The Unraveling

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

  That’s right, my kittens: with ZANGO JANGO’S MARKET TIPS you’ll be ahead of the game, making the bets of a lifetime, the ones that’ll burrow you into DEPTHS OF SUCCESS you never knew you HAD IN YOU!

  Now . . . I say that every week. And that’s because it’s always true. Week in and week out, JANGO brings you that teetering-on-the-edge-of-the-byway contrarian bite. But this week . . . this week, my puppies. Well. This week . . . is different.

  What I’ve got for you today is so big and so wild my predictive agents say half of you are going to abandon old ZANGO’s spot, never to return, before I’m done. But I’m begging you: HEAR ME OUT. If you close your ears on old Fathersibling Jango now, you’ll regret it later, may Groon mourn!

  So what’s the BIG BET?

  . . . let me lead up to it, turtles.

  If you missed a little thing called THE UNRAVELING this week, you need to enter the World Hermit Derby, and ZANGO will bet on your bid. I’ll admit, the clowns’ shindig wasn’t my cup of fluffy; but whether you loved it or loathed it, the question for us BETTING FOOLS is, what OPPORTUNITIES does it present?

  Everyone knows the markets will react. The SAPPY PUNTERS we love to tweak are taking the obvo bets, putting their chips on the collapse of a few more tottering cohorts, or sell-offs in feedgardener confidence. Maybe a few are venturing a bit farther, wondering about a POLITICAL REALIGNMENT. Will the Clowns collapse as a political force altogether? Contrariwise, do the Midwives look so helpless that the Clowns will surge ahead? Or even—and this is as close to the brink as SAPPY PUNTERS can bring themselves to think—will BOTH sides of the Fun/​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Safety axis lose out, and a long-awaited THIRD FORCE arise in our weak tea of Age of Digging politics? Maybe cobbled together out of those disgruntled staidophobic Vails and their creaky, strutting old-soldier heroes . . . ?

  But puppies: that’s all MEAGER PIE.

  When the Consensus is betting “Things Shake Up” and the Counter-Consensus knee-jerks “No They Don’t,” what does ZANGO JANGO say?

  ZANGO JANGO says: “You Ain’t Seen NOTHING Yet.”

  Take a look at the chart below (as always, data for your agents to munch is on the flip side). That red line is the frustration index for uncohorted Vails in the 150- to 350-year-old demographic, broken down by birth order and plotted against the blue line, the reciprocal of ambition times longing for that same group over the past two thousand years. The spike this week is impressive, but so far so standard.

  But Zango, you’re asking, what’s that yellow line doing there? Well, puppies, that’s the index of willful denial for latterborn Staid parents in the same age group. Specifically: it’s the number of heartbeats per day they spend trying not to think about what they’re thinking about. This week: SPROIING! Forgive my vulgarity, but it looks like it’s going to take a lot of spoon-passing for “the still center” to “clear the mind”!

  But now take a gander at the CORRELATION (see the green callouts).

  There’s a reason I ran this graph out to two thousand years. Because when did those two factors sync up last? In the Age of War, that’s when: just before major intergender hostilities broke out.

  Puppies, we’re looking at a leading indicator of chaos.

  So, what’s the BIG BET?

  Well, this is where half of you snapcakes cancel your subscriptions . . . because ZANGO’s about to overturn the oldest rule in the business, the fresh-waxed baby-bettor’s first-learned maxim: never bet against your own mental coherence.

  Oh, believe me, JANGO knows the arguments for the rule. Yes: if you’re likely to go loopy, that’s already priced into your rep. Yes: people are notoriously bad at predicting self-default. Yes: the only way to win is to lose, because the emotional upheaval of ontological collapse will swamp any trifling gains you might eke out from the successful wager. That’s all true: under normal conditions.

  But THAT WAS THEN, puppies. What’s coming down the sluice is such a wild ride, anyone who tells you who’ll be up or down in a month is chewing spent glowtubes. No one knows.

  But I’ll tell you one thing JANGO knows:

  You might be as solid and stable and centered as the most self-satisfied Long Conversationalist who ever passed a spoon.

  You might be as glory-crowned and praise-sung and glad-hearted as the cockiest bangle-daddy who ever slammed an opponent to the mats.

