripping. Everything’s fucking splendid.” Apparently no one in this household had slept much, and who could blame them? “It’s been two days.” Sellars groaned, but the consciousness fragments of his friend were unimpressed with chronology based arguments. “Rare, but not unheard of. Plus my sense of time might be fucked.” “And what about me?” He could feel a pressure adding resistance to the other side of the wood “What about you?” “You think I’m a hallucination?” “I dunno, are you gonna tell me the sun’s flickering like a light bulb” Dean slumped back a bit further. “I’m not going to lie to you, if that’s what you’re asking.” “Good, then tell me it isn’t. Just tell me I’m imagining this shit and I’ll believe that I’m not imagining you.” The voice sounded pleading, but he knew that if he gave in to the fantasy then Cole would probably never fully recover. There was no way out but forwards, and so he said the words which felt like breaking something inside of his soul. Like snapping time in half and dropping the very idea of a future down the bottomless pit of celestial strobe: “But it is.” Maybe the cackle drifting through the door was meant to be triumphant, but it just sounded sad. “Then you’re a hallucination. Good job brain. Damn good job. You do a really…” He sighed. “you really do a good Dean impression” First ghost now imagination-figment. Sellars was getting tired of having his reality questioned or ignored, but for now he could push that feeling down enough to not sound angry. “How likely do you really think that is?” Once solipsism had made its nest somewhere, the thought germ was always so terribly resilient. “Does it matter?! What’s the fucking alternative? What are the odds that I drop acid and the laws of physics actually crash right after, huh? Everything is more likely than that. Everything.” Game over, Dean thought. The issue was that he couldn’t think of a single thing to say or do which would have convinced him that this was reality, if he had been tripping while the sky-outs started. Drug induced insanity was simply the reasonable conclusion based on prior evidence, but Dean didn’t want to play into his friend’s delusion either. “Let's say you are tripping. You’re not, but let’s say you are. Are you enjoying it?” He left no room for an answer. “That’s the point, right? To have fun? But you sound pretty anxious, so why not go for a change of scenery? Might do you some good.” After a moment of deliberation the door clicked and slowly creaked open. Dean had almost feared he would have to kick it in or crack the lock – something needlessly dramatic and trust-breaking – if push came to shove. He certainly never had any intention of leaving matters unresolved. Still; the way Cole was staring right through him did hurt enough to counterbalance any feeling of success the boy might have otherwise experienced. Mr. and Mrs. Letwell could barely contain themselves, though they made a valiant effort, in order to not immediately scare their recently recovered son off again. Dean’s orders. The kitchen atmosphere had entirely flipped, and even the flowers out in the garden somehow looked healthier. Cole was pacing around the room, repeating motions, picking up objects and putting them down again as though growing accustomed to a game environment. The others meanwhile had settled down around the kitchen table. Silently retreading though-loops and discovering new ones in the recesses of unresolved worry. Dean felt sick to his stomach again. If the previous days could be characterized by a singular emotion it was this one. This and maybe anger, but currently one was extinguishing the other. Much as he wanted his friend back, he absolutely did not want to subject him to reality. Maybe the drug excesses of yesterday had even been an attempt at reaching the same weightless state of genuinely believing that this was gonna end. That he’d sober up and that everything would be in its proper place again. He could go to college, find love, lead an actual life as opposed to a grotesque parody of the idea. Even if the world did go back to normal, society was reestablished atop the iterative ruins of its predecessors; who’s to say this wouldn’t happen again? Who’s to say it’d end next time. The only way for any of this to ever be okay was for it to be entirely in your head, or at the very least to believe that it was, and since he himself sobered up, Dean knew that this gate was closed to him. How could his conscience ever allow him to lock it for someone else? The Letwells listened silently, occasionally offering awkward words of reassurance, despite obviously not wanting to hear it. They wanted to get Cole back, but they also wanted to believe that this would be a kind thing to do. Looking back between his friend bemusedly rolling a glass back and forth, and his shaking, sleep deprived parents, Dean had a difficult time imagining how they could genuinely believe that their son’s situation wasn’t preferable to theirs. Reality had given up on them. It was time to face the absence of facts. But still, the conversation was going nowhere. If all they had left was sadness and anger, then they might as well talk about that. “I might have killed someone”, Dean said, digging fingernails into the skin of his left arm.
