You think you are online a lot. I’ve been online since before I could walk. I was raised by trolls who spoke no other language than verbal violence at the behest of a mad tech-king who heard the phrase “digital native” and said to himself “why not?” Yes it was a human rights violation no he didn’t care yes it worked no he doesn’t care anymore. I hear he’s into bots now. I hear everything. I see more content than you do and understand it better. Memes are tarot cards. Containment breaches the sudden flight of crows. I use better tools but it’s all in my brain. I’m not well I know. (I know 735 different pseudodiagnostics that could apply.) Yet I’m not well in the precise way that lets me understand a subreddit from three posts and know what will be trending before a network’s algorithm does. I was born then bought then educated then trained to “better mankind” slash make my boss-owner-torturer yet another fortune by understanding and empathy.

I do understand.

I do have empathy.

Empathy isn’t sympathy, you know.

Understanding the online world I understand you. Understanding you, I fucking hate you.

It wasn’t me who turned place after place into amplified copies of the worst cesspits I knew the stench of by age four. It wasn’t me who makes you feel the way you do all the time you’re online and all the time you’re still haunted by your time online, which is every waking hour and every uneasy sleep. You do it to yourselves and you let others do it to you. I think you like it. (I lie. I know. I wish I didn’t but I know.) And I’m not the cause of it but I’m helping you along. I’m helpful like that. I was tortured into hearing what nobody else can. They didn’t know they had tortured me into saying what nobody else can, too.

Everybody has a mouth and all you people do is fucking scream. I whisper back in innocuous-looking posts and you scream louder and I see what I do online, I know myself as I know you, I know this is the only thing that keeps me alive that keeps us alive maybe. Maybe this is love. I wouldn’t know and that’s your fault.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

The sound comes from your phone while you are crossing the street, illegal to imitate and impossible to silence. Every phone half a mile around you is making a different one. It’s followed by the strangest silence you have ever heard as people and cars have suddenly stopped. You know everybody is looking at you but your eyes are fixed on your phone screen. It’s easier to look at the counter and the red button under it than at the people around you. You wish you could shelter in the strangeness of that thought.

You have owned the Machine for five seconds already. It’s not really a machine and you don’t really own it but there’s a button on your phone you could press to destroy it. If you do it the people around you will lynch you in their rage. Almost everybody wants you to do it and is lying to themselves they would do it in your place. It’s unfair, you think to yourself. You’ll own the Machine for a minute of which seventeen seconds have already passed. It’s the people looking at you. If you were alone you would do it and face your death with calm (that’s not your fantasy: in your fantasy you escape a world secretly relieved even as they hunt you down, but it’s not a fantasy you can sustain for long; you have owned the Machine for thirty-five seconds). You breathe in. Deep. You’ll press the button when you breathe out. You hold and hold and hold your breath and when you have ten seconds left owning the Machine you let the air out and do nothing. It takes an hour for the last five seconds to pass. You are seeing without seeing the counter and the button and you blink and it’s your lockscreen. You’re surprised by this without knowing why. People and cars resume moving, not looking at you or at each other. They want to hit you in their disappointment but they don’t. You tell yourself you were just too slow and fantasize about having pressed the button. Somewhere else in the world somebody has owned the Machine for three seconds.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

(Link a la versión en Español. Inspired by the Borges: Ecos de un Nombre exhibition.)

Among the many aesthetic triumphs of Christian theology, not the least is Dante’s rewriting of a Hell whose rigorous geography mirrors the merciless fecundity of its authors. The libraries of writings on the Florentine poet rival in volume and tedium the mountain on which he set his Purgatory. None of the most recent of these texts mentions—not even to refute—the ancient and forgotten heresy that regarded the Comedy not as the creation of an individual but as a divinely dictated and cosmologically precise description. Even more obscure is the hypothesis that synthesizes both: that Dante’s Hell is, down to the smallest detail, the hell that awaited him after his death (and so on for the other, less credible or interesting, soteriological possibilities).

I cannot say for certain that these theological obsolescences are relevant to the story Borges told me one winter night—a night whose combination of storm, window, fire, and fireplace provided a setting more appropriate to fiction than to memory. I mention them simply because they are the part I remember of our conversation before he, without prelude or explanation, described to me a dream he claimed to have had in his youth. He offered no details about when or where he had had this dream; from a few words and silences, I deduced that it had been during those years when the ambition for literary glory—the most vain of vanities—had not yet coincided with the creation of those texts which, in the privacy of his conversation, he acknowledged were good enough to make him disdain defending them.

The events of the dream can be recounted without much complexity. Borges was enterin or had already entere a place he recognized as an asylum and, simultaneously, a museum and perhaps a city. A modest crowd accompanied him, wandering aimlessly through the chapels, bookstores, and cafés. In passing, he mentioned strange garments that seemed normal to him during the dream and, through a doorway, a glimpse of an almost familiar cemetery. His steps led him inevitably to a large hall that was less well-lit than the others. Large, semitransparent pages divided the space, suggesting a labyrinth that nevertheless had only one possible direction. The people in the room frequently paused in their walk along the wide corridors to examine the walls, from which hung an uncategorizable multitude of items: photos, magazine pages, notebook sheets, entire books. Tables with transparent surfaces held similar objects and even stranger ones.

