by Exurb1a
Logic Beach – Part I: The Great British Polly Hunt
Exurb1a
Table of Contents
Introduction
THE END
THE BEGINNING
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Introduction
Writing a book is rather like tequila shots. Fun at first, then almost immediately a horrific chore you barely remember starting. For that reason I have decided to release this book in parts. That way I can catch a breath before moving on to the next section.
I suspect there will be three sections in all, though since I haven't actually finished writing the third, I can't say for sure. My first two books were something close to careful architecture. This one is going to be more like gardening. So please do bear with me if you happen to enjoy this story. If you don't enjoy it, well, please bear with me anyway.
As ever (and even more applicably these days) I really couldn't have made this happen without your unrelenting (and frankly inexplicable) support. Those of you propping up my silly excuse for a career are saints as far as I'm concerned. Your support means the absolute world, and if I ever do have a firstborn and you ask nicely, you can have it. Or hang out with it a bit at the very least.
This story was written in hotel rooms, mostly, travelling around Bulgaria. You will notice Bulgaria features quite heavily in it. That's partly because it is one of the finest countries in the world, and partly because I've been living here a while and have fallen hopelessly in love with the people and the geography. A word of apology though: after several years I am still a stranger here. It's pretty bloody cheeky for some pompous foreign know-it-all (who barely speaks the language) to turn up and try to condense your country down to a few hundred pages. I hope you don't think that was the objective, because it wasn't. If some idiot came over to the UK and boiled it down to, “They drink tea a lot and do kissing weird,” I think I'd be pretty annoyed.
What I'm getting at is that there will be cultural simplifications. If you're Bulgarian, please see if you can forgive me for that. It's just that the place is in my blood now and I wanted to write it a love letter.
Likewise, the physics in the pages ahead is purely speculative, probably too speculative. I have tried to keep as close to the status quo as possible, but I wrote some of it after a few drinks. However, the core idea is one I suspect might have mileage in it: Is the universe fundamentally logical, or isn't it? Is physics an expression of a deeply rooted necessary geometry that could be deduced from first principles? I have no idea, but it seems like a matter we should settle one way or the other at some point. It would be nice to take steps towards nailing it in our lifetimes, if possible. I think so anyway.
Also, I shamelessly stole the idea of cosmic sociology straight out of Liu Cixin's trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past. It's a fantastic work of science fiction and I highly, highly recommend reading all three. I trust that admitting to plagiarism will make it seem more like very heavy adaptation. Or loving theft.
In any case, cosmic sociology is a really elegant answer to the question, "Where are all the aliens?" and I urge you to look into it.
As always, you're welcome to drop me your unfiltered outrage/disgust/diatribes at [email protected].
I enjoyed writing this one. I do hope you enjoy reading it.
All the best, as ever,
Ex.
An enormous thank you to Patreon supporters:
