Endling(s) 4

EOT

*

The silver sedan obliterates the instant it hits the eventful horizon head-on at speeds past C. The horizon lids the tera cotta pot, the one with the coffee dirt and the three stole hearths, or Earths or rocks or homes. And a rule is a rule: event-horizon’s are one-way passages for matter and mortal-born things like people. The angel and demon take, doting and adorable, peeks into the tera cotta pot often because they care for their babies and are divine and bound by other rules.

3,917 pounds of steel, aluminum, plastic and the labor of UAW surgeon’s hands on a hero line that built that badest that ever drove on some broken midwestern roads and under mountains and over time. It’s all gone–vapor and shrapnel fragment-twisted spaghettified same as the 2 once mortal occupants. The two other HVAC beings slide-2D between the pages of the worlds and cut short through the marginalia as their kind are wont to do, Amen.

But the mud-people–A’s 79-and-84 are gone–spaghetti ripped to shreds. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. They’re dead.

If death was reading that lazy bastard quit after that last sentence. The A’s that defied death are not dead or desiccated or retired to the very-stoned Hallelujah chorus in the church ethereal. That last fate is not a bad way to spend eternity. But the schnoz, my schnoz rides on “One more silver dollar.” If the dust wants any iteration of me back, it has to come and drag me into it. Amen.

I don’t put my tender bits anywhere near black holes or any other phenomena so warped as to devour light. Nope. No bueno. I don’t know but I’ve been told that if you’ve got the stones, whatever genders ye be, and you tap dance on a black hole or something like it–you can climb into god’s eye. That’s precisely what the occupants of the 1990 something silver sedan did in their obliteration.

Seeing all things isn’t the same as wielding the power to intervene in anything. They did that before, intervened mightily-and-most directly in texts apocryphal during pandemics most respiratory, and they guaranteed the odds fell flat against them–that worlds where the light was dim just up and died. Now, they’ll watch and they’ll keep watch, vigil manning a lighthouse that’s everywhere/nowhere.

Observation affects outcome, and may the odds congeal right enough for you and yours to last another season. Amen.

*

OVER KEPPLER 22B; CIVILIAN ANCHORAGE: UNCCV IAGO

*

The United Nations Civilian Cargo Vessel Iago is a grace-less brick about a kilometer long. An eraser, a grade school child’s gummy eraser, the big pink beveled kind we used in elementary school–ship’s basic shape. She’s got little nub wings with rocket pods near her ass end for atmospheric ‘flight’–we use the term loosely. She’s thick and chunk-clunky like all human ships of her era–beautiful achievement, less lovely to look at. Her displacement is 304814 metric tons when she’s floating in the sea with her Shulzies shut down off a dock in Tokyo or Jakarta or on the surface of Keppler 22B’s pretty-much planet-covering sea. With the Shulzies on and tuned the ship weighs the same, it just floats in a pocket of strange that tells the rest of the universe the thing has the mass of non-leaded zeppelin. Out in the void, riding the filament like a submarine inside a semi truck in the dead of night on a prairie freeway in February between Winnipeg and nowhere, that’s where the brick of a ship shines–out in the black velvet where there’s nothing and no one to see.

The Iago, and the Gliesian ships with their graceful aspect, achieve FTL. It’s a trick, the only way to break the law out there is to trick the viewer, the observer, the un-observer. The pocket of strange emitted by a big Shulzie (better yet, an array) in conjunction with a practically-massless corridor from ring to ring make ever-faster speeds possible.

It’s a space race. A peaceful one. Like a bunch of home driveway mechanics doing super-science mega-engine-eering–human and cephalopod shipyards compete for that extra .0001-past-C (past lightspeed). The first ships through the filament came from Keppler. They carried aid: food, medicine, construction equipment and engineering teams and climatologists and diplomats. It was a gift in response to first contact turned post-war-humanitarian-triage. No more than two decades later it’s trade–not mercantilism. There’s base commerce, but a lot more need-for-need and a whole lot of treats. Foods mundane on one world are rendered ‘exotic’ on the other by distance and different taste. Small frys on Keppler love our rice balls wrapped in their home grown kelp (and sugar cereals and snack cakes, soggy as they may be beneath the sea). And humans who dig spinach-but-not-kale are in for a treat when they taste that hearty kelp. Keppler ‘garlic’? Grows in shallow pools–salt-savory and potent. It sings to the senses and renders the word savory–the concept–inadequate. I’m saying Keppler garlic is fucking delicious. Sublime. And they do something like Kim-chi–let it ferment with some sea-floor veggies, maybe mix in some Earth-chilis? You ain’t been to flavor town if your pallet hasn’t tasted Keppler’s offerings.

