Archive of Our Own ^beta

There’s a monster next door. It roars, gurgling, gnashing its teeth and moaning up at the stars. At least, that’s what it sounds like. Its source may not be quite as innocuous as the wind, but I’m fairly certain it’s the neighbour’s pool. The pump must be all jammed up, because when the water flows through it at night, in the absence of the day’s standing audio miasma, it gutters and growls, vibrating so low it feels like the ground is shaking. How am I supposed to sleep like this?

I’m not, is what I’m learning. I barely have in days. I’m just about ready to grab my diving mask and a spanner and go fix the pipes myself. Can’t they hear it?

The pool lets out a long, garbled scream. I imagine the monster again. It’s probably red, with four eyes and huge teeth and a long purple, forked tongue…

I’m not getting to sleep tonight.

I roll out of bed, put on my glasses, and go to the window, pulling back the curtains. There’s someone moving around in the neighbour’s yard. Not a monster, someone person-shaped. I can only see the top of their pointed hat.

A witch, then. Almost as good as a monster. I pull yesterday’s jacket from the back of my chair and slip it on before going outside.

The night is warm, the stars glowing their eternal, cubic green. There’s a guy over the fence sifting through the pool with a long cleaning net. 

I walk over to the fence and watch him for a moment. Then I clean my glasses, because the shadows are messing with my vision, distorting simple shapes in the interplay between light and water and leaves. The man doesn’t look right. His head is too long, and too green, and he has no neck. He’s definitely not one of the neighbours, who also don’t have much neck, but only because their skin has stretched loose and wrinkly from long lives spent supporting skulls. 

“Hey there,” I say, with what little cheer I can dredge up. “Are you here to fix that pump?” I have to yell just to be heard over its screams. Water rushes, squelches; there are little crunching sounds like snapping carrots. My teeth ache.

“Oh no no no,” the green man hollers, smiling toothlessly. “The pump is pristine—all things flow free. I’m just picking out a few spots of muck here and there. They’re mine, you see. In you, there are leftover pieces of me, like armpit sweat stains. Literally!” He lifts up one arm to show the stains on his threadbare, green woollen coat. They’re black, and oozing. 

“Uh…huh,” I say, because what else can I? I think I’m meant to call the cops in this situation, but the guy seems fairly harmless, if weird-looking. He probably has all the standard human facial features, and the night’s only playing tricks on my eyes. I just hope he doesn’t come any closer so I am forced to find out whether or not I’m right. 

“Do, err,”—I realise I have no idea what my neighbours’ names are—“the owners know you’re back here?”

“Yes, yes,” says the cleaner, focused on his task. “They do now.” He looks at me in what may be a meaningful way, but his features are too misshapen to parse. There’s this weird, cleft growth in the centre of his face. 

“Oh, I’m not the owner,” I say. “I live here, you know,” I stomp to emphasise my clearly distinct location, “next door.”

He laughs. It goes on for a little too long. “I know you’re not the owner. How could you be? You were, yes, but not anymore. You gave it all away, blown out like a candle on a cake. The wax no longer contains the flame. Smoke, in the breeze of a breath. Your wish transforms you.”

The pool sighs; there’s a sound like a fork scraping ceramic, then the gurgle of a stomach. Mine is growling too. 

“You should really get to know your neighbours, dear Betty,” says the cleaner. “They’re oh so old. Dandelions, withering by the day. Unlived dreams left far behind.” 

Again, I stick to the script. There’s an obvious question that can’t go unasked. “How do you know my name?”

The cleaner turns his unripe banana head my way and widens his white coin eyes. “Magic.”