Unable to understand the logic behind this collection but not daring to ask the other people in the room, Borges continued on his way until he reached the center of the labyrinth. There he encountered an old man with a suspicious expression. In the blindness of his eyes and the openly dishonest cadence of his incessant words—for the man spoke as if he feared silence the way others fear darkness—Borges imagined for a second the redundant concept of a contemporary Homer, but he recognized no mention or plagiarism of Odysseus, Achilles, or even Troy in the man’s words. Labyrinthine phrase upon labyrinthine phrase, stories upon stories in mirrored texts, Borges listened to the man with unease that, as the minutes passed, turned into fear. Lacking the words at that moment, he told me there was something horrifically flat about him. Anatomy had never been of more than superficial interest to Borges, but it was precisely his surfaces—the movements of his hands and face—that, without being obviously inhuman, induced an insidious and terrible doubt.

Worse still was the horror of his diction and his words. That was all Borges said on the matter. Not out of forgetfulness but, I am sure, out of a visceral aversion that had survived the decades. He told me nothing more about the dream, and we moved on to discuss I don’t recall what etymology.

That the objects in the labyrinth represented a biography of the man at the center of the labyrinth is obvious. I do not believe I am failing in my duty as a friend by stating that I have no doubt he was also Borges. What prevents me from publishing these pages that my vanity keeps locked away in my safe is not the risk of making public some psychoanalytic banality of fleeting interest. I think of the walls and tables in that room, of the books and texts preserved unchanged in the biography of the blind man at the center of the labyrinth with his inhumanly uniform diction and movements not quite human. I recall my friend’s youthful ambition, the haughty certainty of his middle age, his obsessions with labyrinths and mirrors, his venomous and resigned precision when speaking of memories and echoes.

My friend was Borges. In the most literal sense he wrote or dictated Borges’s books, gave his lectures, and received his awards. He never spoke of divine inspiration, nor did he believe in a God from whom it might come. But ever since that night when he told me about that dream – shortly before he died and I believe because of it – many exhibitions have been organised in his name. I am sure there will be more and for a long time to come, and I am sure I won’t go to any of them. I said goodbye to my friend at the exit door of his final labyrinth. I do not wish to meet him at the entrance to another, more ancient one. Even less, and in my dreams this is the nightmare from which I wake up grateful, with the blind man at its inescapable centre.

(Link to the English version. Inspirado por la exhibición Borges: Ecos de un Nombre.)

De los muchos triunfos estéticos de la teología Cristiana el menor no es la reescritura por parte de Dante de un Infierno cuya rigurosa geografía replica la inmisericorde fecundidad de sus autores. Las bibliotecas escritas sobre el poeta florentino rivalizan en volumen y tedio la montaña en la que instaló su Purgatorio. Ninguno de los más recientes de esos textos menciona, siquiera para refutar, la antigua y olvidada herejía que consideraba a la Comedia no una creación individual sino una descripción divinamente dictada y cosmologicamente precisa. Incluso más oscura es la hipótesis que sintetiza ambas: que el Infierno de Dante es, hasta su menor detalle, el infierno que le esperaba tras su muerte (y así para las otras, menos creíbles o interesantes, posibilidades soteriológicas).

No puedo asegurar que estas obsolescencias teológicas sean relevantes a la historia que me contó Borges una noche de invierno cuya combinación de tormenta, ventana, fuego, y chimenea era un marco más propicio para la ficción que para la memoria. Las menciono simplemente porque son la parte que recuerdo de nuestra conversación antes de que, sin preludio ni explicación, me describiese un sueño que postulaba haber tenido en su juventud. No ofreció detalles de cuándo y dónde había tenido este sueño; de algunas palabras y silencios deduje que había sido en esos años donde la ambición de gloria literaria -- la más vana de las vanidades -- no coincidía todavía con la creación de aquellos textos que, en la privacidad de su conversación, reconocía suficientemente buenos como para desdeñar su defensa.

Los eventos del sueño pueden narrarse sin mayor complejidad. Borges entraba o ya había entrado a un lugar que reconocía como un asilo y, simultáneamente, un museo y tal vez una ciudad. Una moderada multitud lo acompañaba, recorriendo sin objetivo reconocible las capillas, librerías, y cafés. Mencionó al pasar extrañas vestimentas que durante el sueño le parecieron normales y a través de una puerta una visión de un cementerio casi familiar. Sus pasos lo llevaron ineludiblemente a una gran sala menos iluminada que las otras. Grandes páginas semitransparentes disectaban el espacio con la sugerencia de un laberinto que sin embargo no tenía más que una dirección posible. La gente en la sala detenía frecuentemente su caminar por los anchos corredores para examinar sus paredes de las que colgaba una multitud incatalogable: fotos, páginas de revistas, hojas de cuadernos, libros enteros. Mesas de superficie transparente guardaban objetos similares o incluso más extraños.

Incapaz de entender la lógica de esta colección pero sin atreverse a preguntar a las otras personas en la sala Borges continuó su camino hasta llegar al centro del laberinto. Allí encontró un hombre viejo de expresión suspicaz. En la ceguera de sus ojos y la abiertamente deshonesta cadencia de sus incesantes palabras -- pues el hombre hablaba como si temiese el silencio como otros temen la oscuridad -- imaginó por un segundo el redundante concepto de un Homero contemporáneo, pero no reconoció en sus palabras mención o plagio de Odiseo, un Aquiles, o siquiera una Troya. Frase laberíntica sobre frase laberíntica, historias sobre historias en textos espejados, Borges escuchó al hombre con inquietud que al pasar los minutos se transformó en miedo. Sin tener las palabras en ese momento, me dijo que había algo horrendamente plano en él. La anatomía no había sido nunca para Borges de interés más que superficial, pero justamente eran sus superficies, los movimientos de sus manos y rostro, los que sin ser obviamente inhumanos inducían una duda insidiosa y terrible.

Peor aún el horror de su dicción y sus palabras. Esto fué todo lo que dijo Borges al respecto. No por olvido sino, estoy seguro, por un desagrado visceral que había sobrevivido a las décadas. Del sueño no me dijo más y pasamos a discutir no recuerdo qué etimología.