Adam Horne, Adrian Dalen, Adrian Horga, Akira Schroeder, Al Rose, Al Rose Sébastien, Aldo Andriani, Ali Gungor, Ali Özgür Arslan, Alex Chung, Alex van der Weerden, Aleksander M Lingstad, Alexandros Skourtis, Alfie Barton, Alume, Amadeus Phoenix, Angelo Iasevoli, Anthony Campolo, Anthony Nascente, Arman Athwal, Artem Vyalkov, Bastiaan Lodder, Bárður Clementsen, Bartek Mendrela, Bas van Otterloo, Ben Djibeh, Ben Hannel, Ben Macintosh, Ben Mountford, Benedict Donovan, Benedikt Jaletzke, Bétovune, Beto Cols, Bharat Raj Nair, Blair A Piggin, Blaise Ritchie, Blake Campbell, Boris Chan, Brian Yun, Brendan Cunningham, Brigham Burdick, Bruno Caminada, Chanda Unmack, Charlie Ambler, Charlie Fish, Chris Barber, Chris Thorough, Christian Bay, Corbinian Büttner, Corrigan Miller, Costel Girboiu, Daniel Clarke, Daniel Cross, Daniel James Freer, Daniel Gombik, Danny Mac, Daphne Roberts, David Nicolas Ring Dafonte, David Supernor, Davis Vilums, destofworlds, Dražen Popović, edsperanto, Elbracht, Eli Samuel, ericblobb, Ewan Clarke, ExcellencyPeter, falkiboy, Felix Liver, Ferdinand Helm, Finlay, Francesco Cusimano, Fynn Klinkow, Gabi Ghita, Gabriel Guzman, Gavin Graham, Gautier Dekeyne, Gunnar Guðvarðarson, Halfbakery, Henrik Arnøy, Halil Kaskavalci, Hugh Mungus, How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?, Iliya Sofkov, Imogen Owen, Jack Driver, Jade Dunham, Jade Palmer, James Groves, Jérôme 'Neofox' Schaeffer, Jared Bass, Jean Nicholas Brisset, Joe Johns, Jean-luc Picard, Jens VC, Jimmy, John "Johnny-Guitare" Crousse, John Gregory Long, John Woolley, Johnny Gomez, Jordan Bradbury, Joseph Everett, Joshua Bunt, Josie Koznarek, Joscha Seemann, Joseph C, Josh Horswill, Juan Mrad, K Simon, Karl Dawson, Kieran Duncan, Kevin Focke, Kris Arruda, Kristoffer Lim Ersland, Kristen D. Smith, Kurzgesagt, Kyle Beck, Leander Seidlitz, Levi Will, , limbusx, Logan Rankin, Lottie Alice Woodbridge, Lukas Schimmelpfennig, Lub, Iuri Spier, MK, Malcolm LaRose, Mark, Marcus Skandfer Backer, Marvin D. Widmer, Matias Fernande, Matthew Zeller, Mert Kızılırmak, Mike Bott, Millie Tempo, Mike Ainslie, Mint, Neal Dornseif , Nick Escue, Nick Reese, Nils Mentzel, Oaelluin, Oliver Sartun, Oliver Sulkowski, Oliver Andryszewski, Olisonera, Ondřej Vaculík, Palamour, Paul Matthijsse, Pauline Johnson, Peggy Pulley, Pierre ‘Flumble’ Orsat, Quinn Flower, Preston Alberio T. Croshaw, Rachel Silberman, Radu Terec, Ramon Kool,Raya, Rex Yuan, Robert Newton, Rodolfo Davis Millet, Roger Rösch, Rowan Mackenzie, Ryan Dunne, Ryan Estes, Ryan Phipps Kenny, Sam Derbyshire, Sam Roman, Sam Rose, Samuel Jones, Samuel Rojas, Shweta Bharadwaj, Simon Bubach, Silvio Fedrigo, Sky Nite, Supanovi, Stabosaurus, Swanny, Tamás Deme, Thammarith, That guy from Scotland who didn't want me to put his name in but I sort of did anyway as a joke because I'm grateful, Tim Burton, ToneZone, Tony Beighton, Tre Glen, Trevor Hubbard, Tristan Manchester, Vegard Stenhjem Hagen, Victor van Earthington, Víctor Martínez Nouvilas González Pallejá, Waz, Wenesse, Wolfgang Weber, Weronika Michalska, Yaman, Yanko, Yann Leretaille, Yaron, Yasir Al-Latifi, Yosef Shuman, Zaheer Jamal, and Zonja Monda.
This one, with love, is for Bowles and the Dog Wrestler
The End
He woke, only seconds old; bolted up. Panic.
A beach stretched before him and on the beach were objects, small and large, some made of what looked like slowly melting glass, others of metal. One was mundane, a cube. The rest were many-sided unfamiliar shapes.
A pretty woman was sat beside him.
“It's all right,” she said and smiled kindly.
“The hell…” he muttered. He went to jump up but the woman put a gentle hand on his shoulder and rubbed.
“It's all right,” she said again.
“What's going on?” He glanced out at the ocean. The water, he noticed, was made of shimmering geometric tiles. The sky was just as strange: cracked in places. The sand was covered in equations, some long, some short.
The woman put her head on his shoulder. She smelled like some exotic spice. And a little like home too, wherever that was. “There's nothing to be frightened of,” she said in an accent he couldn't place.
“I remember…” he said and thought: What? I remember what?