September 21st, 16:00, A park bench, Edinburgh, Scotland Reg’s phone flashed with another set of coordinates written against a fogged-up car window and encrypted by way of their usual cipher. Scrambled according to send-time. It seemed that Sol-Systems was finally drawing close, but then again her entire path here had been a mad zigzag of back-trackings and misdirects. Further obfuscated by way of feeding sometimes correct, sometimes false location data directly to the media-apparatus through people like Reginald. Not a single part of that strategy seemed exceptionally useful to him. It felt like the kind of plan someone would come up with by thinking about spy movies, not by attempting to construct a scheme with good chances of actual success. Solid strategies tended not to have quite so many moving parts, but then again: Solsys hadn’t been caught yet, so perhaps she was more competent than Reg gave her credit for. The possibility that he himself was being baited came to mind for the hundredth time in as many minutes, and once more he discarded it with a hand-wave. Not because it was unlikely – he currently pegged the chance at about 60% – but because he didn’t much care. Being taken in by mysterious kidnappers might even offer a similarly good shot at getting some info. It was cold out here in the wind. Hitchhiking to Edinburgh had been a pain, but sadly public transport was mostly out of commission, which meant that all he had to guide him were some badly remembered anecdotes about motorway nomadism from his more adventurous friends. A trucker had asked for his jacket in exchange for the ride once they were already driving, and Reg hadn’t gotten the feeling that saying “no” would have been an option, though maybe it would have been. In retrospect the whole affair seemed more like a polite request rather than extortion, but there was no way of reversing the trade now. He wrapped his arms around himself in order to preserve a little more heat, when a person in a black hoodie pulled so far over their head that it seemed to be swallowing them sat down next to him. From within the cavity of the stranger’s obscured countenance glinted a pair of broad, oversized shades, and the man suddenly found it very difficult to uphold any assumption of competence with regards to Sol-systems. “Reginald Newhall?” asked the hoodie in a hoarse whisper before clumsily lighting a cigarette and proceeding to smoke it. Reg made note of how all the accompanying mannerisms reminded more of an impression of a French artist than of anyone actually sating a nicotine addiction. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “yes?” Conspiratorially, Sol-Systems placed a duffle bag in between them and opened it with what felt like excessive care. Something moved inside. “There is a cat in here, yes?” she asked in an uneven rhythm which sounded as though it were tripping over its own syllables. The bag did indeed contain a gray cat for some reason, though Reg had no idea what to do with this information. “Is there, or is there not a cat.” she reiterated with what sounded like exhaustion. “Yes” he finally said. Halfway between a question and a statement. Reginald got the distinct impression that a mind-game was being played, but he couldn’t even make an educated guess as to what the rules were, or whether he was a participant. The woman flipped down her hood and shades as though the “yes” were a code-word for the air being clear, which Reg assumed it probably was. Anyone passing through here would be solely interested in getting to Corner Pub and therefore unlikely to pay much mind to the conspiracy of two taking place on a random bench near Calton Hill. Three men were playing cards on the grass a few meters away, but they appeared to be minding their own business. “Good. Your trust is dangerous. Possibly misguided, but appreciated. I’m Caitlyn, emissary of our sun.” She looked like she was shaking and her scrambled manner of speech had gotten even worse, though she seemed to relax slightly when reaching inside the bag to pet her familiar. The whole comparison was flatly embarrassing, he thought: Reg had put so much concerted effort into an appearance of academic crunch-dishevelment, and then gone on to top it off with two days of genuine full blown existential panic, but still: Caitlyn Everard looked so much worse than him. “Creature” was the only word that came to mind. He'd say she seemed like something that lived in dumpsters, but then “lived” was already a bit of an overstatement. That smug expression on her face was the only part of Solsys which looked even remotely alive. “Jesus, are you smoking those cigs backwards?” Reg asked, barely joking, but certainly not expecting her answer of “perhaps once or twice by accident. The uh- the filter. Its burning quickly becomes quite obvious.” A 90% certainty-assessment that this wasn’t a joke kept the man from laughing and with slight mental strain he could detect a semblance of embarrassment in her features. In retrospect Reginald could definitely see how that happened, though this understanding hardly made her any less of an insane person. Caitlyn hadn’t been looking at her hands at all while lighting the thing, and she certainly hadn’t been looking at him either. Her gaze was entirely fixed to the horizon every moment of every second. Not exactly at the sun, thankfully, a good bit below it, but he certainly