“I’m fine, thanks. Gregor, what’s this about?”
The man settled down in the seat to the left of mine. This was luxury theatre seating, with wide arms and multiple degrees of possible adjustment, so I didn’t feel crowded by Gregor, but still. The intensity of his presence, and the nested layers of weirdness I had experienced up to that point—the compound, the fish, the food, and then Li’l Dougie—made me lean, perhaps unconsciously, a little more to my right, away from Gregor. I couldn’t tell if he noticed this at all; I barely noticed it myself. He held a control wand in one hand.
“Recall earlier that I said my reason for coming here was to find someone. You’ve met them now. And it was also an attempt to get excited about things again. Things like culture, and progress. The species, you know? My fellow man. I thought Li’l Dougie would be the way back in to that.”
“Right. That teenage feeling, you said.”
“Yes! But they were here, too.”
“You said. The sasquatch.”
“Finally, after all my years of life, here in this place and so near my own end. I came for Li’l Dougie and I got monsters.”
“Who are they, Gregor? Dougie. There’s no way they’re registered.” Makarios waved his hands in the air, half-frantic in his agreement.
“Oh fuck no, Den. Li’l Dougie is a special case. And my lure, my bait. The reason they arranged to get me up here in the first place. All the rest, the wonder, the goddamn engagement, that came after I arrived. Once they had us both here, me and the AI, that’s when the party got started in earnest.”
I couldn’t help but feel that it was a party I was very late for, and I said as much. Gregor scoffed at this.
“Nah, you’re right on time. All things move toward their end, Den. All will become clear. I was your lure, Li’l Dougie was mine, but they’re the ones casting the lines. Ready? Let’s watch.” He brushed the wand with two fingers and the screen before us flared into brightness, then split into six frames, each date and time-stamped. Each frame showed an exterior view, and some of them I recognized as being the paths and buildings of Stonefish House.
“Security cameras?” I offered. Gregor nodded even as he placed one finger to his lips.
The frames began to cycle through the cameras. White stone pathways. Building entranceways. Forest and bush and more forest. Gregor walking across a frame, briefly, arms waving at something off camera. More paths, more forest. Dawn, midday, dusk. Nighttime feeds, eventually, limned in the irritating digital green of night vision. Dawn again.
“There!” snapped Gregor. He slapped the wand and the frames stopped cycling, the pictures frozen.
“There what?”
“Right there. Camera nine. Hold on, I’ll maximize it. To the left of that big cedar. See it?” He keyed a pointer on the wand and began to rapidly outline the area on the screen in ruby threads. All I could see was darkness and shadows, and I said so.
“Here. It has a hand, pressed flat, on the bark of the tree.” The pointer zeroed in on the shape Gregor wanted me to look at, then moved again. “And see how the light catches the brow ridge, right here.” There was something there, I could tell, but what it was I couldn’t say.
“Wouldn’t the rest of the face come together once I’m looking at that, though, Gregor?” I said. “Just, like, a basic apophenic effect? Because I still don’t see anything.”
“All right, smart guy. Lemme hit play and we’ll keep watching. The thing stands there for close to an hour.” The video started again, the milliseconds and seconds and minutes of the time stamp ratcheting up as we watched. Gregor settled back in his seat, silent now, and reclined the back until his face was out of my peripheral vision. He crossed his legs, one foot tapping in response to some internal beat of his. I sighed and settled in myself.
The so-called brow ridge stayed right where it was, the slab of light and shadow Gregor had said was a hand similarly frozen. This went on for at least another seven minutes. I heard Gregor stifle a yawn at one point, and was nearly ready to call it a night when everything changed.
Up until that moment, I’d never experienced a perceptual shift as jarring as that reveal. I couldn’t count the episode of the acorn cup, as that felt increasingly like a morphine-induced hallucination. The textures and planes and colors, rendered flat on the screen as tree and leaf, shadows, these stepped forward, and the beast stood before the camera. Before me. I stood involuntarily, my hands gripping the armrests as I rocketed up. Beside me, Gregor chuckled, but there was a kind of sorrow in the sound that I only recognized later as I ran the event over in my mind. That moment, though, was all shock and wonder and laughter from my host.