I’m starting to accept that I’m going to have to cut my losses and apply for a different research program. The one I was hoping to score a place in—studying Petroglyphs in Australia—was meant to send through a response to my application two days ago, and I’ve only got a few more days to apply for something else before next term’s window swings shut. I need to get myself into a decent research team—a field expedition, preferably—if my PhD application is going to stand a chance. Predictably, there’s an overabundance of archeology grads at the moment quickly realising that there’s a shortage of both professorships and funds dolled out for hunting mystical artefacts. I guess we’ve got Indiana Jones to thank for that, though as much as my Mom seems to think I’ve spent the last six years slaving over old books because some Hollywood buff looks good with his shirt off, I had a fascination with historic relics long before that. 

I’m not sure where it came from. I don’t have a convenient story—like, my Dad had a book full of runes and buried rat bones for me to find in the sandpit. I’ve always carried what I felt was the appropriate amount of infatuation with ancient civilisations, it’s the rest of the world that was over keen on caring too little. 

Humanity is a collaborative endeavour, one in which everyone partakes without understanding all the steps that came before. Dredging backwards to the beginning of that story—to the foundations of what we are now—what could be more important than that? The stories we told, the forces we believed in and why…Uncovering them is not a passive exercise. We don’t study objects of the past just for the sake of cataloguing them to be gawked at by the odd Museum-goer. Every discovery forges a living connection to the past, because in the same way that generational memory passes forward through the filter of each mind it touches, our perceptions pass back in remembrance. Humanity is a collection of closed loops, little circular brooks of time. People think of time as linear, but it’s not. It’s not flat either, spread all around in three-dimensional space, all points equidistant from the origin—it’s far stranger. More like a body of water, a pool; it has depth. And in the gloom swims…everything, all at once. Everything! Brushing past blind, gunk lodged in the pipes and the tile seams, cockroaches scuttling across them, and above the oblivious things whose tiny brains bleat survive, survive, survive, there’s something huge, and clawed, red-ridged, four-eyed…

Unfortunately, that’s just the state of the American macroculture today. No one cares about the past anymore. The future is too big and terrifying, too precarious, balanced on the bleeding edge of atomic breakthroughs and political turmoil. Things were starting to look up a couple of months back, but in the end, Regan and Gorbachev couldn’t agree on a piece of paper to sign, their IOU not to decimate U with intermediate-range nuclear warheads. Annihilation is still very much on the chilly war table, a background threat dragged across the decades, losing its teeth. Everyone wants to be a nuclear engineer, or a politician that professionally scorns nuclear engineers, or what the news calls new age hippies that unprofessionally scorn both. Everyone wants to fix the world. I just want to see it. 

There has to be a better kind of magic out there. Not the sort that eviscerates, that drills down to the atomic whine and ratchets out to celestial insignificance—that we let loose and now states back down on us all with boundless hunger. You’ve got to believe that the human race knew other secrets in the past, and that we can grasp them again through the esoteric objects left behind. This isn’t the end state of the human species. 

Between my lack of sleep and refusal to believe that my perfect application for my dream research expedition could have been rejected, I can’t concentrate on finishing any alternative applications. I really don’t want to spend the next six months cooped up in a library poring over some other professor’s passion and fetching him his morning coffee. 

My Commodore 64 screen blares its white rectangle of words in potentia. I read back over what I’ve written and find it completely nonsensical—a real Jack Torrance moment for the ages: 

Reveal the path and grant me passage. Reveal the path and grant me passage. 

On and on it goes, and you know what? My grades are probably good enough to get me into most programs even with this application letter. I’m half-tempted to give it a shot.

There’s a knock at the door. I was practically camping by it over the few days when I was expecting a response to my application, but the habit has since dried up. I race to the door and fling it open. 

And find myself face to face with what I hoped I wouldn’t have to see. It’s last night’s mystery pool cleaner, up close, in daylight. He really is green, his head looking like it was grabbed at both ends and pulled, then dipped in guac. He gives me a chummy smile and brandishes a single envelope. He’s got a mailman outfit on and everything; blue shirt and little blue shorts, but his hat is the same, yellow and ribboned and witch-like. 

He says, in a perfect impression of the AOL guy, compression static and all: “You’ve got mail!”

