Malfeasance and dark crimes worsened corruption. Deep in the city, cries for help were ignored even as whispers of betrayal were hunted down. Hope was going well among the wealthy elite as fear cowered in poverty’s shadows. A nation murdered by induced cancers collapsed to rot while its denizens feigned ignorance of their looming doom. Such pestilence lay across the cities and farmlands, small towns, villages and hamlets of a once-great nation that recovery could not even become a faint dream.
All because of words.
“How many crises can we surf at once?”
Dunne walked beside Walgarde past boarded shops. Rats skittered along the gutters. Shapes lurked in alleys and windows.
“Sink or swim.” Walgarde lit a cigar.
“Thought you quit.”
“Did. Many times.” He pulled up his collar as a storm began, creating his own acrid cloud. It followed in his wake like a spindrift ghost.
Rain was sky blood spilled by cuts of lightning into the roar of thunder’s resonating pain and complaint. Cosmic knife-fights above them meant little to Dunne and Walgarde. Even cut-and-parry on street level impressed them less than avoiding puddles.
“There it is.” Walgarde cut across the street toward a door set in brick between two boarded store fronts.
Dunne followed. “How’d you spot that?” A brass name plate no bigger than Walgarde’s cigar stub marked the door as the latest meeting place for the itinerant, vaporous organization called MOLOK.
Walgarde removed the plate and pocketed it. The two knocked in a certain pattern.
The door popped open with a pneumatic hiss.
They stepped inside, into pitch darkness, onto a steel grate. Once the door had sucked shut, their ears popped and they fell into emptiness.
Just as dizziness enough to nauseate struck, they stopped falling, stopped spinning, and stood once again on a steel grate. A faint light blossomed around them.
“Never get used to that.” Dunne stepped off the grate onto concrete.
Walgarde followed and the lights kept brightening until the large room became visible, stacked crates in one corner, water tanks in another, the control area on a dais near the center. Simmons appeared atop the control stack in his usual sweater and jeans. “You guys hungry?”
Simmons was always hungry.
#
Magnetic Oscillating Light-Oriented Kinetic travel: MOLOK.
#
Dunne set aside the book he was reading. Information could be transferred between worlds, so fetched books proved popular. “Ever notice shapeshifters are always man plus some animal?”
“Man is the element common to all paranormal claims.” Walgarde kept cooking the Western omelettes.
“The scary part, too. If man had but claws, fangs, etc.”
Walgarde chuckled and chucked in some chopped chives. “All we have is our dull little brains.”
“Suffices. Still, we’re not shapeshifters.” Dunne stood and inspected the meal being made: Omelettes, bacon, sausage, toast, jam, and orange juice, all of it fake. No one could afford the real things anymore.
“Shapeshifters? Sure we are.”
“Disguise doesn’t count.”
They carried the plates of food to the table where Simmons sat sipping tea he swore was “old, but real”. No one argued; didn’t matter.
They ate without shop talk.
#
Neither liked going back into what they called the murk, or Murka, an ironic nickname for the bitter facts of the North American continent in the post extinction years. They likened themselves to coal miners and joked about unionizing, going out on strike, or being buried in a market collapse.
That last jest tweaked nerves. What if they got stranded in the murk? Would rescue be possible? Each had beacons embedded in their bodies, each carried other beacons, and scanners, and various examples of well-disguised technology that translated downward. They had to be translatable upward, too, so as not to be left behind.
Were such items lost, their proximity chips would destroy them if they weren’t back within the men’s body’s chips’ influence before a certain amount of time passed. Both Dunne and Walgarde knew they probably had what they called Off or End Chips inside them, which would turn them off, too, should it become necessary. Being stranded would do it, they figured.
“We’re cyborgs.”
“Nah. Just walking bombs.”
This was truer than not, both feared.
#
“Is this culture worth saving?” He held up a disc of rock music from The Monkey Dogs. “It’s on Serious Coin Records.”