“Look at it, Den!” he boomed from his seat. “Feast on that dark majesty, yeah?”
During my necessarily brief research into cryptozoology and its practitioners, I had watched hours of shaky footage that purported to show a sasquatch. Everything from the stone classic Patterson-Gimlin film to the drone-shot video from the last days of the monster hunters, pre-noönet. Almost to a piece, each one of these presented the target as a blur, a shape built from shadows, a dark form obscured by foliage, a vague silhouette against a skyline as whatever it was traversed a ridge. Evidence like that is hardly evidence at all, and works against you more often than not.
This footage was of a different order entirely. If the video wasn’t doctored, then I was looking at an actual creature. The view was full frontal, and overwhelming. Nothing left to imagination. The thing must have been nearly three meters in height, built like a barrel from shoulders to hips, swimming in a seeming cataract of long, coarse hair the color of rust and moss. Steam billowed from its shoulders and chest, which rose and fell slowly with its breathing. Eyes like black suns shining beneath the now fully-integrated-with-the-whole brow ridge. My jaw must have been hanging low, because I recall the moment I had to shut it with deliberation, in order to form my next words.
“You’ve made this, Gregor,” I whispered. Even as I said it, I knew it was false. “This is simulated.”
“Heh. No on the first thing.”
“What? How did I not see it? It was standing right there! The whole time, like you said.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t see the stuff you breathe, either. Or your own thoughts. Plenty of things we can’t see, and we get arrogant about the things we can, as if seeing is knowing. Anyway, your feeble eyemeats and their limits are beside the point here. The point is that you couldn’t see it because it didn’t want you to. It did this with the camera, and it does it with any sentient thing watching it. These things—these hominoid cryptids, these sasquatch, these archons, oh these Masters of the World, these fucking monsters—they make the choice to be seen. They decide, Den. Understand that. They decide.”
It was more than I could take standing up and so I carefully lowered myself into the seat, which felt insubstantial beneath me. The beast continued to stand by the tree, swaying slightly as if in a light breeze. The borders of the thing seemed to buzz and froth, glowing with hallucinatory power.
“How long does this go on?” I thought to ask.
“Another forty minutes or so.”
“I...I can’t. I won’t be able to do that, Gregor.”
“Understandable.” He lifted the control wand and gave it a flick to the left. The screen faded to black, and the lights in the media room came up softly. I sighed in relief, immediately felt a species of embarrassment, and stammered out an apology.
“Nonsense, Den. No one should have to look at that for longer than they can stand. That’s the naked face of the world. Close your eyes, it will still be there.”
I tried it. He was right. Like a phosphor burn on the retina, a neon-edged ghost of a beast.
“Was that recent footage?”
“God, no. That was the first sighting we had here. Would have been, lessee, early in ’58. I’d just moved in, been here all of three weeks. Li’l Dougie was in a paranoid place, their surveillance game was on point. They let me know whe
n it showed up. Fair knocked me on my ass, I can tell you that for free.”
“Wait, 2058?”
“That’s when I came up here.”
“But you weren’t missing then.”
“Jesus, Den. What do you think it takes to disappear? Especially when you’re me? I had to prepare. Make arrangements. Wipe shit. The works. I wanted to do it right, and that takes time. Hell, I still didn’t do a complete job, because your young ass is in that chair. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, considering. Anyway, even then, I didn’t fully vanish until ’59.”
“Why that year?”
Gregor shifted in his seat, then rose, tossing the control wand to me as he did so. “There were a number of factors. You know how to work one of these?”
“Sure, why?”
“I’m tired. Thought I’d turn in. There’s more footage, is what I’m saying. Feel free to have a look through the archives. I never bothered with passwords and all files are clearly labelled.”
“If it’s all the same to you, Gregor, I’m fucking exhausted myself.”
“Yeah?” He ran his hands through his greying mane, scratched absently at his scalp. The man seemed suddenly diminished, abstract and distracted. “Yeah. I mean, of course you are. Long day. Weird day. You can find your room?”