“Impressive,” I mutter, and take the envelope. This is the one—it’s from Griffith University, and it’s about to tell me whether I’ll be spending the next six months studying Petroglyphs painted by the world’s oldest living culture, or shuffling around in a library somewhere here on the west coast. My hands shake with the effort of not tearing the envelope into shreds right here on the threshold.

“So, you’re a mailman too?” I ask the green man. Come to think of it, what else did we talk about last night? I don’t remember going back inside. 

“I am the harbinger. Tee hee.”

“Did you just say ‘tee hee’ out loud?” 

“Ah ah, don’t go questioning the simple inflows of your eyes and ear holes now. When they can’t be vouched for, whatever will be left? Now, go on and open that letter you’re so hipping hyped about. I know it’s just jazzed to see you too.” 

“Right…” All this weirdness was much easier to handle last night; it felt like a fever dream. Now here stands its figment, grinning under the discerning light of the pentahedron sun. It’s looking particularly red today. 

“You ought to stop snapping your fingers together like that,” says the mailman, “you’ll give yourself a cramp that twists so tight cartoon stars pop out. Spling!” 

“Huh? Oh.” I notice my other hand, whose fingers have formed an imitation crab claw, pushing thumb and fingertips together incessantly. It takes some effort to stop.

“This is what happens when you don’t chew your food,” the mailman says solemnly. “The stomach has to work extra hard, and all the while, the meal is whole and peeping, with those big-ol peepers,”—he pokes the lenses of my glasses with two outstretched forefingers, and I’m too confused to be outraged—“cosmic enzymes working overtime to strip all the waste away from the lean, mean human soul. Boop!” He pokes my forehead.

My stomach lets out a low, shuddering growl, and a crack shoots down the stone stairway to my door. 

“Thanks for the letter,” I say with finality. I don’t know why I let this guy go on for so long—maybe just to see how weird it got. I don’t want to listen to this anymore; I’ve got a letter to open, a career to set in motion. Some lunch to eat, apparently. Lately, I’ve been so hungry. 

As the mailman leaves, I see my neighbours strolling along the street outside, hand in hand, walking a penguin. They look like a happy couple, the way old couples are supposed to look, quietly satisfied. I imagine they’ve been together for a long time, because it’s a nice story to tell. The man’s hair is long, and he wears small, circular glasses. The woman bears an uncanny resemblance to my grandmother. 

What was it that the green guy said? Right: unlived dreams left far behind.

My application was accepted! Squee, etcetera. I knew it would be—how could they say no to these accolades? But still, it’s exciting. Once I’ve screamed a bit and punched the air, my thoughts shift to the logistics of it all. I’ve got my plants, I’ve got my cat, Orgalorg, named for the mythical deity of chaos. Someone will need to look after them while I’m gone. 

I pick up the phone to call…someone. I was going to tell someone. Short, vaguely purple, lives down the hall of what is, I am just realising, a bungalow. What should be a University of Washington boarding house is in fact a spacious family home.

And the objects are all wrong. I’ve got my trusty computer, all my research books and archeological magazines, but the TV is an old black and white CRT. There’s a box of children’s toys on the floor—a stuffed rainbow unicorn and a little blue, wind-up robot. This is the house I grew up in, frozen in a late sixties haze, and entirely empty. If I called my Mom, would she answer? 

My fingers are cramped from their constant snapping. 

The phone rings.

“Hi, this is Betty Grof speaking.” The phone is decidedly preset-aged too, and mobile. 

“However it has to happen,” whispers the voice on the other end of the line. It’s mine, muffled by a pumping sound, the shunt and squeak of pipes. “I wish for the power. I wish for…the power. The power. I wish for the power. Power!” She starts to laugh, then the sound morphs into a cackle, then a long, liquid choke. 

Something catches my eye in the mirror, I turn and watch as two holes burn into the flesh of my cheeks, flaming green. It doesn’t hurt. It feels good.

