by Isaac Marion
“She would sit right here,” Julie says, stepping onto the rug. “Like she was meditating.” She drops to the floor, cross-legged. The red light casts deep shadows on her face; she looks like a statue of some terrible goddess. “I don’t know how she could stand it.” She rubs the sides of her head. “Feels like I’m being buried.”
“It’s BABL,” Tomsen says, so giddy her voice cracks. “Same noise as the eastern generator. Harmonic resonance with the mantle? Tuning tectonic vibrations and distorting the magnetosphere? Maybe, maybe, but where is it?” She squirms and fidgets. She looks ready to set the bomb off right here. “Julie, where is it?”
Julie looks down at the rug. “This thing was Dad’s idea. To make Mom more comfortable, he said.”
It’s not actually a rug, just a rough-cut square of the same stiff commercial carpet that covers the floors above.
“She told him she didn’t need it, she liked the cool concrete, but he put it here anyway.” She tries to lift the edge—it doesn’t budge. Shaking her head in angry disbelief, she hops to a crouch, digs her fingers in deep, and pulls. The rug rips free of its glue and peels back, revealing the faint lines of a rectangle cut into the concrete. She pushes a tiny button, there’s a hiss, and a section of the floor swings upward on pneumatic hinges.
Another staircase awaits. But this one isn’t dark. This one is flashing with colored light, echoing with voices and snippets of music.
“Goddamnit, Dad,” Julie whispers. “You knew.”
Tomsen starts for the stairs but M pushes past her. “Bullet sponge coming through.”
I clench my hands into fists as I follow him.
The staircase is narrow and incredibly steep, sloping almost straight down into the flickering darkness. I have to keep my hands on the walls to stop the vertigo.
“He knew,” Julie murmurs into my back. She sounds far away, caught between anger and grief. “All those years, he could have cleared the fog and reached out to the world, and he sat on his hands.” Her voice trembles. “All those medals…and he was a coward.”
I can think of no possible way to comfort her. No wordless hug is enough for pain like this. But she won’t have long to dwell on it. After a descent of about four stories, we have reached the bottom.
Squinting against the flickering lights, we step into the basement beneath the basement.
This place bears no resemblance to the standardized structures above, as if it were built in a different era with a far bigger budget. It feels like we’ve crawled under a county permit office and discovered a pharaoh’s tomb. The huge, circular chamber rises sixty feet to a geodesic dome of tarnished green copper. The curving walls are lined with heavy-duty versions of familiar equipment: bulky monitors with inch-thick glass, mixing boards with palm-sized steel knobs and faders, computer towers encased in concrete and so overbuilt they’re the size of refrigerators. Technology that once strived to be as small and disposable as possible has reversed course, adapting to a world without repair or replenishment—adapting to live forever.
Because this place was precious to the former owners of the world. To control who can see and say what; this was always the dream of such people. In past eras they had to rely on social convention, political machination, and physical intimidation. All so very effortful. So when they found a way to silence the whole scary mess from the safety of their bunkers, it’s no surprise they poured their hearts into it.
BABL will last for centuries. Unless it doesn’t.
It gapes in the center of the chamber, Tomsen’s “inverted tower,” a perversion of its namesake in form as well as function—not an edifice reaching for the heavens but an absence plunging to the depths. The mouth of the pit is wide enough to swallow the house above us. The walls of the shaft are studded with green copper tetrahedrons that grow smaller as the shaft narrows, funneling toward some distant choke point deep in the blackness. Each stud seems to produce its own faint noise, bleeding together into that chaotic chorus, and from somewhere at the bottom…a churning. A thick, low rumble that I hear only in my bones, like the growl of some enormous stomach.
It’s good down there, says a voice near the base of my skull, perhaps my limbic cortex. We drank the deep dark and it was sweet.
Am I standing on the edge of the pit, staring into its dizzying regression of pyramids? Is the noise that fountains up from those depths actually in the air or only in my head?
