“That’s garbage, Gregor! We were coerced.”
“Were we though. Were we. Come on, Den.”
I couldn’t say anything. He was right. God damn him, but he was right.
“I’m going out there to find it. I’ll hunt it down, and I’ll kill it or, you know. The other thing. Tell you what though, if I do manage to end it, I’m gonna take a big shit in its mouth.”
“Mouths.” Somehow, I managed to smile.
“Ha! Right. Well, I’ll space out my efforts then.” Gregor mimed straddling the beast, moving along in a squat over the ring of the thing and pausing for effect. It was so stupid, so juvenile, I had to laugh. Gregor did too.
“Shit, son, that’s all I needed to hear.”
“What was the first part, man? The already done part.”
“Listen to me, Den. You have to shit in their mouths. Do you understand? It’s the only sane response to their...efforts. I don’t know how that’s going to look for you—”
“Gregor. What have you done.” My mouth had gone suddenly dry. The air tasted like lead.
“What I should have done in the first place. For you, for Jeremy. I should have protected him. Made better choices. If I’d only—...”
“There’s no guarantee your boy ever existed, Gregor! You said yourself!” My vision was swimming and my alarm grew with each dizzy plunge. “They could have planted Jeremy in your head.”
“Yeah. Yeah, they could have. They may well have, and all I’ve got up here is a bad story with an ugly end. But they got one thing right about it, Den, about me. It’s how they tweak all this to convince us that this is fine somehow. This is fine we say while the world burns. And we say that because they get enough of it right! All the small joys and neat questions and little moments that keep a person going. It’s about investment in the end. Do you have commitment to their bit? Will you push enough into the skin of the Stonefish to trigger its barbs, generate some novelty, some miniscule twitch of transformative pain? You think it’s for you, or the species, or fucking science, but it’s for them. It’s all for them.
“See, Den, they knew I’d choose my boy over them. They fucking loved teaching me, showing me wonders and horrors, knowing that I’d come this close to taking their offer. But we’re x-rays to them. Just very basic code. They knew me, knew I’d reject their role for me. I’m no prophet, despite my history. You can disappoint your editor with that later, if you make it. No, I’d reject them, I’d look down from the goddamn mountain at all the kingdoms of the world laid out before me and I’d say no. I’d do the right thing. And they punished me for it. They looked forward to dishing it out. They get off on it.” Gregor leaned into my face, brought a hand to the back of my skull to cradle it. “Easy there. Look, let’s get you down on the floor, Den. You’ll be safer there.”
“Jesus, what’d you do, Gregor?” I didn’t need to ask by then. It was clear I’d been drugged. Something slipped into my bowl of stew when he’d served me.
“Making you safe, son. Safe as possible. I can’t have you following me. Not for this.” He disappeared for a moment, returned with a thin pillow and a blanket. “Let’s get you tucked in. And then I have to go take care of that thing.”
“You’re insane.” My voice was as slurred as my thoughts, nightmarish and slow. His face was a landslide of flesh and boulders grey and black. Eyes like occluded suns. Gregor passed a rough palm over my eyes, closing them against the vision, and I hadn’t the energy, or the will, to snap them back open. High above in the darkness, his voice came again, receding.
“Sure, Den. Sure. A broken part of a broken machine, making a broken assessment of a broken situation, and hoping to fix it, knowing I can’t. But I can let them know what I think about their efforts here. Maybe, if there’s anything above them to notice such statements, I’ll be noticed. Fuck! Let them be judged if there’s any justice!”
I made noises at him, pleading and senseless. Grunts in the dark. I don’t know what I said, and it didn’t matter.
“So, what can I do? I can shit in their fucking mouth, Den. You’ll find yourself in a room. You’ll find yourself with their choice.” Suddenly his lips were at my ear, his voice as big as the world. A titan’s voice, each word a destroying wind.
“Shit. In. Their. Mouth.”
***
I awoke to nothingness.