“Betty,” says the voice on the phone. It isn’t mine anymore. “Remember what you wished for. Remember; not the thing itself, but the power to make it happen. You could not have been given what you did not desire, at your deepest core. Power.”

“It saw into me,” I say, and stroke my new eyes, the flat sides of my face, reddening. “It saw what I wanted.”

I didn’t want to fix the universe. I just wanted to see it. 

People stare at me as I walk to class the next morning. They’re probably checking out my brand new face. It gets uncomfortable after a while, those stares. Their eyes are so wide, and black, their breaths steaming the air around them. Lay off, guys, it’s not my fault I can only walk sideways. 

I yawn as I sidle into my seat in the lecture hall. I couldn’t sleep last night, again because of the pool. It was louder than ever, churning and rumbling and echoing with a voice that said I wish, I wish, I wish. 

Well I wish I’d gotten more sleep, because Simon Petrikov is coming in to speak today about his research. Hello, the guy who discovered Enchiroid Petroglyphs! He brought together seemingly unrelated petroglyphic carvings found across countless ancient cultures, and drew patterns between them, connecting them as stylistic variations of the same root language! The implications of this discovery call into question our understanding of the connectedness of ancient civilisations—did these patterns emerge independently, from some underlying neurochemical quirk? Was the language passed down from a shared parent, or was the language itself shared through hitherto unknown global trade routes? As a professional through and through, Petrikov neglected to give his opinion in his breakthrough paper. I wanted to ask him about his personal hypothesis when I met him in the library last week, but I was too flustered. It was all I could do keeping it together long enough to form words. 

When Petrikov walks in, I get unreasonably excited. My claws snap like crazy. He’s wearing the same suit he was in last week, the elbows patched over, shirt fastened with a red bow tie. He’s no Indiana Jones, but he does regularly brave it solo around the world searching for artefacts that most people don’t believe exist. Mostly because no official body will fund his expeditions. Presently, he trips over the lectern and drops his papers everywhere. 

Part of me wishes I were in the front row, so I could rush over and help him pick them up, and maybe our hands would brush accidentally-on-purpose, like they did in the library. Unfortunately, I’m walled in by the…whatever it is occupying the rest of the seats in the hall. They’re shadows of some kind, transparent but impassable. 

Once Petrikov has his papers in order and our professor gives him a proper introduction, Petrikov begins his talk, pushing his first slide under the projector. There’s a lot of runes, and a lot of red.

“Golb,” he says, adjusting his glasses. “An entity referenced in various pantheons of ancient cultures.” The being is pictured a few times on the slide, one depiction smudged and crude, from a cave painting, the other a detailed ink illustration from a 11th century manuscript. Four wide eyes grace the plane of a face extending downward from a pentahedral dome. 

“As you can see, it has a sun-shaped head, and is generally depicted surrounded by these star-like objects.” Petrikov indicates the green cuboids surrounding the creature. “This of course has led to speculation on whether Golb serves as a representation of the sky—the heavens above our world. However, all textual mentions of Golb describe it as an entity of chaos and destruction, bent on spreading doom.” 

Petrikov looks up at his enraptured audience of one. I smile at him, then he frowns. “Egh errgh,” he crows, making a noise like a gameshow buzzer. “Wrong. They’re all wrong! Golb is…” he pats his hands on his thighs, imitating a drumroll, then adjusts the next slide. “A baby!” he says, and indeed, the slide shows a photograph of a human baby, albeit one wearing a strange, white hat with two knobs on top. Petrikov’s hair has turned a dark shade of red, and grown several inches. His glasses are square. 

“Golb is a tiny, little, chubby wubby baby,” he says, though his voice is different too. Higher, and more gravelly. His smile is very wide. “Not this one, mind, but the comparison remains.” He clears his throat, and changes the slide to another illustration of Golb. “It does what babies do. It eats. It grabs; it explores. It’s a fresh, fat, red thing slowly discovering the multiversal existence it has been born alongside.” Petrikov is wearing a yellow, pointed hat, just like the mailman’s. 