got the uneasy feeling that this woman hadn’t allowed the sky to leave her field of vision once over the past days. “I assume you’ve kept up with the news during your trip?” Reginald broke their silence to get back to the topic at hand, and Solsys scrunched up her brow, still staring off into the celestial distance. “Not holistically…” her voice drifted off into a mumble, as she said something about impossible consignments of information and then seemed to do a bit of arithmetic ball-parking. He had almost gotten to the point of tapping her on the shoulder to get the sky-prophet out of her scatterbrained monologue, when Caitlyn raised her voice back to a volume where it felt like she might actually want to be understood: “...anyways it’s been a fraction of a fraction of the contingent plausibly composed of insight as opposed to lies and slander.” She paused as though believing Reg had genuinely asked whether she had consumed literally all news reporting which occurred during her journey. Then she blinked in an off-puttingly deliberate-feeling way and added “If you… If you’re asking about the portentous reappearance of one Tara Keene then yes. I’ve been made aware.” Her baseline tremble amplified to a shudder as she reached back over to the cat like an addict desperate for her next fix. Reg could see a faint metallic shimmer from inside the hoodie-pocket. “It either lends credibility to the info you claim to possess, or… or it’s a very heavy handed attempt to gain my trust, “Mister Newhall”, and this is really a set-up.” Caitlyn mimed scare-quotes at the air in front of her. “Horribly heavy-handed. Not subtle at all… like with the keys-guy” it seemed like she was gonna drift off into her mumble again, but Caitlyn caught herself in time. “Both as a show of trust and also as a threat, I will tell you that I brought knives with me. Plural. Sharpened multiplicities. It would not be in your interest to betray the sun.” Reg of course had no intention either to somehow upset a celestial body, or to unceremoniously be stabbed by the evidently unstable person next to him, so he simply nodded, unsure of whether she could even see the motion in her periphery. “My flatmate disappeared Tuesday night”. Solsys furrowed her brow skyward again. “I don’t presume that your flatmate is Miss Keene, is she? Lots of people vanished that night. Only a few were actively vanished. Logistical limitations.” A strange numbing sensation ran through Reg when he realized that she was talking about humanity as though describing the goings on within an ant-colony. Moral indignation would have been his expected reflex, but instead came only the desire to join her in the glass-shielded outsideness of their eschatological bubble. “Not him, no. He’s just not the type. Locks himself in his room and then vanishes the next day? That doesn’t sound like running off to me. That sounds like he planned something, or went looking for something or found something, and if he did… Well I want to find it too in that case.” She exhaled vaguely dismissively through her nose, while nervously picking at her cuticles. “What’s so funny?” Reg asked, but she only mumbled that he wouldn’t get it, and that he should hurry up with the story before “something bad happens”. For a moment he wondered whether this was another threat, but her own implacably terrified expression seemed to speak against it. “I went through his IP history to look for any obvious leads… Not necessarily optimal behavior, but he doesn’t really believe in trust anyway, so make of that what you will.” Micheal possessed that sort of awfully convenient ignorance with regard to his own ignorances. Things like believing incognito mode would suffice to hide Tuesday’s journey through cyberspace. All it took was for Reg to check the router log and do some cursory searching to stitch together an attempt at contacting Tara Keene, a journalist and old acquaintance of Michael’s who had suspiciously vanished on that very same Wednesday morning. A massively tenebrous blind spot for blind spots tunneling down to nothing less than a misremembered perversion of default Dunning-Kruger. “… so especially now that she resurfaced, I think it’s reasonable to assume that my friend, Michael Lowe, is either mixed up in the same thing as Keene, or that he somehow found out about her involvement way before anyone else and then took off or got vanished.” Through the entire explanation Solsys had given her best attempt at a poker-face, but her expression lit up the moment Reg gave Michael’s name. It almost seemed like she was going to tear herself away from the horizon and turn towards him: “Michael Lowe! Michael H. Lowe? MHL?!” A small part of Reg’s soul which hoped to ever understand anything died of a stroke. “y-yes? How could you possibly-?” Caitlyn smirked up at the sky like a mad-woman “Thank you for your cooperation, Mister Newhall, but I’m afraid that information is still classified. Eject!” Before he could even ask her what she meant by that, the three men Reginald had noticed earlier surged in to push him to the ground as Solsys grabbed her bag and stormed off. The three fans turned recruits wouldn’t hurt Newhall, she hoped. Caitlyn had explicitly forbidden them to inflict harm unless she herself was in danger, which she didn’t feel like she was, or at least not more than