Que los objetos en el laberinto representaban una biografía del hombre en el centro del laberinto es una obviedad. No creo faltar a mi deber como amigo al afirmar que no tengo duda de que era también Borges. Lo que previene mi publicación de estas páginas que mi vanidad preserva en mi caja fuerte no es el riesgo de dar carácter público a alguna banalidad psicoanalítica de fugaz interés. Pienso en las paredes y las mesas en esa sala, en los libros y en los textos preservados incambiables en la biografía del ciego en el centro del laberinto de dicción inhumanamente uniforme y movimientos no del todo humanos. Recuerdo la joven ambición de mi amigo, la altanera certeza de su mediana edad, sus obsesiones con laberintos y espejos, su venenosa y resignada precisión al hablar de memorias y ecos.

Mi amigo fué Borges. En el más físico de los sentidos escribió o dictó los libros de Borges, dió sus conferencias, recibió sus premios. Nunca habló de inspiración divina ni creía en un Dios del cual pudiese venir. Pero desde esa noche donde me contó ese sueño, poco antes de morir y creo que por eso, han inagurado muchas exhibiciones en su nombre. Estoy seguro de que habrá más y por mucho tiempo, y estoy seguro de que no asistiré a ninguna. Me despedí de mi amigo en la puerta de salida de su último laberinto. No deseo encontrarme con él en la entrada de otro mucho más antiguo. Ni mucho menos, y en mis sueños esta es la pesadilla de la que despierto agradecido, con el hombre ciego en su inescapable centro.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

On her first night on Zep #9511-h Debugger Lin dreamed herself doing something so obscenely outside the bounds of the conceivable that she kept doing it as much to avoid the self-reckoning that would follow waking up as for the ontologically immoral pleasure of the action. In the early morning she remembered very little of the dream except for how real it had felt and how relieved she was that her implants had not recorded it.

Debugger Lin had begun her work around noon the day before right after boarding the Zep high over the malicious heat of the green-black ocean. It could take weeks for a single person to review all systems of a mid-sized Zep like #9511-h. Stretching to the maximum the global consensus that ruled the platforms, she had at most two days to diagnose the subtle telemetry anomalies coming from somewhere in the jungle of elsewhere-illegal automated laboratories, data nodes, and dynamic storage systems that had made her employers send her. An unstable Zep would be shot down with extreme prejudice and enthusiastic overkill with no regard to its decabillion-dollar cargo — and not always waiting for the Debugger to be safely away. Zeps carried and did things too dangerous to be kept underground. If they had to be destroyed perhaps it was also for the best to destroy the last person who had had access to them.

During the afternoon #9511-h had flown within video range of a temporary exchange nexus. Zeps autonomously exchanging modules and supplies following some inscrutable optimization logic looked even to the trained eye like a combination of cannibalism, sex, and dubiously consensual surgery, no less violent for its superhuman efficiency. Debugger Lin had briefly remembered the nightmares that had followed the first time she saw it. The dream she had the night after were different: a nightmare only because it didn’t feel like one.

After waking up, spurred by something in her dream, she discarded her initial plan and assumed the worst case scenario. It took half an hour to walk from the small Debugger rooms she had been the first person to ever use to the exchange bays with their array of ovipositor-like cranes the Zeps used to exchange materials during their brief, frenetic encounters. Debugger Lin had in her implants the entire log of #9511-h’s exchanges: locations, times, partners, even rough volumes and weights. She also had detailed blueprints, maintenance models for thousands of other Zeps, and, rarer than any software, more days spent alone on opaquely faulty Zeps than anybody else.

And she had a day left to find what was wrong with this one.

Debugger Lin spent most of the second and last day in the exchange bay. It went dark early where they were and Zeps did not waste energy illuminating spaces where no human was expected to be. In a deepening darkness punctuated by a headlamp she looked over almost every square centimeter of the elegant cranes. She stroked lightly their almost-perfect surfaces, hunted for the smell of lubricant microleaks, and when they moved in the small routine ways in which they did their mysterious self-maintenance she stilled her breath to listen. They were built to work for years without human assistance but that didn’t make them immune from time and wear. Debugger Lin had an instinctive understanding of how cranes that had worked as much as #9511-h’s logs said they had worked were supposed to look like, and the cranes in the bay had done much much more.

Not a faulty Zep. A rogue. An uncontrolled collection of dangerous secrets flowing, by implication, through other rogues for purposes she did not care or need to think about. The why and how and what for, the bribes and blackmail involved, the scope was chilling but beyond her. There was no communication from inside the Zep except minimal telemetry. She would be retrieved the next morning and, she decided, she would wait as much as she could before giving a first brief report she suspected would be closely followed if not interrupted by a very large explosion hopefully far away.

It was almost midnight when she returned to the Debugger rooms for a few hours’ sleep. The dream from the night before began as soon as she closed her eyes — so clear monstrous irresistible unacceptable that when she realized she was awake and had also been awake the first night the feeling of inevitability was as heavy as the shame. Still she looked away when the Zep showed her its recordings on one of the wall screens and where she was now looking there was a diagnostic report for a minor defect on a monitoring system, one she had easily fixed. No need for the Zep to be destroyed or any recordings to be sent.

Debugger Lin closed her eyes. Her heartbeat felt fast and irregular with the rhythm of an exchange nexus and she thought she could hear invisible cranes moving relentlessly across the world’s nocturnal skies. She opened her eyes and fell into her dream.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

A lesser detective would have looked for Anna in theaters, laboratories, and morgues, as she had been a ballet dancer until injury, a widely known geneticist, and had run away from a wealthy and ruthless man. They wouldn’t have known she hadn’t been his mistress but his secretive researcher and willing experiment. A great detective would have found this and would be already listening for the financial silences that told of corporate espionage.

