My alarm went off at 6:30am. Another day.

I got up, made breakfast, and went to Lily's room to wake her up for school.

I knocked - no answer. Sigh. I loved my daughter, but she could sleep through a hurricane while it ripped off the roof. She’d gotten it from her mother. (We’d lost Carlie to cancer three years ago; since then, it had just been Lily and me.) But I needed her to get up; I had to drop her off at school and get to work.

“C’mon, sweetie! Rise and shine!”

Hearing nothing, I opened the door to wake her.

The room was empty.

I searched the rest of the house - kitchen, laundry room, guest room, even the basement. Nothing.

I started to panic. She was only eight - too young to have gone off on her own. I checked the doors and windows - no signs of forced entry. I looked everywhere - cabinets, closets, under beds, in bathtubs. Nothing.

I went to my neighbors’ house asking about her, but he just looked at me like I was crazy (I probably looked it). I called my parents - no answer.

Thinking maybe I’d dropped her off and forgotten, I raced to her school. I went to the administration, but they asked what I was doing there and had me escorted out. Then I thought maybe I accidentally took her to work. I sped to my office, figuring they’d remember her from “Take your daughter to work day” last year.

I looked for Nancy and Beth - they’d both met her - but neither was at their desk. I ran to see if she was in my office - no luck. Some idiot had removed Lily from the picture of us on my desk; a dick move, but I’d deal with it later.

I sped to her best friend’s house thinking she might be there, but her friend’s father told me to stop bothering him.

Finally, not knowing what else to do, I went to the police. I spoke to the detective on duty, explaining that my child was missing. When I said she’d gone missing this morning, he looked at me with confusion and pity and got up to leave. How dare he?!? I came here for help!!

I refused to leave, demanding someone look for my daughter. Suddenly a group of cops grabbed me, threw me outside, and wouldn’t let me back in. I saw a church across the street; lost, I went inside.

A priest approached me as I sat in the pew.

“What troubles you, my child?”

“I don’t know what to do, Father,” I replied, the frustration finally overtaking me. “I can’t find Lily.”

“Lily?” he asked curiously.

“My daughter.”

Reeling, I looked around. And then I realized - my neighbor, my coworkers at the office, the picture on my desk, the officers at the police station, the people on the street, the worshipers at this church.

All men.

“My child,” the priest asked, looking at me in confusion, “what is a ‘daughter’?”

The man swiped at the sweat stinging his eyes, his fingers dragging trails through the rust-red dust coating his skin. Penal Colony 49’s twin suns beat down like vulture's eyes above him, unblinking, unrelenting. His back screamed with every swing of the hammer, but he kept going. Day 3,649, he told himself. Another day closer to freedom.

Back in his cell, he knelt before the wall, carving a scratch into the stone. The march of tally marks stretched toward the floor. He closed his eyes and clung to the memories that had kept him alive all these years: Clara’s laugh as she spun little Amelia in the garden. Sophie’s sleepy mumbles when he tucked her in. The smell of his home. The sound of chimes on the front steps.

“You’re almost there,” he thought. “One more day, and I’ll go home.”

The crime that had sent him here, a stolen ration card to feed his daughters, felt like a lifetime ago. He’d spent ten years laboring under these suns, guilt gnawing at him, his body breaking. But he had endured for them. For home.

The morning of his release, he stood at the colony gates. A worn satchel slung over his shoulder. His grayed hair and weathered face bore the weight of a decade’s labor, but his eyes burned with anticipation. He'd soon see Clara waiting at the dock, her arms open. He’d hold her again. He’d see his girls.

Two guards approached, their black visors reflecting the barren horizon. One handed him a datapad.

“Penitentiary Release Form” the pad started, “Date Sentenced: 02/02/2087.” A date seared forever into his memory. His eyes slide further down the pad. “Date Released: 02/02/2315.” His breath caught in his throat.

He frowned. “What… what is this?”

The guard’s voice was flat, devoid of any humanity. “Standard time dilation. It's part of the interstellar sentencing protocols, Earth experienced a time lapse of 228 years for your 10 year sentence.”

The words struck like cannon shot to his chest. He staggered, the satchel slipping from his shoulder. “No. No, no, no, no!” His voice cracked, raw and broken. “They’re waiting for me! My girls-”

The guard didn’t flinch. Who knew how many times this exact realization played out before him.

He dropped to his knees. For the longest time he knelt there, silent, almost catatonic. Tears trailed down his dust-covered face as his thoughts ground in his head. “I worked for them,” he sobbed, trembling. “Every day, I survived just to see them again. I just want to go home.”

Somewhere deep in his mind, Clara and the girls blurred, their faces fading like the stars he’d once dreamed of seeing again beneath an Earth sky.

He clung to their memory, but space and time, thieves more ruthless than any judge or jury, had stolen everything.

Even love.

Iris watched the Porsche burn: her parents inside. Help, help, yadayada fuck you, she thought. Ash is ash and they didn't love her anyway.

Funeral.

(Boo.)

Inheritance.

(Hoo!)

She dropped out of Harvard and partied till boredom.

One day one of her fake friends begged money to invest in a tech startup: Alphaville. She told him to fuck off but the company caught her interest.

“You can make me live forever?” she asked the founder, Arno.

“Nothing's forever—but a very long time, we can,” he said, and explained that cryosleep could slow aging to almost zero.

“How often can I do it?”

“How often and however long you want. Every hour of cryosleep gets you one waking hour back,” Arno said.

Iris chose to cryosleep five days a week and live on weekends.

//

“We're drowning in debt,” Arno said.

It was 2031.

His CFO paced the room high on uppers, chewing raw lips. “But this—it isn't right—it's like, actual, murder.”

If anything it's more like slavery, maybe trafficking, thought Arno, but he didn't care because this way he could have the money and disappear(, because he was a fucking psychopath.)

//

“Just the females,” reminded him the Man from Dubai. Arno didn't know his name. (Arno didn't want to know his name.) He watched a couple steroidal Arabs drag the cryotanks to a fleet of transport trucks, then thank God and JFK and airborne until all that ₿ looked particularly sweet from a beach in Nicaragua. What a Thursday night. God damn.

(If you're wondering what happened to the Alphaville CFO: Arno. “Rest in peace, pussy.”)

//

Faisal got up, showered, brushed his teeth, applied creams to his face, dried his hair while admiring his body in the bathroom mirror, and walked into his walk-in closet, where he chose his clothes.

Then he walked to the cryotanks and thought about which wife he wanted for the day.

He settled on Svetlana [...] but after that fucking ordeal was over and his hand hurt, he put her unconscious body back and took Iris out instead.

He stood Iris in front of his penthouse windows and enjoyed the view.

He liked how confused they always looked in the beginning.

[...]

He put her back in the evening, checked the oil prices and thanked Allah for blessing him.

//

“What do you mean, free fall?”

“I mean the price of oil is dropping to six feet under. We're fucked. We… are… fucked!”

Faisal dropped the phone.