A hand clamps onto my shoulder.
“R,” Julie hisses under her breath. “Look up.”
I tear my eyes away from the pit and raise them. Across the gap, on the far end of the chamber, I see what looks like a news broadcast studio. The colored light is from a wall of monitors displaying video streams and editing software. And a man and a woman in colorful ties are grinning and gesticulating into a camera while three men in white shirts operate the controls.
I had almost forgotten there’s more to this place than the jammer. Before we silence its noise and let the world start talking, we have one final message for it to shout.
The pitchmen and their assistants are so absorbed in their production that we’re close enough to smell their rancid cologne before they notice us. But of course they express no surprise. They just swivel their grins from the cameras to us.
“Hello!” Blue Tie says.
“How can we help you today?” Yellow Tie says.
Black Tie is notably absent. The other two seem somehow more absurd without his dull gravitas backing their prattle.
The pitchmen await our response patiently, but their more recognizably human assistants seem to understand the threat. Tomsen rushes toward them and they cower against their equipment. “Excuse me,” she says politely, like they’re blocking her path on the sidewalk, but they just cringe away from her. “Excuse me!” she shouts and starts hitting them with the briefcase like an old lady berating ruffians. I wince, imagining the contents of her “purse” turning us all into char, but the assistants scatter and she sets the bomb down and goes to work on the control panel.
“I’m afraid you’re interrupting an important announce-ment,” Blue Tie says, switching to his grave face. “The Axiom Group headquarters is under attack at this time.”
“Our employees are very important to us,” Yellow Tie says, still smiling. “If you’ll allow us to continue our announcement, we’ll get someone from the nearest branch to assist us right away.”
Above all the editing screens, I notice a bigger monitor that appears to be the actual Fed TV broadcast. I expect to see something like an emergency weather warning—flashing alerts and clear instructions, perhaps a screeching tone to get people’s attention—but to my amazement, even their distress call is embedded in LOTUS obfuscation. Stock footage of thunderstorms and forest fires intercut with old photos of the stadium and inspirational quotes about patriotism and preserving our way of life. The closest it gets to specificity is a repeating clip of the pitchmen gazing earnestly into the camera and urging America to “support our leadership in these difficult times.”
No casual viewer would guess that Axiom is on the brink of disaster, and I’m guessing that’s the point: to cry for help without looking vulnerable. Anyone watching this without the code key would get only a vague sense of unease. A generalized fear that only firms their support for the strongman rising in their midst.
“We’re going to make a different announcement,” Julie says.
“We advise against creating any further instability at this time,” Blue Tie says as if guessing our intent. “People need certainty in an uncertain world.”
“That’s literally impossible,” Julie says. “What does that even mean?”
“People don’t need meaning.” Yellow Tie’s smile takes on an unexpected subtlety that sends a chill down my spine. “They just need to feel safe while they die.”
What kind of minds remain behind these waxy, intercha
ngeable faces? From what inhuman script are they reading? And can we shred it?
Julie steps up to Yellow Tie and stares into her glassy blue eyes. She sniffs. “You smell like death,” she says quietly. “You smell like the plague.”
I hear muffled noises above us. The hiss of the basement hatch. Then Timothy Balt and two dozen of his Cock Street Boys come thundering down the stairs.
I sigh. Julie grinds her teeth. Tomsen keeps working.
“That was a nice little jog around the city,” Balt says, swaggering toward us with his pistol at his hip like a cowboy. “I needed a good workout, been getting some flab.” He lifts his shirt a few inches, revealing chiseled abs. “But shit’s getting serious out there, we don’t have time for—hey you! Butch!” He jabs his gun at Tomsen. “Quit fucking with that. Hands up.”
With an agonized grimace, Tomsen pries her hands away from the console and puts them up.
“We appreciate your work, General Balt,” Yellow Tie says with a sultry smile. “It’s clear we weren’t wrong about your abilities.”