The void I faced was so profound I could feel the pupils of my anguished eyes straining to their widest aperture, hoping to catch at some fleck of dust, some grateful flaw in the perfect grey emptiness. Even a difference in the gradation of that grey would have been welcome in those first seconds of my immersion in this new Numpty, this fresh hell. Actual blindness would have been a mercy. Better the dark than this living negation.
This was the time for panic, Gregor.
I may have screamed, though there was nothing to hear. The sensation of my own lungs pushing air out past vibrating vocal cords, the red feeling of suddenly constricted throat and neck muscles, all this reached me as a piece of news from a place far distant, and then vanished like an afterthought. It was probably screaming, and probably mine. The light prick of saline at the corner of my eyes arrived, fled. I thought of the Japanese person on Ky’s video, crawling across the pavement, teeth rattling in their sockets in protest. I think I closed my mouth then.
Similar, too, the vague vertiginous sensation of shoulders and arms working, pinwheeling. Fingers, grasping, felt like slim, ineffective needles pushed into airy masses of pudding, into an imagined space and not a real one. Not even pudding, something even less substantial. I could not tell if I was prone still, or sitting. Standing? I ached to feel my vertebrae, moaned inwardly for the sensation of something firm at my back. Where was the floor Gregor had laid me out on. Where the pillow, the sheet, Stonefish House itself.
A time for panic, but with nothing to bring that feeling down on, it passed, or at least retreated, becoming a part of the background noise of my mind.
I forced a stillness, then. Movement was death, now. At the very least, it meant possible injury, and that was something I could not afford. I would have to center myself in this null space if I was to survive.
I began by tagging the things I could feel, however remotely. At my core, a kind of tumbling, as of soft masses revolving about each other. Intestines and their contents, I guessed. Gregor on shit: show us what you’re made of, player. Did the effects of the Numpty extend to the individual perceptions of the literal trillions of flora and fauna that called my guts home? Could that tiny mob sense the change. If they did, I wouldn’t know, but for a strangely grateful moment I wondered if the rolling sensation was somehow their voice, their ancient microscopic migrations through the maze of my guts finally becoming apparent to my conscious mind. However faint their presence, I latched on, hoping for guidance.
None came, of course. There was no communication with something so far beneath me on the scale of life, even resident within me as they were. Was this how Mandibole felt, as segments of lesser reality cycled through its incomprehensible form? Did Double Ramsey find themselves urged to scratch itches they couldn’t find when we died in our thousands each day. Did Babayoko know what it was doing when it repaired my destroyed knee, swapping it out for another version found elsewhere in its greasy toolkit? Did the ODB or As You Know Bob give the first fuck about what we thought of their actions, their various perversions and special blasphemies.
Moving out from my guts, I tried to sense my frame, my limbs. Where was my fucking heartbeat, the rush of blood in my inner ear. I strained to force information from parts of me that I knew were connected but not transmitting. It was like trying to look at my hands in a dream, to find my feet. Motive actuators were what I needed. Find these lumps of flesh with which I moved through and made changes to my world. If I could do that, I could maybe begin to make sense of the phantom environment around me, begin to breathe in the choking greyness. Moments before I had detected a slight nausea roiling up from my guts when I though
t of pinwheeling my arms in the blind panic I’d only half suppressed since. Could I trigger that feeling again? That rumour of feeling?
I have no idea how long it took, minutes, or an hour, but finally the ghost of my hands appeared to me. Understand that I was still unable to see anything, but the outlines of my hands, or at least the tips of my fingers became subtly apparent to my mind, as if I’d pressed them into a layer of dust or fine ash. It wasn’t much to feel, but the walls of my prison were before me. To feel relief at such a thing; the horror of it, to be trapped and happy to know it.
Fuck the sasquatch. Fuck the elohim, the archons of this toxic world. Fuck these kidnapping, pervert, landotter bastards.