A shrug. “Everything’s context”
#
A red-light saint
Splattered bright
On reflective yellow paint
On the road to Canaan
Lightning-startled
Epileptic insight falls
Rocks from sky intense
On crawling boy-toy Paul
Incantations swirl, sparrows
Blown on twirling Djinnic winds
Manifest blue uniforms in
Dust-cloud sand-blast certainty
To curse is to encircle,
Cursus maximus culpa
To stop is to arrest,
Barring escape from jail
Said red-light saint
Shoveled into ambulances
Scurries to assemble a
Diet of earth-like worms
Ninety-eight degrees of sex
A thesis of irregularity
Nailed on mourning-wood doors
Locked against entreaty
Can we rise
One last surprise
To swim the oceans
In her eyes?
/ geste
#
“It’s got a good beat.”
Dunne squinted against the glare of this over-polished witticism. “What does it for me are the modal shifts inside the chords.”
Walgarde laughed. “Wish we had a good beat.”
“Stop complaining. At least we’re not on reclamation.”
Both knew reclamation mined useful items and material from the stinking, toxic depths of outmoded landfills. Much better being assigned to culture, both knew.
The barbed retort stung Walgarde, who’d served on reclamation before just barely passing the test to move into culture, where Dunne had always been assigned. They’d proven an effective team.
#
A slender young man in sneakers, jeans, and a hoodie, hood up, sat on a stone wall in a suburban back yard. Hunched, knees wide, he read a single sheet of paper over and over, then folded it. He stuffed it into a pocket.
Once full dark had developed, he stood and crossed the lawn to a set of French doors at a patio. He took a tool from a hoodie pocket. A crack echoed into the dark yard.
Pocketing the tool, the young man looked left and right, then behind himself. He pulled the French doors open enough to admit him. Crossing the dark basement room, he passed a pool table and mounted stairs. He came up into a kitchen, where he listened, motionless.
Hearing only the ticks and muffled thumps of an empty house, he left the kitchen to the right, entering the living room. At a far corner he opened a door slowly slipped through into an office, and shut the door behind himself.
At the desk, he used the tool again to ope a locked middle drawer. The crack bounced only once off the room’s walls. A key from the forced drawer opened a cabinet across the room.
He took a japanned box, relocked the cabinet, returned the keys to the forced drawer, and left the house through a side door.
#
We have the box.
It is not for sale.
We will protect it
If and as long as
You coöperate.
#
John James Brandt glared at the phone in his hand. He wanted to throw it. “Do you even know what’s in that box?”
The calm, neutral, older male’s voice purred in Brandt’s palm. “I know you are in my box. That’s what counts.”
When the call ended, Brandt was caught mid-breath, inhaling to yell obscenities. Left hanging, he put the phone on his desk and slid it toward the tea of detectives. “Can you trace the last received call on this thing?”
“We can try.” The female detective took the phone as the male detective jotted notes into a Moleskine with the black ink of a 19¢-style crystal Bic medium point. “It would help,” he said, “be helpful I mean, if we knew what’s in the box, Mr. Brandt.”
“It’s mine, it’s valuable, and opening it can destroy it. It’s stolen. I want it back intact. That’s all you need know.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Yes. If it gets out.”
“A code?”
Brandt sneered. “Don’t be ridiculous. Codes are changed a trillion times every trillionth of a nanosecond by the Q’s.” Quantum computers, able to take literally an eternity to calculate literally anything and doing so outside our physical world, allowing them to give us what was, to us, an immediate answer regardless how long the actual computing took, verged on Magick.
The male detective frowned; yes, code had been a stupid guess, revealing his lack of technical training.
A moment of strained silence ensued.
“Radioactive?” The male detective again.
The female detective: “Alive?”
Brandt snorted, disgust clenching his fists. He glared, saying nothing.
The police left, none the wiser.
#
The surveillance bot projected the scene from an hour ago. It showed two men approach a scratched, warped wooden door set into a brick wall. They came from near the surveillance bot’s vantage, crossing the street away from it toward the wall and door.
One of the men opened the door and stepped into darkness. The second did the same and the door slammed shut.
Trask looked up from the projected image’s shimmer and across the street toward the door set into the brick wall. “Yeah, so? They’re still in there?”
“Never came out but, uh.” Hamner looked at his feet. He shook his head.