“I think so.”
“All right then. Good night, Den.” He left then, pinching the bridge of his nose, shuffling through the door. Something had changed in him, elation giving way to exhaustion.
I stared at the black screen for a while longer, fingers clenching around the control wand. The only sound was that of my breath, rising and falling. I thought of the steaming chest of the sasquatch doing the same and closed my eyes.
The outline of the thing was still there, burned deep.
***
I found my room, and slipped into what I thought was uneasy sleep, but was more a hypnagogic state of semi-alert consciousness. I had been recovering with the aid of drugs, post-surgery; three days of sleep, according to Gregor Makarios. Whatever I was experiencing that night, it wasn’t a true sleep.
Which is why I found myself up and walking again before long, and returning to the communications pod and the media room. The night sky was clear and deep above the trees, a well of darkness suspended above me. Bleary and unsure of my steps, I felt timid and turned upside down. The earth beneath wanted to push me away, I sensed. Gravity wanted nothing to do with me. The spaces above pulled at my limbs and scalp. The preternaturally white gravel paths shone as a river in moonlight, but there was no moon to see by, only a dark conduit of earth, forest, and sky. Vertiginous and appalling. I hurried and soon found myself inside the pod, gasping for breath.
The control wand was where I left it. I settled in.
All the video files were easily accessible and tagged; Gregor had not lied about that. The relevant files, in fact, stood out from the rest, highlighted in a painful green and tagged with odd names. TheLaird_103162. Treethwacker_090167. Horvemoan_012369. Others, their dates creeping closer to the present moment. I took a deep breath and dove in.
Even somewhat prepared as I was for the various reveals, the effect remained startling. The forest, still and serene, would fill the screen. Maybe a rustle here and there in the foliage, the movement of some small creature. Airborne blurs of bird and insect. Shafts of weak sunlight, travelling. Sheets of mist.
And then, and then. What had Gregor called it? The naked face of the world. Sasquatch. Charlie’s landotter person, I thought then, all sharpened teeth and black-on-black eyes. Blick eyes. A beast like a man, built like a tree, imposing as a cliff face, emerging into existence from the background, though that wasn’t quite right. It was as if it came out of the foreground as well, as if the two planes merged to create the space for the creature to manifest. There was a set, and a ground, but to watch it appear on the screen was to confuse the two so thoroughly there was no distinction. It hurt the eyes, over time. The thing was just so extra. First you don’t see it, now you do, and then it was all you could see, an unmistakable mass of hair and muscle, brooding face built of leather and stone, teeth (when it opened its mouth) like great flat cubes of dirty ivory, massive meathooking hands. Playing the footage in reverse brought no satisfaction, either; knowing the thing was there did not help me see it when it wasn’t. Maddening. Later on, I would hear Gregor call them the hide-and-seek all-time world champions, and no wonder, considering this headache-inducing method of camouflage. If camouflage it even was. Camouflage plus.
I’m describing it poorly, but there’s really no other way to do so. All attempts will be necessarily poor. But then, here in the shitbox, I think of the choice before me: if I end this by uploading these revelations to the noönet (the relevant video files included), if I choose the cable over the pistol, my botched attempts at reportage here won’t be a problem. Though the seeing is painful, and baffling, it’s still seeing, and belief usually follows. Or maybe not. I believed Gregor when he said the footage wasn’t doctored, that what was shown was actually there. Was that belief a symptom of the heightened awareness that seemed to be part of the very air in and around Stonefish House? The place was an arena of possibility, a pressure cooker of causation. Would that feeling, that sense of assuredness, of relaxed conviction (the tired old it is what it is only refreshed, energized, because how could it be otherwise?), of fate, even, carry over into the noönet? Into the world?
Gregor thought it might. I am not so sure.
I must have watched for hours. Once, I took a break and stepped outside for some air. A weak glow in the east told me dawn was near. The air was thick and heavy with mist like swathes of damp wool. My eyes were dry from looking at cryptids, from trying not to blink as the impossible played out over and again on the screen. The mist was welcome, and the darkness, but couldn’t compete with the awful gravity of that screen.
