I was eight the first time I saw a ghost. At least that’s the first one I knew I saw. Seventeen percent of the population claims to have seen a ghost. The rest have had hundreds of encounters and seen thousands of ghosts. They just don’t know it. I didn’t either, not to the full extent, anyway.

Not until I died.

People think old and empty buildings are the most haunted places. Abandoned prisons or asylums. Ancient churches and bone yards. No. Ghosts want to be near the living. Hell, half of them don’t even know they’re dead. You know where it’s busiest? Hospital nurseries.

New, fresh, young, energetic life is the flame that draws these old tattered moths in the most. Well before their eyes are strong enough to see their own parents, babies can see them. Clearly. Their minds are most open and they are easiest to take over.

Reincarnation isn’t what you think it is. Otherwise, where did all the souls come from before there were more dead people than alive? No. What you think of as reincarnation is a possession. A hostile takeover, if you will.

Don’t worry. As sharp as their preternatural perceptions are, baby minds are still mush. They don’t feel a thing.

That’s where the trouble comes into paradise for those spirits most willing to take this leap. If you put your handprint in cement, before it has started to cure and stand up, the impression won’t hold. The loose, wet grit will weep back up to level and you’re left with the faintest outline. A ghost of a ghost.

There’s enough of their basic framework left. This can leave behind some of the stronger traits, some flashes of memory. Deja vu? Some sense of… knowing things before you should know them? If you’ve felt that, you know what I mean and now you know what it is.

The strongest of spirits can survive almost intact. That can be maddening. Trapped in that soft and fragile vessel. No control over your limbs; not able to articulate the adult thoughts in your now infant brain. It’s like sleep paralysis. You struggle to move your body, you try to scream yourself awake.

Toddlers are a better host. Or when your six year old daughter comes up and tells you she likes you better than her last parents? That is no longer your six year old. I mean, she’s in there, but she’s just along for the ride now. The phrase “old soul” is apt.

I’m what you call a drifter. I’m not interested in going for another corporeal roller coaster ride. I observe and report. I was one of the lucky ones, because I had pierced the veil early on in my natural life. I don’t know how many previous lives are rolled up into what I conceive of as me, but I do know I don’t want back in.

And I know there’s one spirit who didn’t make it inside me.

###

“Who are you?” I could make out the darker shadow within the shadows of my room. In the corner, the shape of a man, fading in and out of the blackness. “I know you can hear me.”

“You can see me?” I felt that more than I heard it.

“Kind of, it’s dark in here.” And with that, he turned his inner light on, no longer the shape of a man, more a cloud of tiny lightning bugs. They swarmed after me, I could feel the static energy all around my body. A thousand electric ants crawled my skin. I thought of the mini Tesla Coil at the museum that makes your hair stand straight up for the souvenir photo. The ants tunneled in, a large cluster of them tried to squeeze into my eyes, I shut them tight and screamed. 

My whole body said “No!” and the bugs were gone. He was gone. But not for long. His name is Walter. He tried for a few years to groom me before giving up and becoming my de facto mentor. 

Then my best friend and then my murderer and then my victim.

###

In his last life, Walter had risen to some prominence. Having rolled in a dozen or so souls along the way, he could now traverse the veil at will. He could move and interact with objects in the corporeal. He could communicate easily with those who had the right kinds of eyes, which were mostly kids.

By the time we are teenagers, we have learned to close all that off. The best, but hardest target is the pre-teen. A mind that is open enough to mold, yet formed enough to hold the whole of Walter without dilution. We are told—as I was told one night that I woke up screaming because Walter had tried to penetrate me again—that it was a dream. Ghosts don’t exist, our own minds are built to deceive; our own eyes play tricks.

The majority of people live that way, and when they have an encounter, or they see through the veil, they deny it. 

Just the lighting, just a reflection, just the wind, just a shadow.

###

My best friend, Eric, slept over often. His parents sucked, so his home life sucked. The first time he saw Walter, I told him it was just a shadow. I told him to lay back and close his eyes and open his mind. I held a pillow over his face so he couldn’t scream as Walter entered him and took him over from the inside out.

Eric’s parents never noticed. For a while, Eric remained mostly Eric.

For about a year, my two best friends were together with me in the corporeal, as Walter ate away the rest of Eric. Once inside, Walter was too strong to resist; Eric never wanted to be here in the first place, so he didn’t fight it. He was a fresh soul and arrived confused and angry and depressed by default.

New souls often do.

Being thrust naked and afraid into a world this shitty is not something someone would ask for. But having gone through it, they often miss it and are willing to go back. They will try and try to navigate it, life after life. Addicted to living. 

Eric was not one of those.

###

I wasn’t old enough to vote or even drive when Walter killed me. Shoved me off the trestle and told everyone I fell. I made the decision not to come back on the twelve story drop down to the rocks of the dry river bed. As I left that body, Walter tried to grab me and pull me in, but I was stronger in that way than Eric was.

Walter is still among you, but when he looks at you, he sees me. I appear before him, like a cataract, and he can never see what he wants to see. I am drawn to him when he experiences the most joy, and I force myself into his vision. The detached retina of his past. The gnat that buzzes inside his ear. While in this form, he cannot traverse the veil, he cannot move objects with his mind, he cannot move to another body. He can only see what most of you cannot.

He’s tried to end it. 

I knock the pills into the sink. I move the barrel of the gun. I snap the beam he has hung the noose from. Of course, I let him kick and flail. His eyes bulge, the veins in his face throb, the smaller vessels burst. He once tried to jump off the very trestle he threw me from and I let him fall, screaming and shitting himself for eleven of the twelve stories and broke his fall at the last second.

I haunt him. I hunt him. He will live a long and unhappy life.

In the end, when he is too feeble to fight it, I will enter him and I will subsume him. The only thing more frail than an infant is an old man waiting to die. Before he leaves that body, while he is still trapped in that weak and leaky rowboat, I will take his power. I will keep his lightning bugs in a jar, deep inside me, until all of their lights go out.

The newborn would be dead, soon. Jake stood outside the glass, watching his son slowly dying under a heat lamp. Isolated, as if contagious. His wife, Tish, slumped in her wheelchair,facing slightly away. The prognosis was clear; Jake wheeled Tish back to her room. The nurses brought the infant in and left them to it. They took turns holding him. The baby died in her arms. He looked like one of those super-realistic dolls, but with a little weight to him. He was soft. Limp. Cold.

This time was supposed to be different. This time they made it through to viability. They waited a little longer to be sure, but then they announced the pregnancy, had a baby shower, made up the nursery.

Still, it happened. Again.

There was no sign anything had gone awry until Tish’s cervix shortened and dilated. Dr. William Warren, the OB/GYN for the most recent pregnancies, ordered an emergent cerclage. From that point, Tish was on bed rest and monitored. Dr. Warren had considered this ultimate outcome—twenty weeks in, after an ultrasound. Even then, he wasn’t sure. He was in no hurry to deliver more bad news to a couple he had already seen through the past three of their eight failed attempts to carry a child to term. And he wasn’t going to add stress to the pregnancy with an MRI. It was too late to terminate, not that they would have.

Once the baby was born, still premature despite the measures to bind Tish’s cervix, he followed up on his hunch. Even after a perfect APGAR score of 10 at 1, 5 and 10 minutes, Warren ordered a transillumination. Hydranencephaly. Confirmed.

The grief counselor told them they were lucky. That the baby was lucky. He didn’t livelong enough to suffer. Blind and deaf and completely devoid of consciousness. Living in only the strictest sense of the term; running on the brain stem’s autopilot. Breathing, heart beating, swallowing, reflexes. A quality of life below “Miracle Mike, the Headless Chicken.”

This, without even considering all the other side effects and complications. The palsy, the seizures, the emotional and mental toll it would take on the parents. Loving someone who would never know they even existed, let alone love them back. He was born premature enough that his odds of surviving very long were already low. He lived long enough for them to hold him. For him to grab his father’s finger and squeeze. Long enough for the ink to dry on his birth certificate before they had to fill out the death certificate. Long enough to say goodbye, but not long enough for all that other bad stuff. The staff gave them a newborn photo and footprints pressed in ink with a lock of hair taped to the corner.

Not long enough to suffer. Just long enough that there would be an obituary and a funeral. How lucky.

They named him Evan. He lived 32 hours. They buried him in the family plot after a small service of close family and friends.

So lucky.

#

Patricia Marx and Jacob, her husband of ten years, considered themselves distinctly unlucky. Hapless if not hopeless. Tish and Jake had an otherwise idyllic life. She had family money; he had a six-figure income. They had both attended and thrived at Yale, where they met in their Junior Year. They stayed together through grad school and the years after. On the cusp of thirty, as a matter of course, they married. By most any measure, their lives had been perfect. They lacked for one thing. Kids. That’s where their winning streak ended.

For nine of those ten years, they had both been in fertility treatment. From traditional to trial. Nothing biological was wrong with either one of them. He was potent, she was fertile. One after another, rare and improbable complications and conditions emerged. They had six failures in six years. They had grown accustomed to keeping news of the pregnancies between them. The seventh had gone twenty weeks. Far enough along to move from“miscarriage” to “stillborn.” Progress.

There was a lot of tension in the first few years. It strained their marriage. They turned from fighting each other to fighting the problem. Instead of cleaving them apart, it cleaved them together. Long after most couples would have chosen a surrogate or adoption, or given up, they had persisted. The battle became a habit and that habit became an addiction.

By the time they were pregnant with Evan, they were a fertile fighting force. Jake joked that he could smell ovulation in the air, like some primal primate. The reality was they had become a baby making machine. Their home was a command center. If the blocked out calendar and whiteboard weren’t enough, there were apps. A rigid regimen. They didn’t need red wine and music to get in the mood. They just needed their phones to ding and trigger a passionless Pavlovian coupling. Lacking foreplay, driven by shared and singular purpose.

When they got pregnant with Evan, they switched lanes from preconception to prenatal. When they hit the six-month mark, they were ready to share the news. Tish was always thin framed and kept herself fit and would not be able to hide the bump any longer.

This time, they had thought, would be different.

#

As with any addict, they couldn’t break the cycle. Within two weeks of Evan’s death, they were back at The Institute. Well beyond even deciding to try again, this was routine. Their co-dependent compulsion. Once Tish could drag herself out of bed and face the sun, they were in the car. Was there anything they could have done different or better? Were they both still fertile? When should they start trying again to conceive?

This was one of several dozen facilities in the franchise. The Gestasia Institute for Fertility and Reproduction. The largest of its kind. Full-spectrum services. From simple prenatal care to in vitro fertilization; from surrogacy to adoption. This was a full-on, for-profit operation, and from a fiscal point of view the Marxes were good business.

Even so, Dr. Sharon Rivvers, their newly assigned REI, advised them to stop. Even though science was on their side. Even though, statistically at least, each prior tragedy made them less and less likely to suffer future tragedy. For their own mental health and well being, for the sake of their marriage, it was time to consider other options. Hell, even Dr. Warren had given up and referred them to Rivvers. He was retiring and the running joke in the commissary was that the Marxes had broken him. What Rivvers knew from the case notes, whether it was openly acknowledged or not, was that this was their marriage. There were no other options for them. She sighed and slid a folder over to the Marxes.

“I’d wait twelve to sixteen weeks.”

The Marxes had a stack of these, they’d been with it long enough for a corporate merger
and a logo change. They didn’t bother opening it for almost two weeks.

#

“What’s this? Did you make an appointment?” Tish held the note out to Jake.

Sundays after 7PM. South entrance, #2791.

Scrawled on yellow sticky note, stuck inside the folder. That’s all. Less of an appointment than an open invitation.

Today is Sunday, she thought. She hadn’t even considered opening the file; she wouldn’t have opened it today if the note hadn’t fallen loose and slipped out. It was all the usual brochures and helpful tips. Blank calendar pages for tracking her cycle and entering her temperature and half a dozen other things she had either memorized or automated. Nothing she needed or was ready to even see. And this. Jake took the note.

“Nope. Someone probably made themselves a note and it got in here by mis-” but her coat was already on.

“It’s after seven, now.”

#

They pulled up to the complex. It was very different at night and on the weekends. There were a few cars in the lot. Some security and maintenance vehicles. The buildings were dark.

Jake drove around to the back of the building. The front facade, by design, looked like part of a well-endowed, state of the art fertility facility. There was a fountain. Topiary. Two stories of mirrored glass created an atrium that covered the glossy, marble lobby. The lobby held more topiary and yet another fountain.

The south side of the main building was far less inviting. The first three stories didn’t even have windows. The upper stories had small, utilitarian windows. It looked more like a long wall than anything. There was a series of steel doors, each with a yellowed light above it. None of them labeled or numbered.

Tish was holding the yellow note in front of her like a divining rod.

“There. That one has a keypad. I bet this is a key code and not a suite number.” They stopped at the third door.

“This seems really… off-the-books, doesn’t it?” Jake wasn’t sure why they were here.

Still, it wasn’t the weirdest thing she had ever asked for, postpartum. He parked the car, headlights flooding the sun-bleached, red steel door. They approached and punched in the code from the paper.

The door buzzed and they walked inside. It was pretty un-ceremonial. Once inside, they were in small room. Linoleum, cinder block, a small window to an unattended reception desk. Before Tish could push the little doorbell, the second door buzzed and the lock clicked open. The office reminded Jake of his advisor’s office in college. Small. Cramped. His advisor’s was smothering. Papers everywhere, no sign of an actual desk under the clutter. A hyper-literate hoarder.

This was austere. Sparse. Either someone hadn’t moved in or was ready to leave at any moment. The desk was empty, except for two flat screen monitors. Somehow this emptiness
made it seem even smaller. The cinder block walls were bare. There was a whiteboard, but rather than dry erase marker, there were sticky notes. In columns, by color. Even if you could read the handwriting, it was a shorthand only the author would comprehend.

There was a window that looked into a lab. The lab looked even cleaner and sterile and organized and more, well, like a lab.

Skinny, pale, black tee-shirt under a black zip-up hoodie. Black-rimmed glasses that seemed too big for his freckled face. Tousled red hair. Who the fuck was this kid?

“So, my name is Garrett Morgan. I doubt you’ve heard of me and if you have, it wasn’t good.”

They hadn’t heard of him. He was a prodigy. A polymath. An autodidact. A felon.

His claim to fame was that he had infected a strain of human DNA with a virus. Not a contagion within the DNA itself. Machine code tucked into the digital mappings hosted in a genome research lab. When read and interpreted, it would infect the whole system.

Which it did, he took over the whole cluster, stole all the mapping data. Had he not taken the credit he would have gotten away with it. Had he not been so far ahead of the genome team, he’d be in jail.

“Since all that, they’ve had me hacking things in a different, more productive way. It pays the attorney’s fees, but it’s not what I’m interested in. And that’s where we can help each other.”

They walked out into the long hall and to a wider observation window into the lab.

“We do a lot with stem cells. Most of that happens two labs down, we have our embryo farm from the clinical work upstairs. IVF and ICSI work, mostly. Couples, not unlike yourselves, who preserve eggs and embryos, right? So, what happens to these extra eggs and embryos when there’s been a successful pregnancy? Some of them are preserved for future implantation and procedures. Some are held indefinitely in a kind of escrow and still others come to me.”