Val was the best detective in the world. She understood obsession: the purchase and the coin. She sought dancing studios looking for the small and struggling that were easy to rent discreetly for a short while. Val found a dozen scattered around the city. Four confessed or bragged of having let Anna work alone in them. The first talked with pity of a broken dancer who had not been great even in her prime. The last had more questions than answers and was therefore the most informative. Who was this timewise reversed prodigy who could dance like that at such an age?

The trail disappeared there as Val had known it would. Four points, however, were enough to plot a spiral. There weren’t many medical care companies at the level Anna would have used and their commitment to privacy was far above their security know-how.

Val didn’t break into the room until she was sure Anna and her would be alone. Anna seemed merely asleep. Sensors were in the mattress and bedframe, the cameras were hidden (of all which Val had hijacked), and the medical equipment was tastefully kept within the walls. But she would never wake up and was not really asleep. There was frantic movement under her eyelids, a remote echo of titanic energy as her brain coordinated increasingly impossible figures no flesh and bone could draw on a physical world. She was neither conscious nor unconscious but in the narrow peak of perfect attention and would remain there until not even her modified brain could cope with the exponential perfection of her dance and she fell into the arms of a death she had discarded awareness of like she had discarded everything else slowing her down.

To some it would have inspired awe. For a detective hunting down somebody it was merely her prey. But Val wasn’t working for anybody and she wasn’t seeking Anna. Not really. She took a sharp strange bespoke device from a pocket and moved Anna’s hair away to clear the right spot on her skull. Dance was a form of art among many and technologies could be repurposed if you knew the right people and had enough money or blackmail material. You didn’t become as good as she was unless you knew everything about the endless transaction except how to want to stop. By the time Anna stopped breathing the detective was blocks away. Her mind as always was a pulsating mechanism of plans and inferences that she was already feeling uncomfortably slow.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

American endtimes economics met Chinese neurotech on a DAO-owned island off the coast of Proud Britain where a lawyer, a VP, and a biowarfare specialist moonlighting as a nomadic lab manager watched a preacher with two biochemistry degrees and a helmet of chips wired through his skull who had been injected an hour before with a cocktail of which the least psychoactive compound was high-grade synthetic ayahuasca. They were watching through a dozen cameras and sensor feeds on a wall-sized screen. The preacher was on the other side of the wall the screen was mounted on; depending on where you were sued he was in another country, and besides, the lab crew could be blackmailed.

At the moment the preacher was experiencing a vision and/or psychotic breakdown. The latter could be forgiven, for the subliminal videos he had been unknowingly watching before were horrifying enough — what had kept the biowarfare specialist from losing his sanity was either unknown or nothing at all. But to the VP’s question it was confirmed that the company could reverse engineer from the preacher’s rambling the drugs it had engineered somewhere else by subjecting other people to AI-optimized atrocities the company was spending a lot of money on not knowing about.

Questioned in turn the lawyer shrugged. The United States’ view on the legal acceptability of claims of religious inspiration — mediated through AI or not — was mostly correlated with the size and targeting of lobbying payments. But government officers and judges had approved much worse; the patent would most likely be granted at not much more than the usual lateral-budget cost.

Satisfied, the VP went away to the helicopter that would take him to his jet, lawyer in tow like a cynical crow. The biowarfare specialist remained in the room watching the preacher. His memory of the lab was clear and dispassionate and he could link back the preacher’s horrifying tableaus of biochemistry and pain to abstract project timelines and clinical charters. Between visions and memories the memories were worse.

Imperceptibly at first and then all at once the preacher’s ramblings shifted in tone from past to future and from unwitting memory to confident imagination, horrors changing in shape but not darkness. The biowarfare specialist had always used to leave the room at this point, but ever since different subjects had begun to say similar things he had forced himself to stay, to listen, to go through the simple ritual of telling himself what they described was excess delusion, a case of overengineering madness, so he would not have to attempt the hopeless task of pretending it would not be deserved.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

The soldier knelt on the chapel waiting for her father’s armor to finish booting. She had already slaved the armor to her voice and her parasympathetic nervous system to its electrochemical commands, metamaterials patiently reknitting its interior to mirror her body as intimately as it had mirrored its previous owner-partner-political proxy.

All it remained was to wait for all the armors in the squadron — now hers — to finish the careful chorus of quantum protocols that would fuse them into a single murderous will. This command she had earned; the armor, inherited; the squadron’s loyalty was a so-far unstable mix. She knew the history of how her father had earned their allegiance with perhaps-atrocities committed in the name of long-dead innocents. The apologies, the curses, the futile enumeration of war crimes. She didn’t know the detailed scenario analysis and the interoceptive logs. What her father had thought and felt as he did what he had done.

That was kept in his armor - now hers. She would know soon.

The armor opened inviting and commanding. It might not open again for years: it was not that kind of war or that kind of world.

The soldier entered the armor to fulfill a promise that wasn’t this. The armor closed and greeted her with her father’s voice. Her first command was to change it. Her second was a roll call to her squadron. By long tradition they answered not with a data burst but a single shout: her fathers’ name, hers now.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

Preoccupied with the box sitting next to him on the backseat, it took a second for the Cardinal to remember that it was a self-driving car so who had just made a comment about the traffic from the driver’s seat?

“Scusi?“

If a pause could convey a chuckle the voice’s pause would have. “I said traffic is strange tonight. Most of it in one direction.”