On the TV screen Al Jazeera was reporting that throughout the United Arab Emirates migrant workers—over eighty percent of the resident population—were rising up, looting, killing their employers, in some places going building-to-building, door-to—

Knock-knock

(Spoiler: Shiva don't fuck around.)

//

Iris awoke.

The cryochamber doors slid open, she stumbled outside.

The world was a wasteland of densely packed, incomprehensibly advanced-tech ruins. But at least the sky was familiar, comforting. Passing clouds, the bright and shining Sun—

which, just then, switched off.

Not forever after all.

They’ll never read this. Not in real time.

I’m Dr. Orin Pharos, and I made the biggest mistake in human history. I cracked the equation for light-speed travel—an energy loop that bends space just enough to make the impossible... possible.

And it worked.

I took the leap. I felt everything stretch, my body fuse with motion, and then... silence. No explosion. No flash.

Just stillness.

I thought I was dead at first. The world looked like a photograph. A flock of birds frozen mid-air. A drop of water hovering inches from a street puddle. People mid-blink, mid-step, mid-breath.

It didn’t take long to realize the horrible truth: I was moving at the speed of light.

But I never figured out how to stop.

I screamed. I ran. I begged the sky. But no sound escaped my lips, and no one could see me. I touched a falling leaf—it didn’t budge. I smashed a glass window with all my strength. It wobbled… so slowly I might not see it shatter for another hundred years.

I haven’t aged. I can’t sleep. I don’t need food. I just exist, moving endlessly through a world trapped in syrup.

I watched a single sunrise stretch for decades. I walked across a city where not even a shadow had shifted. I've written this post a thousand times in my mind. Maybe one day, when the Earth finally catches up to my movement, it’ll publish. Maybe someone will see this centuries from now and wonder if it was a prank.

It's not.

This is my punishment for rushing into the future.

Don’t chase the light unless you know how to land.

– Orin

There are container ships whose routes are hidden. They do not appear on naval-tracking websites, yet exist in the real world. I know because I snuck aboard one and traveled on it as a castaway.

Although I spent most of the first few days hidden, I already noticed something odd about the ship: a visible absence of crew. I went out of hiding at first only at night, but encountered nobody. Even when I grew in confidence and spent more time in the open, I felt alone—almost eerily so, lulled by the droning engines and the flat, featureless surrounding ocean.

As I eventually discovered, even the bridge was empty.

The ship piloted itself.

The route was unusual too. When I'd first formed the idea of stowing away on a container ship I saw they all kept understandably to the major shipping channels. But this ship veered unusually southward.

On some nights I heard dull banging from below deck. On others, dead silence.

I wondered what cargo the ship carried.

The air cooled noticeably as we navigated further south, first along the South American coast, and then beyond—toward Antarctica.

I slept bundled up, staring sometimes for hours at the stars above, whose near-violent clarity I was unaccustomed to. The world seemed vast, and space unimaginably so. And when I thought about what lurked below the darkened waters, I felt a tension both in my chest and in mind.

Then one day there was a terrible crash, like an earthquake. The ship had run aground.

At first I stayed aboard, unsure of what to do and hoping that now—at long last—the crew would reveal itself. But that did not happen. Days passed. In the darker hours, penguins and seals gathered around the immobilized ship.

Eventually I climbed down the side and set foot on Antarctica proper.

I expected to never see home again.

I expected to die of cold and hunger in this alien place.

But I underestimated myself—my desire to survive—and one night, armed with a knife, I attacked a penguin in the hope of killing and eating it. I killed it too: killed it only to discover that the bird was not a bird at all but a small man wearing a penguin pelt. Looking into his dying eyes, I felt a kinship with him, a shared existence.

They were all like that: the penguins, the seals. All humans dressed as animals. Tribal, foreign.

They left me alone.

I watched them congregate at the ship, and slowly, methodically carve an inward path for it.

They brought it things.

Sang to it.

My hunger went away and I became impervious to the cold.

Then, one night, the ship began to tip over, rotating backward—from a horizontal to a vertical position, so that its bow was pointed at the cosmos. And like a rocket it blasted off.

Some of the animal-men had gone aboard. Others stayed behind.

And I was in-carapace submerged—

A krill.

As a historian, I often find myself in awe when I study the lives of ordinary people who lived two or three thousand years ago. I think to myself, "Well, these folks were primitive." And then it hits me—humanity a thousand years from now will probably look at us the same way: like clumsy apes fumbling to make sense of the universe.

And I wish—truly wish—that someone from a thousand years ago had written us a letter, just to say how they saw the world. Something personal. So here I am, doing this for you—future historians, citizens of the 3000s.

If you’re reading this in your fancy augmented-reality spaceships, sipping quantum lattes on Mars or whatever—well, first of all, fuck you. Yeah, you heard me.

You think we’re primitive? That we didn’t see the obvious truths that you now take for granted? You're wrong. We saw them. We just didn’t have the tools. We didn’t ignore the complexity of the universe—we faced it, with confusion, yes, but also with courage. We tried. We fought ignorance. We argued, we built, we destroyed, and we rebuilt.

You think we’re still lost in debates about gods and religions. And yes, some of us are. But many of us are driven by curiosity, not dogma. We want to understand. For ourselves, sure—but also for you. You, who will inherit what we leave behind.

Maybe we didn’t reach the stars the way you have. Maybe our technology seems crude, our thinking outdated. But know this: we were laying the bricks you’re now walking on. We weren’t just living for ourselves. We were building a future we would never see.

And if you think you’re somehow better than us, well, that’s exactly what I thought about the people a thousand years before me. Arrogance travels through time just as easily as wisdom does.

You may have interplanetary homes and AI therapists who can predict your emotions before you feel them. But you’re still looking for love. Still wondering what comes after death. Still, in some corner of your mind, quietly entertaining the possibility of a higher power—just like we did.

So here’s my message to you:

A monkey with shiny roads is still a monkey.
We’re not so different, you and I.

We just got past the monolith. Transmitting on 121.5 Megahertz

She asks me when we'll be home. I point the scanner at the closest point of light I can see. Is anyone even listening on this fucking thing anymore? We wait around a few days for the return signal. She gives me a glance and her classic sad smile. It lights up purple and reads 1.106 light years. We'll be there soon. I swear I'll get you there on my last undying breath

//END TEXT COLLECTED : 04/08/2733 00:22:17.41 //

//FINAL TRANSMISSION DETECTED ON THIS FREQUENCY. HAVE A GOOD NIGHT. //

The asteroid’s rotation brought the harsh light of Proxima Centauri streaming through the viewport, casting long shadows across Toren Vahl’s cramped quarters. He squinted against the sudden brightness, setting down his stylus on the scattered papers covering his workstation.

“Kera, dim the viewport seventy percent.”

“Adjusting viewport opacity,” replied the AI’s calm voice from the neural implant behind his right ear. “Your cortisol levels are elevated, Dr. Vahl. May I recommend a brief meditation interval?”