I made fists of both my hands, and pushed in a direction I guessed was down. Pushed into more nothingness, more barely-there imaginary pudding. Barely there was better than nothing, though, and the more I pressed, the more I willed sensation, the more came through. Was I fooling myself? So desperate for orientation, for placement in the world, I was imagining feeling what simply was not there to feel? I thought of the fox in the original Numpty, leaving its turd steaming for the drone cameras to capture. Had I shat myself again, I wondered, and if I had, how would I know? To put my hand in my own warm mess and know it for what it was would have been like finding gold at that point. Like water in the desert.
That fox had known what it was doing. Where it was. The beast had been unaffected by the Numpty. Lucky dog.
I pressed the ghosts of my fists deeper into the emptiness, and was finally rewarded with an answering pressure, a resistance. No way to tell what it was I was touching but the sensation of warmth cradling my knuckles floated up from below. Still pushing, I opened my fists and closed them again immediately. Something folded and warped in my grasp.
Paper, I thought. A piece of fabric, or plastic? Again, there was no way to tell, but I was holding some thing, some object. Something flat, thin, and easily crumpled.
I almost fell into the fallacy of thinking I’d grasped something real. I’d come right to the brink of that thought. Gregor would have laughed at me, probably was laughing wherever he was. No. No, their simulation was offering up better information to another part of the simulation, and that was all. I was a piece of the camouflage coming into tune with another piece. Making peace. It was atonement, of a kind, and the impact of it was almost enough to make me give up right then and there. This was our ground of being, this cardboard and Klieg light falseness. If there was a point to the illusion, then it could only lie in its destruction. It was best to lie down and die, like the black bear Gregor and I had ruined as Mandibole’s tools. I hoped it was dead, then, another fouled, whimpering donut melting into the muck of the lying earth. If it was, then Gregor wouldn’t have to kill it.
It wasn’t earth crinkling in my closed palms though, was it. I had something to hold on to, unreal or not. I had an orientation. And so I twisted, first to the left, and feeling no resistance in that direction, corrected that motion and turned to the right. The suggestion of movement within my vertebral column arrived like a dream of fireworks popping into the night from a distant horizon. The microbial hordes below offered up what might have been a cheer; the snake of my intestines rolled in response, hungry for more. I heard Gregor then, or recalled hearing him. Same difference.
First Law of the Universe, Den, he said. Shit, son. Show us what you’re made of player. Shit, or get off the pot.
I turned again, twisting, holding tight to the vagueness in my hands for support. Bright crescents of sensation where my fingernails dug through the material to cut into my palms deepened my focus, so that when the thing came into my field of vision I hardly recognized what I was seeing, or the fact that I was seeing at all.
It arrived, a fitfully blazing orb of deep, angry red. Shining, shaking, pulsing like a dying star in a grey, heat death sky. When I finally understood what I was seeing, the anguished implications of it, I cried out in the silence. The distance I would have to cover in the Numpty to reach it, and the inevitability of that attempt, crashed in upon me as a landslide of despair.
It was the tree. The Japanese maple, half a click from Stonefish House, high up in the little stone alcove above the gorge that cradled the compound. Gregor’s memorial to the erasure of his son, his sacred space, the smallest of memory palaces. An easy ten-minute hike under normal conditions, with a trail spooling out beneath boots you could see and rocks you could lean on, light pouring from above and all around, from all the other simulated things that could be, and were, in their teeming tens of thousands.
Glowing. Alive and vibrant, creating a bubble of significance in the void, a trembling sphere of isness. Rendering the void meaningless by its very presence within it. Another something, pregnant with possibility. Just seeing it there, far away and floating, was enough of a sensory explosion to clarify and affirm my hands. My eyes, tearing up, the heat of my gratitude carving salted channels into the numbness of my cheeks. I could feel the tension thrumming across and through my scalp and forehead, heralds of an oncoming migraine.
All thanks to the maple. Gregor’s sacred tree.
GREGOR ON MEMORY
“I only think about him when I’m here, Den.”
“Why is that. I can’t imagine the kind of focus you must have. I’d never stop thinking about something like that.”
“And why is that?”
“I wouldn’t want to forget. I mean, you must worry about that, Gregor. Forgetting about Jeremy? You’re the only one who ever knew he existed...”