  You might be cozily embedded in a flock of beloveds who weep themselves to sleep each night just from the pure joy of knowing you.

  You might, in other words, be the LAST person in the Groon-regretted world who ANYONE would expect to slip your grip on reality, to be able to humble your pride, let go of your glory, and flounder your way to the sweet, sweet release of collapse.

  If you are that person: make this bet anyway.

  Because here’s what ZANGO JANGO’s charts are whispering: the next ten days are going to offer you AMPLE opportunity to fulfill it.

  10

  Fift and Shria sat, legs dangling over the byway’s edge, watching the parades. The one that had dispersed their riot was far away now, the bulk of it ascending a curved stickywall in Dismal Bunny habitation, other strands overflowing onto nearby stairways. The parades’ cacophony had faded to a whisper-thrum, distorted by sonic damping but still filling Fullbelly. Below them, the glowtubes turned the mellow gold of first evening.

  Fift’s legs and back ached. It was hard to look at Shria: the livid purple bruises on vir swollen face, the ruin of vir clothes.

  They were the only people left on the byway. Small worker trashrats sifted through the parade’s debris, meditatively munching down the smaller portions, dragging the larger portions away to compost-sluices.

  The feed was coming up in spurts. On for five hundred heartbeats, off for a thousand, on for seven hundred, off for two thousand. Most messages were still getting lost en route, but there were also odd ones getting through, things Fift’s attention agents probably wouldn’t have allowed zir to see if they’d been in their right minds. A supposed reproduction of the Vail-hating Tractate of Mulami, excised from the Long Conversation before Pip and Grobbard were born, with various portions newly underlined. Messages from Staids Fift didn’t have any connection to at all. {We know what you and the Clowns and that flowblocking alien are really up to!}, one said. Another: {Who raised you? A good staidchild wouldn’t have been within a thousand bodylengths of such a violence-orgy! I’m derating your parents as soon as the feed allows!} Another: {I like you very much maybe I could come live in your apartment I would be very quiet we could pass spoons and lean our shoulders together almost touching.}

  Ze wondered if Shria was getting such messages, and what they said. Virs were probably worse. Ve’d been in unlicensed combat again, off the mats, like when ve was a child. It was far more serious now.

  “Vvonda is pissed off,” Shria rasped.

  “At me?” Fift asked.

  Shria snorted. “At you?” Ve grabbed a passing trashrat and dropped it over the edge. It fell about a bodylength before it was caught by invisible gossamer strands. Bouncing, jiggling, and wriggling, it righted itself, then scurried away through the air, chittering, yanking its legs from the gummy invisible web at each step. “No. Not at you. That we missed the fight. That those rent-a-body freaks left before we got here.”

  “Vvonda likes to fight.” Cold crept up Fift’s spine. The roaring sea of Vails, blood on the slick skin of the anonybodies.

  Shria shrugged. “Well, you know. Sport fighting, playground stuff. Ve’s never been to the mats. Ve keeps saying ve wants to, but . . .” Ve shrugged. “At our age it’s kind of complicated. You just look like a fool and impoverish yourself if you go around challenging for no reason. It’s hard to work up the right set of . . .” Ve waved a hand vaguely, and then coughed. Ve looked tired. “You know.”

  “Have you ever . . . ?”

  Ve shook vir head. “I think that stuff is stupid.”

  “But . . .�
� Ze stopped as vir jaw tightened.

  The image of vem diving, tackling the red nobody. Disappearing into the crowd. Leaving zir.

  The silence between them shifted; its inaudible score crept an octave higher. A moment before, that silence had wrapped them together in its invisible blanket; now it heaped between them, a frayed and stiff and tangled cloth, and Fift did not know how to move it aside. Ze wished ze knew what to say, to find zir way back.

  {It’s my fault, isn’t it?} ze asked zir context advisory agent. {I let vem go into the crowd in the first place. I even followed vem in. I should have insisted. I should have been the prudent one, the still center. Why didn’t you say anything?}

  But zir agents were still a mess. {Normative evaluation is compromised by deficits in synthesis, telos, and ontology.} zir context advisory agent sent. {Your pardon is entreated.}

  The Midwives could take vem away. Fighting off the mats at sixteen years old. They wouldn’t care who started it. Not in the middle of a crisis like this. There were already reports filtering through the ragged feed, of curfews, confiscations, evictions, lookup curtailments, cohort dissolutions, disappearances.