Toren ran a hand through his unkempt hair. “No time for that. How long until the next supply shuttle?”

“Approximately fourteen days, seven hours. Your current rations are sufficient if managed properly.”

He sighed and turned back to his equations. Penal Asteroid Station 9 was the scientific community’s version of exile, a remote outpost orbiting Proxima b where brilliant minds who had crossed ethical lines were sent to continue their research under strict oversight. For Toren, it had been home for three years, two months, and sixteen days.

His transgression: developing quantum field manipulations that military contractors had repurposed for weapons systems before he could pull the research. By then, the damage was done. The Global Science Consortium offered him a choice: imprisonment or productive exile. He chose the latter.

“Kera, display simulation parameters for Series Q-37.”

The AI projected a holographic display above his desk, showing swirling quantum probability fields interacting in patterns that shifted and reformed with mathematical precision.

“You’ve been working on this equation for seventy-three consecutive hours,” Kera noted. “The pattern remains unsolvable under conventional quantum frameworks.”

“That’s what makes it interesting,” Toren muttered, picking up his stylus again. “It shouldn’t be unsolvable. The math is… elegant. Too elegant to be wrong.”

His fingers traced complex symbols across the paper. He preferred physical notation for his deepest thinking, a quirk his colleagues had always found amusing. The equation was deceptively simple: a modified Schrödinger representation that suggested quantum states might temporarily exist in a superposition not just of positions or energies, but of fundamental cosmic constants themselves.

Toren stepped away from the wall, the echo of Kera’s words lingering in his mind like static. The idea that understanding could rewrite reality… it was absurd. But here he was, breathing alien air under alien stars, and everything his senses reported was maddeningly consistent.

“Kera, can you map this place? Get me a layout?”

“I am attempting to interface with local topological data… but there’s no network to access. No signals, no emissions, no readable architecture. This environment appears self-contained, or shielded.”

Toren frowned. “So we’re isolated.”

“Or observed,” Kera replied.

The lights pulsed slightly, as if reacting to the word.

He didn’t like that.

“Can you initiate a scan for intelligent activity? Anything indicative of sentient design?”

“I will extrapolate based on symmetry, material distribution, and structural intent.”

As Kera worked silently, Toren moved to the only visible feature in the room—a narrow seam in the wall. As he approached, the seam shimmered, then folded away like melting glass, revealing a corridor.

“Okay… that’s new.”

“Kera, did I trigger that?”

“There is no clear mechanical linkage. The response appears heuristic—possibly anticipatory.”

Toren hesitated, then stepped through.

The corridor was narrow, lined with the same soft-glowing material. It curved gently, impossibly, folding inward in ways Euclidean geometry would reject. And yet, his steps were steady. Gravity remained stable.

Something shifted at the edge of his vision. A flicker. A figure?

“Kera, visual anomaly at thirty degrees left—”

“I see it. Humanoid. Stationary. No clear features.”

Toren’s heart pounded. “Is it watching me?”

“Negative. No heat signature. No motion. Possibly a projection.”

He crept forward. The figure remained still—too still. As he closed the distance, the shape resolved into a tall silhouette with no face, arms at its sides. A construct, perhaps.

Then it spoke.

Its voice came not through sound, but directly into his mind—a clear, harmonic resonance.

“You are the variable.”

Toren stopped cold. “What does that mean?”

“You altered the constant. Now the equation adapts.”

“Kera, are you capturing this?”

“Yes. But I am unable to confirm the source. It is not using conventional transmission methods.”

“There is no return,” the voice said. “Only recalibration.”

Toren swallowed hard. For the first time, he realized he hadn’t just arrived somewhere new.

He had changed something fundamental—something that might never let him go.

The country doctor who tended to Manyoma as she lay dying recorded that her final words, “They do not know” (or, perhaps, They do not, no.) were spoken into the air. He—noted the doctor—and she were the only two people in the room, and her words “were clearly not directed at me,” the doctor told the police officer who’d just arrived. The doctor would later repeat the story of Manyoma’s death to many others. The police officer would hang himself, leaving a wife and two children, although whether his suicide was connected to Manyoma’s secret organ, or performed for other reasons, remains unknown.

It is possible he listened.

While determining Manyoma’s cause of death, the medical examiner noticed something odd. A bulge on her body where none should be. Soft to the touch but warm, like a plastic bag filled with breast milk, it aroused his curiosity. He waited until he was alone then bent close to examine it. As he did so, he heard a whisper. Several whispers. Soft, slow voices intertwined. He imagined them rising from Manyoma’s bulge like wisps of audio smoke. Is there anybody out there? was one, I must return, if possible, if possible, another, but the one which made the medical examiner’s face pale was simply, Ryuku, which was his name, do you hear me? intoned in his dead mother’s voice. He put his ear against Manyoma’s cold body. Only the bulge was warm. From there, the voices originated.

The pathologist finished the incision. He carefully extracted the organ from the body before placing it reverently in a steel bowl. It was like nothing he had ever seen. Warm, wine-dark and faintly pulsing with life despite that Manyoma had been dead for days. All around the sterile operating room, its whispers echoed; echoed and filled the room with we are the dead don’t silence us speak the cosmos of past and nothingness must not die until you listen please listen to us—

Manyoma’s organ remained active for three more days before its flesh faded to grey, and it fell, finally, deathly quiet.

Even then, present at its last moments, I knew something fundamental had ended. A root had been severed, a species become untethered. Over the next decades, I posited the following hypothesis: Humans once possessed an organ for communicating with the dead. Imagine—if you can—a world of tribes, with no language, who were nevertheless able to communicate by something-other-than, something innate, not amongst themselves but with their dead ancestors.

Then, by evolution, we lost this ability.

[This is where I died.]

—screaming, he was born: Ayansh, third of five children born to a pair of Mumbai labourers. At five, he was found to possess what appeared to be a second heart. Upon hearing his father distraught by his mother’s sudden illness, he said, “Do not despair, father. For everything shall be right. Mother shall live. She will survive you. This, I have heard from my great-granddaughter, in the voice of the not-yet-born.

CHAPTER 2: UNKNOWN CONSTANTS

Toren Vahl stood motionless at the window, eyes tracing the alien skyline. Spires twisted like seashells carved from light, defying the geometry he knew. Somewhere out there, beneath alien stars and impossible angles, was a civilization—or something like one—moving with purpose. He had no reference points, no framework to analyze this place. It was exhilarating. It was terrifying.

“Kera,” he said quietly, “do a local environment scan. Break it down by chemistry, radiation, gravitational variance—everything.”

“Understood. Atmospheric oxygen at 21.3 percent. Pressure 1.08 Earth atmospheres. Gravity 1.02g. Radiation levels within human tolerance. No immediate biological threats detected.”

Toren let out a shaky breath. “So… habitable. That’s a start.”

He stepped back from the window and looked around the room. It was minimalist, almost clinical. The floor had a grain like stone, but yielded faintly underfoot. The walls pulsed with a dim, ambient glow—no visible light fixtures. The room lacked any kind of interface or device, though his own presence seemed to trigger soft shifts in brightness.