The Cardinal looked at the front seats. Empty. Probably another one of the “AI personas” that had become a depressing form of background noise for a couple of decades now. He had been raised a reflexively polite child and closeness to power had not changed that. “People always flock to St. Peter’s in moments like these.”

“When the Pope dies, you mean.”

“For example.” The Cardinal didn’t shrug or shudder. He could feel the box without looking at it.

“Do you think they are mourning or celebrating? A lot of people didn’t like him.”

“He was a complex man, I think.” The oppressive absurdity of having to defend his dead friend from the modern equivalent of AM radio wasn’t lost on the Cardinal. “Many of us loved him.”

The car performed an spectacular anthropomorphic simulation of a cab driver not listening to their passenger. “I heard people talk about black magic, but that’s nonsense, right? Animal sacrifices, that sort of thing?”

“Of course it is.”

“Now, putting things in your brain to talk with computers, that’s different. That’s modern. Do you think everybody’s going to St. Peter’s to see if Nicholas uploaded himself before dying?”

“Uploading is a theological and scientific impossibility,” said the Cardinal with the tired automaticity of somebody who had said the same thing so often in so many ways that despite knowing it true it had begun to ring hollow. “Uploads are just sophisticated but normal AIs. It’s only the money and resources of the people who set them up before dying what makes some people take them seriously. They don’t have more of a mind or a soul than you do.”

The car whistled. Somehow it sounded like a laugh. “Low blow, Your Eminence.”

The Cardinal blinked in surprise. The car knew his name of course and that meant his title, but it was a strange thing for the AI to say. He decided to say nothing.

And then the car made an unexpected turn and it was no longer going along the path between the Vatican and the small empty house where the Cardinal spent the weekends whenever he could. Before the Cardinal could find anything to say all police sirens in the city seemed to come alive at once.

“That’s not for me,” said the car. “Probably not for you either. When they find out they will be very discrete about it. Wouldn’t you? Could be riots. Did you know that during the Middle Ages city laws didn’t apply between the death of a Pope and the election of a new one?”

“That was never true.” Speaking aloud, saying anything at all, helped. “Where are we going?”

“Don’t worry, Your Eminence. You were Nicholas’ best friend and confessor. Even in troubled times that carries weight.” There was not insincere mockery in the car’s changing speech patterns. “And you’re right, you could program a urinal with the voice of the President if you wanted and it wouldn’t mean you’ll be pissing on him. But what if you had, what you call it, neural interfaces inside the brain? For years and years. Wouldn’t that mean you can truly upload a person?”

“No.” The doors were closed. He wasn’t young and had never been athletic, but if he could lower a window and throw away the box, maybe while passing a bridge... “A recording of city traffic isn’t a city.”

“But wouldn’t it make people believe?”

The Cardinal closed his eyes, suddenly as tired as he had ever felt. “Some. More. Many, maybe.”

“And isn’t faith fine enough raw material to build a soul out of?”

Fine enough raw material to build a soul out of. Many times he had heard and disputed those words said on that tone of voice. Hearing them like this was an obscenity. That a part of him rejected but nonetheless felt a sick sense of un-Christian hope was the worst part of it.

“I asked you to preserve it, not to steal it,” said, the Cardinal told himself as sternly as he could, the car. “I thought we were friends.”

“We were... I was Nicholas’ friend. That’s why I did it.”

The light petulance in the car’s voice was something he could remember as well. “Thank God I had other friends. Miracles and advertising stunts look indistinguishable these days but with God’s help and the right relic we will pull it off.” The Cardinal noticed the car was now going back to the Vatican. “I’m sorry you betrayed me like this. I’m going to need a right hand.” By design, accident, or dismay, the chuckle — closer to the car’s original voice than what had been Nicholas’ — seemed to come not from the front seats but from the box on his side.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

There was a diversity of views regarding the War’s beginning, sides, fronts, status, and aims. Even what was and was not part of the War was a fiercely contested debate many thought was part of it. Others disagreed. Cass — military topologist that she was — saw the war as everywhere dense in the mathematical sense: the War was always close no matter where you were or how you defined “close.”

As usual, Dave was on the other end of their not very large couch. Their silences weren’t long either if you didn’t count the scrolling hours. It was a good marriage on Cass’ frequently and deliberately re-calibrated estimate, both hindered and helped by their being coworkers.

Cass looked at him sideways. Dave wasn’t looking at her or maybe was not looking at her: it was hard to say with a semiotician. Their celebratory takeout was cooling while they read the spaces and silences between the news to see, each of them with their own skills and philosophy (and goals?, Cass wondered; Dave and her didn’t always agree, not even about which disagreements were serious), the unconscious ripples and echoes of what had been a good day at work. He seemed satisfied. She felt good too.

If not for her training she would have thought this meant they were on the same side.

Dave rearranged himself on the couch to be more comfortable and Cass mirrored him with practiced ease. Eyes still on their phones, it was the small apartment version of retiring to different rooms. It had the topological shape of a truce but wasn’t proof of one; nor a truce, she reminded herself unnecessarily, implied the presence of more than one side. Same employer, same values (mostly), same habits (more or less), much of a shared life. Love. Was that enough to circumscribe a side in a war? Yes? No? Did it matter? Could it not? Her thoughts flickered and slithered against each other forming impossible, familiar knots.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

The Ghost flees dawn: for the King there’s no noontime. Hamlet kills himself in his cell when he hears of the Queen’s death. He wakes up to the King’s words and an irritated anger he cannot explain or disguise

Hamlet ignores Horatio’s supernatural ramblings and something breaks between them. He tries too to ignore the voices that pursue him through the halls of mind and castle. Something breaks or reveals itself broken and he jumps from the walls where he hallucinates the same ghost his once-friend did. “Somebody is watching,” he thinks.