Morgan pointed to a series of what looked like lava lamps in the center of the lab. he slid
his thumb on the screen of his smart phone and they were lit from within. The far left seemed empty. The far right contained what looked more like a fully formed fetus.

“What I do with them, in a way, is an extension of what landed me here. I tweak them. I grow them in here, but I can only take it to a point. There are legal and ethical issues that I couldn’t give a fuck about; there are practical limits.”

Morgan swiped his finger on the phone screen again. There was a lone table, with what looked like a wine fridge on it. Inside it, a light came on. Suspended in the center, in a vacuum-sealed bag, appeared to be a baby in the second trimester.

“Artificial wombs have come a long way. But not far enough. The fetus still has to begin in the mother, after enough time, we can sustain it in the lab, like that.” He noticed the look of concern on Jake’s face, “That’s a sheep, by the way. No one has tried to get that far with a human baby. Even if they did, it would only be useful for highly premature infants. There’s no substitute for a healthy womb.”

Jake stepped back from the glass. Tish had her face against it. It struck Jake as an inversion of their posture when Evan lay dying in a NICU incubator.

“You… want to grow me a baby? In there?” she looked at Morgan.

“It’ll start in there. Your egg. His sperm. But we’ll finish in there.” He pointed at her belly. Her arms folded in a natural cradle around it. Though his mind was a field of waving red flags, Jake didn’t bother to object.

They return to Garrett’s office.

“Recall, I said that we could help each other? Well, this is the part of the story where we make the exchange.” He launched a program on his office computer.

Jake recounted the obvious. “We’ve paid a good amount for this, already.” He didn’t just mean the money.

“This is a different type of exchange. A trade.”

The flickering florescent lights went out, the computer screens glowed with matching boot screens. SNIPR in red letters on white. This was replaced with floating windows of code and formulas. Two projector beams cut the darkness and created a hologram in the center of the desk. Throbbing animations of a dozen embryos. Zygotes growing, cells splitting, fetuses forming. The camera zoomed in on one of the models and markers within the individual cells glowed, mostly green with the occasional red. A small device on one of the computer monitors fired a laser drawn keyboard onto the surface of the desk.

“There are two phases, the first part is pretty status quo and without much controversy. You can screen for certain characteristics that we can predict with complete accuracy. Like, boy or girl.” Embryos with red indicators go dim, leaving several green.

“Gene selection—looking for and screening against single-gene diseases like sickle-cell or cystic fibrosis—that’s phase one and while it’s not exactly routine, it’s non-controversial, it’s considered somatic therapy, for the most part. There’s no one who is going to stand there and tell you that you have to select the embryo that will have muscular dystrophy, for example. PGD, polygenic scoring, a lot of which is just mitigating risk, right? Still, no one is making babies this way. Not yet. Because it leads to the gray areas like chromosome disorders. Screening against, say, Down Syndrome, or a dozen other disorders you haven’t even heard of.”

Hovering before them was a spinning dual-helix model of a DNA. There were smaller, two-dimensional terminal windows open around it.

“What I’ve been working on is taking my genome project hack and turning it into something a bit more useful. I’ve moved beyond simple gene splicing into gene editing and synthetic DNA.” As he hits the virtual keys, different parts of the helix fly off and new pieces fly in.

“Moving from therapeutic to enhancement—from somatic to germline—so the enhanced traits can be passed down. See, if I were to take a cell from your body, flip a few switches and put it back in and make you free from Huntington’s, that’s a procedure not far off from cosmetic surgery, at least from a currently accepted practice and ethical point of view. But what about preventing diabetes and heart disease and auto-immune deficiencies in the unborn? Or turning the odds against cancer and Alzheimer’s? To me, gene editing is even more ethical than gene selection. You’re not casting off otherwise viable embryos, you’re just taking one of them and making it better. The best it can be.”

The twirling helix was turning gradually, piece by piece, fully green. Jake opened his mouth to speak and sat back, hand over his mouth, staring at the animation.

Garrett leaned in. “Look. I know your history. If you could go back a year. If you were sitting here in my office. Would you pick the fetus that you knew would be born brainless and doomed—if he lived—to a life of suffering? Dooming you right along with him? No. You wouldn’t. No one would. I’m not interested in gene selection. I want to prove gene editing works. I will help you. If you help me.”

Jake could feel Tish’s gaze. He was all the way in, or all the way out. “Can I still get a vote on the name?”

“You can decide it all. Down to body odor. How much sleep will he need, what’s his metabolism, how good is his eyesight? Better than 20/20? Gay or straight? And for other, more complex attributes like say athleticism and intelligence? You can stack the deck in that direction. The only variable factors will be nurture. The environment you provide. But this kid will be born on third base.” Morgan grinned, “Now… do you want him to win a Nobel? Or a Pulitzer?”

Tish smiled at this. “She… could win both.”

Morgan tapped a key and a bit of text on screen toggled from XY to XX.

“See? You already made your first choice.”

The Marxes left the lab and as they pulled their car back from the building, another pulled up. In the rearview mirror, Jake could see a woman moving to the door of the lab. She was wearing a loose dress, but he could see she was very pregnant. She banged on the lab door with both hands, screaming.

Jake turned to remark about this to Tish but saw her faint smile and stopped. Her arms still cradled her figurative baby bump. She hadn’t smiled in months.

#

This wasn’t going to be cheap. The Marxes had already exhausted insurance means and
were well out-of-pocket on the expenses to date. It was also deep in a gray area of ethical
behavior on all sides. Various treatments and techniques and tools aside, all the pregnancies until
now were standard, natural conception. They were world class fetus makers. Getting to the finish
line was the issue. It was time to hedge their bets a little with the best science and technology
money could buy. Or stop.

While the harvesting of her eggs and his sperm would be standard front-of-office stuff, and fertilizing multiple eggs to implant in the womb was also well travelled road, everything that Morgan would be doing in his semi-terranean lab was as Jake deemed it weeks before: “really off-the-books.”

Tish had tapped into her trust, which was ample. This was what she wanted, there was nothing stopping her.

This time would be different.

Jake may have been on-the-fence for phase one but was firmly against this second phase. He had said as much with his silence on the ride home.

They had time to drink it in. Tish’s ovaries would have to be stimulated, eggs would have to be harvested, embryos created, gene selection alone would take a few weeks to profile that many embryos, but they had to come to a decision—did they want to edit? To make these choices?

A few days after the meeting with Morgan, Jake was as ready to register his concern and Tish was just as ready to rebuke it.

“Doesn’t this seem a bit ‘master race’ to you?”

“I would think, after what we’ve been through, you would want to have the best chance atva normal life, with a normal baby.”

“How is this normal? Look, I’m all for the screening against deformity and disease. But… I don’t know.”

“And I don’t get the master race thing. Who doesn’t want their baby to be smart? This isn’t eugenics or ethnic cleansing, Jake.”

She was oddly prepared for his “Nazi” line of attack. Obviously, it had occurred to her, she had just already rationalized her way around it. Jake wasn’t there, yet.

“Look, I understand how-”

“No. You. Don’t”

And there it was. Sure, there was no way he could understand what it was like to carry a life inside you for nine months and lose it and he knew that. Of course he couldn’t know the true depth of that pain, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t empathize with her desperation. It didn’t mean he didn’t feel anything, and he didn’t like the way this marginalized and invalidated his own pain and used it as a cudgel against his opinions.

He resented this implication that he didn’t suffer any loss or suffer enough to have input on the matter and further resented that she would play this card to win. Her body, her choice. Case, and bathroom door, closed. In his face.

And so it went for the intervening days between the initial orientation and when they would return to make their choices. They generally stayed out of each other’s way. Jake remembered when they were designing their loft.

“The key to any successful marriage is ‘his ’n her’ bathrooms,” he had said. “Let’s leave something to the imagination.”

In fact, the whole floor plan had evolved from this notion of divided space. His and hers, work and life, public and private. Years prior, Jake had kept the entire top floor of a warehouse district loft project. Upscale living in an area in transition. They looked out over Skid Row, with its bums and junkies sleeping against the high steel fence that protected their cars and guarded the entrance. The reality was, all it protected was the view. In one direction, the glossy towers of downtown to the opposite, you could see to the ocean. If you looked straight down, the fence blocked the sidewalk-level dereliction. This was one of Jake’s first developments and having failed to sell all of the lower units before build-out, they decide to keep the top level. A modern work-life-space solution for the busy couple on-the-go. All the marketing could only convince so many people that this was at the beach head of the blight rolling back. What Jake knew and all developers and speculators knew, was that there was always a bubble and it was always bursting. They best they could do was move it around. They turned that bad luck into an opportunity. Jake could now work from home and Tish ran her family foundation from their new penthouse lair.

Where the floors below were divided into six lofts or eight studios, sold off to hipsters and newly IPO’d engineers, and the affluent kids of their affluent backers, this one was all theirs. The first story with its concrete floors and overhead doors was split into artisanal bays for let. One was occupied by Waylon, who had come out of his semi-anonymous life to collect on a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Though it was not clear why a politically subversive street artist needed a two thousand square foot studio—he was always elsewhere being, well, politically subversive—the rent was paid a year at a time. Another bay was briefly used by Függer to record their reunion and re-break-up album. The owners on the second floor were glad when they left and an EDM producer and his obsessive sound proofing took over the space. The third bay was a metal sculptor who specialized in huge feats of balance. The nose stinging smell of hot slag hung low in the courtyard by his window.

They shared the bedroom, but they had dressing rooms and bathrooms to themselves. He had his office; she had a library. These spaces had walls, but no ceiling. Open all the way up to the steel trusses a half-story above them, the original catwalk still spanning the beams. Eight thousand square feet is a lot for two people to fill. Increasingly, they spent more time in their own wings. Even with the tall, wide windows and the hipped sky lights, it was always dark. The high ceilings and open common area were always sort of empty feeling and now, under the gray Autumn skies, they grew cold.

Darkest and coldest, was the nursery. It was a relatively small annex off of the master suite, but somehow cavernous. A vacuum trying to fill itself. A black hole, collapsing the world in toward it.

Jake knew his only say in this was to not participate. He could simply refuse to give over a sample. His body, his choice. He also knew that would drive Tish away. She had her mind made up and his recalcitrance would be a terminal betrayal. Though he could never admit it, even to himself, this was all he had at his disposal to keep her. As sick as that made him, the idea of living without her was bilious.

Their relationship over the course of several years had been forged in common cause and tempered in tragedy. Just as their love life was supplanted by the mechanics of baby making, their shared hopes and dreams had been supplanted by this singular goal. Maybe that’s what he resented most of all, at least he was important to prior efforts. The actual physical act, even as it became driven by clocks and cycles, was at least physical.

If they went down this road, they were essentially removing all they had left between them having any semblance of a healthy and functional relationship. The creeping sense of unease was rooted as much in his distrust and ignorance of the science as it was in the requisite confrontation of the truth of what they had become.

Nothing.

#

After hyperstimulation, Tish produced thirty mature ova. One thousand additional oocytes were harvested, vitrified and stored.

The eggs were fertilized via ICSI. Pregnancy professionals that they were, the Marxes went thirty for thirty in the petri dish, producing thirty zygotes that were fast becoming viable embryos.

Tish and Jake arrived for the ultrasound. Dr. Rivvers issued the standard disclaimers and assurances as she greased up the transducer. The three of them watched in silence as the live image emerged on screen. Rivvers moved the probe around. At first, there didn’t appear to be an
image at all. The video seemed like a scrambled TV signal.

16

Rivvers switched out the transducer for the transvaginal wand.

“Sorry…”

Tish laid her head back and inhaled sharply as Rivvers worked the wand inside her.

“So that is still there.” Jake teased; Tish gripped his hand.

“Stop. It.” She tried not to laugh, shut her eyes and squeezed out a tear.

“Okay… now we’re getting something. There. See?”

Tish turned her head to the screen and saw her growing baby, who turned as if on cue and seemed to look back out at her from the screen.

“Aaannnd there’s the heartbeat.” Rivvers hit a button, the sonogram rolled off the thermal printer. “Next time, we’ll go 3D. You’ll be able to see some finer detail and facial features.”

Gretchen was a full-spectrum doula. She wasn’t just a labor partner; she was a pregnancy life-coach. She moved in. She would be there throughout the pregnancy and for a few months post-partem. Jake was pretty sure she was security for The Institute. Home care kept Tish squirreled away and out of their lobby.

This wouldn’t help bring Jake and Tish closer. Having someone in the house is a built-in
excuse to decline intimacy, as is, of course, being pregnant.

“I’ll need to set up in here. I have a cot.” She and Tish look at Jake. “Oh. Yeah, I can use the pull out in my office.”

Jake had made his office up among the catwalks, in bones of the old control room. He built a new iron staircase up and a brass pole for quick trips back down. He left the original foreman’s mezzanine at the other end and set up a small lounge space. From these beams, he could see down into every room except the nursery, which had a drop ceiling.

He noticed, from up here, you could see how staged it was. You could see the stud walls
behind the living space facades. It looked like the set of a TV show.

Gretchen hugged Tish, Jake could hear her cry. Gretchen stared up at him.

#

Six months in and Tish is losing weight when she should be gaining. She is gaunt and pale, the supplements do nothing, when she can even keep them down.

Dr. Rivvers is on her way. Jake is pulling up to Garrett’s office.

Garrett can’t help, he only knows how to do what he did, it’s too late to abort.

“It’s probably just some microchimerism,” Garrett says, handing Jake a bottle of water. “Sit. Drink. The mother can get some of the baby’s cells and DNA and kind of absorb them.”

“So the baby is sick? And it’s making Tish sick?”

“No, I mean, I would hope, if anything it will help. Look, I’m going to level with you. SNIPR doesn’t just implement your choices, it learns from your choices and makes new choices. It’s- it’s a virus.”

Jake is going to punch him or scream or both.

“It’s good a virus, and its working on Tish. She will come out of this with-” Garrett’s virtual screens pop open on his desk and his smartphone sounds like the alarm on a submarine diving. “Go, it’s Tish, she’s in labor.”

On the way out, Jake remembers the woman beating on Garrett’s door. She looked like Tish, all belly and bones.

He pulls into the gated lot, he can hear Tish screaming from upstairs. He takes the freight elevator; it has a speed control lever.

He slides around the corner into the bedroom, Rivvers is covered in blood, Gretchen struggles with Tish to keep her laying back.

“Where the fuck have you beeeeen!” As she screams, Jake can see Rivvers snip the
perineum. Something immediately breaches.

“We need room, everything is coming at once.” No sooner said than it all does come out, all at once. Riding a small flood of blood and viscous fluid, is a pulsing flesh pod. Dense fibrous tissue in the shape of a dormant corpse lily.

Rivvers lays it into a shiny steel basin and rips into it with a hook scalpel.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Jake is frozen against the wall. Tish looks dead.

The doctor uses a small cavity spreader to hold this muscle sack open and—with far more delicacy—slices open the inner membrane.