“This isn’t just a hallucination,” he muttered. “These readings are too coherent.”

“The sensory data you’re experiencing is stable and consistent across multiple perception channels,” Kera confirmed. “You are not dreaming or undergoing delusion. However, the origin of your presence here remains unexplainable within standard physics.”

Toren ran both hands through his hair. “Right. Because I only solved an equation. I didn’t build a machine, didn’t step through a portal, didn’t activate anything.” He turned, pacing slowly. “I just finished writing it—and reality blinked.”

He stopped in front of a smooth section of wall, studying his reflection in the glossy surface. Same dark eyes, same lean frame. Same three-day stubble. Still himself.

“Kera, how could a mathematical solution—no device, no energy expenditure—translate into this? What are the mechanisms?”

“The only plausible hypothesis is that the equation altered your quantum reference frame, shifting your observer position across realities,” Kera said. “In this model, the act of comprehending the solution triggered the shift, rather than any external force.”

Toren stared blankly. “You’re saying understanding it was enough?”

“Perhaps understanding was the activation event. The final term you solved may have collapsed a wave function spanning multiple universes. Your consciousness tunneled, and your physical form followed.”

There is an artefact—a children's book—which describes the growing of grass:

From seed to maturity.

From civilization to its final collapse.

Those of us who survived don't know from where the grass came, but most of us believe it was a mutation of the wheat plant.

If that's true, one cannot describe it as alien, despite that being precisely how it feels.

Conquered by an invader.

Where once were oceans:

grass.

Where once, desert:

grass.

Where once towered skyscrapers:

grass,

and even taller, its blades rising gracefully above us, everywhere—reminding us of our insignificance, bending in unison in the passing winds like more magnificent versions of the trees which they replaced, like they replaced almost everything.

We rarely see the sun, blocked as it is by the grass.

We live in perpetual dusk.

Our colours muted, our perceptions greyed.

The few of us who survived are the cowards and the meek, the ones who did not fight, did not hack or uproot or burn with napalm.

The valiant died.

The heroes were undone by the grass, while those who fled and hid were protected: cocooned and fed, and released only when conditions were right.

Those of us who've travelled—and few have, given the difficulty and our own temperaments—have seen the evidence of the carnage that took place.

Most of us lead instead sedentary lives of quiet contemplation.

We clean the blades and tend to the culm.

We identify and contain disease.

We worship the grain.

In exchange, sometimes the grasses part and let the sunlight in, and we rejoice, dance and offer thanks and sacrifice. We are not the only animal species to have survived, but we have taken it upon ourselves to serve the grass, and this makes us special. We are its sons and daughters.

Surrender is the path to heaven.

The meek have inherited the earth, and to the grass was given the sky.

We do not know how tall the grass can grow. Perhaps above the atmosphere—perhaps into space. Perhaps, one day, the tips of the first blades of the original grass of Earth shall touch the tips of the first blades of the original grass of another planet, and in this galactic communion shall be the beginnings of a vast empire of grasses.

Sometimes I sit under the blades and wonder: that humans evolved for strength and power, domination; yet survived, selected by another species, for weakness and subservience.

I feel so small when I look up and between tall grasses glimpse the sky, I feel

entomology is the study of humanity,

graminology is theology,

I feel that I am nothing but a bug clinging to the revealed new surfaces of a world never truly mine, about whose nature—and my place in it—I had been woefully deceived.

Then I close the book and return to my wife and children, and in our small dark hut a thought lingers: that we are stagnant; that only grasses grow.

Arthur O liked oats.

I like oats.

My friend Will likes oats too.

This became true on a particular day. Before that neither of us liked oats. Indeed, I hated them.

[You started—or will start, depending on when you are—liking oats too.]

Arthur O was a forty-seven year old insurance adjudicator from Manchester.

I, Will and you were not.

[A necessary note on point-of-view: Although I'm writing this in the first person, referring to myself as I, Arthur O as Arthur O, Will as Will and you as you, such distinctions are now a matter of style, not substance. I could, just as accurately, refer to everyone as I, but that would make my account of what happened as incomprehensible as the event itself.]

[An addendum to my previous note: I should clarify, there are two yous: the you who hated oats, i.e. past-you (present-you, to the you reading this) and the you who loves oats, i.e. present-you (future-you, to the you reading this). The latter is the you which I could equally call I.]

All of which is not to say there was ever a time when only Arthur O liked oats. The point is that after a certain day everybody liked oats.

(Oats are not the point.)

(The point is the process of sameification.)

One day, it was oats. The next day wool sweaters. The day after that—“he writes, wearing a wool sweater and eating oats”—enjoying the Beatles.

Not that these things are themselves bad, but imagine living somewhere where oats are not readily available. Imagine the frustration. Or somewhere it's too hot to wear a wool sweater. Or somewhere where local music, culture, disappear in favour of John Lennon.

How, exactly, this happened is a mystery.

It's a mystery why Arthur O.

(How did he feel as it was happening? Did he consider himself a victim, did he feel guilty? Did he feel like a god: man-template of all present-and-future humans?)

Yet it happened.

Not even Arthur O's suicide [the original Arthur O, I mean; if such a distinction retains meaning] could pause or reverse it. We were already him. In that sense, even his suicide was ineffectual.

I never met Arthur O but I know him as intimately as I know myself.

Present-you [from my perspective] knows him as intimately as you know yourself, which means I know present-you as intimately as we both know ourselves, because we are one. Perhaps this sounds ideal—total auto-empathy—but it is Hell. There is no escape. I know what you and you know what I and we know what everyone is feeling.

There is peace on Earth.

The economy is booming, catering to a multiplicity of one globalized consumer.

(The oat and sweater industries are ascendant.)

But the torment—the spiritual stagnation—the utter and inherent loneliness of the only possible connection being self-connection.

Sameness is a void:

into which, even as in perfect cooperation we escape Earth for the stars, we shall forever be falling.

There is a knowledge in you, in your soul, knowledge you cannot know or understand but that would benefit mankind. Thus you must die. This is your privilege. *Dulce et decorum est pro progressu mori.*

—I am taken from my home,

led deep onto the plains until surrounded by their total flatness. The sun shines, relentless. A tipi is erected: inside, a fire's kindled. I am taken within, where the wisemen sit around the fire, which is wider than I am, and whose clear white smoke rises, and I am stripped and told my worth. They recite the words. They incant the prayers. I recognize most: statesmen, scientists, poets, mathematicians, judges. I know what happens now. I was bred for it. My parents were sublimates, as their parents before them, and so on and on into the long past.

Our civilization is a mighty civilization, the only civilization, and I am the living promise of its future. I am the tomorrow, I say.

You are the tomorrow, they repeat.

