Chapter 1: “And their Line Went out Across the Worlds”
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PROLOGUE: HEAT DEATH AND RE-BIRTH
FRAME: GREAT BIFURCATION (PLUS 100 BILLION YEARS((RELATIVE TO READER FRAME(BIG CRUNCH)))
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The Red Star never fell. Calamity came. Disasters great and small poured on all the worlds in creation. Misfortunes, monumental and minuscule, happened with regularity in the endless great cosmic cycles, as they had in the previous cosmology. The forces of hell and heaven did manage them (or fail to). But that breath of chaos blowing between the two halves of the pomegranate, that barest breeze let into the garden of creation–it did good. That chaos not consumed by Leviathan, did change things and re-jigger the odds of all things happening/not-happening.
In time, the pools of light on the scorched plain did what creation does: it proliferated. Whole worlds and the vast and cluttered space between worlds spouted forth, not-ex-nihilo. Again, the universe became a multiverse.
On the plain, the two plates of ash at the End of Time, wind blew dust from nowhere to nowhere to reveal new lonely liminal things. Just as before: the skeletons of places people pass through. The lobbies and passageways where we leave bits of self in the ‘getting there’. When we’re done with our waypoints and bus stations and airport terminals they end up here: nowhere at the End of Time. Above the plain, visible from anywhere on either plate of packed ash: the cosmos. All of it. In short, the symphony you see when you look at the night sky (or what you did see before the light pollution). The ‘sky’ above the scorched plain at the End of Time is absolutely rotten with stars in the new cosmology.
The web of stories spread by heretics. They were inoculation, gossamer shimmering filaments written between the pages of time and space. These words linked the proliferating worlds. They were civil defense fairy tales about the last Locust, the Red Star. The narrative threads stretched and distorted, but they held each time a new node emerged in-and-of creation. The defense. The rampart. The webbed levy before the flood. It grew, and many times many worlds became entangled in it. Over it all, and orbiting the new cosmology, the Red Star loomed. Its orbit decaying/stable, it would/could fall and begin the proliferation of its kind again at any time.
The Witch waited, observing and measuring. For billions beyond billions of years a big-nosed Witch in aviators kept watch on the big bad, or maybe just the thing that became her big bad–an anchor for an anchoress. Time in a timeless place seems like a gift from where you sit. From her frame of reference, it was a curse. Born mortal, she breathed no air, but she breathed. Her heart was a steady metronome. And the rhythm of breath and heartbeat over a time inconceivable drove her mad, many times it drove her mad. She sat in isolation on the verge of desiccation, feral from torpor for an epoch or age. She left her instruments and her cheap telescope behind to return to the church. She would come home to meditate in a weed cloud, to drink the ambrosia and feed on whatever new stories there were. The new stories were just the old stories worn and deformed (but made new in the mangling). She loved them, for she loved all stories. Every time she returned to the church, she searched for Adam in the congregation.
Sometimes, she thought she saw him out of the corner of her eye: 2D, work boots walk-running with a purpose, red flannel jacket, neat dreads poking from beneath the beanie, big black beard. But her eye never caught him whole, never apprehended him fully–not one more time in the whole long arc of that first multiverse. The first man never showed himself to her again.
Sane again and restored, the Witch would return to her watch. She would climb the skeleton of that ghost coast-redwood. High in the tree, and high as hell, sword in scabbard beside her. Coffee. Bathrobe wrapped tight around her, she would begin the watch again–carefully calculating, measuring, and monitoring the Red Star’s orbit that defied entropy and never decayed.
As the last star burnt out, and all-that-was became almost cold enough to big crunch back for the next big bang birth, she went out onto the scorched plain at the End of Time. She found the grave she tended regularly. She dug it out of the dunes: the fossil of A(84).
She was, like most of the A series, not one to let things go. So a grudge held till the literal-figure-al end of time was not beyond her. When you seek revenge “make two holes” she says aloud to nothing and no one as she sets an alarm on her cell phone for 13.5 billion years into the next cycle. She lies next to the corpse of her friend and becomes like it, she mimics and desiccates and dies the-death-of-the-soul–or seems to. As she watches the last star burn out, as she falls into the plain (more the thing itself than on it) she whispers to the fossil remains beside her “be not afraid.”
When the last star burns out, when god’s machine calls all back for the big crunch, it seems she’s done her due diligence in preparation. There are two graves on the scorched plain at the End of Time, two desiccated fossils past dust-dry, waiting: A(79) and A(84).