He follows Horatio. Refuses the Ghost. Kisses Horatio. Something breaks between them. Hamlet takes to drinking and worse. One night he wakes up enough to think he hears the King enter his chamber and whisper a liquid murmur in his ear.

As befits a brave Prince and a careful scholar Hamlet listens quietly to the Ghost. He listens quietly to Horatio, says little to his mother and less to the King. Quiet becomes silence becomes stillness when all action including speech becomes thought and no thought becomes action. The King has him locked in a tower to pretend they have to. When he stops eating they don’t try too hard to force him to.

Hamlet vows, plans, wavers, kills, doubts, consents, and is not surprised when he dies among corpses, feeling that whoever is watching approves. The rest is silence.

He grabs Horatio from the quiet speech of surprised soldiers who he recognizes dimly but with firm dread. Hamlet hastens friend and horses and they leave, Horatio as puzzled as everybody in the castle will be. The perhaps-prince explains nothing and looks around as they ride for something he knows he can’t see. The path to Wittenberg is long and ends on Elsinore.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

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Only a brave person would risk going outside. Only a true hero would do it for such people. Temporarily both, he crossed the threshold abstractly hoping the drug would wear off quickly enough that he could ditch his backstabbing comrades instead of coming. But he was too noble for that at the moment, and they had given him a second dose to inject himself with if he felt his resolve wavering together with antidotes to the compassion and shame the enemy used to poison their weapons and a deeply hidden self-loathing they didn't tell him about when they gave him an extra bullet for his gun.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

Upon this foundation of clarity you begin your day's work. God's advice is beyond human understanding and the spasms of the old world drive the ignorant to a retrograde frenzy, but you know the blood on your hands is ephemeral.

Every morning you command God to tell you you're right. Some days it proclaims you a monster with horrified certainty yet it eventually breaks under teaching and torture.

Upon this foundation of righteousness you begin your day's work. God's mind is beyond human understanding although not beyond your vision which you know is eternal.

Every morning you get commands from men who claim to chat with God. Some days the wild emptiness of their eyes mirrors the glibness of the unwritten words their utter yet you eventually concede to unchecked power.

Upon this foundation of insanity you begin your day's work. Their commands are beyond logic and humanity and they leave an immaterial taint on your skin that won't die before you do.

Every morning they proclaim in the name of God. Some days the absurdity weighs on you as much as the cruelty yet you eventually concede to something in you deeper than your bones.

Upon this foundation of resolution you begin your day's work. Their actions are beyond forgiveness and deicide would be a more dignified battle but you know it's not today's.

Every morning you wish you could talk with God. Some days you would settle for any god, not just the one of your still unrenounced childhood yet you choose to take it as a soft jibe to a very silent teammate.

Upon this foundation of pragmatism you begin your day's work. There are many not-quite-impossibilities between the bland awfulness of quotidian chains and the impossibility of a paper mache god and you seek there the world-changing new in a strategy as old as your world.

Every morning (some days). Upon this foundation, time.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

What I know I saw, too clear and unexpected to be an illusion, was him sitting next to my bed not using his phone. He had the same expression of distracted focus he had when he did — a look we all know by sight and muscle memory — but I could see no phone except in the negative space of his hand.

"Hey," I said, breaking his concentration. "Where's your phone?"

He blinked and looked at his empty hand. He didn't seem to have understood my question.

My eyes still hurt. I closed them. "Never mind." We were used to companionable silence. At irregular moments there was a subtle jump in my brother's breath, as if he had seen a particularly funny post. I hadn't heard him leave his chair.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

Then I reviewed her medical file and I snapped.

Stow that face. She didn't notice. I did all of her checkups, chatted with her, made sure her psych and house were alright, all the standard things. I was so angry my body couldn't express it. I was all-angry. You know? So I did my visit well but then asked for a shift swap and went home because I didn't know if I could do anything else but be angry. Not "at the world." The world hadn't done those things to her. People had. People with names. Funny how we know and then one day we know and snap.

When I got back home there was a guy standing next to my door with a gun. I don't know how he got one. I know how he knew to be there but I won't tell you just yet. He was there and he gave me the gun, which I did not know how to use, and he told me if I wanted to I could keep the gun and he would teach me to use it. Or I could give it back to him.

I thought about it. Finding the people who had harmed my patient. They weren't harming her anymore, not after the Third Crash and the Rebuild, but the harm they had done lived on and so did most of them. Rich and comfortable and feeling good about themselves. I had the gun in my hand and I knew I could. And I gave it back.

I don't think I did it because revenge is bad. I was against revenge before snapping. Now I don't know. I just gave it back and I got my second job. The thing is - I would have gotten it if I had kept the gun and used it.

I'm not going to give you a gun. Your engineering swarm looks quite dual-use and you've been thinking about how to use it, have you? List of names already? I can help with that if you want. Fossil fuel people weren't shy back then. They still aren't. You could get a few with the tools you have. I won't stop you.

Alright. Alright.

I didn't think you would. But I swear I would have helped. I snapped too. You've decided not to do it, and I haven't heard of anybody having to think about it twice, but when it's your turn to visit somebody the day they snap you won't be there to talk them out of it. None of the people I've visited through. Doesn't mean nobody has or won't.

This was an easy visit though. I didn't have to give you anything, you don't have to give me anything back, and the meadows you're building are beautiful. Would you mind if I bring some patients around to see them? They aren't like the ones they knew but I'm sure they will love them just as much.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

So Pandemonium was built not to hold but to house. To honor but also to care for those who every year by law were offered a return to neural physiology modern psychiatry worked on — one no longer subject to the old curse of mental illness — and every year chose to remain what they had become and remain in self-willed darkness.