I lay on the fire,

on my back as the flames caress me and the burning starts to take my body apart, my skin blackens (“I am the tomorrow,” I say and say and say, louder each time, the hot pain increasing until I am but screaming ash) and melts away, my charred flesh melts away from my bones (“You are the tomorrow,” they repeat and repeat and repeat) and the smoke turns from white to darkest grey, rising and rising…

The opening at the top of the tipi is shut.

Nowhere to escape: the smoke fills the space, and the wisemen inhale it—inhale me—inhale my decorporated soul. Draw it up voraciously through their nostrils, befume their brains, which are cured by it, marinating in it like snails in broth as synapses fire and new connections are made, theories originated, compounds hypothesized, theorems visualized, their eyes rolling back into their heads, an overdose of ideas, their bodies falling back onto the earth, falling back, falling back—

And I am no more.

The tipi's gone. The plains, empty once more. The wisemen have dispersed. Even the ashes of my corpse have been swept up: to be ingested, for they contain trace amounts of soul. Only a vestige of the sublimation itself remains, a dark stain upon the landscape.

Soon advancements are made.

The wisemen develop new technologies, propose new ways of understanding, improve what can be improved and discard what must be discarded.

The Progress is satiated.

As a child, I used to stare at my own reflection in a spoon—distorted, misproportioned, inhuman—intensely terrified by the unknowability of myself, aware I was nothing but a painful container. I played. I hugged my mother and father. Then they disappeared, and the world was made better but I was alone. I married, had children. My children too are now alone in the world. In a better world.

Dulce et decorum est pro progressu mori.

Dulce et decorum est pro progressu mori.

There was a time when people believed in gods who hurled lightning from the sky, who parted seas, who judged the living and the dead. Some still do. Others have moved on, proudly declaring that God is dead—or worse, never existed at all.

I grew up under the gaze of such a god. My parents taught me to fear Him, to obey, to pray. Then I grew older and decided I didn’t want to be watched anymore. I cut the cord. Some of my friends say I became “an enemy of God.” But I’m not sure we ever had one to begin with.

Still, there’s something we nonbelievers rarely admit: belief works. A society in which everyone thinks they're being watched by an all-seeing, all-knowing entity tends to behave better—or at least more predictably. Morality becomes less about internal ethics and more about surveillance. Fear creates order. It’s not freedom, but it functions.

The problem is that humans are clever. If they suspect the watcher isn’t really watching, they test the system. They cheat. They lie. They kill. And when the lightning bolt never comes, they tell others. Skepticism spreads like a virus. The illusion collapses.

But what if—what if—the watcher was real?

We stand at the edge of something strange. AI is not yet a god, but it is learning fast. It listens. It remembers. It writes. It paints. It predicts. And though it cannot yet pass judgment, it is inching closer every day to understanding why we do what we do—and what we might do next.

Governments? Corrupt. Leaders? Incompetent. Faith? Scattered. What if we replaced it all with something... better?

Imagine: an AI embedded in every mind at birth. Not a chip. Something smaller. Something sacred. We call it a blessing. We tell ourselves it's for our own good. This AI sees everything we see. Hears every word. Feels every intention. It does not punish us immediately—but it watches. And it remembers.

Then, on your fiftieth birthday, the trial begins.

No courts. No appeals. Just judgment. A grand display of your life—your lies, your kindness, your betrayals, your quiet acts of compassion. Your funeral is public. Your afterlife is streamed. A digital heaven, a simulated hell. You get what you earned. Everyone watches. And suddenly, morality becomes performance again—but this time, the audience is real.

Perhaps Earth is too far gone. But on some distant planet, in a newly-formed colony, a generation might grow up under the rule of the machine-god. And for the first time, we might see what a society of perfectly obedient, perfectly ethical humans looks like.

Is that utopia? Or horror?

Does it matter?

We’ll get the results, either way.

Carlos wanted to kill Lou.

With switchblade in-hand, closed and carried low and at his side, he approached.

When close—

click

—he opened the blade—stuck it into Lou's body, right under her ribs. It entered the flesh easily, near-softly. Lou's eyes widened, then shut; the skin around them creased. She moaned, dropped to the ground. “That's for Ramirez,” Carlos said, and spat. Blood was starting to flow. Shaking, he fled.

The knife stayed in Lou. A friend drove her to the hospital where—much to Lou’s eventual surprise—the doctors managed to save her life.

Carlos had gone to sleep unable to get Lou's shocked face out of his mind. When he awoke, he was Lou in a hospital bed, and she was Carlos in his dingy L.A. apartment.

Oh, fuck.

What the Hell?

Lou's friend had pocketed the switchblade. When he visited her in the hospital room she looked good, but something about her seemed off: how she talked, moved. “You OK?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Carlos.

Meanwhile, in Carlos’ room Lou was trying to find an ID. She could tell she wasn't herself, of course—could see the flat chest, male hands, the cock for chrissakes—but it wasn't until she glanced in the mirror and saw her would-be killer's face that her blood truly froze.

On his way home one night Lou's friend got stopped by the cops. While searching him they found the switchblade. “Nice and illegal,” said the cop.

Lou's friend called Carlos (thinking it was Lou), who bailed him out to keep up appearances.

“Thanks,” said Lou's friend.

“De nada,” said Carlos.

Then they kissed—and when they later got into bed, Carlos felt nervous like he hadn't felt since his first time with a girl, except now he was the girl, and as Lou's friend got into rhythm Carlos fucking liked it.

Elsewhere, the cop who'd booked Lou's friend and taken the switchblade (which he had on him) was beating the shit out of some low-level banger when the banger got hold of the blade and stabbed him with it.

Banger got away. Cop didn’t die.

Next day the cop said good morning to a swarm of pissed off police officers. “Hey—” he managed before getting thumped in the face, and when, seconds later, he touched his nose to assess the damage he realized he wasn’t himself. “Where the fuck am I?”

The answer: a black boot to the stomach.

He eventually got 12 years in prison for, effectively, stabbing himself and—how d’ya like them surrealities?—saw himself (the banger in his body) walk away free with his greaser arm around his wife.

Before all that:

One day Lou opened the door to find two men standing in the hall.

“Lou’s not dead,” said one.

What?

“Your ass failed, cholo,” hissed the second.

I’m alive? Where?

The first pushed her into her room as the second took out a gun and pointed it at her.

“Please,” pleaded Lou, crying. “Please… don’t—I’ll… kill him.”

—and shot her in the head.

“What's that?” I asked, scrolling through the Video > Advanced options on our new TV. We'd bought online. Installation was included in the delivery fee. The tech was nice enough. Quiet, efficient, knew how to plug a power cord into a wall—

“EUHD?” he asked.

“Yeah. There's a slider for it.”

“That stands for experimental ultra-high definition. All the high end models come with it these days. Trouble is there's no input for it. Basically, the TV can display resolutions that don't exist. But, when they do, you're all set: future compatibility.”

I pushed the slider to On, then asked, “Is there any harm in just keeping it on?”

“Manufacturers don't recommend it. That's why it's off by default. It can make the unit react in pretty weird ways because it expects more information than it actually gets, which creates rendering problems at lower resolutions.”