Balt gives the two pitchmen a quick nod, avoiding eye contact. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him look uncomfortable, and I wonder how much he’s learned about the nature of his bosses.
“So you’re gonna hijack Fed TV?” Balt says to Julie. He forces a derisive chuckle, getting back into character.
“Yep,” Julie says.
“Gonna spread the news that Axiom is bad, get the people to rise up?”
“Yep.”
“Dumbest shit I ever heard,” Balt laughs. “You looked around lately? People are sick and tired. You think they’re gonna ‘rise up’ against the guys putting roofs over their heads?”
Julie stares at him, stone-faced. “Yep.”
Her voice is cold and blunt. This is one person she’ll make no effort to convince.
Balt’s grin flickers with frustration. No doubt he was hoping for a juicier tease. “Well,” he grunts, “if you’re gonna just lie there, I guess we’ll get on with—”
His mouth clamps shut. He spins around to face the staircase. “Who the fuck that?”
Another stampede of footsteps is rumbling in the house above us. A lot more than two dozen.
“You locked the hatch, right?” Balt shouts at one of his boys, who nods emphatically.
The noise is closer now, almost directly overhead. The sound of things banging and scraping on concrete echoes down the stairwell.
“Fuck me,” Balt mutters, putting on the fierce scowl he wears when he’s scared. “Fuckin’ Boneys got through the walls…”
But he’s wrong. I hear no warbling hum. No trace of the atonal theme music that accompanies those clattering horrors. This is something else.
“New orders from Executive!” Blue Tie announces suddenly, and Balt startles. “Please bring the intruders to the conference room for questioning at this time.”
Balt squints at the pitchmen. He squints at their walkies, which have not made any sound.
“Why?” he says. “We’re under attack, we don’t have time for—”
“Bring the intruders to the conference room,” Blue Tie repeats more forcefully, gesturing to a door on the opposite end of the chamber marked emergency exit.
Balt hesitates, gritting his teeth, then raises his gun. “All right.” He points it at me. “Move, corpse.”
Balt’s gun is huge. Some kind of high caliber magnum, so oversized it looks like a toy. How many times have I played this silly game? How many times have I stood frozen in the sightline of a gun, paralyzed by a bullet that hasn’t been fired? By the invisible threat, the fear of a possible future?
What if I don’t play? What if I walk away?
“Hey!” Balt shouts. “The fuck are you’re doing?”
I’m walking past the pitchmen. I’m walking around the edge of the pit. I’m walking away from Balt.
Incredulity pushes his voice to a girlish falsetto. “What the fuck? I’m pointing a gun at you, dipshit!”
I’ve circled behind his crew now, and they’re all staring at me, searching for some explanation for my behavior, but their frame of reference is limited. They begin to laugh—the corpse’s brain finally melted! Let’s watch the show!—and then I turn and sprint up the staircase, and their laughter dies.
Balt is probably shouting, guns are probably firing, but I hear only the scuffling and wheezing in the room above me. And my heartbeat, pounding slow, like I’ve never been more calm.
I flip the hatch’s lock and give it a nudge. Then I come back down the stairs at a leisurely pace, emerging into the chamber with my arms out, palms up, a gesture of surrender—not to Balt, but to whatever happens next.
I indulge in a small, slightly vindictive smile as Evan Kenerly and two hundred dis-Oriented people flood in behind me, swinging pipes and chunks of lumber.
WE
In the glorious mess of the Library, books are bound loosely, pages migrate freely, and one moment of a life might disagree with the next. So when a corrupted man dies and can no longer cause harm, even his own memories rejoice. The better parts of his life, the Higher moments, they celebrate along with us and we bear them no grudge, because the Library is not a collection of people but a collection of moments, experiences, thoughts, and sensations, and we have only one goal: to elevate the whole.