“We don't have so long left,” she sa
id. She kissed his arm, then laid down in his lap. He tried to place her face.
“I'm dead,” he said.
“No, nothing like that. Want me to explain?”
The face still wasn't familiar, but the pattern of speech was. He looked out to the equation-riddled sand and the plate glass sea and the fractured sky. Beyond the sky, he saw then, was a huge black mass on the horizon, pulsing like a lung. It looked hungry.
“I can show it all to you, so you remember properly,” she said. “The grammar of everything. Do you want that?”
“Yes…”
And he remembered then, all of it, the enormity, sweet Jesus the enormity, too much to hold, past and present, future even, a warped echo, the scuttling little feet of the centuries, time too big to stare directly at, familiar, familiar – yes, I remember, what I was and what I wasn't, ten thousand years – more perhaps? Sweet Jesus.
He screamed.
“Don't you want it?” she said. “Is it too much?”
“Yes, yes…” He covered his eyes.
The memories were gone as suddenly as they had come on.
“All right then,” she said and rested her head against his. “Whatever you want. We'll just sit a while on Logic Beach. We'll just sit a while. Would you like that?”
“Yes,” he said in a small voice. “Yes, fine.”
The Beginning
1.
18/10/2021
P,
What was I, 29? One night I went to throw something in the toilet bin and waiting there at the bottom was one of your used tampons, half-unwrapped. Maybe it should’ve grossed me out. I wasn’t grossed out. It struck me as kind of holy for having been associated with you somehow. In that moment I decided I would make you my wife, or give it my best shot.
We weren’t even living together at the time, but we moved in a few months later. I pretended to be reluctant. I wasn’t, not really - just didn’t want you to think you’d snared me too easily.
What then? We shared a bed, shared a bathroom, shared a toothbrush sometimes. You stopped wearing perfume so often and I stopped combing my hair. And slowly (though I can’t point to exactly when) we gave up flirting down tin-can telephones and came out into the daylight of real living and took a good long look at each other and shrugged and went off into the future.
I reckon love is really confirmed in disgust. There comes a moment when the apple of your eye does something just absolutely hideous; rolls over to kiss you in the morning with Satan’s breath, says something a little mean about you at a party while you're standing right there, leaves the stench of shit in the bathroom unsuspectingly. And that is when love is either born or stillborn. The propagandised lover you’ve been sleeping with suddenly turns into a real, shitting person. In that moment you either plot a path out of the arrangement or give yourself over completely. I saw your gross sides: drunk, pissed off, spiteful, lazy, jealous, scheming, self-absorbed; everything, I think. I liked all of it, even your morning breath.
Once, when I was young and dumb, my dad and I were arguing about whether we’d rather be smart and miserable or happy and ignorant. I said smart and miserable because I was a pompous dick back then. And he said, “What’s the point in any of it if you aren’t happy?” That didn’t make sense for another decade and a half until one night when you’d fallen asleep on the sofa and I got you up and helped you into your pyjamas and carried you to bed and watched you sleeping for a long time, just held you for a long time. You smelled like Christmas Eve. It was probably the most romantic half hour of my life and you weren’t even there for it.
Now the house is doused in your smell in a way I’ve never noticed before. I find your hairs on the pillow and put them to my nose, but what’s the use? Your coat still carries your perfume; I sleep with it sometimes. Stuff that was junk just a few weeks ago – snotty tissues you left on the side, crumpled notepaper, socks behind the bed, whatever – I collect them up delicately like the custodian of the Museum of Your Life.
It has been 151,200,81 seconds since you went missing. Two and a half weeks. I have decided to write to you, just like I did in the old days. And when you’re back I’ll give you these letters and you can tell me your side of things and I’ll show you mine. It can’t hurt, can it?
Bullshit aside I just miss you. God, I just miss you.
B x
2.
Look for the man with air for a belly. That’s what they’d told her. Argie demanded a clearer answer. None was given. And so she walked.
Sludge treacled by in the gutters. The afternoon stank of death. Above, three moons were rising and two were setting.
Look for the man with air for a belly.