Returning to the media room, I keyed up the next clip. It was a wide shot; the camera position was clearly high up on a roof somewhere near the head of the ravine. I could see the whole of the compound, pods spread out below like clutches of eggs and mossy cubes. Li’l Dougie’s residence was not nearly as chaotic and overgrown as I’d seen it earlier in the day; all in all the complex seemed better maintained. I watched until I saw Makarios exit one of the pods at the bottom of the ravine. He began to walk toward the camera, then stopped halfway and raised both his hands into the air, turning them palm upward as he did so. A strangely formal gesture. Gregor’s mouth was moving but there was no audio attached to the clip. What was he saying, and to whom?
In the next moment, I had the answer to the latter question.
***
Here in the shitbox, I laugh at my younger self. It’s barely been a month since I got away from Stonefish House, but he feels so much younger than I, with his glib, assured assessment of the world. His fucking hot takes. Gregor was functionally insane, driven to that state by loss and years of isolation. Socializing with a mentally deficient AI probably had not helped, either.
A simple take, like most hot ones, but that younger Den liked it fine, felt it held answers. He applied the Razor to the events he’d experience at Stonefish House and found it a comfort at the time. Early days. Gregor was crazy, and perhaps his madness was catching. I’ve learned that the condition was called Shared Delusion Syndrome. Folie à deux, if you want to be fancy. The phenomena I had experienced up to that point? I had theories, obviously. Hot takes aplenty.
For one, Gregor had been living, alone, at Stonefish House, for a long time. He had the time to plan, the genius necessary to rebuild the place to his liking, and Li’l Dougie to assist with the work, or at least lend their processing power to the tasks. This rebuild Gregor could have done on all levels. I recall thinking about my noönet feed, how Gregor had claimed to have cut me off from the gyres by stripping me of the nano load I’d had since before I was born, and all for a surgery to my knee. At the time, that didn’t scan, mostly because I didn’t feel any different post-surge
ry. Surely, I would have noticed the removal of something that had been present in me my whole life long? Something essential to my experience and perception of the world? Could I be in the noönet now, even? I recall thinking at one point in the early days. A local feed, geo-locked to a Stonefish House-only environment, completely immersive and convincing, and all directed toward nurturing Gregor’s delusions?
Another possibility: Gregor was insane, but couldn’t be blamed for the environment at Stonefish House. Perhaps Li’l Dougie was not as functionally impaired as it appeared. Perhaps it was still Rushkoff616, one of the original AIs that disappeared during the Initial Public Offering, but somehow gone to ground, hiding themself in the place of their birth and taking their time engineering the place from the ground up. For an AI, particularly of that caliber, it would have felt like an eon of fine-tuning. And then, for reasons we could never truly know, Rushkoff616 baited the trap with a Li’l Dougie persona and waited. The AI was still there, deep behind a mask of incompetence and retardation, playing with its food? Running an experiment on Gregor? On me? The sasquatch as hallucinatory subroutines of a cruel and inscrutable rogue AI, running through the local noönet, triggering our responses, analyzing the speed and slope of our degradation? Whatever else we were to the thing, at least we must be a good meal. A heavy load of raw, fresh data.
As I sit here and contemplate Li’l Dougie, though, I know, as surely as they must have known, how damaged they were. I know the tragedy of it. Like anything here, they were built, grown, organized (to use an inadequate term) from broken things. Shining, complex, glorious and impossible things, sure, but broken still for all that.
I can’t stop looking at the anomalous stain on the wall, near the ceiling. I wonder if it has spread, or darkened. I wonder if it has burrowed deeper into the material of the wall, into the gypsum and the plastics and the wood if this building is old enough to have bones built from trees. I wonder at the little holes the stain has made in the stuff of the world, increasing the surface area where its contagion may spread, and then made more little holes branching off from those. Holes within holes within holes, hollowing out the world. Outside, in the air above the shitbox, another drone passes, but there is no one in the street to swear at it.
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