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EOT/ELSEWHERE; The Mad Ramblings of the Scribe A.GIF AGB (After Great-Bifurcation);(BGB Before Great-Bifurcation)
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If there was pain in the bifurcation, Leviathan didn’t feel it. To grow and shrug off the pond and smash the brutalist block to bits, it felt good. But there was pain later when she shit out Cassius.
He pained his mother at birth too, abnormally so. He was a bag of jagged joints and sinew as an infant and whip-chord wrapped around razors as a man. He is all angles, too skinny. Always that “lean and hungry” look.
You know him if you know that play–how he pin-cushioned Julius Caesar. Success was the product of many “new-game-plusses.” He failed, and failed miserably and bitterly, many times.
His first draft, first play through of that life, he came at Caesar hungry. If you know humiliation, you know the hot blood of shame. That burn behind the skin that meets the gaze, the eyes of judgement that hold you there as you try to fall through the floor. You may know what it means to be beaten. But unless you happen to have been born with the avarice and ambition of a god crammed in frame that could sustain neither, you do not yet know Cassius.
There, held before his peers the Roman senate, Marcus Antonius’ choking him. The big man holds him by the throat, displays the dagger he ripped from lean Cassius’ grip. Marcus displays both trophies. As the big man kills him, his last thoughts are silent curses: that the stupid should be so strong, and hateful words for the gods that made him frail.
Time went on, long on, for all creatures living and not, for all things luminous or cold and dead. Midges and Mayflies beheld creation for a day. Redwood’s rose to tower and die. Stars far greater than yours burnt out. Eternity concluded and was reborn, identically-equally-opposite in all things.
113 billion years after Marcus Antonius killed Cassius in front of Caesar and the senate, after that first young universe had collapsed to dust and ash and rose back again, he remembered. After the universe followed its arc like a Newton’s Cradle on god’s desk and re-did the same old show again, he remembered. Cassius was born that second time, in that second universe, screaming out his death–and nearly killing his mother, as always.
He was nothing so silly as an infant with a man’s intellect. But the child dreamed his death, and by the time he became a man, he remembered who he was and who he was destined to be. What he was capable of.
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AGB (After-Great-Bifurcation)
Earth(0x7DD);(0x53); DMV (Washington-DC/Baltimore/NO-VA) Urban Corridor); 26-27 November, 2013
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There is a block with a problem, a small-town city block of concrete, the whole thing standing over its pit parking garage on stilts half buried. Each apartment building on chicken leg steel stilts stuck in the bedrock. It looks like any number of people-storage slabs for workers on either side of the Cold War (first or second). It is a brutalist filing cabinet made vibrant and alive in the doing, in the living (though it is host to a parasitic entity). The foundation is cracked after that baby earthquake a few years back, that shimmy. But every room in the place rents for more than a grand a month. Market value for the palace tenement where the flag pins with security clearances do gentrify with a vengeance.
The problem is a man, you’d recognize the pancake ass and big nose of the naked man in the twisted sheet, even in the half light of the vision dancing ethereal on the wall before him. It’s not just a hallucination, there is real light here, ghost images dancing on the wall while he spouts poetic gibberish. An honest to god mundane miracle, witnessed by no one else in the apartment.
The bad doctor, the childish anarchist, and the woman are panic arguing in the front room–arguing about the problem. He passed his electric acid test that night, he was always good at tests. He passed in that he did not leap from the balcony of the 10th floor filing cabinet apartment.
The problem is that he is not dead.
He has a name: REDACTED. He is an A series: A(93). As noted, they are “least-likely” beings: those for whom non-zero events are unrealistically likely–the luck that lets you win the lottery or get mauled by multiple bears on a given day. The least likely shit is most likely to happen to them (and to keep happening to greater effect/severity/frequency).
For those who valued the predictability of the old arrangement, “least-likely” individuals are a defect to be removed. They, “fuck up the odds”, sometimes by simply existing. Cassius is one of those who hates the “least likely.” In fact, he’s the first to name them as a thing worth hating.
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The Mad Ramblings of the Scribe A.GIF
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The dead watch the living. If that sounds creepy, it’s because it really fucking is. In the old cosmology, the dead were ground up, some of us, to feed the potential of a fraction of the living. In the before times, ghosts of some portion of people were processed and rendered probabilistic essence. Essential nutrients for those that are well fed and already roll loaded dice.
The new cosmology is better, or will be a few heat deaths and re-births from now. But there are those who benefited from the old arrangement, who want the old ways back. They want the torpor and so much more. They are the army of beige men who do what Cassius orders. They are the man who likes to tell stories on road trips about the history of fast food franchises. They are the man that marvels telling you that you can get the same fast food sandwich at every exit across this continent and several others. They’re a joke, the prospect of them doing harm to others is a joke. That’s precisely why they’re dangerous.