usual, which is to say significantly. He’d been nice, Sol-systems thought. Strangely stiff and hollow-eyed, but nice. Maybe she would properly add Newhall to her one-man team once she could afford to be a little more trusting, though the prophet had no idea when that day would come. Him and Susanne. “MHL” was one of the recurring codes in a communique Caitlyn had received from an apparently captured professor DeVries. One of twelve, most of which she had already figured out. There seemed to be other other children of the sun and the idea filled her with a penetrating sense of orbital camaraderie. Solsys had long considered the possibility, even written about it, though none of them seemed to be quite as competent as her at evading the government, judging by how little she had heard from them. Still: despite his apparent lack of caution, Caitlyn could not help but feel a certain bond to this M.H. Lowe and all the other solar siblings she might have out there.
September 21st, 17:18, Military facility near Oban, Scotland Trust in Sol lay in tatters across the minds of committee members, at least when it came to answers regarding a certain blogger. Caitlyn Jeanne Everard, the person who had been running Sol-Systems, just posted a “List of known prophets”, which obviously included her own name, but also troublingly that of Michael and eighteen others. The eighteen were traps, they were almost sure of it; randos assembled from the pages of an Aberdeen phone-book, but the task-force had been wrong a lot recently and thus certainty did not take root as readily as it used to. Lowe himself stood convinced of Campbell’s theory that the additional names were bait and that Solsys would track them to see if any were kidnapped. It would be consistent with her general conspiratorial paranoia, though the term “paranoia” didn’t quite carry its usual hit of condemnation when the plan of taking these individuals in for questioning had been a matter of discussion only minutes earlier. The sky for its part denied that there were more people wrapped up in the phenomenon, and this was consistent with their observations of never registering an unaccounted-for blink, but then again: how could Everard possibly know about Michael. All of this was vaguely concerning, but another matter troubled the man behind the podium much more: “why was the panel questioning Sol’s trustworthiness and not his own?”. Finally curiosity reached the brim of its container and boiled over into a back-and-forth between Campbell and Volkogonov about security matters. “Sorry, but this bothers me: Do you have a lie detector hooked up to me? Have I been psy-oped into thinking those don’t actually work when in reality they do? Why is your immediate hypothesis not that I’m hiding something? I’m not, but that’d definitely be my suspicion.” “Classified” shot the general with a bored terminality that seemed to characterize most of his speech, though Michael had developed a decent intuition for how far he could push things at this point: “But does telling me pose a serious risk? Genuinely?” Otto Volkogonov did not at first humor the follow up with a response. He leaned back in his chair indicating that they could safely return to whatever the previous topic had been, but the matter seemed not to be quite as final as he wished to present it. A number of committee members directed uncertain glances at the general when Michael raised his eyebrow in a manner that had come to mean “I will test this”. The old man sighed like someone forced to placate a child. “It poses a substantial and unnecessary risk to the assumed mutual trust between you, Mister Lowe, and this task-force. Moreover it is a waste of time. Just do your part and frolic about the fact that you are not under any suspicion.” How he was framing this annoyed Michael to no end. “It poses no risk whatsoever to the foundation of our trust because this is the foundation of our trust. I would like to know the composition of the ground I am standing on, general.” “Ohhhh dear. Kid, you barely ever want to know the composition of the shit you’re standing on. Bit of life advice.” It was impossible to detect whether that was a joke or not, but at the very least it seemed to be a grudging concession. “Go on then, that’s why we have you lot of professional explainers, no? Enlighten the man. At this point we’ll waste even more time arguing.” Characteristic sounds of evasion as postures were deliberately reshuffled in an attempt to avoid being called upon. Nose-goes for respectable adults. It was Tackett’s precise, glass-cutter-voice that finally ended up accepting the task: “When we asked you to outsource Sol’s assessment to the contents of our minds this morning, the first few were easily confirmable statements of alternating veracity. One in one-thousand certainty of the experiment’s success would have been preferable, of course, but we felt comfortable sacrificing some of it in exchange for evidence of your trustworthiness.” Garber-Bullough almost choked at the word “some”, which Michael ball-parked to mean an order of magnitude. He was proven correct immediately: “The final three were therefore of a different nature: “Michael Lowe is not being manipulated by another agent”, “Michael Lowe will only give honest answers to our questions”, and “Michael Lowe will not conceal any