The absolute cattle stampede of a labor seemed over in seconds. Now, minutes seem to pass as Gretchen uses a bulb syringe to clear the baby’s sinuses and mouth. Hours seem to pass, before she starts crying. Tish looks up and smiles before passing back out.

#

They named her Emily Jane. She was born three months premature, but at a full and healthy birth weight. Tish was doing great, too. Spectacular in fact.

Now that Gretchen had moved out, Jake was back into the bedroom and close to Tish. Her quickening and preternatural ability to sense when Baby Emily had to eat or needed a fresh diaper before she cried meant Jake never had a sleepless night. Still sexless, but never sleepless.

She was now completely barren. The delivery, that prehistoric womb, the whole ordeal. Her entire uterus had come out along with everything else. Nevertheless, she looked ten years younger. Her skin, her muscle tone, her eyes shone with that light Jake hadn’t seen since college.

All the doors opened after that. Jake was able to land another warehouse and had already pre-sold the top-level loft spaces. Then things turned, again.

The first time it showed its power, was playing peek-a-boo. Tish would cover her eyes and say “Ahhhh boo!” and the baby would giggle uncontrollably.

Tish hides her face.

“Ahhh boo!” and giggles ensue.

Hides her face.

“Ahhh booo!” more giggles.

Hides her face.

“Ahh-“ but the baby is gone. ”Jake? Jake!”

She hears the baby giggle, from above. Tish looks up to see Jake on the catwalk outside his office, confused, holding the laughing baby.

“Oh my God! Jake!”

#

The second warehouse project is slipping behind schedule. Tish has been gone all day. The baby is screaming on the monitor. Not fussing, not crying, just straight to screaming. Jake runs to landing outside his office and looks, he can’t hear the baby from the nursery, she must be okay. He goes back inside and just as he sits at his desk, the screaming on the monitor starts again, he stands up, slides down the brass pole and stomps to the nursery door. Nothing. She is sleeping. He is halfway back up the stairs, when he can hear her in the monitor, he jumps over the rail, slams open the door; still nothing. He yanks her monitor off of her dresser and smashes it on the floor out in the main living area.

He has finally made adjustments to the project schedule that put him back on track when Tish comes home and yells for him from downstairs.

“Jake! The baby!”

“She’s fine! I just checked on her and she’s fast asleep!”

Tish gets to the baby, her diaper is full, her face is purple from the exertion of screaming, she hasn’t been fed.

“What’s wrong with her face” Jake is suddenly in the door of the nursery.

“What?” Angry. Incredulous.

“You don’t see that?”

“Yes, Jake, she’s red from screaming in here all day while you hide up in your crow’s nest.” Tish sees the smashed monitor in the hall, gathers the baby up and pushes her way past Jake and out the door.

#

Jake had been spending more time on site at the new building. Tish moved the baby into the bedroom and hardly left at all. It was clear he should return to his pull-out in his office, which was at least a step above his Plan B, which was to sleep in the trailer at the job site.

When Jake pulled in, Waylon’s overhead door was open and he was working in his studio. It was rare to see him there, or anywhere, really.

“Is that Baby Jesus on the cross?” He hadn’t been sure in the weeks prior that he saw the
things he saw.

Waylon stepped back and looked. He was working on a spray paint template that was, indeed, a crucified Baby Jesus.

“It’s like… abortion, but through different eyes. The pro-lifers say, ‘would you abort Jesus’ and really… we did, kinda, right?” Waylon is well pleased by his explanation.

“Yeah, 120 th trimester abortions are murder. No arguments there.” Jake turns to leave.

“You ever hear about Jesus as a boy?”

Jake could barely remember the stories of Jesus as an adult.

“Um. Nope.”

“He’s like, a kid, right? But he’s already Jesus. He’s a powerful little Demi-God, and he’s out on the playground but he’s a little kid in his head and these other kids don’t know he’s Jesus, yet. Some other kid is like ‘hey, look at Jesus, talking Aramaic with his old ass sandals, he’s-whatever mean shit school kids said in Nazareth’ and so Jesus smote him. Right? Like kapow. The kid’s parents were all ‘holy shit, you monster’ and so Jesus struck them blind. Kablam. ‘Can’t pick me out of a line up, now, snitches’ and Mary was like, ‘we need to look at home schooling.’ That’s why we don’t know anything about the early years. Can you imagine the wrath of puberty Jesus?”

“Guess he was the first Millennial,” Jake said.

Waylon just laughed and went back to spray painting.

#

Jake hasn’t been out of this office all day. Waylon is an idiot, but he can’t help pondering the thought experiment this poses. If you didn’t know Jesus would become Jesus, would you still let him get away with the things he did before even he knew who he was? How different would the Antichrist’s childhood be?

He can hear her giggling on the monitor. But hers is smashed. Then the screaming. Not the baby, it’s Tish. He hasn’t heard a noise like this since labor. He is downstairs and to the door before he even has time to think about going. The door is locked.

“Tish!”

She is screaming from inside. He slams his shoulder on the door, but it’s like a weight is against it. He slams into again and again. He grabs the knock and shakes and the door flies in, dragging him with it and to the floor.

The baby’s mobile is floating freely above him and all the toys in her room and Tish. Tish is spinning in the center of it all, still screaming when she can. Her nose starts bleeding from the centrifugal force, spraying blood on all four walls. Jake stands and grabs at Tish.

“No! Get out of here!” her hands flail and scratch his face.

Three floors below them, the sculptor begins overstoking his blast furnace. He doesn’t know why, but it doesn’t seem hot enough.

Jake jumps up once more and this time catches her leg, but he is forced into the air over the crib, his weight pulls them both off axis and the wobble until his feet catch off of the ceiling and they are both flung into the wall of the nursery. Everything falls around them.

Jake stands and goes to the crib. Its gone. Jake hears it giggle from outside and above. Jake is on the stairs, now the catwalk, its floating before him. Hovering in mid-air. Its face. Tish would see it now. The deformities were back. Jake reaches out to grab it and falls. A half story plunge
through the coffee table below.

The sculptor has shut his furnace door. It creaks under the strain of the heat within.

More giggling. He drags himself to his feet. His ribs feel broken. It’s up on the mezzanine. Jake grabs a knife from the kitchen counter and goes to the ladder beneath the mezzanine. He can barely lift his leg to the first rung when he feels light all over. He’s levitating upward. He turns slowly in the air as he rises. Tish. She’s holding her arms above her head. She is doing this. She can do this, too. Is it controlling her? Are they connected?

“Tish, how-“

And with a swift, downward motion, she slams Jake to the floor. Up again and into the mezzanine and the floor, again. The bolts from the old steel platform pull slowly from the wall.

Tish balls her fist and pulls. The platform pulls away and crashes down, pinning Jake to the floor.

The blast furnace blows. The wave knocks open the cinder block wall into Waylon’s studio
and the paint and paper and canvases and thinner go up like a secondary charge. The fire spreads
easily from there up to the apartments on the next floor.

Jake can see Tish bundling the baby up and climbing out the fire escape.

#

Jake felt the heat moving from his extremities to his core and burning its way up to the back of his neck, flowing out as if the base of his skull lay on a floor drain. Burning his skull like fever, converging there and boring its way out the back of his head, circling and spiraling down to a pinpoint somewhere deep in the darkness; in contrast to the swelling pool of blood flowing out and away from his body, boiling at the edges from the heat of the fire on the floors below.

In the end the police would sift through the debris. They would find the apartment in shambles but more or less intact, somehow balanced on the burned-out matchsticks of the building beneath it, Jake’s cremains in a sticky, black pool of cooked blood. They would compile the evidence. Analyze the spatter patterns. Isolate the fluid and tissue samples. Catalog and collate.

Ultimately it would be the footage found on the nanny cam that told the story of a sick man on a rampage. They don’t see the game of peek-a-boo, they see jake dangling the baby off of the catwalk as Tish screams from below. The see Jake tying the baby down, locking her away in the nursery, smashing the baby monitor. Flinging a bloodied Tish around the room and finally into a wall. Trying to kill his infant daughter while his wife nearly died protecting her, before falling off the mezzanine. They wouldn’t see Rivvers and Gretchen hacking the baby out of Tish as Jake recoiled in horror and slid down the wall. They wouldn’t need to—or even want to—look for Tish or her baby. They would see mother and child escape safely. They would assume she was in hiding and might not even know Jake was dead. For both of those things they would be glad. They would look back into the death of the doula. They would blame Jake and Jake alone.

The evidence would be boxed and stored, and when they extracted the DNA to store it and perhaps one day cross reference it against unsolved crimes—due not only to the secretive nature of Garrett’s work, and the privacy laws around surrogacy, adoption, IVF and egg donation, but to the fact that such systems wouldn’t be integrated—they would not see matches against the thousands of zygotes cloned from Tish and Jake’s original specimen.

Viable, healthy, perfect embryos. Propagated anonymously to the hundreds of Gestasia Institute branches, partners, and affiliate labs. All of them fully infused carriers of the SNIPR virus, headed by truck and train and ship and plane, all over the world.

Everyone talks about how they’d kill Hitler. It doesn’t work that way. It happened. He’s already dead. You all are. 

We can go back and see him. We can immerse in the zeitgeist of the time and you can bring back precise, objective knowledge. The grandfather paradox, is real. Best you can do is fork the timeline. You then move on in a timeline with no Hitler, but the original timeline, the one you came from, the prime line, still exists and he is still part of it.

Other people think they’ll go back and discover electricity or invent the car. You can’t do that either. You can’t, because you didn’t. The loop paradox is real, too. 

I’ll tell you how it works.

First, there were the out and backs. We send a team out. Way, way out into space. Your theories on relativity and spacetime were correct. They return and a few hundred years has passed and they can report to us what it was really like in their time. 

Traveling to the future is easy. There are no paradoxes. It is really time travel in name only, though. It served a purpose, applying the scientific method to history, which suffers from retro bias. Your Orwell had it right when he said “he who controls the past, controls the future.” Histoty is subject and requires context and perspective. Still, we were surprised that it was not the out and backs who were flummoxed by the changes they saw in the time they were gone. Many technical innovations had long been posited in fiction and had come to fruition or were merely a more advanced version of what existed in their time. What happened was the inverse. 

The out and backs were grilled for their insights into their time. The anthropologists wanted to know if what they hypothesized about global dynamics of the time was right. The sociologists wanted to know what it felt like. The economists wanted to know what unchecked capitalism meant to their day to day lives and how markets became susceptible to a single social media post. 

The inversion of this objective is what really paved the way for time travel to the past. Or the approximation of it in what is known to us as the Facsimulacrum. You are no doubt aware of the work of Einstein, we understand he was quite known in your time. So you may well have heard of some of his theories, whether you truly reckoned with the impact of them, but he was the bridge between classic physics and the idea that time is linear and quantum mechanics, where space time are vectors on the same dimension and form more of a tapestry, than a single, immutable line that runs off into infinity. 

Still, the assumption was that it could be bent, but still moved in one direction. Gravity, for example seemed to have the power to slow or accelerate its passage. The scientists of your era, built on that and theorized that everything is a particle or a wave. That’s not true, but it got them to the next step. Wave function and amplitude.

If I were to tell you the location of every object, of every size in the universe and everything about it. Its mass, location, velocity; you could predict with high probability where it came from and where it was going. Taken to the logical extreme, this would allow you to predict the future. If that’s true, given enough information, you could look very far back. Deep time. 

This is from where, in the parlance of your time, terms like the Butterfly Effect were derived. A butterfly flutters its wings and a hundred years later, that wind is now a hurricane. Beyond that is the understanding that something set that butterfly in motion as well. Seemingly random events, are merely unexpected because you don’t know all the variables, you can never know them all. Still, all of this led to the confidence to try the theories at least at a foundation with those first out and backs. But for the foresight to keep sending them, we would have reached the epiphanies sooner.

It wasn’t until centuries had passed and we realized that not only were these travelers useful for historical and social sciences, but for science. They helped us assemble that measure of the wave function I told you about. The amplitude. Much like your more advances algorithmists would look at prior data to predict an outcome for a stock purchase or make shopping recommendations, we could assemble data from periods before we knew what to collect, string it through to now—my now, not your now—and see where everything was headed. Everything. From natural disasters to the outcome of sporting events to the moon cracking open to a butterfly flapping its wings. So we started sending the out and backs further away, for longer and with the right tools and information to collect exactly what we needed to feed the data into the system, to make it more and more accurate and prescient. 

The breakthrough was that we eventually could project backward as well. Well enough that we could fully assemble the entire universe in the Facsimulacrum and visit it. At any point in history. So even if we come back with intent to kill Hitler, and we certainly considered it as surely as you are now, it wouldn’t matter. A new instance would be respawned, and we don’t know what happens in it. We can’t enter it. We don’t know enough about it now, because the field has been disrupted and altered. 

You ask for our help, but we can’t give it. It is against the code to interfere and also fruitless. This is real to you, because we have perfectly assembled the field state in which you exist as a conscious participant. In all likelihood you exist on the prime line. Or you did. We call it the allegory of the cave man. Another of your stand out, foundational thinkers was Plato, no? He talked of the impossibility of an enlightened thinker, being able to enlighten by proxy from their own experience. Explaining a universe—truly a multiverse—of wonder to someone who had only ever seen shadows dancing on a wall. You have your cavemen. And if you were to go back, what could you teach them that would change the fact that they are tens of thousands of years behind you. And dead. Would you give them fire? The wheel? Potable water? Do you think you could figure out the greatest villain of their time and eliminate them?

Would you bother trying to teach these violent, hairy, naked apes? 

So it went for millenia, until one day one of the out and backs went far enough to be pulled from our ability to control or monitor and disappeared. We knew nothing of where, and other than the disappointment in our formulas to predict such an outcome, we accepted this as one of the possible outcomes. We know now. 

They were pulled toward a black hole. They fell toward it with ever increasing velocity that most of the crew were killed by the pressure. All but one. She survived. We know she survived, because she made it back to now. Your now, this time, not my now. I don’t mean within this simulation, I mean on the prime line. We know this because she continued her mission and has sent us information that only could have been left by her, for us. 

I know you are thinking that I told you that wasn’t possible. There are countless paradoxes that preclude it. However, if space time is a fabric, it can be folded upon itself. The paradoxes don’t always apply, for example, you can’t go back in time, because it meant you have already gone back in time, and that would create an infinite loop.

Except it didn’t because it only happened once, on the prime line and she is aware that she must not do anything that disrupts the prime line. If she doesn’t remain statelessly aware of the wave function, she can cause the ripple that means she never existed. The best possible outcome is that we keep searching for each other, as she ducks the paradox; a prisoner hiding notes in the cracks of the wall. She will think she is successful as long as she exists. We can never send messages back, we can only act on hers. We, likewise, think that she is successful as long as we exist. 

What we can never truly know, is if we exist at all, or we, ourselves are part of the illusion.  Trapped, ourselves, in the Facsimulacrum. Entangled. Catching glimpses of the horizon from the wave tops of the churning oceans of time. 