“What?”
Hamner shook his head again. “Go open the door.”
“What for? We should wait for the team, do a full raid.”
Another shake of Hamner’s head. “Just go do it. Trust me.”
Trask, put out, strode across the street with a show of anger in his quick, angular motions. He grabbed the handle, twisted it, and pulled. He pulled harder, frowning.
“Locked.”
“No hinges.” Hamner had sauntered across the street to join him. He glanced back at the surveillance bot, disguised as a steel barrier blocking a delivery alley. He tapped the door. “No hinges.” He produced a crow bar, the small kind, and began prying at the edges, splintering the wood.
With Trask’s help, they got the door off.
It snapped at the top, then tumbled back, revealing bricks covered with flattened globs of dried glue. No opening, no doorway showed.
Trask snatched the crowbar and tapped the bricks.
Hamner shook his head. “Solid as a rock.”
“How’d you know about this?”
“Seen it before. I think the door was a marker for an inter-world portal. It think we’re being salvaged.”
Trask, studying the crow bar as if wanting for find a nice soft head to slam it into, grimaced, his face swelling and reddening in fury.
If there was one thing Trask hated, it was being salvaged. It meant the places around you didn’t make it. It meant any second the places around you could blink out, the way so many others had.
To go blank, most called it. Rooms, houses, buildings, blocks, and entire counties or bigger divisions of place simply ceased being. What had been around it closed in, making a seamless quilt of crazy juxtapositions.
Farm fields instantly abutting high-rise apartment buildings. Your local deli, with a laundry on one side and a café on the other, suddenly became a café next to a laundry, no sign of a deli ever there.
#
“Theft.”
Maguire flipped hair out of her eyes.
Bonsauder watched her, his skin prickling in atavistic fear. “You’re saying someone’s, what, stealing chunks of the world?”
“Editing, then.” Maguire shrugged, stood, and paced in the cramped office. Books, all manner of recording formats, and images ranging from sepia photographs and hand drawings to shimmery holograms crammed all space in the office not necessary for air, furniture, and people. Pacing in such a place comprised three steps before a turn was necessary.
Squeezed onto a stool in a corner, Bonsauder felt fat, as he usually did when he visited Antiqua Maguire, whose mahogany features had graced many an academic journal and popular blog site. Professor of Inter-Stitial Ekistics, she studied how things fit into spaces between other things, with an emphasis on interdimensionality. Other Words Theory, some knew it as, but a name by any other rose is just a label.
What it boiled down to, for Bonsauder, was Maguire’s instinctual analysis of otherwise baffling phenomena. He consulted her often, now that the vanishing zones were becoming a terrifying banality apt to strike anywhere at any time.
His job was tracking down missing people from missing places, to see if perhaps they were being rearranged, displaced but still somewhere in our zone of existence. If not, was this enemy action or nature going mad?
Maguire perched on the swivel chair behind her over-burdened desk. “Someone’s stealing our world from us, piecemeal. Trust what records are left. Everything is shrinking as the remaining reality patches itself together.” She paused, then pointed at him, a teacher directing a student’s wandering mind to focus. “If this doesn’t happen evenly across our cosmos, huge imbalances will arise. Gravity will smash galaxies together like water balloons, and devastation won’t begin to describe it.”
Bonsauder left Maguire that day dejected about the end of everything, and terrified at the impossibility of imagining where it was all going.
#
Into the box where reality could ride out the time storm, which would for a duration incalculable mix and blur distinct flow into a tumbling swirl, as if rivers became rain drops the size of hurricanes. For that event time meant nothing; any reality caught in such a storm would be crushed and smashed, compounded into a kind of physical slurry neither primordial nor entropic.
Scaled down, compressed, and nested, reality remained poised in the box, until time allowed coherence again, when the box might be opened.
#
Guardians, Overseers, Docents, be comfortable.
We have gathered it all.
We are the subset that contains the set containing the subset.
Aleph and impossibility.
Zed divided by zed.
The center is everywhere; rejoice in our triumph.
Chronology is retained.
Chronology is returned .
#
Most never noticed.
• • °