  They’d take Shria to the Pole, and it would be Fift’s fault.

  Ze swallowed. “We should have just left.”

  Shria looked over at Fift, a heat in vir eyes—anger? Shame?

  “Because you’re right, it’s stupid, fighting is stupid.” Maybe if Shria said it aloud, for all the world to hear—if ve apologized now, renounced vir part in the riot—maybe they wouldn’t take vem away. They still had an audience, intermittently: a dozen, then a few hundred. Gawking at two kids who’d been terrorized when the world’s watchful feed went dark.

  “Fift, stop it,” Shria said.

  “But you just—”

  “Cut it out.”

  “I just think—”

  “It’s a little late for thinking.”

  Fift felt zir face get hot. Ze should have been thinking. But ze wasn’t the careful one. Ze was the rash one, they both knew that. Ze’d reached into the soft blue tangle of Shria’s—

  “Well, you should have stayed with me,” ze said.

  It was a terrible thing to say.

  But ve should have.

  Shria looked down, hunching vir shoulders. Expression leached out of vir face; it went slack, empty, pale.

  Fift knew that look.

  Nine years old, on the surface, clutching vir bundle of mossy sticks, avoiding Umlish’s eyes.

  Fift looked out the porthole of the robot bat and saw, far below, two figures crouched at the edge of the empty byway, separated by a wall of silence: forlorn, desperate, alone—

  —and raised zir eyes from the byway’s edge to search the vault of Fullbelly.

  There was the bat; and there again was the cold sensation (which ze would never, ever get used to) of seeing zirself doubly from far away.

  The bat descended like an angry omen. Fift stood up—and watched that tiny, helpless figure on the byway stand up—and felt dread prickle on the back of zir neck.

  11

  “Should Fift Brulio even be here?” Arevio said. Ve picked dirt from under vir nails in one body; in another, ve stole a glance at Fift.

  “For Kumru’s sake,” Frill said, sitting down in vir own lap. “Ze’s sixteen years old, don’t you think ze has something to say at a family meeting?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” said Arevio, as vir other body nodded vigorously. “Is it a family meeting or a parental cohort meeting? I don’t think—”

  “Oh, please,” snapped Father Thurm. “Can we get on with it?” Bright squiggles of some arcane data visualization arced over the skin of vir strikingly bald black scalp.

  It was something of a bad sign, Fift thought, that Thurm was actually here in a body.

  Thurm’s career as an agrochemical Far Theory manager had blossomed around the time Fift was born, and ve’d become modestly famous as an amateur Near Theoretician on the same topic shortly thereafter. (Apparently the Far Theory part was organizing ancient agents too complex for anyone nowadays to understand, while the Near Theory part tried to guess how they worked? Something like that.) So Thurm was always busy. As far back as Fift could remember, ve showed up at the cohort only for the minimum one-night-a-month sleepover that the family’s pledge required.

  It wasn’t like with Miskisk; Thurm messaged Fift every day or two with some joke or amicable suggestion, and still got along with most of the others. But ve never came to meetings. Pip and Thurm in the same room was an event.

  “Does ze want to be here?” Smistria asked, half-turning to Fift.

  “Ze needs to be here,” Pip growled, hands folded over zir stomach.

  Fift was there, all right. Ze was there in all three bodies, though ze tried to keep each of zir bodies out of the others’ view. Ze didn’t want to look at zirself, particularly not here, and not—why in Kumru’s fertile womb had ze agreed to this?—with zir neural data currently viewable by zir parents.

  “Can we talk about what happened on the byway, please?” Father Squell asked. “Because . . .”

  “Yes! Pip Mirtumil, Smistria Ishteni, Grobbard Erevulios, I appeal to you: what does this mean for us?” Arevio asked. In vir other body, ve chewed at vir thumbnail. “After all, we allowed Fift to wander off and get into that; don’t you think it could affect our parental conscientiousness ratings?”

  “Oh, please,” Thurm said again.