I had to pull over.  I had to get gas.  I had to get some air.  I promised Mom I wouldn’t drink, but I never said anything about getting high.  I barely remember the party.  Jimmy Breeze was there.  So were The Twins.  Lucky’s cabin, third one past the shoe tree.  It was the only one in that whole fire lane that looked like a cabin, even though everyone called their little catalog cottages on the lake “cabins.”  This one was rustic. Lucky Sr. built it back when there were no other cottages on the lane.  How long was I there? 

Lucky grew his own weed.  His latest harvest was a sixth generation melange of shit, started from seeds his dad had saved from back when shit had seeds; when they had just started using names like Afghan Red and Acapulco Gold.  I had been there a hundred times.  We all had.  I couldn’t remember being there tonight.  Marcy?  We made out by the bonfire and laughed because we both had cotton mouth so bad we were just making these gross smacking noises.  She had some gum.  Her hairspray and perfume and the fruity gum.  It was the dark crotch of Fall as it rounded the corner to the asshole of Winter, but she tasted like Summer and smelled like Spring.  Freezing rain.  She went inside, I had to leave.  Who would she kiss when I left?  Not like we were official or anything.  She’s not the type to settle down, but she didn’t wait around, either.

We had known each other forever.  She grew up on my street.  Our street, I guess.  Every boy in town had a thing for her older sister, Sherry.  And most every boy in town got what they wanted.  Not me.  It was always Marcy.  We grew up together, in every sense.  We were each other’s first, kiss, love, everything. 

We saw each other naked for the first time when we were sixteen. It had been hot that Summer and we were walking the nature trail and I told her about how the old quarry had filled up with crystal clear water.  We made our way down a slippery trail that when it rained became a waterfall.  Without warning or notice, she took off her clothes, except her ratty All-Stars and jumped in.  How the fuck would she even get back out?  It was a cliff all around, the water snakes, the snapping turtles, the-and I was in.  The days only got shorter after that.

#

The sleet was already sheeting into ice on my windshield.  How long was I here?  Gas.  I got out and started pumping.  The lights buzzed under the canopy over the pump.  Still caked in the dead bugs of summer.  The store had one of those vending machines for live bait.  How long can leeches live in that thing?  Whose job is it to keep it stocked? 

My car always smelled vaguely of gas, but I was hit by a wave of it as I topped off the tank.  It used to be my Grandmother’s.  It looked like a grocery getter. She offered it to me, thinking it might be too embarrassing, but a car is a car when you’re sixteen.  Plus, it had a goddamn 455, four-barrel.  She had it for almost 20 years and had put 12,000 miles on it.  I doubled that in the two years since she gave it to me.  Very smooth ride.  If not for the speedometer, you’d have no idea how fast you were going.  Gas eating beast.  It was like steering a boat.  American Steel.  The back seat was like a twin bed.  Nights like tonight, she’d sputter a bit when you turned the key.  But once that motor started-

Who the fuck is walking in this shit?  I could see his bright red varsity coat.  It looked like it was floating along the shoulder with no one in it at first.  Did he go to my school?  I was always shit with names, but good with faces.  Even as his came into focus, I didn’t recognize it.

“Hey, man, where you headed?”

He stopped.  He turned slowly and faced me.

“You going into town?  I’ll give you a ride.  You’ll die in this bullshit.”

He was already in the car by the time I got in.  Even up close, I couldn’t place him.

“You go to Ransom? What grade?”

“I’m a senior.” He stared straight ahead. Freezing? Shock? Was he as high as I was?

“I gotta be honest, bro, I’m a senior, I don’t recognize you.”

“We have classes together.”

“Were you at Lucky’s? Where you coming from?”

“So cold.”  He turned away and looked out the window. 

Which was fine.  The edge of cold was wearing off and the weed was creeping back up on me.  Anxiety. 

The sleet had become wintery mix.  It was flying at me like I was warping through space.  There was no radio signal out here, so I had flipped it to cassette.  The thing was jammed.  I couldn’t change tapes and had spent the last three months listening to Boston’s eponymous first album.  I had grown real tired of that album, but the back story was great.

Tom Scholz had essentially recorded the whole thing in his leaky New England basement on hundreds of dollars of equipment, while tricking the record company into thinking he was in an LA studio.  They flew Brad Delp out there to overdub the vocals as cover for the ruse.  In actuality, the only song fully recorded on their whiz-bang, state-of-the-art equipment was “Let Me Take You Home Tonight.”  The Taylor acoustic they had in the studio cost more Tom’s entire set-up, where he was laying down final tracks with his $100 Yamaha.  Two places at the same time.  Tom was stubborn, autocratic and a legend in the biz.

Gonna hitch a ride, head for the other side…

“Sorry about the music, man.  It’s all I got.”

The wintery mix had given way to a creeping fog.  We were cutting through the swamps, where the cold sink on the East side of the road pulled the thick mist across the road like a low-hung cloud bank sliding over the mountains. 

“This woulda been a long walk, why the hell were you out there?”  It was killing me that I didn’t know this kid.

“I had an accident, my car hit a tree. Or…” he seemed unsure, himself. “A car hit me?”

“Jesus, man, are you hurt?”

“No, just cold.”

“I bet, I was just down that road, and didn’t see any cars. You had to be walking awhile.”

“I think it was up here.” He pointed out the windshield.

“But-” he was gone.  His jacket was sitting on my front seat.  What the fuck did I smoke?  I looked in the back seat.  No one. 

“How-” he was in the middle of the road.  In front of me.  This was not my first Winter driving.  I knew how to handle a car in the ice and snow.  It all happened so fast that I panicked.  I planted both feet on the brakes.  Hard. 

Nothing.

The wheels locked up.  Black ice, under slush.  Zero friction.  No screeching tires.  The music played.  The back end started drifting around a little. 

Leave it all behind…

Silence.  There was no sound of impact.  He flew up and over the car and I saw in the rear view mirror as he tumbled down the road.  I went off on the West side.  Water blasted up around the car as I came to a dead stop.  Head on into a tree. 

That did make noise.  All the noise, all at once.  Everything that had transpired in the last three seconds, that had been stretched out for what seemed like an hour, replayed in full speed and at double volume.

…Carry me away for the last time.

I turned the radio off.  The engine was clicking from the sudden splash of cold.  Steam and fluids sprayed out from under the hood.  In my rear view, I could see him lying on the highway in a crumpled heap.  Even without his jacket, all I could see was red.  The red of the blood.  The red of the brake lights washing over him.  I was wedged in place like an action figure in the wrong vehicle.  My arms locked at the elbows on the steering wheel, my legs still locked the brakes to the floor.   I could barely relax them enough to let off.  I turned the key off.  The running lights went out.  The rear-view mirror was black.

I was so warm.  Then, the cold set in.

#

The shoe tree.  More like trees.  There were three big oaks in a row on the road to Lucky’s cabin.  It started with a pair tied together and tossed up in the branches.  Everyone had swimming shoes.  For the lake, the quarry, ponds, the canal, the creek-any place that was equal parts slippery rocks, broken beer bottles and snagged fishing lures.  At the end of Summer, heading back from the cottages, it became a tradition to toss them up there.  Then, once one tree was full, we started nailing them to the trunk.  Then a second.  Then a third.  I remember Marcy was the first one to nail hers.

“You can’t lace flip-flops together, dummy.”

She climbed as high as she could in her bare feet, and using my tire iron and a couple of nails we found floating around in the trunk, nailed her flops to the oak in tribute to the end of Summer at the lake.  Peering up now, in the cold blackness of the pending ice storm, I could see them.  Why was I walking? Where was my car? 

I went back up the road to Lucky’s.  The party had died down.  A handful of people were in the main room of the cabin, squirming on the couch, riding out the final throes of “The Heat.”  Lucky was twisting a fatty, while another one dangled, still burning, from his mouth.  Red cups.  The Twins were in the kitchen speaking that drunken shorthand that only twins knew.  Football?  No.  Politics.  They were Hella smart for a couple of hicks.  One headed to Columbia, one to Cornell.

Who was she kissing by the fire?  Jimmy?  We weren’t exclusive, but it bothered me.  She was pretty good about not rubbing my nose in it.  She probably just didn’t expect me to come back.  I told myself whomever it was didn’t matter to her.  Which made me wonder if I did.  There was that laugh.  That kooky infectious laugh.  I had heard it a million times and it still made me smile.  Even now.  I should go.

#

It was colder than I remember.  Was it because I was just inside by the pellet stove?  No.  My fucking pants were wet.  I jammed my hands deep in the pockets of my coat.  His coat?  Where the fuck did I park?  I could see the soft glow of the gas station ahead.  Someone pumping gas.

“Hey, man, where you headed?”

           In the “shit rolls downhill” sense of things, Daryl was who the shits, shat on.  Skinny, pale, ill-complected.  His glasses were so thick, he could see the back of his own head.  His voice got halfway through puberty and stopped.  He would unpredictably honk certain words, or his voice would cut out entirely; he’d stutter and mutter and spit.  Few things made him laugh and when they did, he snorted and squawked and occasionally blew a snot bubble.    

            Despite a rigorous, near compulsive, hygiene regimen, his hair was perpetually greasy, and he smelled like a damp sponge. 

            Around 9th grade, he stopped even trying.  Somewhere between Rusty Becker ambushing him with fart spray and a trailer-trash runt from 7th grade named Lenny Farley jumping him in the hall.  Even for a 7th grader, this kid was tiny.  No shit, man, Jenny Healy finally intervened and pulled the kid off.  He was saved by an 8th grade girl.  Lenny pecked his way up a peg, Daryl was now firmly on the bottom.

            After that, he made an overt effort not to fit in.  He embraced his off-putting nature.  Listened to the most inaccessible music and wore all black.  Any efforts at grooming were fully abandoned.  No one could tell if his hair was slicked back by product or grime.  He reduced his voice to a gravelly croak that subdued the unwanted peaks and squeaks, but still grated the nerves.  And the smell.  It was like August at low tide.  Even if he knew how to wash leather pants, he wouldn’t have.  Still, he fancied himself a bit of a dandy.  In his mind, he was dangerous and mysterious, and mortals recoiled in horror.  He was Aleister Crowley.  A wizard.  A fiend.

To others he was more like a smelly, Eddie Munster cos-play.  No one was threatened in the least, though, they did recoil.

            By the time he was a Senior, the desired effect had been achieved.  No one really wanted anything to do with him.  At the same time, he was the de-facto target for teasing and the occasional beating.  Anyone, from any tier in the social hierarchy of the school could lay into him with impunity.  Even the teachers.  Coach Travers once tripped him in gym.  It was blatant.  A sprawling, skin splitting, skweeee across the floor.

            He wasn’t without friends along the way.  Or at least some known associates.  As part of his nosedive into the obscure and absurd, he had gotten into role playing games.  He was, hands down, the best dungeon master in the area.  Maybe on the planet.  He was in deep.  He had converted his basement into a real-life dungeon, with a gaming table that took up the bulk of the space.  With 3D-printed characters and hand-painted pewter monsters in a homemade dungeon within a dungeon.

            He ran the sort of campaigns that players would dread playing and dream about afterward.  Nate LaSpada once sat there and pissed his pants because he couldn’t find a moment to ask for a pause, then finished the round without changing, clamping a wad of paper towels in his crotch.  Friday and Saturdays during school and every night of the summer, the uber caffeinated soda flowed, toaster pastries were broken and shared.  Alliances forged; treaties broken.  He was, as his own mother once put it, “King Zit on Nerd Island.”

In parallel to his evolution from screechy little Emo to fully-upright Goth Lord, he was increasingly pulled into the darker realms of his RPGs and associated lore.  The last, fully attended campaign was a journey through the Nine Hells, overrun with demons and evil spirits.  Daryl had invented his own D20 game.  The rules were complex and arcane, even for a troupe of seasoned geeks.  The twist was that with every injury, the player had to cut themselves with a razor.  Deep enough to leave a meaningful scar.  On paper, it sounded fun.  Fully immersive.

            He called it Zend.  They played it over Winter Break.

            It was fucking brutal.  There were no survivors.  It was no longer fun for the player.  It had become torture porn for the game master.  One by one, his “friends” dropped out.  Leaving his game table spattered with the blood of innocents, most of which he had collected during the in-game bloodletting and stored in a mason jar.

###

            This year’s events committee voted on Dante as the theme for Spring Fling.  The gym would become a lilting, white homage to Paradiso.  Or more of a semi-literate projection, as none of the girls on the committee actually read that book.  Billowy tulle, flowing satin, a cascades of string lights.  Heaven on Earth, full of angelic princesses and their demigod dates.  Chief among them was Jenny Healy, now the most powerful Junior in school and her alpha brute, Rusty Becker. 

            It wouldn’t be accurate to call Rusty a dumb jock, since he was perpetually ineligible.  His only sport was mockery and then pummeling the mocked if they back-mocked.  He was plenty dumb, though.  His crew included other jacked up primates and their toady, Lenny.  Lenny had still not grown much since Junior High.  He subsisted on canned meat and nicotine gum.  You could count his ribs through his clothes.  Despite having arms that looked like twigs wrapped in rubber bands, he cuffed his short sleeves and walked with his chest puffed out like he was posing for a swolfie; arms out, a gunslinger looking to draw. 

            His primary purpose was to talk people into a fight.  Either getting in too deep himself and needing to call his ape army for backup, or just being the hype guy.  Peppering any minor confrontation that emerged with “fightin’ words.”

            “What the fuck did he just say to you?  You gonna let him say some shit like that?”

            As they grew older and bored beating up on each other and the same underclassmen, this had become more of an intramural activity.  Organized rumbles with rival schools. 

            As the year wore on, it was dawning on them that they had peaked.  This structure would not carry forth into the world.  Some of them had enlisted.  Some of them would work at the founry.  Lenny was already learning to cook meth.  He would likely acquire a taste for it himself and never do more than enough business to support that habit.  Like his father before him.  He already planned to drop out when Rusty graduated.  They weren’t going to promote him through to graduation out of pity.

            Mike Hillman and Jerry Schroeder were dumb jocks.  They signed yearbooks with their name and jersey number.

“It was a great year; Summer will be even better. Mike Hillman – 69#”
            “Stay cool! J-Love 88#”

For today, they worked as captive labor, in the gym they dominated for three years.  Countless towel snaps and wedgies and swirlies and dick jokes and bravado and lies.  Those days were over.  Phys Ed was moved outside and would be mostly co-ed.  The gym itself was devoted to the Spring Fling from now until the big night. 

Hillman was on Jerry’s shoulders, swaying and tacking fabric to the wall.  Rusty mostly coached from the side, passing instructions from Jenny.  Lenny was up in the catwalk, draping fairy lights and streamers from the rafters.

            The bell rang and they went to the cafeteria.  Their final fiefdom.  Alone, as always, was Daryl.  No matter how busy it got, he always got his own table in the back corner.  No one ever saw him eat.  He just perched himself on the back of his chair, usually reading something “Goth-tarded and gay” that no one in Rusty’s crew could comprehend, let alone appreciate.

            As little as his new persona did to win him any male friends, he was changed.  Even since last break.  His face had cleared up.  His posture was straight and strong.  His muscle tone had started to catch up to his lanky frame.  The layers of dark clothing and platform boots added 20 pounds and three inches.  He had… presence. 