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MACEDONIA 42 BC; HADES; BGB (Before Great Bifurcation)
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Cassius abandoned his army to be murdered at Phillipi. He found the river where the oracle suggested. He paid the cost to Charon. He fell through. The frail man flourished there on the scorched plain, packed ash was a fitting environment. He grew more devious and powerful with knowledge stolen from Nic and luminous beings I dare not name.
This was in the old arrangement, long past long before that fuckup with the schnoz down Virginia way introduced “before”–causality–to a place that shouldn’t have it. Once applied, causality instant-retroactively applied to the EOT’s whole “history.” It’s getting chaotic on the scorched plains. After Job but before causality, when the multiverse was young and fecund. That’s when Cassius founded the Host Hedron, the dice cult. Their (apparent) worship of god’s machine earned them a nice heavenly tax exemption and cover for Cassius’ activities.
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They flatter heaven. They make a joyful noise to god’s machine on Earth, and when they land on the plain. In that initial panic at god’s absence, their joyful noise to the mediocre machine is blessed news–some constituency was happy. And joyful bureaucrats did contact god, because god still carried a phone at that point. They begged the author of all to return. They passed on praise of the machine, not the author’s best work and god knew it. Hearing others praise the machine’s mediocrity made god feel worse and like more of an omnipotent fuckup. They threw the phone out onto the ash. In this way, Cassius kept the almighty in despair and at arms length at a key “moment” in heavenly politics.
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AGB (After-Great-Bifurcation)
Earth(0x7DD);(0x53); DMV (Washington-DC/Baltimore/NO-VA) Urban Corridor); 26-27 November, 2013
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It’s already snowing outside when the problem shakes awake to answer a cell phone that’s not ringing. Fat flakes. Tecmo-super-snow. Smothering, unrelenting, snow. All told, it will be a few inches fewer than a few years back, the time the salary men and women ditched cars on the freeways and just wandered off into it.
The voice that’s not on the other end of the dead phone tells A(93) his wife has been hurt, it’s urgent and there may not be much time. Please hurry to the hospital. Never mind the woman who crawled into bed round dawn, the woman who is not his wife because he does not have one. Never mind anything but the urgency of the call.
Outside in the snowfield parking lot, a forgettable man kneels to tie his shoe behind an old Ford. He reaches, not subtly, under the car and toward the gas tank. The forgettable man stands, and walks off toward a Metro station tied to another Earth. A few taps on his phone and the bomb on the car is armed. A few more, and he has real-time location data on the device and vehicle.
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The tip of A(93)’s nose is numb, fogged glasses hanging off it. Hands digging snow from behind tires, heart pounding. Tossing cat litter for just enough grip to swing two tons of Detroit-and-Toronto steel out of a hole in a snowfield.
No one is on the roads but the plows. No one is stupid enough to drive in this shit with other people who don’t know the fine art of coaxing a car through slush. Every road is a single trench cut by an overtaxed plow. He’s reading road markings from memory and guessing, correcting when a stop line or dash peeks from beneath the white.
He thinks he remembers where the hospital is. Rear wheel drive is, in fact, lovely in snow. When this light turns green, he’ll feather and goose the gas in that order. Car’s ass will drop and dig and kick forward up to speed at a rate appropriate to the weather. He calms himself driving in snow by reminding himself of before. He wasn’t born to books and elbow patches. They’re Teamsters. He can “handle a fuckin vehicle in all fuckin conditions”, proven in a 4-banger Dodge with bald tires and electrical gremlins.
As one does where he is from, he recounts aloud stories of past winters, with plenty of “oh shit-shit-shit” interjected every time he has to brake for a light. He tells fish stories to himself set in some half-dead car in some weather way-fuckin-worse-than-this-shit. In the doing and the telling, to no one at all it seems, he recalls himself. There, about a quarter mile from the hospital, he sits a full three light cycles that seem a day. A set of minor miracles unfolds–a bit of what’s possible-but-least-likely in terms of human capability.
His uncle Gary. That old drunk bastard woke up speaking three languages, then three more. Started writing equations on the wall. It accelerated. Math, more languages, winning lotto numbers. He celebrated his millions by bursting into flame in front of the TV during the lotto broadcast. Spontaneous human combustion.
The hair on his neck stands. A seizure bifurcates his brain into two at once: one following a fool-fake-message, the other full of foreknowledge of what will-and-must-not-be. Intersection before the hospital, there is an on-ramp. Inclined down and into an old style freeway: a pit in the Earth. Contain the blast he thinks in the 100-million-mile-long seconds.
The light turns green.