Argie did not know this part of the city. A hag wandered by in torn rags and eyed her with five pink pupils. The hag grumbled. Argie tried to smile and the woman went on her way. More wretches followed and passed, stumbling, gurgling, wild animal cries. They were heading middlewards, Argie knew, to the Death Forest where perhaps they would be lucky enough to die.
She wandered aimlessly a while, down backstreets, alleys, up spiral staircases. This district of the city was nothing but one enormous market, each street selling more bizarre commodities than the last: stolen mindpatches, fermion loops, timepass tea, even books.
A little boy appeared from an alley and stood before her, his arms outstretched. She bent down to him. His face was scarred and dirty. She checked his history. He was well over three thousand cycles old. Some little boy. She started back sensing a trick. Too slow.
There were fingers in her thoughts then, probing from behind. She tried to scream but paralysis had already set in. The boy watched her blankly. The fingers swam about through her top-thoughts, then wandered leisurely down to her memories.
“Yeessssss,” the fingers said. “Ease into it. No harm. No trouble.”
“Ease into it,” the little boy echoed. “No harm. No trouble.”
The fingers touched at her past as one might a museum relic.
“Complications in here,” said the voice. “Complications indeed. Relax into it. No harm.”
“No trouble,” said the boy.
The fingers worked deeper into her memories, her early years. They quickened at that, excited.
God no, Argie thought. God, please no.
It seemed painfully stupid now, to go wandering through these streets without any security alongside.
God no, she thought again. Please just no.
The fingers probed further back through her selfsense, then idly flicked ahead. The man with air for a belly. The fingers paused.
“What business do you have with him?” the voice said.
No, Argie yelled inwardly.
The fingers busied in her recent history, precise now, peering into her time with the infant. Then they pulled back. Argie felt her selfsense under her control again and fell to her knees. All quiet in the street. The boy watched blankly still. Argie turned about to face her attacker and met eyes with an ancient hag.
“Follow the stream,” the hag said, pulling her hand back into her sleeve. “You’ll find the bellyless man at its end.”
“Stream?” Argie murmured.
The hag nodded to the rolling sludge in the gutter. Then she gestured at the boy and the two of them linked fingers and disappeared up an alley.
Argie wondered briefly at this strange mercy, wanted to yell after the hag, hurt her. Instead she followed the gutter down the street.
How much longer did I have? she wondered. The old woman’s fingers in my mind, seconds perhaps before everything went porridge. What are they always looking for, these awful fucks? Either they do it for pleasure, or with purpose; both equally terrifying.
The gutter followed the street faithfully. The moons were setting now. Peddlers yelled out to Argie, proffering five-dimensional fruits and Christ knows what. She was too exhausted to even acknowledge them.
The market began to thin out but the gutter continued. The folk grew more warped, too many limbs or no
limbs at all, eyes and ears where eyes and ears should not be. Many of the figures were barely recognisable now, some animals, some just animated skeletons shuffling about with carrysacks and boxes, some protruding from hyper dimensions and peeking into 3D space with just their heads or arms.
The gutter spiralled around and down, the streets shrinking with the incline, the houses built at forty-five degrees and the sludge flowed fatter alongside. Above, the sky receded behind the buildings until only one moon shone and then that was gone too.
At last the sludge flowed beneath a wooden house and vanished. There was no way around. She knocked on the door. A clatter from inside, footsteps, then a little telescope shot out from a panel in the door and scrutinised her.
“Yes?” came a muffled drawl.
Argie put her face to the telescope. “I'm after some help.”
“No help here. You’re lost. Off you go.”
“Please, you're The Navigator, aren't you?” She squinted into the lens.
“No time for games. Fuck off,” the reply came and the telescope receded into its nook. The footsteps sounded again, fading.
Argie constructed a packet of selfsense, enough to communicate her recent history – the story of her and the infant, as much as she could fit into a digestible format at least. She propelled the packet through the door. The footsteps paused a long while. She eyed the sludge again. Gelatinous and black, the stink unbearable.
The door pulled back. Behind stood a sapien-looking old man wearing nothing but a pair of ripped black shorts. His face appeared cracked like stonework. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, more ash than tobacco. His stomach was missing.
“Your stomach is missing,” Argie said.
“Very astute of you, I'd hardly noticed. Was that packet yours?”