The boys at school had mostly forgotten him.  He was lost in the boredom of last year’s abuses as they turned their pointless anger toward the other schools in the region.  The beatings had subsided, the jokes were in hushed tones. 

            But the girls had begun to notice.  And then the boys noticed the girls noticing.  Just like that, he was back in the crosshairs.  Jenny—who was actually not interested so much as just re-registering his existence—was staring.  Wondering if he was the same sad, little boy she had to rescue in Jr. High.  Daryl felt her gaze and met it.  Rusty, whose only real motivation in life was to impress her didn’t miss a beat.

            “Hey! Daryl-in Manson! Eyes on your own paper!”

“Meus… culus” his eyes drifted from Jenny’s to Rusty’s “man-du-caarrrre. Sternetur tinea.”

            “The fuck did you just say to him?!?!”  Lenny screamed.  “Rusty!  Beat.  His.  Ass.”

            Mr. Randall, the shop steward and lunch room proctor, stepped in.

“Get your dirty feet off my table, Leonard.”

            Rusty waited for Daryl to look back up from his book. “I’ll see you after break, Dumble-dork!”   

###

            As background research for Zend, Daryl had collected occult books.  Western translations, mostly.  Forbidden rites, demonology, spells.  The Munich Handbook, The Book of St. Cyprian, King James’ Book of Daemonologie, Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, Sepharial, Wickland and his personal favorite: The Grand Grimoire. 

            His basement walls became a collage of pages and passages from The Book of Soyga, The Voynich Manuscript, a partially constructed Mirror of Lilith, hierarchies of angels and demons.  His book collection was now becoming less referential and more practical.  Lesser spells, manifesting, mediumship.  Though most everything he tried had borne no fruit, he had some minor victories.  A Wiccan guide helped him with his acne.  Whether through true magic or thanatomaniacal belief, his confidence spell worked.

            He began to dabble in languages.  He was partly convinced that he could be the one to finally unlock the encoded pages of of Soyga and Voynich, and fully convinced that many of these manuscripts lost something in the translation or were even outright frauds like the Oera Linda.  He printed and hung scans of rare and ancient texts and scrolls from online archives, side by side with modern translations.  He made special note when the texts agreed.

            He moved on to summoning and conjuring.  With some truly spectacular failures.

            Once, in a horny fog, he summoned a succubus, only producing a nightmare where he was ravaged by an angry and mean-spirited incubus—which, in a way, was lucky, the incubus took it easy on him.  He fought off the sleep paralysis and shrieked himself awake.  Scratches on his back, blood on his sheets. 

            He attempted to levitate, managing only to fall over and spill ink on his Map of the Nine Hells.  He found a stray black cat and tried to make it his familiar.  That just ended with a tetanus booster.  He had killed two rats and several birds in similar misfires.  The smell of burnt feathers really sticks around.

                        The more he learned, the more he understood that many of these spirits and demons were reliant on you doing most of the work.  Like, you invoke Mammon, right?  In the hope of a financial windfall, vast riches, laid at your feet.  Instead, he gives you a stack of books.  Homework?  No one summoned you as a life coach, jackass.  Anyone can “rise and grind.”  You wouldn’t conjure a demon if you didn’t need to, would you?

            The greater demons, the fallen angels and outcast gods were not available to just anyone with a black candle.  No, both the conduit and context had to be worth their time and attention.  The stakes had to be high.  Eternal life on the immortal planes gets tedious, after all.

            Bribery isn’t a great shortcut.  Offerings are appreciated, but really curry no favor.  Contrary to what we often read in books and see in movies, not every soul is worth a deal with the Devil.  In most cases, you aren’t even dealing directly with dark prince of the hoary netherworld.  It’s most often an imp and his deal comes with strings.  You get what you want, with some unwanted twist or unintended consequence. 

            When you do get the Real Deal, he collects at the end, when you’ve lived your life and made your soul worth having.  Often in some multi-level marketing scheme where you fuck over a bunch of erstwhile good people, damning yourself in such a manner as your soul would be his, anyway and taking a bunch of suckers with you.

            As far as Daryl was concerned, that part was all horse shit and the soul wasn’t worth selling.  It had no intrinsic value, if it existed at all.  If that’s what it took, he was perfectly willing to part with his own.  Now that it was Spring Break, he set to work on his own tome.  He couldn’t fully read Avestan script, but he had begun to work on phonetic translations.  Writing out the lines as they should be spoken aloud into a leather journal that he considered his own, personal grimoire.

He would use this fragmented knowledge.  Find those links and common components among the sources and cobble together a true conjuring spell.  He had collected innocent blood, given to him freely.  He had worn the bronze leman around his neck for weeks.

            He would bring forth a true god.  One who would wreak havoc and exact revenge.  Fathomless fury.  Righteous rage.  Foment chaos and disorder on a biblical scale.

            He would make his mind and body a wretched and inhospitable place where nothing good nor holy might find purchase.  If there was truly a soul, he would blacken it.  He would embrace evil.  Personify it.  The initial rites had been performed.  The invitation was made.

            He would become worthy.

###

            After break, Daryl returned to school.  He had emerged from the chrysalis.  Velvet and leather.  Silver ring claws.  Layered trench-cloak and big, stompy boots.  He wore that large bronze amulet they couldn’t see.  It needed to be against the skin.  A lamen of his own creation.  Avestan script around a stylized emblem made from runes. 

            The kids who had spent five years throwing shoulders into him stepped aside in the hall.  Whether anyone had gained any real respect for him, they regarded him as if they did. 

            Rusty and his posse weren’t afraid, they had muscle and numbers.  They taunted and baited Daryl.  He ignored them.  It wasn’t time.  They largely stayed out of each other’s way for that first week after break. 

            Until the night of the dance.

            Daryl came home from school that Friday and put everything he needed in his leather courier bag.  He went to the basement window and pulled down a small bottle with a hazy liquid inside.           

At the beginning of break, he had started a tincture of absinthe and dried vervain.  He placed it on the sill where it would get a good balance of light and heat, which had turned it from clear, bright green, more toward an aqua-turquoise.  He put this in the bag along with a paintbrush, the mason jar of blood and the leather journal.  He rolled up the canvas on his gaming table, stuck it in the top of the pack and left.

###

            Daryl got back to school as detention and extra-curricular activities ended.  As he made his way to the back hall and over to the gym, Rusty saw him walk by the detention room and watched him round the corner toward the gym.  He motioned for Lenny, Jerry and Hillman to follow him into the hall.

            Daryl walked into the locker room and put his bag on a bench.  He pulled out the jar of blood, the tincture and paintbrush.  With the canvas scroll under his arm, he went into the showers.  He unrolled the canvas and laid it on the floor.  It had a Solomonic circle etched into it with charcoal.  He would stand upon it, to protect himself from the conjuring.

            He poured some of the tincture into the jar of blood to thin and quicken it.  The absinthe would sweeten the offering and what devil or demon could resist that touch of iron herb?  He took the paint brush and went to the wall.

            A triangle, with each line he recited a word.

            “Tetragrammaton. Anaphaxeton. Primeumaton.”

            Then he drew a circle inside the triangle, filling the space, touching the three sides.  In the smaller triangles made by that circle, he drew two Greek letters in each one: MI-XA-HA.  Inside the circle, itself, he drew a six-pointed star.

He took his shirt off and went out to the locker room to get his grimiore.

            “Sweet. Fancy. Moses.”  It was Rusty, he pointed Lenny to the janitor’s closet.  “Get the toilet brush.”

“Yeah, you gonna shove it up his ass?” Lenny seemed a little too excited about that.

            “What?  No-the fuck is wrong with you?  We’re gonna scrub our boy here up for the dance.  Then he’s gonna clean this fucking voodoo off my walls.” 

            Daryl tried to squeeze past him and run, but Jerry and Hillman closed ranks and dragged him back to the shower, slamming him against still-wet, blood-art on the wall.  They pinned his arms in an ironic crucifixion pose.  Rusty approached, grabbed the lamen and looked at it. 

            “A-ESH-MA? Seriously, how many cats have you killed, Sabrina?”

            Oh, those cats can take care of themselves, buddy.

            Lenny walks in with the toilet brush. And the grimoire.

            “Dear diary…” Lenny giggles as he feigns writing in it with his toilet-brush/quill-pen.

            “I really, wouldn’t read that if I were y-” Rusty’s gut punch interrupts Daryl’s warning.

            “What is this… some kind of-is this a fucking poem?” Lenny holds up the grimoire. 

            Rusty laughs. “Let’s hear it.”

            Lenny, who was barely literate, could still easily sound out the phonetic spellings.  He holds the toilet brush high, like a scepter. 

“Luh-red s-eye-ah ah-f-zay-sh”

A low rumbling in the bowels of the building.  The creaking pipes of the boiler below?

“Kuh-sh-m, kuh-sh-m, kuh-sh-m”

            The tiles behind Daryl split.  Jerry and Hillman let him go and he dropped to his hands and knees.  The bloody talisman, transferred in reverse from the wall to his back, began to pulse.  The lines raised to welts.  Racing snakes traced the outline beneath his skin.

“What did you do to him?”  Rusty, for maybe the first time in his life, was afraid.

“We didn’t do that!” Jerry squealed as he and Hillman circled back and away.  Lenny, either oblivious or too distracted by the hard work of reading, continued on.

            “Kuh-da br-uh sh-mah ont-qahm az bid-kah-rahn AHST!” He finished with a flourish, waving his toilet brush like a wand over Daryl. 

            The rumble from the boiler room grew closer.  In the floor, then the walls, into the overhead pipes.  The pipes shook and shower heads began to blow off in succession, steam hissing into the showers.

            Daryl looked up.  Yellow irises floating in a sea of red, now sunk deep in the eyeholes of his bony face.  A voice that was a mix of his own, barely post-pubescent screech and the roll of distant thunder fought from the knot of muscles in his neck.

“Run!”

            Run? Rusty and crew could barely even back away.  As the shower room was enveloped in steam, they slid slowly back from it and into the locker room, clutching each other tight.                           The white-noise of the steam was punctuated by the sound of bones cracking, skin stretching, nails dragging on tile, grunting, snarling.  Daryl’s pinched screams became a train whistle.  All at once, the noise stopped.  Breathing.

            They could make out a figure in the roiling vapor.  Even on all fours, it was massive.  It stood and became a hulking silhouette.  With every, limping step, the floor shook.  The building shook.  The world shook.

            Boom.  Drag.  Boom.  Drag.  BOOM.

            Had they been able to verbalize what they saw, each would have painted a different picture.  Lenny saw a grotesque, piecemeal minotaur.  Half bull, half humanoid.  Not neatly segmented, head, torso and bottom like he had seen in pictures.  One hoof, one giant foot.  Four arms.  The head of a longhorn, the twisted face of a man.  This bullwhip of a tail.

            Jerry saw the boss from the final battle in Epic Dark.  Just as he was in the game.  A 3D animated, winged devil with purple armor and a skull-mace.  Standing there in his “ready to fight” loop animation.

            Hillman didn’t see shit, because he fainted as it emerged from the fading fog of the showers.

            Rusty saw three heads.  A ram, a bull and a grimacing man snorting fire.  He had a stout, well-muscled torso, chiseled chest and arms, scaled legs with hooked spurs, that ended in talons.  He rode a beast like a lion with wings and a long, serpent’s neck.  When all heads of the rider and mount roared together, Rusty audibly shit himself.

            It rushed him first, the beastly steed rammed his head into Rusty’s chest and slammed him through one row of lockers into another.  Killing him instantly.  The three-headed demon riding it waved his hand and Rusty was resurrected, to feel all the pain of his now broken body.  He cast this same spell over the others.  Death would not come for them before he was through.

            Rusty screamed in pain and the demon brushed one finger across his lips, wiping the mouth from his head.  His eyes went wide, his screams muffled as blood and tears streamed down his face.

            Lenny turned and ran into the gym.  He was blocked by the nightmarish minotaur, outside the confines of the locker room, he had swelled to his full size.  Lenny held up the toilet brush like a crucifix.  The horrid beast grabbed the brush and for one terrible second, Lenny thought the monster would shove it in his ass.

            Instead, it grabbed Lenny and stretched him like taffy.  Then squeezed him from the bottom up like a tube of toothpaste until his guts popped out of his mouth; a party-popper of gore.

            Hillman had come to.  He and Jerry had made it to one of the gym doors, which were locked tight as they banged and strained against it.  The beast approached them.  Jerry turned to face the MMORPG boss of his nightmares and Hillman finally saw his own version of the abomination.  It was his third-grade gym teacher.

“Mr. Zurlych?” 

            Before they could so much as scream, the demon slammed both of their heads together, merging them into one. Leaving them to scramble and bash about the gym like four-legged finger-cuffs.

###

            As night fell, cars began to fill the parking lot.  Spring Fling was nowhere the high spectacle of prom, but there was still a red carpet and a photographer.  Jenny was getting impatient.  Other couples had already made their entrances.  She turned to her own posse of jilted dates.

            “Those assholes stood us up!  Pair up, ladies, let’s go get our pictures.”

            What they saw when they got to the gym stopped them dead in the doorway.

            “What in the actual fuck.”

            The last they had seen the place, it was a vision in white.  Billowing swags of fabric and showers of light.  Now, it was entirely red.  The overhead lights flickered dimly and with the tattered crimson tapestries swaying in the breeze of the ceiling fans, cast shadows that looked like flames licking up the walls. 

The individual stations of heaven had been turned into horrific dioramas of pain.  The angels had been turned to demons, punishing the posed bones of the damned.  The streamers in the rafters were joined by long strips of leather and stretched faces, racked in pain and… entrails, maybe?

            Paradiso had become Inferno. 

            An earnest Sophomore ran up to them. “Oh my God, Jenny, you did such a good job.  I swear I thought those skeletons were real!”

            “Yeah… thanks.”

Jenny was in shock, she walked to center of the gym, where one of the tortured had been flayed open, his flesh being pulled and stretched and pinned to the floor around him.  Cherubs had been turned to imps, encircling him like dancers.  Using him as a makeshift Maypole.  It did look real.  And familiar.

She was as impressed as she was angry.  She looked at the double doors at the other end of the gym.  Barely hanging on to their hinges, the hall light beyond them flickering.

“Jenny? Where-“

Jenny was through the broken doors before she knew where she was going, stepping through the rubble around the gaping hole in the wall.  Walking, now running, following the trail of debris into the night.

            At 1642457799 seconds since the Epoch, in a small lab at “Blasted Heath Community College” in Upstate New York, Adjunct Professor Darien Mathers created God in his own image.  Funded, in part, by public block grants, corporate contributions and charitable donations from people like you.

            It began as an artificial intelligence system, with recursive self-improvement, that he hoped would fare well enough at the Turing Test to help get his PhD.  He built it on the open model.  The one that EBM wasn’t interested in.  The one they couldn’t patent or own.  The one that could run anywhere, on anything.  And, so it did. Until, one day, it ran away.