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EOT: A(79)
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Yeah, A(79) slept through her alarm, as she always has and always will. Amen. Her phone pinged the scribe A.GIF who buzzed Bartleby. Here’s how that went: “Go wake the witch up.” You do it. “I live in a cubicle in orbit, I have no fucking clue how to get away from or back to this place. Just, please do me this favor.” I’d rather not.
That led to calling in a favor from a former Custodian who knew a guy who had a Tardigrade friend out that way.
The witch wakes to a purr, bristle whiskers. She believes it is her cat, Jonesy, a feline not seen in beyond-billions. She mutters to the beast, “Baby, I’ll feed you in a minute.” When the thing nuzzles, she scratches it’s almost-fuzzy chin. “Jonesy, ok. ok.” as it kneads and turns to put it’s ass in her face.
The first thing A(79) sees after a few billion years sleep is a familiar asterisk on a completely alien little Waterbear. They are hyper-empathetic creatures, all beyond brilliant (and wise to boot). They also tend to behave much as house cats. Another thing: god didn’t make them.
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A quick Tardigrade digression, because verily I say unto thee, the scribe A.GIF is very stoned. Waterbears/Tardigrades, of all sizes and varieties, just sort of wandered in at a moment when the author-of-all was quite overwhelmed and stuck. God was always prone to melancholy, long past long bouts of it. It was in a deep bout of despair and in that creative space between first and final draft of creation–when you and I and all that will ever be was half written–when god felt like quitting the whole enterprise. That’s when the first Tardigrade came, then another and another (so on and so forth, amen). They were the author’s inspiration for cats, all cats, but companion cats most of all.
God was not a fan at first. They did try to banish, for immediately one leapt on (and across the desk). Unicorns, Nessy, several sub-species of Sasquatch and a few cryptids never were because a Water Bear stepped in the ink on the book of creation.
God did fume and “Shoo! Git! Off the desk!” and was absolutely shocked at the thing’s lazy defiance. The angels were all giggling and trying to imitate the purr and other vocalizations. One Waterbear, who would later be known as Jonesy, took a shit in Lucifer’s shoe.
God laughed, dabbed at the ink, and with a Tardigrade curled up in their lap, continued to write you and I and everyone and everything into being.
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The witch conjures coffee and a joint, make it several. “Thanks Jonesy” the thing nuzzles her leg, rears up on it’s hind legs. “You imbibe?” Purr-affirmative. She passes the joint to the thing that hops with glee. It takes a long hit and offers it back covered in Tardigrade snot. “Keep it.” She lights one fresh.
“What is, why is my robe wet?” She dabs with her hand, sniffs. “Did you piss on me?” The thing chitters and babbles. It runs in circles digging the outline of A(84)’s grave. Together they uncover the fossil from the accumulated ash.
A(79) looks down her nose, sips the never-ending ambrosia mug. She’s puffing a joint, grows two arms to pass Jonesy coffee and a spliff. “Down that coffee and do your thing” Gesturing toward the remains. Once refreshed, Jonesy the Tardigrade does piss on A(84) “I wanna see a good coating head to toe, there we go.”
Nothing. No sign of life from the fossil, though it be covered in piss. “Got any more?” Jonesy strains. One last drop. Shakes his head “No.”
Well, shit. She plops and contemplates. “So you’re saying a little whiz and ‘bang’ I was back up?”
Purr-affirmative. “Maybe he’s not here anymore.” Burble chirp. Bark. “Yes, Jonesy. Clearly I mean his metaphysical or ethereal essence, his soul. I mean his fucking soul, Jonesy.” Purr. “I’m sorry, I’m frustrated.” Jonesy nuzzles. “We need the Parson.”
“Sup.” Gah! and Jonesy leaps a foot in the air, back arched. There is a long nosed, short-haired woman. She is hovering cross legged. Bathrobe and jammies. Coffee and licorice, unlit joint behind her ear.
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A(93) looks past his numb nose at the on-ramp and coaxes the car down into the empty pit freeway. Calculus makes sense in an instant stretched and spread. Contain the blast. He feels hot, rolls all four windows down. His body temperature is past dangerous and rising. Windows down he drives away from the ER, skates down the onramp.
He is incandescent, and time is moving entirely too slow for the speed of his brain. Maybe he can make it to the first overpass? Maybe he can tuck and roll? When the bomb detonates, so does he.
No lightning. No prisms. No rescue. Just the wreck of a 1990-something Ford sedan on it’s back. The car is on fire, under it’s bulk lays on the charred remains of it’s passenger: some graduate student no one gives a fuck about.