“As the jellybean jigsaw of the multiverse spreads and multiplies, so too does Golb, its twin in the stelliferous womb, chomping down on all the sugar it can reach. There’s no intent behind its actions, no intelligence. It’s all instinct; the animalistic instinct of a newborn, only just beginning to form an understanding of the boundaries between it and everything else. There’s no language, not yet. No fine motor control. These are things that it will learn, in time. And in much less time than it would have ordinarily required.” Petrikov narrows his eyes—only they’re not his eyes, they’re definitely mine. My hair and my voice, aged by a few years, dishevelled and dangling right over the edge of sanity. I look like shit. 

“You’ve accelerated things. You’ve usurped the emerging mind of a god before it had a chance to fully form. You asshole! It’s like taking candy from a baby! Well, at least you’ll savour the taste. It was wasted on the kid, am I right? Yeah, I’m right.” Betty nods to herself, frowning. “I’m right. Besides, it was the only way to save him.” For a moment, her glasses shrink and smooth back into circles, gleaming white in the light of the projector. 

“Obvious questions are coming to mind at this point. If Golb is a baby, what was its mother? Are there other babies—other sets of twins, multiverses and their carnivorous counterparts? I don’t have those answers.” Betty, her eyes wide and manic and saddled with dark bags, stares up at me from behind the lectern and says, “how about we search for them together?” 

Betty of the future wears a green woollen coat that oozes black slime at the pits. 

She winks. “You’re in for a wild ride, sweetcheeks.”

Here’s what I know: I am being digested. My body and memories are flaking away in the acid barrage and won’t last much longer as they are. My college dorm is my childhood home is the womb itself, my mother’s and that of whatever birthed this multiversal pair. And it’s a stomach, which is also my stomach. I’m digesting myself because with every nutrient stripped and syphoned I merge more fully with the being encasing me, Golb, the heavenly vista and the eater of worlds. I wished for this. I’m not sure how, or why, but I did. And this was my heart’s deepest desire: to take the power of Golb as my own. 

This probably has implications for the universe at large, forcibly ageing it from a mere thirteen billion year old infant to the cosmic-equivalent of an adult with a job. What will it mean for the multiverse, which itself is young and fumbling through the early stages of sporadic creation and merging and splitting and bridging? I might destroy everything. 

I might turn around to face the universes I spawned from with a hunger like I’ve never known, and digest it all. There is a better kind of magic, and it’s mine. 

There you go, green man, my peepers are wide open.

This place that I run through now—tilted, sideways, claws snapping, stomach growling—is just the flare in the mind of a body crushed between four walls, who wished for power. That wish is coming true; I can feel power swarming, coursing through me with all the physical intricacies of the four fundamental forces—strong, weak, gravitation, electromagnetism. No: fire, ice, candy, and slime. The friction between them hurts. I want nothing more than for their ordered interactions to end. 

When I make it home, I rush through to the back of the house, pushing past the jumbled, layered days of my human life. The rooms of my childhood are most prominent, a blur of moving, loving figures and the scattered remnants of play—but there’s also the dorm room, with its books and sex and computer screens. There are duller layers, that only occupied a day or two, spent in hotel rooms and the unfamiliar houses of other people. All the time I have lived congregates here into a grey sludge brick that I push through with newly-clawed hands. 

I carve a passage to the backdoor and run out onto the lawn. The grass burns under my feet as I make for the fence and vault over it into the neighbour’s yard. I can finally see the source of the awful noise for what it is. Here is the stomach, the doorway out of this place and into the beast proper, where all my pieces have been flowing as I’ve been shaved down into a sharpened essence of myself, ready to spread my intent through the being that surrounds me. Its head is the sun, now setting, it’s playthings the stars as they fade into view; their evergreen, perfect edges are nothing but objects hanging from its mobile. 