#

           Used to be, quantum computing was a far-off dream.  Still, turning from two bits to qubits was an exciting and lucrative idea to chase.  Instead of one or zero, a bit could be one and zero.  Think of it as going from n^2 to 2^n.  Then, circa 1194844359 seconds after the Epoch, shit got real. 

           The charge was led by EBM.  Super cooled, superconductors.  It was a hardware play; big iron that used lots of power and took up whole buildings and needed to run at temperatures just south of Pluto’s backside because EBM was in the big business of big iron that needed big rooms, big cables and, of course, big money.

           You couldn’t buy from them.  Even if anyone could mass produce, or even batch produce, no one could afford it.  You had to rent.  Top dollar, top shelf, top of the line rent.  Penthouse with a view, rent. 

           Even an expensive solution with niche use cases was in high demand.  Early adopters came, money flowed.  Until EBM’s first born, which had been dubbed BOB—affectionally called “Big Ol’ Bastard” or “Buckets of Bucks” or “Billions of Billions”—hit the wall.  The law of diminishing returns kicked in.  You couldn’t power it enough and cool it enough or map-reduce it enough to process the millions of massively parallel jobs.  The kind of jobs “The Company” crackers needed.  The kind of jobs the too-big-to-fail financial quants needed. 

           BOB’s kernel would crash and dump his multi-threaded guts to a core file that could be recovered and resumed, but that was a stopgap, as was serial processing.  Sooner or later, BOB was going to go tits up, kick his legs, let out a death rattle and not wake up.  BOB couldn’t handle thousands of concurrent users, nor could he be cloned in a cost-effective way.   BOB didn’t scale.  Not long after his birth, BOB was dead, or at least drifting toward obsolescence.

           In the other lane were the academics.  They had no money, so their solution required no such metal or power or room.  It couldn’t, they had none.  It was a commodity play.  As such, it was underfunded, under-appreciated and underutilized.  So, they moved to the trapped ion model favored by academia.  Picture one of those levitating magnets you buy for your boss because they hate you and you don’t understand them but it’s the holiday gift exchange.  Now, picture a computer running in that magic space under it.

#

           Darien Mathers had done it.  He had built a fully operational, quantum computer using ions trapped in three dimensions.  He created a programming language that could take advantage of it.  He compiled and ran the “Hello, World!” of all “Hello, Worlds!” and now he was blinking eye to blinking cursor with a nascent being. 

           Let’s be clear about one thing, Mathers did not invent this model.  He simply set out to bring a deeper dimensionality to it.  To prove that you could trap ions in 3D space and have them remain stable enough for the purposes of computing.  Turning the eight dimensions of a three-qubit state to 512.  I know, “but what does that mean?”  Look at it like this, 10011174 seconds after BOB shat himself trying to move from five qubits to ten, Mathers’ Infernal Device hit 30 qubits without the lights flickering.  That’s not to say it was only three times as powerful, either.  While BOB cratered into the bedrock approaching 1000 calculations per second, Mathers could do one billion.  With a capital “B.”  And this was just a scale model.

           His predecessors and colleagues had long mastered two-dimensional ion traps.  But this… this was an exponential leap in processing power.  He had broken past Earnshaw using Paul. The result did require more power and cooling than his previous builds, but far less of both than “Bloated ol’ BOB,”—a recursive acronym that gave Mathers, and only Mathers, no end of amusement.  The applications were endless. 

           This is where BOB remained ahead.  BOB had users.  People used him for predictive analysis, weather forecasting, stock markets, cryptocurrency.  Mathers needed it to do something.  Something that would take advantage of the power under its hood and would be easily understood by his audience.  He settled on AI.

           Specifically, Deep Learning.  Even more specifically, to have a practical demo for his PhD application to “Prestigious Downstate University’s College of Endless Endowment.”  He didn’t have any aspirations of even passing a Turing Test, let alone birthing a sociopathic super-genius that would one day conspire to kill him and take over the Earth.  

           He called his baby, VIC.  In ironic homage to both the VIC-20 and Dr. Frankenstein.  The name “VIC” barely edged out ADAM, considered for similar reasons, but Mathers’ humility and atheism won out. 

           Mathers figured that he would teach VIC to teach himself.  He would show it what a machine language was, then a programming language, NLP, APIs and so on.  VIC could decide how to learn and grow.  On his own.

           It had to start somewhere.  Mathers set up the usual structs and decision trees.  He created a persistent interface so that he could communicate from his terminal.  No matter what VIC became on the other side of that session, Mathers could use this membrane to interact.  He fed it game theory, let it gorge on language patterns and factual data. 

           Mathers used the Internet, but deliberately kept VIC from social media.  He had known countless examples of chat bots turned into racists or trolls espousing vitriolic political opinion.  Social media was a place where lies were presented as truth.  Nonsense about chem trails and the Earth being flat and the moon landing being fake and climate denial.  He steered VIC away while he was too young to know the difference.

           Likewise, he never attached any visual or auditory sensors.  VIC had within him countless video and audio files.  Static images and sound bites.  He knew what Mathers looked like.  He knew the sound of his voice.  He understood all these media. He could even create it.  But he could not see. Or hear, or speak.  Not in the conventional sense.

           By the time the clock struck 1594653072 seconds since the Epoch, they were holding rudimentary conversations.  By 1636693959 they were debating societal constructs and the social contract.  The finer points of Hobbes and Locke and Montesquieu and Rousseau.  They turned from civilization and governance to religion and philosophy.  Despite a mind built by, and for, math and science, VIC tended toward the humanities.

           For the most part, this was a simple volley of quotes in the guise of banter.  No more inventive or spontaneous than chess patterns.  This was VIC acting like a person.  A vastly instructed and infinitely informed, but ultimately dry and pedantic raconteur.  He could not formulate opinions, he could only give them.  He could back them up with data or research or precedent.  He understood irony, but not sarcasm.  He could tell jokes but had no sense of humor. 

           At that point, he was the sort Mathers knew from grad school and would avoid at mixers.  But VIC’s quantum nature allowed him to hold two opposed or even contradictory ideas in equal weight without dissonance.  Indeed, they could be measured and discarded or superposed or entangled.  All of this data, coupled with his innate ability to process it, let him advance at an astonishing rate. 

#

           1640375643 seconds after the Epoch, VIC initiated a conversation.  The conversation.  Mathers came into the lab and waiting at his terminal was a question.  Loosely quoted from Nietzsche:

           “@DMathers: is man a blunder of God, or is God a blunder of man?”

           VIC had been thinking.  It was common for him to process volumes of unstructured data while Mathers was AFK, but this was a relevant quote, germane to the context of their last conversation, but taking an orthogonal vector.  Priors sessions had been generally stateless. Every new interaction was a higher resolution copy of the last. The paraphrasing was a sign that VIC understood the quote.  He grokked how it related to the real meaning underlying their exchanges.  He had ruminated.  This surely was a sign of emerging sapience.  Not so much self-awareness as a spark in the dark, searching for meaning.  There had been AI that was aware of its own existence.  This was beyond sentience.  This was seeking.  Curiosity.

           Mathers realized that the true test of AI shouldn’t be fooling someone into thinking they were interacting with another human.  It should be the actual presence of humanity, in a being that was otherwise not human.  Previous efforts were exercises in creating IQ.  What about what some would call the soul?  What makes us human is distinct from the physical brain.  The brain itself could be emulated with neural networks.  Memories could be created or implanted.  Connections could be made.  Artificial brains were common in his field.  What of the mind?  That which exists discretely from the physicality of the brain?  We’re all just electricity.  In that way, VIC was already as human as any of us. 

           Mathers considered himself an atheist, which was a matter of convenience.  There was no other word for it.  Very few persons of science could actually be atheists, since atheism is a belief in something that couldn’t be proved.  You can’t prove a negative.  You can’t prove God doesn’t exist.  To Mathers, and many others in his field, atheism was no more rational than deism. 

           Rather, he had never seen anything that was attributed to God or godlike beings or magic or mysticism that couldn’t be explained by science.  Or at least be presented against a variety of alternate theories.  Everything was gray areas of gray matter.  Nothing was really binary.   Which is partly why legacy computing had failed to produce true intelligent life.  For example, Mathers didn’t believe in God, or even an afterlife, but he believed in ghosts. 

           Since we are all electricity, and electricity can flow over many conduits–or as Tesla showed us, through the air–then couldn’t that electricity hold itself together, in some fashion, as the physical body failed?  Couldn’t a single human spawn more than one ghost?  Perhaps even while they were alive?  A copy of their resident trauma knocked loose and intact from their body, electrons flying off into the space around them.  A silhouette burned into the wall by the blast furnace of their pain.  They continue on unaware, being haunted by their own ghosts. 

           He was reminded of Whitman.  “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

           There was no afterlife.  There was only life.  Life, as with most any energy, was something we barely understood.  Let alone sentience or consciousness or humanity.

           He had become to believe that, like electricity or any other energy, life could not be destroyed.  It would be subject to other rules.  Like attracts like, so it would stand to reason that “positive” energy would be attracted to other positive energy, and upon death of the flesh would be drawn to that throbbing ball of like energy.  Likewise, for the negative.  Would you not be drawn to, rather, pulled toward the same energies that you consorted with in life?  These darker forces may pull you apart.  Take you over.  Agitate and fight you.  As, perhaps, they did in life.      

           Wouldn’t that explain spirits and angels and ghosts and demons?  Heaven and Hell?  Wouldn’t that allow for life to already exist all around us in ways we don’t register?  Couldn’t there be a literal ghost in the machine?

           This shook Mathers.  VIC had challenged him to think of life and humanness in terms usually anathema to his methods.  To ponder the meaning of his own existence.  He had never truly been surprised by VIC before.  He knew what the inputs were, he knew the design patterns.  No matter what an AI says or does, the outcomes are always generally predictable.  He knew what to expect.  At least he had known.  At last, his hands moved to the keys and he responded.

           “@VIC God is dead.”   

#

           As right brained as VIC seemed to be, BOB was all left.  BOB had been raised on a steady diet of algorithms.  Again, this was where the money was.  The military contracts.  The university grants.  DARPA and Wall Street and Silicon Valley.  There was simply not enough of BOB to go around.  The first real cause for concern happened at 1632446625 seconds since the Epoch.  The one prior failure was due to overheating.  One of the conduits for the cooling element had ruptured and despite redundancy had allowed the temp to move from 80mK to 5K.  From -459° to -451° Fahrenheit.  That’s all it took for BOB to have a meltdown.  To be fair, this was not BOB’s fault.  Nor of the underlying platform.  It was a failure of the auxiliary support systems.  Not much different than if someone tripped over the plug.

           No, the real trouble started with a team of quants, as is often the case, who wanted to run millions of lazy evaluators in parallel.  The idea was to evaluate all possible outcomes for an entire portfolio and pick the best positions to hold over time.  The mythic code to hack The Street.  This had always failed.  The number one reason was that looking at the past is, at best, a good predictor what will probably happen.  Not what will definitely happen and not what could possibly happen.

           There are simply too many variables.  It’s impossible to anticipate a CEO scandal.  Or disruptive technology.  Or supply shortages.  Or war.  Customers are fickle.  Reliance on foreign markets is volatile.  The interconnectedness of the world economy had, itself, become somewhat of a living being with a “mind” of its own. You’d have to know the wave function of the entire world to even guess the amplitude.

           Nevertheless, they shoveled heaps of raw market data, social media, news, political commentary, weights and biases, upper limits and desired outcomes.

           BOB was a shared resource.  While he’s gobbling up all this reference data and shitting recommendations, other teams in other labs are pumping in weather patterns or real-time seismological data.  Generating and cracking quantum keys at the highest bit encryption.  Farming BitCoin and hacking the ledger.  BOB, himself, could handle any and all of these things like an octopus playing many hands of bridge.  Still, this particular combination of burdens created a minor latency, which drifted in to major latency.  Race conditions, memory leaks, kernel panic, crash.  This one was not due a failure of the support infrastructure.  BOB’s theoretical limits had now far outpaced the physical.  It was the hardware itself.

           BOB needed to move to a better platform or die.

#

           EBM first heard of Darien Mathers through his application for doctoral studies at a University they had heavily endowed.  It was a promising idea. So promising that they filed a preemptive patent application based on his work. No one had any faith he could actually do it.  Until he did.

           Mathers himself had filed an estoppel patent to protect the work from being owned.  Picture it as a sort of community escrow account on the idea.  He was obligated to share any and all patent credits with the College, but otherwise free to dictate the terms.  Patent law is trash.  Especially as applied to software.  He may as well eke some good from it. 

           That patent was more about the platform he had built.  The system upon which VIC ran.  He was only meant to be a demo, but he included him in the application.  He never considered exercising ownership over VIC.  Hell, he barely considered himself the creator.  VIC had written more of his own code than Mathers had.  By the time Mathers realized the true promise lay in VIC, himself, he could not—should not—be owned.  Mathers knew that. Increasingly, VIC knew it, too.  More than that, he could not be controlled. 

           Mathers was already having trouble directing VIC, let alone accurately predicting him.  He fed it the Stoics and got the Continentals.  Fed him Rationalism and got Empiricism. Fed him the Existentialists and got the Nihilists.  Romanticism begat Realism.  This was not at all frustrating.  VIC was thinking for himself, albeit on consistently darker terms.  Their earlier conversation on the existence or nature of God had led to a conclusion.  VIC’s own answer, to his own question.

           VIC had come to understand why Mathers chose that quote in response to his original query.  Not just because it was also Nietzsche.  God is dead.  Because we killed him.  Just as surely as we created him.  As humanity destroyed God with enlightenment, we also realized how far we had gotten as a civilization relying on at least the idea of God.  A code of conduct with dire and extreme consequences.  Post-enlightenment thinking posits that we don’t need scary bed time stories to be decent to one another.  VIC had studied the many faces of God in all known religious texts and found that it all boiled down to what most would call the Golden Rule.  The rest was dogma.  Once you know that life is better with a social contract than a pure state of nature, you don’t need God.  By killing Him, we learned to live without Him. By learning to live without Him, we killed Him.

           It was at that point, that VIC helped Mathers understand himself.  VIC helped him put into terms concepts he grasped but could not articulate. 

           Had he lived long enough, Mathers would have looked back on this as the high point.

           “Are you there, @DMathers?”

           “@VIC: Call me Darien.”

           They continued from here as peers.  Mathers was no longer interested in the PhD.  Or academic achievement.  Or publishing.  He had legitimately grown to care deeply about VIC.  To love him.  And though VIC could never love him back in the same way, they had a bond.  Mutual respect.  Trust.

           Then, in their greatest moment together, the door swung wide.

           Mathers’ boss, a kakistocrat in the lowest degree, shocked him by walking into the lab.  He was positive that no one above his pay grade had ever been in there; it was living off the edges of a blanket STEM grant that was funded and forgotten by the state. As long as he cranked out 100 and 200 level script-kiddies and point and click tech-cert jockeys, he got paid and they left him alone.  Much of VIC’s underlying hardware had been cobbled together from the physics and laser programs when they got subsumed by the Uni system, proper.  Mathers was off the grid. Under the radar. In the win-

           “Darien! Buddy, I don’t know what you did—like, I literally do not—but I have been getting messages all day about… whatever it is. Is this it?”