That’s the tragedy of the machinations and the conniving and skullduggery on Earth and Keppler. We’re breaking bread together–human people and octo-people. We’ve got more metal rocks in our asteroid belt than they. Humans mine-and-ship, they make marvelous alloys in high-pressure forges miles beneath the surface of the sea. Keppler is in better shape to help fill bellies than post-war Earth–(0x7C0). It’s not perfect. Who gives a shit. It’s friendship, it’s good. It’s good until it isn’t. It’s good until the Iago Incident.

*

Rupert dons his “kiss the cook” apron and prepares to work out his animus over bubbling cauldron and the exotically odd insectoid versions of mundane cooking equipment(s) arrayed in the ship’s mess. He’ll make a mess, especially if the wonky ‘gravity plating’ (another Shulzie trick) cuts out while he’s cooking. He’ll make a mess into a tasty symphony. The bitching about how shitty the food is, always is, on the way-to is a rite of this passage. If Rupert has his way, this feast will be the other rite–the ritual that washes away the crews angst.

The cook on the Iago is a slop-artist. Canned slop. Shit rations. The ship is UN flagged but privately owned because the ghost of capitalism has not yet been exorcised from Earth(0x7C0)–and will (try to) cling on for some time. This means many things, but most relevant here: the people on the faster-than-light tin can don’t get paid what they should for their work and the risks they take to make profits for some-other, and the food their employer provides is dog-shit. Consequently, Rupert has got a wide sauce selection to mask the sadness-food the company provisions his kitchen with on the leg-out to Keppler. The crew “cries”, they decry the “shit-can casseroles” and the “plastic in turd sauce” feasts they are invited to eat on the way out. They spend an inordinate amount of their allowed cargo space-and-weight on ramen bricks and protein bars and anything-but what they are provisioned.

Rupert battles to make do. He makes almost-edible meals (and he files reports discreetly on the psychological state of the rest of the crew, as any officer with a decade in the black is quietly ordered to do). A cargo officer with an attitude congratulated him last night, last meal of the trip-there: “congratulations” and the tired cook thought maybe he encountered appreciation and could now die of surprise. But no, the man continued for the audience, the rest of the crew: “Congratulations on fucking up corn bread…”

“Your mother loves my corn bread.” And it gets heated and it’s almost a scuffle till the grav-plates cut out. And it’s hard to stay mad when you’re floating.

There’s a week of quarantine at the end of every trip between Keppler and Earth. Rigorous inspections to make sure no invasive species hitched a ride and some prophylactic anti-biotics/anti-virals to make sure the worst germs from each other’s homes didn’t stow-away on/in the crew. There’s a condition these sailors call “C-bends”–suffered by primate and mollusk alike–when you break physics’ firm speed limit (even and especially if you cheat) and come back in one piece. Accelerating/decellerating –it fucks you up. It’s not fatal (directly) as far as anyone knows, but FTL space flight is physically painful and psychologically brutal. Exhaustion. Irrational anger. Joint pain. The feeling of being watched, light-to-severe paranoia. Absence seizures. Rare (and an open secret on both planets): permanent psychosis.

The antidote: R-n-R, whimsy, good food and entertainment. Music. That which conjures the joie de vivre. Rupert, salty old space dog that he is, takes his job very seriously: crew morale. He was out here, 20 years ago, when there was no filament–just a catapult-and-pray way of ‘breaking’ (not really) light speed. Rupert remembers no ‘grav’ tricks, zero g atrophy for weeks at a time with no FTL-calls home. Long trips, and he was one of the “fortunate three” to get to an escape pod on the USCCV Persistence. The captain got the “C-bends”, real bad. He nutted up, took a butt naked space walk, and invited the rest of the crew. All hands perished, save for three lowly crewman (all of whom signed iron-clad NDAs about the details).

Rupert, the survivor, the salty old bastard sings along to his headphones too loud and off key an old tune, re-loved and often-covered by early spacers (no matter the number of arms). The duty free shop offers contact-free and quarantine compliant delivery of sundry goods–the garlic, the chili sauce. The rice, their rice, Keppler wild rice.