It’s pointless, staying here, just a cockroach’s instinct to survive, survive, survive. It’s too late for that. I made my choice. Clinging to this last remaining human place, sequestered in my mind as it ascends, would only destroy what little of me remains. I take my acceptance letter out of my pocket. I’ve been carrying it around with me as a constant reminder of the journey to come. 

Betty Grof,

We are pleased to inform you that your application to become one with the entity known colloquially is ‘Golb’ has been accepted! Please find enclosed your one-way ticket to c̸̳̈́̒̚o̶̩͓̳̓͂m̷̜̀̅̓e̸̡̥̓̈́̕t̸̳͌̐>̶̘̥̙͒̓!̴̻͑ͅ

As they say over there, crikey!

I get ready to dive. 

The pool is no longer filled with water. It is many things, all shifting, all vying for my attention at once. I wonder, is this what it will be like, trying to scour through the sensory madness streaming into the underdeveloped brain of a deific infant? The sensory overload of a million universes blaring their sugar-bright lights and grating forces of attraction and repulsion. No wonder Golb took billions of years to learn to sit upright, it has so much more to sort through than your average newborn animal. Even humans have a tough time of it, keeping their swollen heads upright on soft necks and filtering their first two decades through jacked-up frontal lobes. 

Suddenly, the image in the pool clarifies, and I’m looking down from the summit of a mountain, watching someone fall. It’s the green man; he’s reaching for me. I can’t pull him out, he’s right in the centre of the pool, which, incidentally, has grown to the size of a football field and only seems to be expanding. I grab his cleaning net where it has been left lying against the fence. 

“Oh flip, Margles, I thought you’d be in here. Where are you? Margles?”

“It’s me,” I say, “Betty,” though the name won’t apply for much longer. I stick the net in the pool and drag it over to Magic Man—the title feels right, somehow. The net catches a thousand collateral objects along the way; lost memories and dying planets and waygone roaches.

“Oh flip oh flip oh—wait, duh doy, what am I saying? There are no rules here! Fuck! Fuckity fuck fuck. Oh, that feels great.” 

I sweep the net under him and pull it up. His form is very small now, having fallen away down the red mountainside, but when the mesh passes through the tiny, waggling stems of his limbs, they split right along the string, and he is cross-sectioned, melting to liquid cubes and drifting away in the chlorine swell. 

“Nothing to weed,” he whispers, as he dissolves. “Nothing to seed.”

“No!” I cry out, though part of me wonders why I tried to save him, and what saving him would even mean. This place isn’t real, and nothing borrowed, tacked on by sweaty Mars magic, can stick around for what comes next.

I toss the net aside. The Martian mountain is gone, and instead of the euphony of dancing universes, making my eyes prickle with their unapologetic, structured activity built up against the blank red face of entropy, there is just a pool. I can see the tiles at the bottom, and the two figures lying there, chained together. It’s my neighbours—not really my neighbours, but two more pieces of myself, shelved here along with the rest of the junk as Golb’s stomach acids do their work. The bottom of the pool is the crab’s feeding ground, crawling with mindless roaches that scuttle over the couple’s still, drowned forms. I finally realise who they are.

It’s me, old and happy and wrinkly as a prune. The man that I love, and have loved for all the perfect decades of an imagined story, is Simon Petrikov. 

I remember him all at once; I sent the memory away but it came right back, and like a boomerang strikes me hard in the back of the head. I almost fall. 

Simon. 

He is why, and how. I did all of this for him. Everything. 

I remember the world I found when he ripped time apart to say goodbye, not counting on the obvious fact that I would follow him anywhere, no matter how strange. I remember how hard I fought, cataloguing the new, better kind of magic reborn in the fallout of the worst, searching for patterns in all its disparate forms in the hope of developing a unified theory of madness, like Petroglyphs parsed from a thousand frescos and tablets and ceramic shards. One language, that all beings of the new, mutant world spoke. I never could, because Simon’s magic was older, and stranger, as old as the four fundamental elements and tapped into a stream of deeper power—a parallel strand of the same force harnessed in the yellow cube wishing room wedged between all worlds spawned by twisted want. The multiverse is a shared dream, populated by the wishes of those ambitious and daring and mad enough to claw through the walls and party in the insulated passages behind them. Those driven by a desire to fix the world. 