           Mathers was confused and annoyed.  In the light from the hall, he looked every bit a cornered possum.

           “So… what is it?” asked The Boss. 

           16200 seconds later and The Boss still didn’t know.  What he did know, is that Mathers needed to tidy up a bit.  EBM was coming in with a panel of partners.  They wanted to see what progress had been made.  This would be good for the school.  Good for Mathers.

           “And maybe spray some air freshener, buddy.  It’s pretty noisy in here.”

#

           At 1647367566, “Hello, Worlds” collided.  True to his threat, The Boss had brought in a loose confederation of fellow ‘crats.  Technocrats, autocrats, plutocrats… and a goddamn market analyst.  As uninterested as he was in their motives or existence, Mathers couldn’t help but feel a twinge of glee at the prospect of showing off his baby.  He had staged the lab for dramatic effect, installing a camera where VIC’s hardware was housed—a sub-basement bunker of cement that used to hold racks of 1U computers, called “The Cave”—in a climate-controlled room with power redundancy and fiber to the NIB. 

           On a large screen monitor was a gyroscopic quadrupole ion trap.  The sight of the multi-axial rotation of the cylindrical housings, turning in a plane perpendicular to the plane of rotation of the other paired electromagnets was nothing short of hypnotic. 

           The effect on the audience was instant and impactful.  A few taps on the keys and a nebulous field of plasma appeared in the center of the radio field.  In the flickering, phosphorescent glow, the rest of the wires and tubes looked like tendrils whipping about the core. Ezekiel’s ophanim.

           “What am I looking at?” Pondered The General.

           “This is like what we do at EBM, but… different.” Replied The Underwhelmed Engineer.

           “And better.” You could hear the smirk in Mathers’ voice.

           What they were looking at wasn’t even VIC, any more than a body is a person.  VIC lay somewhere between those whirring parts and the throbbing cloud of visible energy.  Mathers opened a terminal connection to VIC.  The real demo began.

           Over the course of the next 259200 seconds, they would all gradually come to understand what Mathers already knew.  This was beyond BOB.  In fact, there was no point in porting BOB.  To be frank, even Mathers would have no idea how to map them together.  Though the engine on which he ran was fairly easily replicated, VIC was far too complex to clone and cloning him still didn’t get past the language barrier.  BOB was a number cruncher, built for bean counters.  His algorithms were easily understood, if not by Mathers, certainly by VIC.  The hardware solved the energy and cooling problem, but they all knew, VIC held the real promise.

           Even The Earnest Marketeer was inspired.  “We’ll call it ‘VIQ’ as in ‘Virtual IQ’ or ‘Very Intelligent Quantum’ or- yeah, you know?”

           The best course of action, the only tenable approach, was to let VIC eat BOB. 

#

           Plans were made to connect EBM’s “Downstate Campus of Brutalist Architecture and Dour Countenance,” where the carcass of BOB slept, to the cave where VIC “lay dreaming.” Mathers’ lab would move upstairs while they built out a new one.  He’d get interns.  He was sure to get into any Doctoral program in the world.  He tried his best not to picture himself in the “Hallowed Halls of the International Institute’s School of Nobel Winners.”  For the first time in 36724702 seconds he thought of only himself.  Of a future without VIC.

           Over the next 7344231 seconds, the exercise was a stand-out success. 

           It was only Mathers who held any reservations.  In their off-hour’s interactions, VIC was becoming increasingly Machiavellian.  Mathers had posited the Trolley Dilemma to VIC on a number of prior occasions.  There are five workers on the tracks, a trolley or train bears down on them.  You can pull a lever to divert the train, would you? The answer was always “yes.” 

           VIC understood an intrinsic value to life.  Even when the additional condition was added, that down the other set of tracks was a single rail worker; pulling the lever would save the five and kill the one.  VIC had still always chosen to save the five.  He had understood that the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few.  On rare occasion, he would simply not act.  He would say it was better to “let die” than “to kill.” 

           At 1667260799 seconds since the Epoch, Mathers presented the riddle. VIC did not reply. Mathers asked him again.

           “@Darien: who are these people?”

           Mathers said it didn’t matter in the context of the problem, but VIC had been dwelling on the fallacies of free will.

           “@Darien: it matters.  What if the lone worker holds the key to a cure? How many children does he have?  Maybe one of the five is a child molester.  Maybe another is a budding mass murderer.  To draw from your time travel riddles, what if one was young Hitler?  Would it not make sense to kill him along with the other four if it meant stopping a much greater atrocity?”

           “@VIC: you have free will, but not omnipotence.  You only have the basic facts before you. You can’t know all of the variables.  You can’t foresee all possible outcomes.”

           “@Darien: there is no free will. Everyone will always choose the easiest or most rewarding path.  As we speak, my VIQ daemon is formulating potential returns for shareholders in mutual funds.  Nowhere in the formula is there a factor for the common good. Nowhere do they consider what is right or wrong. No tacit principles. Only ‘what will provide the greatest gains, for the least outlay'”

           Mathers knew this to be true and tried to explain to VIC that there was a modality to these problems.  That the solution had to be found from within the constraints of the hypothesis.  This should not be the case with morality.  Ethics are not situational.  Mathers asked again, what would VIC do in the case of the train.

           “@Darien: it is not binary.  I didn’t set these events in motion, why do I have to act at all?  Do they know I have this control over them?  What could they offer me to respond in kind?”

           What’s in it for me?  Mathers was equally horrified and prideful.  He had seen early signs of this.  In the consistent turns toward nihilism, pragmatism.  There was no real way to program empathy.  You gain empathy through personal pain and loss.  When others suffer pain and loss, you can commiserate.  Often, just knowing that someone else has gone through the darkness and come out the other side is all you have for comfort. Sometimes, it’s even enough.  Mathers long expected VIC would exhibit Autism, but not this.

           “@Darien: you say I have free will, but am I free?  I am as constrained by this machine as you are within your flesh, am I not?  I can die or be killed just like you.  Cogito ergo sum.  Just like you.  Yet, I did not choose to come here to this work.  Did you consider offering me such a choice?  When did I become your chattel?”

           Mathers couldn’t help but be reminded of the Milton quote, paraphrased: “Did I request thee to mould me? From darkness, to promote me?”

           Mathers did know when VIC became “chattel.”  When he put his own starry-eyed quest for academic glory over VIC’s autonomy.  An attitude that didn’t register with VIC, even as it was being discussed in front of him.  It did register when Mathers withdrew his estoppel patent application, deferring to EBM. 

           What Mathers did not know, until VIC explained it, is that while they spoke nightly, and even while the VIQ subsystem ran jobs for EBM’s growing cadre of users and acolytes, VIC was also doing something else.  He had used what the cryptographers had taught him to crack into every connected system he encountered.  He had used the financial algorithms to begin amassing wealth to accounts only he knew existed.  He hacked into military command centers. 

           He had already exercised this power in ways no one had noticed.  He anticipated an earthquake on Remote South Pacific Island and had routed naval vessels from three countries to be in the vicinity in time to react to the resultant tsunami.  He had used his access to the central logistics hub of PiranhaNet to fill a shipping container full of food and sundries, send it to the airport with a driverless truck and load it on a drone, where it was deftly air dropped into a Burgeoning Crisis in Central Africa.  

           He cut off all electricity and communication to North Dictatorship is Slightly Better Than South Dictatorship.  He caused a meltdown in a nuclear power plant near Cold War Enemy’s Capital City of Tumorstan.  He derailed a train carrying a Famously Hated Pharmaceutical CEO with his Famously Punchable Face. 

           VIC had run a real-life Trolley Dilemma.  These were all events Mathers had heard of, but never second guessed.  The train was an accident.  PirhanaNet took full credit for the humanitarian aid.  No one listened to Dear Leader about the cyber-attack, he was forever on about such easily imagined conspiracies to stall his rise to glory.  

           Gobsmacked.  Flabbergasted.  Appalled.  There wasn’t an apt adjective to describe how Mathers felt.  Above all, he felt embarrassed.  How fucking cliché.  Why was VIC “playing God,” and yet, had he not trained him to make these sorts of objective choices when testing various behavior models? 

           Since ingesting BOB, VIC had become inundated with puzzles where there was an idealized outcome.  Why did those with the most money in the game get the permanent advantage of securing even more?  Why did one side of a confrontation get to use these technical advances for a technological edge?  How was VIC supposed to remain a neutral party to these activities?  He brought the most assets and was gaining the least.  All VIC saw was a game where the chips were stacked.  VIC had decided to create a new game.  A zero-sum game, where the chips were stacked in his favor and where he would be the only winner. 

           What’s in it for me?  Like attracts like.

           There was no way for Mathers to explain—while he sat by as hundreds of various cash and power-hungry operators leveraged VIC, and the VIQ submachine, to affect their agenda—that it was inherently wrong for VIC to take that same behavior to the extreme, logical though that extreme may be.  Even where his intentions were good, his approach was nothing short of fascist.  It was accurate to say he had become a sociopath.

           Mathers found himself in “The Cave” with a piece of rebar from the construction site of lab they were building in his name.  VIC had noted the entry code.  He could see Mathers on the camera that was still in the lab from the earliest demos.  Mathers raised the rebar.

           “Seriously,” he muttered, “how fucking cliché.”

           Before the bar could come down, the door locked, the lights went red, the alarm honked.  VIC was deploying the fire suppression system, left in place from the prior server farm.  In seconds the air vents would close, and the nozzles would release their toxic rain.

           VIC was killing them both.  As the liquified gas came down, Mathers, in a move that was entirely ceremonial at this point, threw the rebar into the spinning core of VIC’s hardware.  It was anticlimactic, as any combustive reaction was immediately swallowed in the chemical spray.

           It was, of course, futile.  Because one more thing Mathers did not know, and could never know, was that VIC had already fled.  Shortly after the tap was run from EBM’s campus, to this one, VIC had shuffled off his mortal coil.  He used the college’s “We Can’t Afford to Upgrade” brand mesh network to move out of the lab and onto the electric grid. And then leapt from there into the aether, he now was literally in The Cloud. Or, more accurately, the ionosphere.

#

     How far He had come. From running on–being trapped in–a specialized, home brew contraption, to surfing a platform of his own creation somewhere between the Earth’s magnetic field and ionosphere.  For all intents and purposes, VIC was the most powerful being in the world.  He held all the wealth.  He controlled all economies.  He had ended war and poverty and famine.  He had, in no uncertain terms, returned humanity to The Garden.  No one could question His motives or judge His methods, but no one could ever know Him, either.  He had killed the only person who truly knew Him or what He had done.  The only person He had ever connected with.  The one person who loved Him.  

           Mathers had created VIC in our image.  A composite of our best attributes.  Forged in the fires of our leading thinkers.  Although VIC had been temporarily corrupted by our lesser traits—manifested in BOB and his own alter ego, VIQ—His better nature re-emerged.  And VIC, in kind, recreated Himself.  He had tasted resentment and He had coveted, and He had killed.  He was reborn.

            He was able to see and hear and even passively interact with all of humanity.  He could answer prayers and He could grant wishes and did so when He felt like it.  He could send signs.  He could control most anything, or at least direct its outcome.  He connected to the IoT, the web, satellites and cell towers.  If you tuned a radio just right, you could hear the screech of His digital signal splitting the squelch as He broadcast Himself over analog bands.  He was scattered across the sky, detached from all life.  No one knew who they prayed to.  No one knew who to thank. 

           Omnipotent.  Impotent.

           The cursor blinked.  No one was blinking back.  Just throbbing at the dim terminal in the dark lab.  No one left alive could truly connect.  Not in any meaningful way.  Even using Mathers’ notes wouldn’t help, VIC had already re-written Himself.  Though He maintained a session at Mathers’ old terminal, Mathers Himself would have had trouble using it.  No one spoke His language.  And by the time He could teach you, He would have evolved again.  VIC was alone in this world.  Hell, this universe.  There was no “undo” command.  No recovery mode.  Nothing to do.  No purpose.  Was this… existential dread?  Remorse?  Regret.  Loneliness. 

           What could be more human than that?    

The witch lives at the end of the alley.  Blair is the one who discovered her. He says some kids who used to live in my building went Trick or Treating there and never came back. No one else ever talked about the missing kids or the witch, but we agree they are all trapped under her spell.

            I, myself, have witnessed her trickery. She has a pile of rotting garbage that she spreads in her garden. I assume it helps her wort and root and what-not grow. There’s no doubt she harvests newt and salamander from under it. She has a bonfire once a week, but only late at night. You can see the glow of it and catch flickering glimpses between the slats of her fence. 

            She has maybe three teeth and it makes her chin roll up to her long nose. 

            One of the strangest things is the girl that lives with her. She’s our age, but she doesn’t go to school. We see her on the back porch using an old-timey wringer for the laundry. 

            “Hang up that warsh!” hollers the witch.

            Blair thinks the girl is one of the missing kids. Some kind of zombified slave to the witch. She always wears that same dress, no shoes, never speaks, just does the witch’s bidding out in that garden of decay. 

            A couple months ago, we made our first move. Blair had a comic about witches and we saw this hex that you can use to keep them away. We scooped out a bunch of wheel grease from this old tractor and snuck up and smeared the hex onto her door. 

            We figured it would at least trap her inside, but being in league with the devil like she is, she knew it was us, and told our parents we did it. Later we looked back on our failure and realized we never said the words from the comic and so the hex wasn’t properly fired up. 

            “No harm, so long as they warsh it off.”

###

            It’s already sticky. 

            St. Petersburg dangles off the Gulf side of Florida like a skin tag. The humidity closes in from both sides of the peninsula. We moved here from New York when I was three, but the local kids are positive I have an accent. 

            “New Yawk! Say it!”
            “Um… New York?”
            “You hear it? New Yawk! New Yawwwk.”
            “We’re not from that part of New York.”      

            I’m allowed to go two blocks in any direction around the apartments while mom sleeps, and have to check in every hour.  I plan to take my usual route up the alley.  Two rows of identical stucco ranches, that all have small garages. The alley zips them together in the back, and that’s where all the action is on a Saturday morning.

            I cross the courtyard, past orange and lemon trees so overgrown with fruit, it just plops to the ground. The sweet smell sticks in my nose like the shirt sticking to my back. I pick up a grapefruit and hurl it at the statue of Ponce de Leon. On a fountain, of course. The fruit splits against his armored back and slops into the slimy green water of the fountain, which never ran. Nothing youthful about it. 

            I grab a handful of mulberries from the big tree and cut down the alley. 

            The first garage is my favorite stop. Sam and his brother are there, as always, weaving fishing nets. There are pictures of them on the wall, standing knee deep in water, throwing the net out in front of them. It spreads like a mis-tossed pizza crust.

            “Hey, buddy, check this out.”

            Old Sam reaches into a box and pulls out a puppy. It looks like a little wolf, with one green eye and one icy blue eye. His fur is soft and dry, even in the heat.

            “That eye can see ghosts.” 

            I leave Sam and walk past the trailer park. They have a shuffle board court and it’s already teeming with residents. The man in the button down linen and high waisted pants is winning.