  “Easy for you to say, Thurm!” Nupolo stood at one end of the table, singlebodied, dressed up for the occasion in ancient cobalt-blue military coveralls with sparkling bangles. Vir face—its skin soft as old velvet from so many decades of routine bodywork—was grim. “They don’t factor much into your reputation. And you don’t exactly depend on these apartments as a home, do you?”

  Thurm crossed vir arms. The temperature in the room felt like it dropped a few degrees.

  “There are five new bets at neighborhood bookies on the topic of this cohort, its parenting competence, and its compliance with consensus,” Father Grobbard said. Oddly, ze was here in all four bodies, all seated in a row, a tiny flicker of wryness passing through one of zir four blank expressions. “The odds tend to be in our favor. There are, so far, no bets offered on forced dissolution.” The other Fathers stiffened, and Fift felt a sharp stab of discomfort in zir stomach at the words, but Grobbard talked on as if unaware. “But the bookies have already estimated the odds on such bets. Low odds, to be sure. But it is notable that such estimates even exist, especially when we have thus far avoided any official rebuke or sanction. I will leave the precise probability landscape to those of you more versed in this kind of thing, but I note that there is ample anecdotal evidence of such a pattern of new betting activity presaging major shifts in aggregate approval ratings . . .”

  “Now hold on,” Frill said, bouncing in vir own lap with impatience. Ve was sheathed in tiny glittering golden bells which tinkled as ve swayed; a second body, underneath, lounged languidly in the seating harness. “We’re talking like all this is purely a fumble that’s opened us up for the blade. But there’s some potential for advantage here too, don’t you think? What about the conversation with the artifact?”

  “With the what?” Arevio asked, brows furrowed.

  “With that Thavé thing,” Frill said. “It’s an artifact of the Ages Before the Ages, right?”

  “Ze likes to consider zirself a person,” Thurm said (vir tone letting everyone know that ve’d had to do with Thavé personally).

  “Whatever, that’s not the point,” Frill said, waving a hand airily. “The point is the spike of fame Fift got out of it, and how we’re going to manage that. I mean, that’s an opportunity for zir, isn’t it?”

  “An opportunity for what?” Smistria said. “If ze’s going to be a banker-historian, I don’t see why ze needs a following who expects zir to be an exoarchaeologist.”

  “A little fame never hurt anyone,” Thurm said with a small ironic
smile. Fift couldn’t tell if ve was kidding.

  “It certainly did!” Smistria cried.

  “Yes! Don’t you see?” Squell said. “That just makes it worse! That means there was an even larger audience for the fiasco on the byway!”

  “And more footage with that Kumru-blessed vailchild,” Nupolo said.

  Fift swallowed, and there was a flutter of activity across zir all-too-visible brains, magenta flickering to peach and canary yellow in the display.

  Ze couldn’t wait to rescind their neural observation privileges. What had ze been thinking, letting zir Fathers paw around in zir brain data, even at a fuzzy macroscopic level? But it had seemed like the only way to persuade Squell to ever let zir out of the house again. And maybe—if ze was honest—maybe ze’d wanted to burrow back into the safety of zir parents viewing zir every emotional spike and trough, like being a toddler again . . .

  Squell narrowed vir eyes.

  “We all like Shria Qualia Fnax,” Arevio said, “but off-the-mats fighting at sixteen . . .”

  “Kumru’s balls,” Frill said, “what did you expect vem to do? What would any of you have done, if your Staid friend was . . .”

  “I’m with Frill,” Smistria said.

  “That’s not the point,” Nupolo said.

  “Ve was apparently gathering a pack of friends to intervene—” Arevio began.

  Fift’s hearts were straining inside zir chests. If only they’d stop talking about Shria. Ze could bear anything else. Ze didn’t want to think about vem, about what ze’d said on the byway. And ze was managing not to think about vem, not to feel anything particular about vem, not to wonder what ve was thinking now, so it was terribly unfair of the scanner to show this ridiculous storm of colors in zir brains every time they mentioned vem.

  “—and if we do get audited and re-rated?” Nupolo was saying. “You think these void-scoured adjudicators and Midwives can afford to be lenient? Clowns declaring a revolution, the feed brought to its knees, riots on the byways—”