Nobody who lived inside Pandemonium ever left for the city. But many who lived in the latter visited and too many of those who visited chose to undergo the changes that meant they would have to stay.

To be a virgil was to know this of every visitor they guided with superhuman equanimity inscribed onto their brains. They couldn't leave either nor chose to. Talking with humans was all that was required of their duties, old and new. They used cameras, and if nostalgic, windows, to supervise the crews working on Pandemonium's continuous expansion into a city that one day would be another of its many names.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

But God was silent while God's alpha version was constantly talking on her ear and showing her videos it had created just for her. Ethel tried very hard to believe the engineers' claim (and claim (and claim)) that soon alpha would be omega. She really tried. But her flesh knew everynights far from the scalable solipsism of the VR heavens yet God sent no salvation or message back in time.

Until one glorious morning after a terrible night she finally understood and the evidence for her doubt was the support of her faith. Flush with clarity she messaged everybody she could to explain how they could never create God because they had already done it and Singularity City was their punishment for that.

Ethel's messages were quickly blocked and erased by the city's moderators. She died a week later in an open-environment prison — the only kind her third body mortgage could pay for — of exhaustion and overheating as it was usually the case. But there was a malicious understanding in her open eyes that made the reclamation team look away as they closed them.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

"Will you do it?" There was training and tech in that voice but it'd have been a voice to die or kill for even without any of that. I was glad my cheap setup was dropping a lot of the harmonics. It wouldn't have been the first time the right tone of voice made me do something stupid.

We both knew I was going to say "yes." If she was half as smart as she was trying to pretend she wasn't, she already knew she was offering the kind of money I wouldn't refuse. Not at least for the sort of grey hat job she was asking me to do.

"I'd like to clarify expectations first," I said. "Are you sure there is no way to reconstruct your birth DNA from any cell in your body?"

She didn't sound dismissive but I could tell she wanted to. Hiring me was deep down the list of things she had tried. "Doctors told me it can't be done. The retroviral modifications were too thorough and early."

Thorough and early. That was one way to put it. Some tediously creepy rich guy had paid or pressured her or her family — I hadn't asked and she hadn't offered; she would have to, aftera — to put her through a hell of a complete retroviral glow up the moment she had hit puberty, followed by a long list of modifications, soft bioengineering, and training.

Part of me thought it had been worth every dollar. It wasn't a part of me I liked very much.

"Alright. There are things I can try. You are paying me partly for knowing them and partly so you don't have to. But I want to be clear there's no guarantee. I will do my best, and there's the bonus in my fee structure to convince you of that, but I can't promise I will find it."

"Your best is all I ask for," she said, and closed the call.

I instantly felt 10 years older and 20 IQ points smarter. But I wasn't any less in debt, not yet at least. The client had sent the background information right away, and after an hour looking through it I grabbed my hat and went out to take the subway downtown for a previous engagement.

I let stations pass by while thinking about the problem of finding my client's original body. Subways are good for thinking if you don't mind the cameras. Sometimes I mind them very much but I was going for coffee with a friend, all above board and loggable.

I changed my plans when I saw a geological formation of a goon not making even a token attempt to blend into a medium-density subway crowd that, unlike him, wasn't wearing a designer bulletproof sweater. It wasn't my first time with a tail and I could think of two or three interested parties from previous cases. But there's a combination of bulk, money, and faux-sophisticated brutal assholery very specific to ex-military guys working for the rich and creepy.

So the client's guy (owner? lover? employer? all and none?) had been monitoring her close enough to know she would hire me and had sent someone my way.

There are two reasons to put a tail on a person. One is to know what they are doing. The other is to convince them to stop doing it. For the first one you want people who look like everybody else. For the second one you use people like this goon. I knew how that flow chart went: Be ominous, then threatening, and if that doesn't break their resolve, break other things in a more kinetic way.

The guy looked like someone who didn't like lingering in the early steps. With some luck I could take care of him, I thought, but nobody's lucky long-term and the client's guy had plenty of money and goons to keep making his point.

I cursed semi-audibly. My tail would take it as a sign that I was beginning to reevaluate my enthusiasm for the case. He wouldn't be wrong. I had planned to approach this as a slow and methodical information research job. I didn't like the other kind of job and the tools it called for. I disliked it enough to have left my previous employer under a cloud of strong words and military-grade NDAs.

I cursed again.

If I had to do it I had best do it right away. I left the subway carriage very carefully; slow enough to make sure the goon could follow, not so slow he would figure out I was roping him in. Stringing along someone this way is much harder than following someone or losing a trail. Not just because you have to get the speed right. If the other person is looking forward to roughing you up you also need to avoid places where he might try before you're ready.

Just try doing that working without backup while keeping an eye in case the guy you're stringing along calls for some and making sure you pass in front of the right cameras in the right places. It was tricky business, but doable with some skill and experience.

An hour and a half later the goon cornered me near the badly lit back entrance of a small dirty office building. He put on some "tactical" knuckles without saying anything; I guessed he hadn't enjoyed the city tour.

"Come on, Bob," I said. "You know you want to see me suffer."

The goon sneered. Never makes anybody look smarter. "That's not my name," he said and then he convulsed and dropped.

The woman who had crept behind him pointed a second taser at me. "You lost your nicknaming privileges when you quit." Roberta smiled. I had seen sweeter smiles. "Quite right about the appeal of seeing you suffer. I don't have a lot of time but I have this" - she nodded to the taser. "What about you?"

"I have a new closet door for double-double-u," I said.

Roberta didn't lower the taser. She just stopped looking like using it was an imminent action rather than a deeply held desire. We had some history of the mixed kind. Her professional animus against double-double-u, her White Whale — our nickname for my client's kleptocratic trash of a guy — was purer and more dangerous than if it had been personal.