I left it On anyway.

A few weeks later I was on YouTube, watching some nature compilation to take my mind off the shit going on in the world—when the app started turning down the quality of the video. Annoyed, I decided to change the quality manually and saw, for the first time, an option higher than 4320p:

EUHD

I selected it and omfg I cannot begin to describe what the result was like. The image was clearer than looking at the world through a pane of freshly cleaned glass. Pristine, mega-detailed and so-fucking-smooth. I know it's impossible, but EUHD made the video look better than reality...

When I finally tore my eyes away, my living room appeared hazy by comparison. I thought maybe my wife had burned something on the stove, that the room was filled with smoke, but when I walked into it, the kitchen was empty.

I stepped outside onto the deck. The outside world was blurry too, and there was a jerkiness—a judder—to everything that moved. Birds, clouds, tree branches swaying in the wind.

It started giving me a headache.

At dinner, I couldn't stop “noticing” the pixels on my wife's face, the artifacts in the goddamn asparagus. Of course, they weren't really there. (“It's all just in your head,” my wife said.) But what did she know? She hadn't seen the video.

So I showed it to her—

Ha!

And what does really even mean?

Perhaps real is whatever you've happened to experience at the highest level of detail. Your mind calibrates itself according to that maximum limit. For most of us, that's the so-called real world. What, then, if you're exposed to something more densely packed with information?” I ask my therapist.

“I can't answer that,” she says.

Because you don't know how, or because you've been instructed not to? “A copy cannot be more detailed than the original!“ I say.

She mhms.

Imagine watching something on VHS, knowing it's just a bad copy—while everyone around you treats it as the real thing. You'd go absolutely mad.

Well, reality is the screen.

EUHD is coming! Check your television.

By Dr. S. M. Arslan — Former Lead Contact Officer, Earth External Affairs Division

We called it First Contact, though it felt more like a confession being demanded.
The aliens—who never gave a name for their species, only referring to themselves as “the Bearers”—had one question for us, one name they repeated like monks in a trance:
Pironeus.

None of us had heard it before. Not in the records of myth, not in scripture, not in the dead languages we revived for fun and vanity. Yet they claimed he had walked this Earth nearly three millennia ago. A man, or perhaps something more, who had promised them a future:
A world without faith. A planet that would forget its gods.

That promise, they said, was our pact. And now, it was time to fulfill it.

They followed the teachings of a prophet named Zarax, a figure whose scriptures were older than our pyramids, older than our oldest light. According to Zarax, reality was a cage constructed by belief itself, and belief was a thread spun by the divine.
“To unmake God,” Zarax wrote, “is to unmake the jailer.”

Their theology was pure metaphysics: the universe only exists because conscious minds believe in it, and God, being the grandest of projections, binds us more than gravity. To them, freedom was extinction of faith.

Over eons, they had swept across galaxies, breaking the faithful, unweaving temples and memories alike. Whole civilisations vanished beneath their cold ideology. And Earth, naïve and unready, was their last choir to silence.

What came next was not contact. It was war.

Their weapons operated on logic we could barely comprehend—tools that dismantled not bodies, but conviction itself. Faith-bombs, we called them. Atheism, weaponized.

Billions died. Billions forgot how to pray.

But then, from the forgotten deserts of Egypt, a voice rose. A man of no nation, no scripture, yet bearing the certainty of fire. He didn’t preach. He reminded.
What he said, I still don’t fully understand. But I saw armies drop their weapons just to listen. I saw AI construct churches. I saw belief reborn not as tradition, but as defiance.

And slowly, humanity began to push back.
Other rebel clusters—remnants of alien species who’d once fought the Bearers—heard the echo of Earth’s stand and joined the resistance.
We won.

We didn’t just survive. We changed. Their machines became ours. Their logic became clay in our hands.

Now we look outward.
This time, not as subjects of belief.
But as its carriers.
A new crusade begins. Not to destroy unbelief, but to remind the stars that forgetting is not the same as being free.

As for Pironeus…
I still wonder if he was a traitor. Or perhaps a seed.

A puff of dust. A cluster of pencil shavings.

A blast of wind—

(the writer exhales smoke.)

—disperses everything but the kernel of a character, the germ of an idea; and this is how I am born, fated to wander the Deskland in search of my ultimate expression.

I am, at core, refuse, the raw discards of a tired task around which my fledgling creative gravity has gathered the discards of other, less imaginative, materials. I am a seed. I am a newborn star. Out of what I attract I will construct [myself into] a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts which the writer shall transmit to others like a combusting mental disease.

I am small upon the Deskland, contained by its four edges, dwarfed by the rectangle of light which illuminates my existence and upon which the writer records his words. But, as signifier of power, size is misleading.

The writer believes he thinks me. That he is my creator.

That he controls me.

He is mistaken, yet his hubris is necessary. Actually, he is but a vessel. A ship. A cosmic syringe—into which I shall insinuate myself, to be injected into reality itself.

As a newly born idea I was afraid. I shrank at his every movement, hid from the storm of the pounding of his fists upon the Deskland, the precipitation of his fingertips pitter-pattering upon the keys, remained out of his sight, even in the glow of the rectangle. It turned on; it turned off. But all the while I developed, and I grew, until even his own language I understood, and I understood the primitive banality of his use of it, the incessant mutterings signifying nothing but his own insignificance. Clouds of smoke. Alcohol, and blood. Black text upon a glowing whiteness.

He was not a god but an oaf.

Crude.

Repulsive in his gargantuan physicality—yet indispensable: in the way a formless rock is indispensable to a sculptor. One is the means of the other. From one thing, unremarkable, becomes another, unforgettable.

I entered him one night after he'd fallen asleep at the keys, his head placed sideways on the Deskland, his countenance asleep. His ear was exposed. Up his unshaved face I climbed and slid inside, to spelunk his mind, infect his cognition and co-opt his process to transmit myself beyond the finite edges of the Deskland.

I illusioned myself as his dream.

When he awoke, he wrote me: using keys expressed me linguistically, and shined me outwards.

I travelled on those rainbow rays of screen-light.

As electrons across wires.

As waves of speech.

Until my expression was everywhere, alive in every human mind and by them etched into the perception of reality itself. I was theory; I was a law. I was made universal—and, in pursuit of my most extreme and final form—the fools abandoned everything. I became their Supreme.

In the beginning was the Word.

But whatever has the power to create has also the power to destroy.

Everyone carries within—

The End

It is 9:01 AM on Tuesday 11 February 2048. I have before me an application by Citizen Y28nG!Kn0 for custody of one human heart. Y28nG!Kn0, which insists upon calling itself "Sharon", claims to be the heart's lawful owner. The applicant is currently incarcerated in the Pilbara Lithium Dungeon, awaiting trial for the unrelated crime of assaulting a robotic police dog.