I never wanted to fix anything but him. 

And as for seeing him…I never will again. Not like this, at least. Not through these eyes, on this face, with this small, electric knot of flesh for a mind. 

The old woman chained to him in death is smiling. I really did want to grow old with him. By his side, the frightening trap of mundanity seemed benign, even comfortable. Maybe it never could have been; he was so set on seeking out danger, he would have found it eventually. Not to mention the state of the world we were both born into, locked on a terminal slide toward nuclear obliteration that had been building since the first race for hydrogen criticality. We could never have made it. The drowned couple is an impossible wish. For the crown, for the time room, for any force in this newborn iteration of the multiverse.

That’s why I couldn’t wish for the thing itself, only the power to make it happen. 

The many timestreams and slipstreams of the pool flow together, obscuring the future sacrificed within. All images mix and swirl, colour building to such an intensity that it flows right out the other side of the visual frequency and shines black as the absence of vibration. The dark water reflects the green cuboids above, descending. I can feel the energy radiating from each one; all genuflected, my parochial scholars. 

Do you remember, Simon, how I ran across the crag and chased all the snakes away? Watch me now; watch all the dangers lurking in the black and unknowable crevices of the universe slink out in alarm and flee from my passage. Watch me clear a path; walk where I walk. 

Stay by my side, and nothing will hurt you again. 

I jump into the pool. 

I don’t need floaties anymore. I’m a good swimmer. 

  As I sink, I feel the water close over my head in a neat, rippling seal. I feel the surface settle. When the sun rises again, it will find nothing more to eat. Nothing to weed, nothing to seed. 

The blackness clears. Across the revolving face of the multiverse, from its base elements, a structure forms. It’s dilapidated, like a shoddy lean-to of twigs tossed together in a schoolyard, playing houses. It sits above every universe, a stick and spit panopticon, ants in suits and ties scuttling around inside. It’s adorable; they’ve built bureaucracy around the bedlam, as if their structures will hold through anything more than a sharp sigh. There are offices, and waiting rooms—job interviews and promotions and auditors and insurance. There are stationary cabinets full of temporal instruments, punching holes through dimensions, or stapling them together. It’s everything I pursued academia to escape from, yet here it is, the baseline framework of multiversal law.

I laugh in the face of it, but not too hard. I don’t want to knock it down. 

There’s a CEO, at the top, with a golden landline on a long, coiled cord. The spiffiest of ants, under the impression that it is untouchable. It’s as if the cruel dogpile of the twentieth century corporate framework is some universally attractive idea for all single minded beings forced to collaborate. Like the shape of Simon's Petroglyphs, I wonder, did this idea emerge independently as some deep-set, immutable rule, or does the shadow that the megastructure casts over its dominion affect the rest, like muscle memory baked into matter’s every miniscule appendage? 

The periodic mallet strikes exchanged between clockface and hourglass are enshrined in the centre of it all, like the ordained market forces of supply and demand. Two ideologies, two nations, locked in a perpetually-escalating conflict that can only end in mutual destruction. What happens when the bubble bursts—when they destroy each other, or simply stop fighting?

I wonder if I can stick it out long enough to see for myself. 

My hands find a familiar position, calling to me with the allure of instinct and extended metaphor. Crab claws, and I cross my legs, tucking my knees up at my sides. I find my new equilibrium. 

My head pounds under the pressure of depth, and I feel it changing; lengthening, forming edges where its corners taper out, and flattening to planes in between. Four eyes burn chaos green.

I hold my breath…

Goodbye brain. 

Goodbye Betty.