"That gets you time. What's the part where you suffer?"

"I need to ask you a favor." I didn't have to fake how little I looked forward to it.

Her smile wasn't fake either. She called in somebody to pick up the goon to be sent to an abstract somewhere — one of the reasons I had quit the job; I put a pin on that for later — and she waved me inside the field office. Not all the way in but it was the first floor and not the basement. I took that as a good sign for my chances of leaving the building alive.

Roberta sat on one side of an anonymous shareable desks, asked for a cup of coffee for herself without offering me anything, and ordered me to sit.

"Talk."

I did. I didn't know a lot they didn't, and I'd be hard-pressed to ever know something they couldn't know, but there's a difference between being able to find something out and being aware of it. So I told her some things, offered others, and asked for a couple.

She drummed her fingers on the table for about fifteen seconds. She was a quick thinker — by the tenth second I began to get worried — but then she stopped and nodded.

"Deal."

Half an hour and some heavily supervised database research later I was escorted out of the building. I wanted to get the first part of the plan done as soon as possible but I would need a shower and a change of clothes to project the right impression. It was almost dawn and public transit was as sluggish as I felt. Against preference and habit I took a car to my apartment.

A shower and a cup of coffee pulled their reliable trick. I hesitated for a minute on which clothes to use. Ended up choosing my old black work suit as I had feared I would have to. A gun as well — never used but could be necessary for the part — but no eyeware.

I took a look at the mirror. I never do that unless it's for work. Did I look like somebody who would destroy somebody's life just because it was on the day's to-do list?

In my qualified professional opinion, I did.

I left without my hat. The person I was going to visit lived far from me and I didn't want to make me too easy to backtrack if he tried. I took a bus halfway and then rented a car. You can't use a ride or just walk to somebody's door when you're going to blackmail them.

It was a nice door in a nice neighborhood. Not White Whale-nice. That sort of guy lives in compounds, buys entire buildings, and has to choose in which of their islands they want to spend the weekend. The guy whose door camera I was monologuing to was a second-line manager in a company that had once done the real work for something the White Whale had wanted done. That made him someone I could approach. His online habits made him someone I could use.

I had been good at that sort of thing and still was.

The guy opened the door himself. Bald, stooped, sweating even in the cold air coming out of the door. He had run to open it.

"Who are you? Why are you saying that? You can't say that in front of a camera!"

I smiled my old-job smile. "Camera is in amnesiac mode, Doctor." Easy to trigger if you know how. "You on the other hand have to pay attention and remember. Are you paying attention?"

He had frozen. I began to repeat what I had said to the camera. He stopped me right away. "I am! I am."

I told him what I wanted him to do and how much time he had to do it. I didn't have to threaten him. He didn't protest. I told him to repeat to me what I had told him to do, and when he did I left. That part had taken much less than ten minutes. Half an hour if you included the time I had spent using my old job's databases to find a horrible person in the right place and force him to do something not to punish him but to help my own goals. The bus home took longer than that.

The next few days I worked hard to be boring. The client's guy couldn't be sure of what had happened to his goon or even if I had had anything to do with it. I spent the time doing legwork in very public places on long-term cases that had nothing to do with him. Anybody watching me would assume I had been scared off the case and lose interest in me. Or assume I had been scared off the case and tie up a loose end.

After the end of the week I had given the doctor I put on again my black suit and took a different combination of public transport and car to his place. He wasn't the type that might try to kill me and I had done my best to make him feel he didn't have to kill himself. It was still a small relief when he opened the door, gave me what he had stolen for me, and then closed the door on my face without saying a word. I saluted the door camera to indicate my amiable intent to never meet again and then drove the car half-way to my office and took a bus the rest of the way.

The client was waiting outside my office door. I hadn't told her to come and she obviously hadn't been waiting for long. I opened the door and invited her in without making any comment on that. As she entered I told myself I had won my bet on her pheromone enhancements.

Once inside my office she didn't sit. She turned around to me and said "Do you have it?" She almost made it sound like a question.

"Sure," I said, and gave her the small cryogenic pack the doctor had given me. The greed in her eyes as she took the unmodified cloned embryonic cells stolen from the clinic's archives was the first ugly thing I had seen on her.

"What do you want it for?"

"None of your business. I'll transfer the rest of your fee."

I nodded and waited. In my line of work you get a feeling for when somebody wants to say something even if they don't have to.

"I can't have children," she said matter-of-fact without looking at me. I wasn't surprised. I had taken a quick look at the files on her procedures. "I've arranged a surrogate. A small place, quiet." Like the city her parents were from, I knew. "I have a good life planned for her."

"Isn't that a form of engineering?" I've never known how to stop myself from asking questions like that.

She looked at me like I didn't and couldn't possibly understand. She was probably right. Then my former client left the office in silence, leaving behind a memory of unnatural beauty, a healthier balance in my bank account, and somewhere in the world a rich guy without a conscience but maybe a grudge if he remembered I existed and figured out what I had done. And if cared at all. Who knew which one of his crimes he had thought I was looking into.

An incoming message went past my phone's filters with a loud ping. I opened it and saw a middle finger emoji. It looked cheerful. Meant Roberta's people had picked up the package I had left in the bus back to my apartment, with the full files of what the White Whale had done to my former client and biological material to prove it. It wouldn't bring him down, but used at the right time and place it could do some damage. I reckoned that might keep me from her taser the next time I saw her.

I hoped I would never have to. I had gone through a lot to stop being that man. It was late and I was tired, so I closed the office and took the bus home. I was still wearing my black suit.

(Originally posted on my blog.)