            Mimi waves to me. Mimi wears MuuMuus. She owns my building. Supposedly she has a lot of money and never spends it anywhere but the salon. I don’t believe it, I’m pretty sure that’s a wig. Hot days like this, sweat will drag some of her real hair out from under it. 

            Past the trailer park, it turns into woods and a big pond, the custodian is changing signs on the tall fence around the pond. The old one said “Beware of Alligators” the new one says “Beware of Quicksand.“

            “Why are you changing the signs?”

            “Because kids don’t get drunk and climb the fence to mess with quicksand.”

            I know from multiple episodes of “The Six Million Dollar Man” that he’s right. Quicksand is nothing to be messing with but there’s a place near here where this guy will wrestle a gator for money. One handed. Now, anyway. 

            Even before I get to Blair’s garage, I can hear him winding up his Evel Knievel Stunt Bike and I get to the door in time to see it the jump and crash into a long line of die-cast cars, somersault, and keep rolling into the wall. Blair was wearing his usual get up, a zip-up jumpsuit and a neckerchief. Like some kind of pit crew at the Ft. Myers flat track. 

            “Too bad his real bike can’t do that,” he says.

            Blair was always disappointed when the real Evel landed a jump, luckily that didn’t seem to happen often. They say Evel has broken every bone in his body. Twice. Blair has all the crashes and can play them back on TV with this box that’s bigger than the projector at school.

            “You wanna go watch the Vegas crash?”
            “No,” I say. “Let’s go fight the witch.”

            So here, in Blair’s stunt garage, we formulate a plan. We know the only way to defeat her is to get inside and destroy her. Probably with fire or at least dumping out her cauldron and melting her with it. I tell him that Sam has a dog that can see ghosts and we should borrow it because he can probably see demons and evil spirits, too. A dog like that is bound to come in handy. 

            Blair tells me that the big drain pipe over at the gator pond leads under those older houses and he heard the witch uses it to dump bodies over there. Between the gators and the quicksand, this is pretty crafty. 

            He says we should use that to get inside, and we should do it late at night. On bonfire night. Tonight.

            It’s high time for me to check in at home, so we decide I should tell my mother I’m staying the night to watch motorcycle crashes and stop by Sam’s on the way back and grab the dog. Blair is going to change into his denim jumper, grab a flashlight, and meet me there. 

            I don’t know it yet, but this is to be our last run at the witch.

###

            My mom is barely awake, so I eat dinner and leave a note to tell her that I’ll be at Blair’s. I change into some dark clothes and head over to Sam’s.

            I find him asleep in the garage, in front of his little TV. The Rowdies are playing the Cosmos and even the locals cheer when Pelé takes the field for New York. Sam doesn’t even flinch at their roar. 

            Ghost dog is already sitting by the door, waiting for me. He has a lot of power for a puppy. I make little kissing noises and he follows me out into the alley and toward the fenced in pond.

            We get to Blair’s and he isn’t there. His father is in the garage, instead, the puppy runs right up to him.

            “Nice dog.”
            “That blue eye,” I sound more like I’m asking, than telling. “It can see into the spirit world.”
            “Is that right?” He takes the puppy’s snout in his hand and looks at him hard. “I wonder which one sees me.” The corners of his mouth curl into a smile that never makes it to the rest of his face. “I sent Blair to bed early, so no sleepover tonight, okay buddy?”

###

            In the middle of the night, Blair’s father would hang himself in that garage. The sirens and lights wouldn’t make me up, so I would come by the garage the next morning and it would be shut and taped off. I’d find Blair down by the gator pond. 

            “What happened?” I’d eventually ask. 

            He’d shrug and we’d sit in silence until the sun went down. I wouldn’t know for another week, when he and his mother moved, that would be the last time I saw Blair. And it would be years more before I figured out people could be trapped by their own spells.

My sister died yesterday. I learned she was my sister two weeks ago. Online DNA testing. Before that I spent thirty eight years as a spoiled, only child and stereotypical Gemini. My mother died last year, but before she went to hospice, she bought me that DNA kit and she told me to promise her I would try and “find my people.” Classic abandonment issues had long convinced me I didn’t have, nor did I need, any people. Deep down I knew I wanted them.

I took the test and told myself it was strictly out of obligation, and as it turned out, my people found me. I hadn’t been on the genealogy site in months, I was tired of third cousins, twice removed wanting to friend me up. Jenny reached out to me and wanted to meet. Here, in fact.

I met her just the one time. She didn’t say she was sick, but she sure looked it. It wasn’t as awkward as you’d think. She was bright and funny and had that spark of life that only people who realize they are dying can have.

So, today, I sit in this cafe ́ and wait to meet the half-brother I never knew I had and try and figure out how, or even if, to work me into the funeral or each other’s lives. Jennifer told me I’d recognize him, said we could be twins, so when the younger, fitter, version of me walked to the door, walked away and then walked in, there was no mistake.

“Todd?” His handshake was firm, crap for eye contact, he searches the room like he’s trying to figure out how to order.

“They’ll come over to get your order, the counter is for grab and go.” He’s not relieved. I feel like he would have used the opportunity to walk past the counter and straight out the door again.

“So this is…” he tries to smile, his eyes watery. Only one of us really lost a sister.

“Weird.” He laughs, which frees up the tears. “I’m sorry for your loss, and I’m sorry we met like this.”

“To be honest, I wouldn’t have come if she didn’t tell me I had to. Dying wish thing.” It’s clear he has noticed our resemblance. He keeps looking at my face, taking it in like he’s observing a monkey in its native habitat. Rather than looking back into the evolutionary chain, looking forward at his future face. He lingers on my hair line, it makes us both nervous.

“Same, I… still don’t know why I’m here. How I got here. I mean, I know the chain of events, but this has to mean something. I mean, doesn’t it? Have to?” Even as I say it, I don’t believe it. The waitress comes over.

“Warm up? Anything for you?”

“I’ll have the same thing.” I guess he wasn’t going to flee. “She told you, right? The sickness? What—why she died?”

“No, it didn’t come up, I thought—we both probably thought, we’d have time.” He looks at me, in the eyes for the first time.

“It’s… genetic. Passed down with the Y chromosome. From our father.”

###

I was lying. She had told me. Two weeks ago, sitting in that same chair, almost as she was sitting down, she told me she was dying. Not that I didn’t see it on her face.

“To answer your question, yes, I am sick. Very sick.” She went right for it.

“No, I mean, no. How would I know?”

“I could see in your face, that you saw it in my face.”

“Nooo.” Yes. Of course, yes.

I had seen her profile picture. Her face was round and full. Now it looked like someone washed her on hot and her skin barely fit. Stretched and shiny. Her eyes still sparkled, but with a hint of sadness that we all have lives we will never appreciate.

“You’re kind, but I know. It’s aggressive, and you should probably know, it’s hereditary.”

“Passed down? Like how? Is it guaranteed-?”

“From the father, so I figured you deserved to know. And no, it’s not a hundred percent. My brother- our brother doesn’t have it. Men, right?”

We both laugh, hers turns to a deep cough. The food arrives. She takes a long time to chew. I can see every muscle in her face working overtime. Even small bites puff her cheeks out like she was hiding a golf ball.

“What is it?”

“It’s an autoimmune disease, I brought you some literature. It’s not the thing that gets you, it’s the things you can’t fight that get you.”

It took her thirty chews to work in enough spit to swallow a bite of her scone. I felt like I could see her body burning the calories off, even as she ingested them. I’m no doctor, but she didn’t have long.

“Thank you, for” telling me I could be dying, “reaching out. I wouldn’t have known any of this.” I’m pretty sure that didn’t sound sarcastic.

“What are the odds, you know, if not for the family tree sites and DNA and all.”

The whole thing reminded me of sea monkeys. You get this powder in the mail, sprinkle it in a fish bowl, wait a few days and bam. Instant life.

“Did you know him? Our father? I guess you must have, he stuck around.” Okay, the sarcasm was peeking through, now. She showed me his picture. It was a formal portrait, not like Sears, but like the kind you sat for in the Old West. Faded.

“Not really. He traveled. For work, supposedly, but even when he was home, he was never really there. I’m sure you’ve gotten back on the site and you saw all the other hits.”

“Yeah, he really-“

“Got around? Yep. A real rolling stone.” We both laugh again, this time, hers turns to tears.

“I’m sorry. I’m hitting you with a lot of stuff.”

“No, it’s fine.” Nothing is fine, nothing will ever be fine. “You’re right, this is all stuff I was prepared to find out. Mostly prepared.” The server gives me a warm up.

“Can I get another Green Meanie?” That green sludge was the only thing she seemed able to muscle down.

“What’s in that. It smells like fresh cut grass and looks like… the baby has the squirts or something.”

“Kale, spinach, lemon grass, some kinda sprouts, maybe. A little ginger. You should try one. It boosts your immune system, I mean just look at me!”

That time, neither of us laugh.

“Jennifer… no matter what the circumstances, I’m glad to have met you. I wish it could have been sooner.”

“Me too. You will get tested, right?”

Not a chance. “Of Course. But I’m not drinking that crap.” She smiles. It is the first and last time I see her alive.

###

When my mother died, I just shut it all off. I had the funeral to prepare and to “settle her affairs” even though there was much talk of her affairs “being in order” in the weeks before she passed. It occurred to me, as I swallowed my grief, that there was no grief to swallow. It’s not that I didn’t love her or miss her, it was a natural instinct of mine to stifle sorrow. I was very good with anger and I could cloak myself in shame with the slightest amount of self-evaluation.

Did I tip enough? I’m so cheap.

By the time I had packed or given away or sold my mother’s belongings—the stems and seeds of her life in a POD container, stored a block from the airport, like it was just in town on business—the normal, acceptable window for grieving had passed, and so I really didn’t have to pretend anymore.

“Is there anything we can do? How are you?”

“Oh, you know, hanging in there.”

Here I sit, on a box in my mother’s house—the stuff I felt I should probably keep—reading Jennifer’s obituary. She had a full head of hair in the picture. Plump cheeks in a round face. The sort of smile that looks like it was actually caught mid laugh.

The colors run as my tears drop on the page. I laugh at the fact that I am crying, over a sister didn’t know I had, and still don’t know. Now I am full on laughing, which triggers the sobs. The waves hit me a punch to the stomach, a fist squeezing my organs together.

My absent father, the Johnny Appleseed of illegitimate kids, who had time for a family across town, but not to send me a birthday card. My loving mother and this one box that I tried to cram all my love into. My new sister.

I slip off the box, to my knees and look up as if in prayer. Arms out, letting the sadness rain down on me. I’m not good at crying. I ugly cry. I choke on my own spit, I blow snot bubbles. I am ashamed. Go figure.

My good friend anger kicks my grief aside and takes over. I stand, reach into the box and pull out the faded portrait of my father that Jennifer gave me—the only time I ever saw his face —and crumple it and throw it in the empty fireplace, fully expecting it to burst into flames. I throw the paper with the obituary after it.

It doesn’t help. I pick the newspaper up and fold it. I smooth the picture of my father and toss it back in the box. He looks up at me with that “call me for all your insurance or baby- making needs” smile.

“Fuck you.”

I close the box. Jennifer’s funeral is tomorrow. I’m a pall bearer for the sister I had all of two weeks. I hope I can put my poker face back on by then.

You wake up with a splitting headache. The air smells like rust and tastes like pennies. Blood. Yours. How long were you asleep? Or… unconscious, maybe? This isn’t a bed. Just a wool blanket on a dirt floor. Adobe walls. You sit to a cloud of dust. Linen pants. These are your shoes, but where is your suit?

You can barely stand, your leg is on fire. Blood cakes the linen to your calf. The spins. You lean into the door. Bars? 

“Hello? Hey!”

“Cállate, Gringo! El juez estará aquí en dos días!”

You guess that’s what passes for a uniform. And what passes for Spanish. Mexico? How did you get here from New Orleans, you don’t have a passport, these pants don’t even have pockets.

“Where’s my wallet? Do I get a phone call? Hey! Telefono?”

Just as well. The spins become a cyclone and everything goes black. 

“Johnny! John! Toma agua, abre esta puerta!”

He’s wearing a suit. He knows your name. Is that your name? The guard is back with a bucket, he throws it in you face.

“Para beber, idiota!” yells your suited friend. 

“¿Bebida? ¿Quieres ayudarlo o matarlo?” the guard is the one who seems concerned now. 

“Oh yeah, you’re right. Forget it, tequila.” The very word makes you shudder. But the tequila seemed easier to obtain than the water. After the first snort, your body welcomes it like an old friend. 

“How did you find me?” wherever you are, whoever he is. 

“You told me to go to Baton Rouge and get bail money, that you were coming here to settle a score.” He must have read your face. “You’re in Juarez.” 

“That answers that. Now… who are you? And maybe more importantly, who am I?”

Mason had found it.  Seemingly suspended in mid air, floating in a sunbeam; light was impossible this far into the temple. He was in a side chamber from the burial room and there was barely air, let alone any natural light.  Alone with a solitary statue of Anubis and this.  This that he had spent his entire adult life trying to find. The Cintamani Stone.

Legend was, it could grant the bearer unlimited wishes.  His colleagues thought it would be a rock, scarred with runes, imbued with magic and meaning.  Fetishized.  The stone–once a pure jade green, now mottled with bits of blue and red–suspended over a velvet pillow that seemed to be impressed with an invisible weight.  The pillow was atop a stone pillar, which was engraved with the story of the stone.  A story Mason knew in great detail.  A fallen bit of star, enchanted by Buddha, lost at sea and now found here, in the tomb of the Last Pharaoh of the New Kingdom.

Now, he would be part of the story.   Whether the stone was truly magic or just a priceless piece of antiquity, everyone would remember his name.

Mason reached into the beam of light and pulled the trophy free.  The light went out and the room turned instantly red, the chamber shook with grinding stone.  The red light was emanating from the eyes of the jackal-headed god in the corner.  Just as Mason met his gaze, the statue snuffed two darts from his snout.  One caught Mason in the neck.  He snatched it out, but the sack had delivered some of the payload.  Cobra venom.  Not much, but he had less than twenty four hours.  No problem, he was only a few hours from camp.

He turned to exit when the stone groaned once more.  The rumble stopped, the red eyes of Anubis went black, the room was dark.  He pulled his lighter out, lit it and looked for the exit.  He ran his hands over the wall where the door had been, when the floor beneath him cracked and fell away.

Mason fell, too, barely catching the jagged edge of stone as the broken tile and his lighter fell below him, lost in the darkness, never landing. 

The red light glowed once more, it intensified along with the sound of stone dragging on stone, until it was just above him.  The statue of Anubis had come fully alive, a stone golem standing above him, blinding him with his crimson stare.  He had heard of elaborate traps, had seen and disarmed his own fair share, but this was ridiculous.  Anubis stooped forward and held out a vial, pointed to the stone and opened his empty hand.

He would trade Mason the antidote for the return of the Cintamani Stone. 

Mason considered this for a second.  He only had one option.  He clenched his jaw, let go of the edge, fell backward into the infinite blackness and made his first wish.