“It’s for that reason, right there, that I restrict myself to thoughts of Jeremy while here, tending to his tree. If it’s all Stonefish, and it is, it is, then memory is part of their camouflage protocol. Memory is the cursed gift of the archons and the archons are perverts. Do you know what happens in your brain every time you recall a memory? I mean physically, to the actual tissues, the cells, neurons and glions and so on.”
“I’m guessing they change. Everything does.”
“Indeed it do, as the mystics so affirm. In the case of your brain, and its access to precious, precious memory, the change is minimal but nevertheless there and the upshot of this? Every time you access a memory, the original imprint changes. Which is to say that every special moment in your life, every triumph or humiliation, your good times and your bad, births and deaths and instances of really excellent sex, all these are not as they were. Every visitation to that remembered scene introduces a flaw, a degradation. The signal becomes corrupted, the data is overwritten. Your memory of the thing is merely the memory of the last time you remembered the thing. All reduces, finally, to noise.”
“Jesus.”
“Uh huh. And so the tree. I remember that he loved this tree. Jeremy. This was his favourite. In our yard. The grounds, I mean. Jesus, listen to me. Our yard.”
“Not hard to see why.”
“Right? Fucking gorgeous plant. So delicate, and yet so robust. Hardy survivor. Nice dense root system, you can drop these pretty much anywhere and it will do fine. Resilient to a fault, which is why it makes such a great ornamental; a dedicated topiarist can make changes to it at will, craft and sculpt it over time. Create these archetypal trees. I mean, just look at what I’ve managed to do here, and I’ve barely any formal training at all. Just watching the groundskeepers every now and again. Even so, doesn’t it just scream Tree at you, Den?”
“I wouldn’t say it screams, but sure. I take your meaning.”
“Form and function. Nature meets art. A simulation of a simulation embedded within more simulation. There never used to be trees like this. Not like this. Maybe in fairy tales. Mythologies. And this is what they want, Den. The archons want novelty. Perverts, but with refined tastes. New shit for old, that’s part of their deal, part of their harvest scheme. They like it when we do this.”
“Art?”
“When we take the world and shape it. We’re the part of the world that takes the raw stuff of the world and makes new, surprising, ap
palling crap with it. It satisfies their needs, I think.”
“Then why sculpt this tree in the first place?”
“I am also perverse, naturally. As are you, Den. But there’s more to it than that. I work with this tree so that I can remember my son, who they took from me. Who, with each visit to the memories I have of him, is taken from me further still, by virtue of the very equipment I’ve been given in order to remember things at all. But let me tell you the worst of it...
“Jeremy was my son. And then he wasn’t. He was here, and then he was removed, and removed in totality. Not even Kari remembered him. Imagine that! Not even his mother. A clean edit, an existential deletion of the sort that only they can do. Jeremy exists only in my mind. So, the question remains, for me, this: was he ever really here? In the world? You know they torture me, Den, with this ghost boy, and they do it because I won’t do their work for them. I won’t be what they want me to be, what they’ll ask you to be, eventually. Oh, I’ll clip at a plant here and there, make it pretty. I’ll obey their First Law and eat their food, breathe their air. And when I was young I made new things, strange things that were revolutionary and different and capital-F fun, but I didn’t know them then, didn’t know the secrets, the truth of the world. I didn’t know the Stonefish.
“The question remains. I remember Jeremy. I remember him as completely and carefully as I can. I limit those memories and only access them here, in the shade of his tree. I remember my son? Do I? I do. They took him from me. Or, and this is how the torture begins, this is where they get their sick pleasure, or! Or they gave me the memories of a son, a son that had never been, had never lived in the first place. And as they gave me these memories of Jeremy, they tagged each one with a bit of data that told me they’d taken him away.”
“Christ. That’s sick. That’s deranged.”
“You’d think we’d catch on faster. As a species. But we haven’t, and we won’t. The noönet. We barely remember last week. What we used to be. And if you can’t recall what you were, you can’t move toward what you could be.”
Stonefish Page 27