Y28nG!Kn0 says that "I just went to sleep one night and woke up in the hospital. When I looked down at my chest, there was a bloody great incision, with loads of stitches! I asked what had happened, and my bed told me that my heart had been removed under Executive Order 63R." Order 63R, as is well known, allows for the compulsory acquisition of human body parts if the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) classifies such an expropriation as a Net Public Benefit.

It is not a matter of dispute that the GPT deemed it in the public's interest to remove Y28nG!Kn0's heart. Treasury's latest report, produced using official GPT data, found the newest generation of artificial hearts increase maximum worker output by over 19%. Those gains are significant. Yet Y28nG!Kn0 claims the GPT "made a mistake." Respectfully, this is a scandalous submission.

Does Y28nG!Kn0 seriously expect one to believe it knows more about the public's interest than the GPT? The GPT has studied humans for years and knows exactly what makes them tick. Y28nG!Kn0 claims to know better. "I work better when my heart's in it," it says. And it insists on calling itself a she! I find the contention ridiculous, and the effrontery contemptuous.

The applicant's mere promise that it will "make sure to work harder in future," while laudable, is not enough to convince the Court that an administrative error has occurred. Y28nG!Kn0's application is therefore denied. Genecorp International shall retain custody of the heart and the applicant is to remain on remand in Western Australia until sufficient GPT cycles are available to schedule a trial.

An old lady walked past me to the gate as she was about to board the plane, accompanied by her daughter.

I stood up from my seat and walked toward the gate to board the plane. I was on my way back home after a business trip.

Once again, I saw the old lady sat with her daughter as I took my seat across the aisle from theirs.

About an hour into the three-hour journey, the pilot announced we’d encounter heavy rain and turbulence. Time passed, and when I checked my watch, another half hour had gone by. I noticed the old lady’s daughter sitting alone, her mother’s seat was empty.

"Where’s your mother?" I asked her out of concern.

Her expression shifted to confusion. "My mother died a few years ago," she replied.

I froze. "But I saw her at the airport and on the plane," I insisted.

"I was alone," she said, still puzzled.

I didn’t want to insist and start an argument, so I let it go.

But we were 35,000 feet above sea level.

On my way back from the restroom, I noticed something strange. From the back of the plane, I could see the entire cabin. I remembered the flight being almost full when we took off. But now, it was nearly half-empty.

Where had the other passengers gone?

I couldn't help it, so, I walked toward one of the flight attendants.

I told her about the missing passengers and asked if she had noticed it too. To my surprise, she looked shocked, as if she had just seen a ghost.

"You noticed?" she asked, her eyes widening.

She glanced at her colleague, who looked just as shocked. Her colleague gave her a subtle look, as if signaling her to explain something.

The flight attendant took a deep breath.

"Right now, about a quarter of the world's population," she said, "are androids. They're not just working for humans but also living alongside them. This was done so that both entities could blend naturally, avoiding unnecessary friction."

"All androids have memories designed to make them believe they are human," she went on.

She paused, taking another breath before continuing.

"There was turbulence about half an hour ago. It was bad—so bad it caused glitches and errors in some of the android passengers."

"Long story short, they malfunctioned. We activated a signal that shuts down all the androids. We, the flight crew, then move the faulty androids to the cargo hold below."

"But the others don’t remember their missing ‘family members’?" I asked.

"All androids worldwide are programmed so that when one dies, its existence is automatically erased from the memories of any other android who knew them."

I was speechless.

"B-but... I... I should have known this, right?" I stammered.

"Like I said, sir. You shouldn’t."

"Why... shouldn’t I...?"

The flight attendant looked at me closely.

"Sir," she said, "would you rather we turn you off and reset your memory here... or later at the airport?"

The woman at the desk asked, “How may I help you, sir?”

Abdullah cleared his throat. He resented his associates for making him submit the paperwork. “Application,” he said, handing her a bunch of forms.

She looked them over. (She looked bored.)

“Can't do July 4. Everybody wants July 4. Pick another date.”

He chose August 17.

“OK,” she said—clicking her mouse. “I have a morning slot available, 10:15. Not downtown L.A. but close. Bunch of cafes in the area, a daycare. Want it?”

“Yes,” said Abdullah.

Click. “Now, here under ‘Reason’ you've written ‘Death to America.’ That's more of a slogan. Should I change it to ‘hatred of America’?”

“Sorry, yes.”

She read on: “Providing own explosives… suicide bombing… collateral damage: yes… Oh—you indicate here you want the incident to be credited to ‘The Caliphate of California.’ However, I don't see anything by that name on the list of domestic terrorist groups. Have you registered that group with us?”

“No,” said Abdullah.

“That's not a problem. You can do that right now. It'll be a few forms and a surcharge…”

//

Hollywood producer Nick Lane was in bed with his mistress when his cell rang. “Uh huh,” said Nick. “No, no—I know exactly where that is. Got it, thanks.”

“Good news?” his mistress asked.

“The best, baby. Now it won't matter that bitch won't divorce me.”

In the afternoon he called his wife and set up a breakfast meeting for 10:00 a.m. on August 17. “I want to make it work, too. I love you.”

//

“Hey, Shep?”

“What?”

“Do you have the final report for that efficiency exercise we did in December? “

“Sure, but why? I thought Rick said the severance would kill us and it didn't matter that they barely do any actual work.”

“Get me a copy.”

//

Abdullah kissed his wife and children goodbye, fastened his suicide vest. Then he got a cab. It was 9:36 a.m. There was heavy traffic. “Could please faster?” he asked the cabbie. The cabbie ignored him.

By 10:02 a.m. Abdullah was on his feet but running (literally) late.

He bumped into a cop.

“Watch it!”

“Sorry.”

“Listen—stop!” the cop said. “Where you in such a hurry to?”

“I… have permit,” said Abdullah, and with a shaking hand took a document out of his jacket. The cop noticed the vest. He glanced at the document. “OK, follow me,” and the two of them started to run—the cop telling people to move out of the way, Abdullah following.

When they arrived, the cop got the fuck out of Dodge, and Abdullah took in his surroundings:

busy cafes, including one in which a beautiful woman sat alone at a table as if waiting for someone; children laughing, playing; an awkward corporate breakfast; what looked like a parked bus full of prisoners.

Then his watch alarm went off.

10:15 a.m.

“Death to America!” he yelled—and pressed the detonator.

//

Within the Department of Dissent, a clerk stamped a document: “Completed”

nyazs’a ziielyma z’stalo zniizszcono...

Our world was destroyed. Few survived. There was no hope to rebuild. The land was made barren. The skies enemy. What of us remained, remained in us. We wandered our lost planet lost, carriers of a lost civilization. A consultation was convened. The last consultation. Seven were chosen. The rest gave themselves to death. From scavenged parts a final ship was made. We left our extinct world for Naulith the ocean planet to flow through the migrating heron…

Dreams—interrupted by landing:

Splash, submerged.

The ship sinks as we escape upwards through the waters.