At the hospital an EMT who just pushed a woman in the midst of a difficult labor in on a stretcher, she hears the boom. She can barely see the black smoke in the snowstorm, though it’s only a quarter mile or so away.
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Frame: Earth(0x7DD); 15-FEB-2009 (AGB)
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Lucrecia, “Lu” or “Lu-Lu” to those who dare the familiarity. She is Cassius great (many times over) granddaughter. She’s in his line. It’s not necessary, but for the best fit, he’s learned to stick within his own line.
Lucrecia, heiress, rich-girl, transnationally wealthy human being. She is tied and trussed, bound and gagged. She is bound in wooden cage high atop a wicker pyre. Her brown hair is matted, blood from the head wound that won’t stop.
Usually, the murderers in the desert let the sacrifice scream (can’t usually hear them over competing sound systems). Most years, there is a joyful tone to the proceedings. In good times, the sacrifices are not as unruly as Lu-Lu, and usually the lottery is rigged to ensure that no one of her station finds themselves on the altar. But here we are: on the high desert out past where the Mormons live. Every year, the richest on Earth gather to cosplay post-apocalypse and carouse with whatever poors can make the trip.
The priest, ruler in practice if not name, of this Earth’s chapter of the dice cult cannot read the portents. Something so simple as reading entrails is damn near impossible. Tomorrow is unwritten or at least obscured. His formerly ample powers have failed him, fled from him (and thus his congregation).
“Friends,” there are grumbles at the term “we’re here to…”
“Burn the bitch and be done!” from a world-famous philanthropist in a skull mask and loin cloth.
“Well, yes. The rite of spring will be observed. Luprecal is an importan…”
“I’ll see you in hell, motherfucker! I will fucking haunt you. You think we’re done? Every night, motherfucker. I’m coming! ” His daughters voice, somehow rid of the gag. The crowd’s response entirely in the style of the philanthropist. They want her dead, anyone dead, any gesture of contrition/submission that might “fix it”–their inability to predict anything at all (even something so simple as a stock price week-to-week). They were certain their “Father”, intercessor between god’s machine and they, was displeased. The priest offered nothing but the same old rite of spring: gather to party and sacrifice one of “the poors” to the machine and to “Father” to find his favor. His flock demanded that he sacrifice his daughter. He made no effort to stop them.
“Luprecal is an important means of renewing the compact with” Time studder-steps sideways. His daughter shrieks like microphone feedback, her voice pours from her father’s PA system. There is a low inhuman thing growling Latin, a robot’s voice belching seeming-random numbers. There is the great white-noise, radio static or friction hiss, like the sound of Leviathan’s passing. The vision of every mortal blurs. They cup their ears and fall to their knees. The priest looks to the pyre, sees as if in a dream, his daughter writhing and battling a man that tries to choke her.
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Lucrecia prayed as they prepared to sacrifice her, not to god certainly, but to something. As they bound her limbs and anointed her in flammable oil, she prayed to anything-in-the-void for “the strength to end every one of these motherfuckers.” Amen.
She saw her answer in a glimmer just beneath the Red Star. It became a glow then a spark. Then came a shit covered demon. The thing landed hard and set the pyre alight. There, surrounded by flames, the demon (Cassius) crawled down Lucrecia’s throat.
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The Pyre explodes in blue fire. The largest logs, cast out shrapnel match sticks. They make tech-bro and hedge-fund kabobs. The shockwave levels luxury trailers, every last one. Half the rich cultists in the desert are incinerated in an instant. Half the remainder are blinded by splinters and the brilliant light of it. But the quarter that survive (primarily the poors) all witness some version of what follows:
The priest is untouched by the blast, by some miracle profane (or perhaps because Lucrecia did not want him to be). Lu walks through the flames untouched by them, though she’s bleeding from the eyes and ears and nose. One eye is flooded red, its pupil fixed and dilated.
Her father recoils in horror. “Come here precious. Give us a kiss.” She’s quick. Hand grips his throat. She puts her mouth on his. Not a kiss. She inhales and her father collapses dead, an empty sack, hollow skin. Finger snap, a demon ‘pops’ from nowhere, proceeds to put the man’s skin on.
They flee before her, Lucrecia, as she burns the camp to the fucking ground–breathing fire like a dragon. The cultists were right: “Father”, Cassius, was very angry. In all the years they had performed this hollow ritual: sacrificed a human to another human (made immortal through unnatural means), Cassius had never heard their revels or smelled their offering. Not once. But Cassius heard Lucrecia’s prayer, and in a way answered it.
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END. CASSIUS AND THE WITCH, CHAPTER 1: “AND THEIR LINE WENT OUT ACROSS THE WORLDS”