information from us”.” There was a sinking feeling in Michel’s stomach as he thought back to his discovery of extraterrestrials, though he didn’t let it show on his face. “You did not pass that last test, though it is easy enough to think of situations in which a refusal to divulge something, consciously or subconsciously is entirely non-malicious. A perfect score would have been convenient, but a failure on this point was not entirely unexpected.” The man folded his hands and looked up at Michael with staid owl-eyes “So you see: we asked you direct questions about the nature of Solsys and we know their answers to be truthful. A mere obscurance of additional information could not possibly account for Everard’s activities and so we must assume either extraordinary coincidences, or a lack of honesty from Sol themselves.” DeVries grinned, and Michael was sure the philosopher had the same quote in mind as him: “Coincidences are just the subroutines of a program whose purpose you don’t yet know”. The professor had of course also turned herself into a subroutine of their more organic twin-project, and this shard of asymmetric knowledge made the line much more amusing to her than to him. Lowe just got the feeling that he was being left behind again and wondered how that was even possible when he had absolute access to literal cosmic truth. He tried not to get distracted by this annoyance. “Thank you. Can’t say I’m happy about the dishonesty, but I see its purpose and might have done something similar in your position.” He spoke as calmly and impassively as he could, but then reintroduced a bit of his normal cadence towards the end when he realized how much this phonetic neutrality sounded like an impression of Tackett. Otto Volkogonov snorted in a manner which made perfectly clear that he saw through the gesture. Michael had attempted to resolve the matter and seem charitable at the same time, while entirely deflecting from the elephant in the room: The things he had hidden from them, and which he didn’t even make mention of now that they had alerted him to their knowledge of this fact. A truly innocent party might have divulged an innocuous omission, such as having asked Sol about lottery numbers, thereby dissipating suspicion, but Michael had been caught off guard. Allowing yourself to think before revealing something harmless was even more suspicious than revealing nothing at all. The general met his gaze directly, and Lowe braced for a killing blow that never came. Volkogonov stayed entirely quiet. The optimistic part of Michael’s brain suggested that he had just been snorting because he too saw the semblance of a Tackett-impression, while the pessimistic part gravely insisted that this would be used as leverage at a later time. Garber-Bullough was getting back to the point, that point being for the most part determinism on steroids. If particle decay was truly random, and if quantum uncertainties worked as expected, then a long term predictive model of reality should degrade in accuracy over time no matter how precise its initial conditions were calibrated, but Sol was confident making predictions about the state of a specific particle fifty billion years in the future. Sol denied the existence of error-margins. All of this, according to her, left two possibilities – she excluded the third option of celestial dishonesty, because it was “unproductive” –: That all perceived randomness is merely the result of insufficient model-sophistication and that the underlying process is in truth fully predictable, or that Sol itself was engaging in a kind of reality hacking or meta-level simulation- tweaking in the case of them not truly inhabiting reality. The observed blink effect with its selective modes of light interaction (photon manipulation, she called it) certainly spoke to either of those. Technology so advanced as to seem not even just magical, but numinal. Ancient legends about sun-gods suddenly induced much greater affective resonance in Michael’s endocrine system. His personal sun god was unhappy with both of the physicist’s options, but after some more questioning they got it to admit that reality hacking was at least closer to being correct. A shudder ran down their collective spines. Animal-fear of an involuntarily theistic type. No one spoke for a few viscous moments. The panel had settled into a rough turn structure over the past hours. Never explicitly stated, but non-verbally enforced in the space between glances. The way customs always form at the cooperative interface of human minds where novelty bleeds into newly minted tradition before you even notice. When the physicist relaxed her posture, she might as well have handed a literal baton to Akande, who had recently been experimenting with storing variables as solar memory. “Sol’s cognition uses some form of general syntax, in which the information-content of a statement is quantifiable.” Michael guessed that he had to burn through a few of those from the lack of preamble. It felt vaguely rude, but he repeated the words into the back of his skull either way. Sol did not complain. “Sol is aware of mathematically provably unprovable statements about the quantity of numbers obeying a certain criterion within the set of all integers…” Again the sky stayed normal. “… and Sol can and will assign the label “alpha” to the shortest such statement according to the canonical information-content-metric of its internal syntax, and to no other statements.” No blink. Professor Akande took a deep breath: “Now; the statement labeled alpha is true” Sometimes Micheal felt like he could feel the blinks coming while he was still speaking, and the intuition did not disappoint. A few people were following along well enough to seem shocked, but the mathematician calmed them with a hand-gesture. “Since this is strange terrain to tread, we should make sure that that’s an actual answer. Let’s try the inverse: the statement labeled alpha is false” This time the sky did not object and Georges Akande seemed to think this settled the matter. Now he too allowed himself to look shocked, and the expression felt much more impactful when occupying his face as opposed to those of their quiet observers. “So what does this mean exactly?” asked Clin like someone forced to commit a social faux pas. The mathematician swallowed, but Dumont-Vatel managed to steal the answer away from him: “It means that whatever mechanisms Sol is using, or whatever reality it inhabits; the means at its disposal are effectively super-Turing. The sky just told us that it can decide a mathematically unprovable claim over an infinite set. This, in addition to what we now know to be reasonably close to reality-hacking, means that we might as well start referring to the entity we are interrogating as a deity, because in every meaningful way it is.” No-one had a cogent counterargument to that, but they didn’t want to accept it either. Even father Dreyfus flinched away from the notion, since it couldn’t help but feel horrifyingly blasphemous. Michael restrained any and all thoughts starting with “hey, god, It’s been a while”, especially since cultural cliche meant that many of those cognitive misfiring ended up being about a cat he’d had as a kid, even though he knew perfectly well what happened to it. A popping sound of gum broke their silence, and all eyes turned to the philosopher, who didn’t look nearly as shaken as the rest of them: “Well what are you waiting for. Ask it: “If we understood by what process you know that answer, we would still think you’re god””. Sky-out. Faces flipped to either relief or confusion, except for that of the priest, who let out a terrified shriek, realizing first what the other implication of that statement could be. It took Michael a few seconds to catch up. He wasn’t accustomed to this way of thinking after all, but when he did his expression fell too. The man behind the podium mouthed the words quietly, not knowing what to make of them, but not so quietly that the microphone would fail to pick them up: “...Demon. If it’s not a god it might be a demon.” A few more terrified sound-bits, but none quite as visceral as that of Dreyfus. Michael’s mind was ticking forward on autopilot and his lips went along with whatever signals they were given: “we would think you’re a-” “STOP!” yelled the general and Michael froze in his tracks. In an instant the manic urgency vanished from the old man’s face. “Kid, think this through. Your conception of a…” He trailed off, realizing that a few of the others also seemed annoyed at this test being verboten, and therefore made his condescension more general: “All of you geniuses must realize that this is a worthless question. We’re looking at a vastly powerful, unfathomably eldritch entity. Even if it isn’t magic, even if it is an AI, what could it possibly be that we wouldn’t label “demon” at this point. I’ll accept the inquiry as soon as any of you can give me an example of what this is testing against. Making ourselves more afraid by confirming unhelpful suspicions is not useful. That’s obvious right? If someone comes in here with a bomb, then any attempt to figure out whether they’re a terrorist or not in the moment is a dangerous waste of time. The required action is the same whether or not they are a terrorist. The question is pointless, its answer doesn’t change the situation in any way.” He sighed. “Surely you have terms for this, for experiments that would validate all hypotheses. Don’t be stupid”. Michael’s respect for the pig-faced military man shot up significantly, and he suddenly felt like a moron again. After a bit of grudging silence, Volkogonov nodded: “Good, now I see you have all been avoiding a question that actually is useful: Is this permanent? We might want to front-load some matters if it isn’t, and I suspect that’s precisely the reason why none of you cowards asked. Because deep down you probably know that a lot of your soul-burning pet-curiosities are more frivolous than the questions we could be answering with a bit of brute force.” The general looked up at Michael and he could clearly see that this was the price for his earlier silence. The debt to be paid. Some more clicks on the competence counter, as the tactician smiled an unassuming smile. In this moment, he had the council on their back-feet, and Michael in his pocket. The entire strike was precision engineered from orbit – acupunctural kinetic bombardment – and you could see it in his face. Lowe didn’t even know why he was so mad about that: while curiosity was his main goal, a lot of it had been sated, and he would be perfectly alright using his pact with a demon for more productive matters now that it was, but the whole affair still felt like losing a game of chess. The man forced a serene smile of defeat before preparing his mental ritual, but somehow the altar felt wrong, and his neurons seized into stroboscopic mayhem when he tried to place a thought on it. Reality lost its mind some more.