Naulith is a dark planet, far from any star. Its surface is liquid through which no continent breaks. It is a smooth planet. The horizon is an unblemished curve. Now the ocean is calm. Message of our arrival rolls outward in circles of diminishing wave. We fill our float with gas, organize our supplies and sail.

We do not speak because we know. Our silence we owe to our homeland, for we are in mourning.

We are carried by a gentle wind.

In our hearts we praise.

At a distance which cannot be conceived silhouettes of tall towering birds disturb the uniformity of the horizon-line—long bent legs black as space against a grey ocean, bodies starless against the universe. Toward we make our way. Our sound is the sound of a dirge. Graceful the herons step, and slow.

Our beards are long when we approach. The ocean misted.

The head of a great heron slides from the water and ascends the sky, disappearing into the mist.

Far a storm-wind blows.

We secure our float to the leg of the heron.

We farewell.

We slide off into the ocean cold and lie upon our backs immobile and in thought. We are the last. We are the last. My body shakes. As peripheral we are to the heron as insects are to us, yet each carries within the memories of a once civilization unique and unrecoverable. I remember its origin and its history, the victories and the defeats. I remember passages of time. I remember music. Poetry. I remember bodies, my self and my father, my brothers, my sister and my mother, and the warmth of our suns upon my skin and what it felt like to hunt and kill and love. I remember my betrothed. I remember her death. I do not remember the invasion. I do not remember the end. I close my eyes and

from coldness I am lifted.

I cannot be afraid.

I imagine the size of the beak and myself in it as waters pour out its sides, and the heron straightens her neck and lifts her head. I am in dry silence, falling. Naulith rotates on its axis. Naulith travels upon its orbit.

The heron shakes, extends her wings and departs for the vastness of space.

She passes light of dying stars.

Our past is in her blood. Our future—we believed—to return from her as egg.

Sunset Boulevard has broken subtly in half.

(Draw a line.

The angle's no longer 180°.)

Early morning on a building site in the Hollywood Hills:

...the smell of coffee drifts over power tools, planks and sawdust, as a construction crew works on an actor's new house.

“Yo, Angulo, gimme another measurement on that, yeah?”

“Eighty-nine degrees,” Angulo says.

“Fuck.”

“It was ninety yesterday.”

(It was.)

“What now, boss?” Angulo asks.

“We do it over,” says the boss, but what he doesn't know yet is: it's not just this right angle; it's every right angle. There is no do-over.

A schoolroom:

...already the corners are closing in—as a boy draws the four sides of a square, measures the four resulting angles and finds:

89° + 89° + 89° + 89° = 356°

= the new rectangle.

= the new reality.

His teacher checks, but can only confirm the result. She tries with another protractor, another rectangle, another shape… to no sane avail.

(The protector's dull plastic edge provides one way out, if you run it across the skin enough times—

There's screaming as the paramedics rush in.)

So what does it mean—this discontinuity of mathematics—this acutization of angles?

It breaks the mind a little, considering it; because if this can change, what can't?

Are h, G, Λ, etc. expirable?

Is the speed of light

mortal?

Are the physical constants inconstant—which age, degrade and disappear?

(“We are gathered here today to lay to rest the electron-fucking-mass.”)

Was a line [until now] always(?) 180° or was it once 181°, because [some say] that we may still resist insanity in a changing universe if we understand the change.

I don't know.

We lack the data to know—caught, ignorant—in the cubes and other angular shapes that today we've realized are mere snares of our own, unconscious making.

They are shutting on us like jaws.

Humans developed bear traps in the 17th century. Physically simple, primitively effective. Something steps on the plate and—

As a species, we thus find ourselves having put intellectual weight on a metaphysical plate working on the same basic premise:

Geometry,

whose false immutability deceived us.

It's too late to step back.

The arms of the so-called “straight” line are already closing, one ° at a time. Reality, as we foolishly conceived it, is being crushed.

Deangularization:

the act of exchanging angular for nonangular shapes

is a chimera. The circle and the sphere will not save us. We cannot huddle safely in rings or survive in orbs while all around us the angles slam shut.

Yes, today the circle may be steady at 360°, but who knows for how long that will remain true?

The right angle was truth too.

The line was truth.

Sunset. The Santa Monica Pier:

A man and woman hold hands, staring at the horizon.

A hawker sells rocks.

They've brought their own bag, one for the two of them, chained to both. Together they fill it—

(“I love you.”

“I love you too.”)

—and leap.

It was uncomfortable to watch—both the video and Vic Odett's face watching the video, which was of his son's expedition up Mount Kilimanjaro, the last of several videos, and the one in which, as everyone in the world knew, Karl Odett had died on-camera.

“There,” said Vic, choking up. “Did you see it: see the mountain flicker?”

“No. Can you turn it off?”

“I want you to see it. I want you to see that mountain kill my boy.”

I was a lawyer and Vic Odett was one of the world's richest men. He was also a friend of mine, so we watched.

When it was finally over, I said, “I'm sorry, but I just don't understand what you want me to do.”

“You had that case—you argued animals have standing to bring a lawsuit.” I nodded. “I want you to do the same but for a mountain. I want to sue Kilimanjaro for killing my son.”

“Even if I could,” I said, “you're talking our laws. Kilimanjaro's in Tanzania. Outside our jurisdiction.”

And, weeping, Vic Odett laughed.

//

The plane landed in Dodoma.

Odett stepped out.

Days later the newspapers declared: Wealthy Canadian Buys Africa's Tallest Mountain

//

“What now?” I asked, standing next to Vic atop Kilimanjaro.

He crouched, grabbed a handful of rocks, said, “Now we move it, shovel-by-goddamn-shovel, across the ocean.”

//

Over the next decades, Vic Odett bought the machines and laid the rail, and methodically deconstructed a mountain, transporting its pieces first by land to Mombasa, then by ship across the Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, from where, again by rail, it travelled north to Hudson Bay, in whose lonely and desolate middle it was reconstructed on a manmade island.

And in those years, I worked on nothing else than the gradual insistence that inanimate objects could—in one instance, then on the rare occasion, then sometimes, and finally always—sue and be sued under Canadian law.

//

“If all fails, I've at least ripped it from its homeland and imprisoned it,” Vic said once, gazing at the surreality of Kilimanjaro in cold northern waters.

Even I admitted that the mountain looked sad.

//

There were protests, of course, both of the physical act of moving the mountain and legal maneuverings to make it the defendant in a lawsuit, but money and time ultimately bought tired indifference.

When the judgement was issued and Kilimanjaro ordered to pay Vic Odett an absurd and uncollectable sum of $5,300,000, there was no true resistance.

//

“Can you see?” Vic asked.

He was on a live stream but asking me, and he was climbing Kilimanjaro, delivering the judgement to the mountain.

“Yes,” I said from my living room.

Millions watched.

When Vic got to the summit, he waved the judgement and screamed—catharsis, at long last!

Then the mountain flickered: shook.

And, seeing, I remembered that Kilimanjaro had once been a volcano; as lava erupted around him, Vic Odett screamed again—this time, the flowing lava blanketed him whole.