This is how we endure the flood of fear that rushes from Axiom’s troops as their victims finally fight back. This is how we maintain a grim smile as a man cracks another man’s head with a pipe and a woman plunges a broken broom handle into another man’s gut. We focus on the Higher shelves, bracing them for the weight of books to come.
R wrestles a man’s gun away and jabs him in the throat with it.
Marcus hits a man so hard his whole face crumples inward.
Julie keeps her back against Tomsen’s while Tomsen scrambles to finish whatever she was doing with the broadcast station, oblivious to the conflagration behind her. Julie clutches a piece of rebar like a sword, swinging it without mercy whenever the battle gets too close to Tomsen. Only a few shots ring out. Kenerly’s crew presses in on Balt’s so tightly that the guns are reduced to bludgeons. Shouts and grunts and crunching noises bounce off the angular dome and echo in the bottomless pit.
It’s mayhem. It’s a miniature iteration of the mayhem in the city, and Addis wonders how far this fractal goes as he crouches in the shelter of the stairwell. He thinks of the Russian nesting doll he played with at his auntie’s house, and how he would scratch and pry at that final piece, certain there was an even smaller one sealed inside.
He looks at his sister standing next to him. She sways and twitches with confused agitation, her pinkish eyes darting between faces.
Nora watches her childhood crush, Evan, take a brutal punch and return it. She watches R, her strange new friend, slam a bloody elbow into someone’s temple. She watches Marcus—she doesn’t know how to classify him—kick a man in the chest, and she watches that man crash into Timothy Balt.
Balt sprawls out on the floor and his gun slides to the edge of the pit. Marcus rushes at him, but Balt jumps to his feet and fumbles a knife out of his belt just as Marcus tackles him.
The knife sinks into Marcus’s ribs.
Nora doubles over. A whimper escapes her throat.
Marcus falls to one knee. Balt raises the knife for a killing blow.
Julie hits him across the spine with a steel bar.
As Balt staggers forward, Julie locks the bar around his throat and pulls so hard she lifts herself off the ground. Balt reaches behind him with the knife and stabs blindly.
The blade sinks into Julie’s calf, then her thigh, once, twice…
Nora hears her friend’s screams like an alarm clock in a dream. Her mind tries to tell her it’s a bird tweeting or a violin playing, some innocuous nonsense that can disappear into the slur
ry oozing through her head. How much easier it would be to stay here in the dim shelter of this staircase and wait until the fight is over. How much simpler to forget the people she loves, to release her attachments, to cut her rope to the world and sink into the mud.
But the rope refuses to be cut. The rope is strong because it’s made of her. The rope breaks the knife.
Nora’s eyes snap open. She sucks in a breath. She runs through the scuffling mob and rams her boot into Balt’s testicles.
Balt drops to all fours and Julie rolls off of him.
“You…fucking…cunts!” Balt squeals.
Nora rears back for another kick, this time aiming for his face, but then her friend screams again.
“Nora!”
Where did that shotgun come from? Who slid it across the floor into Balt’s hands? Nora has just enough time for these pointless questions before something slams into her—but it can’t be a bullet. It’s a soft impact, almost gentle, and it comes from the wrong direction. She topples onto her side, stopping just before the edge of the pit, and then she hears the bang.
When she looks up, Evan is standing where she was a second ago. There is a hole in the center of his chest. He flashes Nora a sad smile, and she wishes there were time to say thank you, and I’m sorry, and a dozen other things, but Balt fires again, and Evan’s smile disappears.
Balt pumps the shotgun as he rises to his feet, his teeth bared in the ecstatic grin of a man winning his favorite game. Then his face flashes to incredulity—Julie is on his back again. This stupid girl isn’t respecting the rules. He already beat her and he’s on to his next target; this repetition is boring.
But it’s not quite the same. Julie is no longer armed with a steel bar. This time she has Balt’s knife. This time she doesn’t try to choke him. This time she cuts his throat.
Balt sinks to his knees. Julie stands over him and he glares up at her, clutching his gushing neck. Even now his face shows only outrage.