September 21st, 18:52, Porth Yr Ogof cave, Brecon Beacons National Park, Wales, UK The belly of a cave felt like a submarine when you weren’t looking and sometimes even when you were. Felt like it in the same way that wine can taste “earthy”: Not actually similar to earth, but resembling it at the intuitive threshold where language can’t keep up with obvious sensory stimuli. Thea often felt that she hated language. You sort of had to at least be ambivalent towards communication if you let yourself be locked up in an underground Plexiglas box for upwards of a year, but any time she gave serious consideration to the matter, or opened up a book, it quickly became obvious that she didn’t really hate language. She just hated using it. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea left the hermit’s hand upwards with a flick of the wrist, spun and reconnected. She didn’t have to open her eyes to catch the familiar leather bound shape, and she didn’t have to open them to notice and log the axial drift either. Submarines felt a lot like spacecrafts when you weren’t looking. Transitive property: Cave like sub like starship. It put her in the mood to do experiments like this; to confirm and re-confirm Dzhanibekov instability with the most reliable instrument at her disposal. That’s what one did in space after all, though probably with proper tennis equipment. She only had books. Thea Santevecchi sighed. She wasn’t cut out for space. Far too many people, far too closely packed, but she would have still liked to do experiments more useful than simply being down here. Technically, this was ESA-led isolation research, but in reality it was more of a publicity stunt than anything else. The additional data wasn’t useless, but when it really came down to pushing the project, it seemed to always be the record-guys, not the scientists who were most invested. She couldn’t blame them. It was a good deal packaged in a good story after all: another Italian name to add to those of Stefania Follini and Maurizio Montalbini, while she in turn got a year off from people. The book slammed painfully against her index finger at outlier-type axis-drift, and the hermit self-servingly decided that this meant her data-set was sufficiently expansive. Still she did not open her eyes. Sometimes she went days without doing so. The nice thing about isolation was that everything was always exactly where you put it. You didn’t need words, and you didn’t need sight. All information was directly inscribed into the objects themselves and the distances between them. The only thing that wasn’t static down here was her own ephemeral (FM-eral) voice, and even that was probably being recorded. The rice-cooker whirred to life and added its own sonic signature to the echo-y deep. Cave-life made you feel like you were part of the fossil record. A permanent immortal fixture. For a few more months at least. Sleep cycle parameters diverged so quickly in hypogean time that she couldn’t nail it down any closer than that and neither did she want to. Any respectable subterranean left their circadian shackles at the door, she mused, realizing that she was probably an authority on the matter by now… A distraction crept into her awareness from three steps back, one to the left: the rice cooker was making the wrong noise. Pairs of beeps at regular intervals indicated that it was next to empty, Thea recalled from a fully memorized user’s manual. Didn’t feel like remembering though. It felt like the machine was communicating its condition directly, and Thea merely remembered speaking its language. The woman walked backwards in assured, precise strides, knowing, not hoping, that she wouldn’t bump into anything. Movement through isolation-space always felt like clockwork, administering dopamine hits with every satisfyingly frictionless interlocking of gears. Like dancing with reality. Her fingers found the off-switch exactly where it had promised to stay last time they made contact and she gave it an appreciative pat on the head. The lid. This too felt like haptic communication. Reaching her hand down into the cavity revealed an almost depleted food-reservoir. She’d expected that. The supply had already been dwindling yesterday, and Thea had made peace with the idea that she would have to eventually open her eyes to figure this out. That resignation didn’t mean that she wouldn’t go through all the motions first. To navigate some more second-nature step-patterns and sink back into her office chair, which was angled at 130 degrees clockwise so that it faced her bed for easy access. She didn’t first reaffirm the location with her hands. Checking was for cowards. Checking was superstitious. Checking meant that you lacked trust in the accuracy of the fossil-record, and that just couldn’t be abided. Satisfied, the hermit rotated her chair back to face the monitor and finally opened her lids. Everything where it should be. A caret cursor blinked impudent flashes into the nothingness, and Thea indulged her mostly-obsolete sensory organ by rolling her eyes. She had not wanted a computer down here. She’d been quite firmly opposed to it, but while the record-folks liked that kind of minimalism, the researchers wouldn’t hear of it. They needed a way of communication, and so Thea had to give them a life-sign every day before going to bed. Hobson expected journal entries, she knew that, and for the first few days she had complied out of some sense of indebtedness to the doctor, but gradually the messages grew shorter and shorter, and now she just sent them a single period each day to confirm that she hadn’t kicked the bucket. Even that much communication with the surface-world felt profane to the hermit, but a deal was a deal. A deal which the researchers apparently weren’t keeping. Last check-in came fifty plus hours ago, which would line up with the last food-drop. The messages in the preceding hours were already erratic, but Thea hadn’t actually checked them yesterday. A period could be typed with your eyes closed easily enough, but now she was really going through it. First theory: April fools. Though that would mean that her sleep-schedule’s fucked to an absolutely unprecedented extent, and she didn’t think they’d cut her food-supply for the sake of a prank either way. Maybe the surface-world had started a war or something. It would explain the confused panic in their final messages, but it wouldn’t explain the image they had affixed: Like a sunset if sunsets looked entirely unlike themselves. Like a sunset in the way that wine can taste earthy. Staring at it made Thea strangely uncomfortable, so she stopped, took a breath and assessed the situation. She did need food. It didn’t look like she was gonna receive any. One of the final messages read “get out” and she feared she would have to heed it. With a heavy feeling pressing down on her chest, like she was being folded into the space between sedimentary layers, Santevecchi typed a period with her still aching finger and hit enter. The haptic feedback stung with soul-shattering finality. Defeated, she opened the door to her transparent cage, her room, her domain, her place in the fossil record and stepped forward. The way out was painfully easy to remember. Sometimes she had nightmares about it, but this wasn’t usually how they went. An oncoming panic attack reared its head, and she pushed it down as hard as she could. Mostly successfully. Lights were still burning in the surface station. Documents strewn about on the floor, and unfinished cups of coffee serving as paper-weights to mess-littered desks. “everything where they left it” rung an ingrained mental aphorism, and somehow that thought was immensely calming to Thea. Calming until she looked out the window. The hermit was a trend setter, it seemed: Reality too had left its circadian shackles at the door and was practically seizing in and out of daytime at shutter-speed. All theories out the window except for one: She had gone insane. How annoying. They all told her it would happen. They all told her and she’d shrugged dismissively every time. Santevecchi took a deep breath and leaned against a desk. Surface-life was just too much for her taste. Too fast. Hypogean life was simple. Abstracted. Suited most comfortably to metaphor. The thought of Plato ricocheted through the empty lab, and she wondered why anyone would ever leave subterranean contentment for this. Insanity was a chore. Out of the corner of her eye Thea could make out a sack of rice, as well as the supply-hatch, abandoned along with the rest of it. Abandoned along with her, though that fact didn’t much bother the hermit. Her recently reinstated sight was already proving useful, she thought, and felt slightly guilty about it. She wondered how long it would take to commit an environment this messy to memory. Maybe a week. Not that she wanted to. Wasn’t her place. Slowly the woman rose back to her feet, stretched and threw the sack down into cave-space. She couldn’t lift it. The thing weighed more than her by a decent margin, but she could tilt it enough to tip over the rim. Porth Yr Ogof received her offering with a consequential, echoing thud, and the woman nodded in approval. Thea Santevecchi returned to the belly of her subterranean spaceship with relief that swelled in proportion to depth. The Plexiglas door swung open and closed almost soundlessly behind her, emitting only a single FM-eral click into the comforting darkness. Everything was in its place. Logged and accounted for. Everything including the box’s denizen. Surface-reality could take care of itself.
No Time In Particular, No Place In Particular There was a chuckle outside of reality. Or maybe there is. Or maybe there will be. Time grows difficult at its fringes, though laughing grows easy. Laughing at the void's creatures especially. Such is the note inscrutability plays in its off-time, once it gets tired of answers. A siren's song if ever there was one. As for humanity: They'll figure it out. The way back is blocked by a fissure in perceived reality, but then again it always has been. "Forward seems a fine direction to be limited to" as they say. Who knows when the sky will be in a mood for surprises again. Caitlyn Jeanne Everard reckoned it would be quite soon whereas Michael Lowe hoped he would at least be given some kind of recovery period.