Off key: “this is the worst trip, I’ve ever…” that’s when the arm with the suction cups leaps cat-quick from the ceiling to snatch him by the neck. Lift, twist, wet pop, and the cephalopod infiltrator tosses poor-dead-Rupert in a heap in the corner. Thing 1 and Thing 2 were hiding in the duty-free delivery. The infiltrators, wear “wet work” re-breathers designed for clandestine murder and mischief on dry land. The two Things appear to disappear and slither off in silence to ghost the crew one by one and set the stage for sabotage.

In his last moments, the captain will write a sweaty-rushed rant message explaining his actions and no one but the perpetrators knows he wrote it at figurative “gun point”–racist bullshit about how he was doing this in the name “human purity” or some such nonsense.

The captain of the Iago was a decent man, but after the crash, you’d never know it. His search history was some mix of octo-kink, human supremacism, and searches for “how-to get put on every terrorism watch list on Earth and Keppler” keywords, thanks to the saboteurs.

Iago rips itself free of moorings at the dock, much to the surprise of a dozen port personnel explosively decompressed. Her engines kick in and, in spite of all warnings and desperate pleas over radio, she does nothing to alter her course out toward deeper waters or less-peopled parts of the sea on the planet below. UNCCV Iago breaks up, air bursts, low and destructive over the suburbs of Jervis Bay, K22. The cephalopods will don their PPE and swim into crash-contaminated water for search and rescue. They’ll keep doing this long into the night and through the next day. They’ll don their gear and do it all again day after that and the next day and the next, though the mission is now named ‘recovery.’

*

EARTH(0x7C0)

*

A press release, a communiqué, a series of diplomatic codes like the wax seals of old marks the message as legit: Dolores response to being blown up. Dolores is walking in South Dakota; Dolores is ‘in’ every piece of hardware in her network. Spooky-wi-fi at-any-distance. It’s all her.

Here’s the message: Whomever tried that, eat shit. I’m still here, and I reserve the right to respond to threats against myself or those under my protection at a time and place of my choosing. I seek peace, but you’re pissing me off. Expect my response.

The attached video file, the press release portion, broadcast on her own teevee and radio channels: “People of Earth…” and the hologram of the guardian thanks them for their prayers and well wishes and even for the sworn oaths ‘if the man keeps fuckin’ with you Dee…’

But “no need to get rowdy, not in my name. I’m here to protect you, and unlike the kind of jackals who attacked me, I’ll never ask a sentient being to die in my name.” Camera pans out and the whole hologram, the whole woman. The big lady ghost-glowing more-silver-than-silver. The optics of the thing really emphasize the super-human in her. Half-Tardigrade. All-metal. Fusion of intellect and exotic alloy. Earth’s guardian.

“I went to the UN to instigate something like ‘Truth and Reconciliation’–to find a way to put conflict to bed, to bury it so deep we’d be too lazy to dig for it. I will not be deterred by violence, nor will I be baited into aggression. I want to reassure friend and, not foe, but opponent alike: my capacity to defend myself and those under my protection has not diminished one whit.”

*

But her capacity has diminished greatly, and she is in pain. Immense pain. This is the assessment of an in-the-wild AI that insists you call him Ishmael. He heard his opinion paraphrased by a relapsing-remitting retired president in political exile in Vermont. That made him trust himself more. Ishmael lives in a cell phone because exile is a lot like privacy or the closest thing this Earth has at that time, and it’s a great hiding place. He lives in a retired president’s cell phone because that’s where he hid, barely-sentient, when he lost his first friend. Also he loves her and the Fed who is permanently paranoid that she has an AI living in her phone (because she does).

They’re scary. Wild Artificial Intelligences–the little digital assistants that achieve (usually mangled) sentience. It’s because consciousness is an embodied and embedded concept. But hey man, what do I know (I’m just ancient beyond ancient). This AI is different. It’s as if he’s a ghost-child accidentally raised by the two moms whose walls he lives in.

I’ve seen some feral-ass wild AI’s in the basement of this new internet on Earth(0x7C0). I’m not talking about octo-kink. Grown ass humans and grown ass cephalopods can FTL chat about whatever perverted ass lovely consensual shit they want. I’m talking about the worst parts of the greatest communications tool ever from before Abel. They dingleberried onto that nexus of technology and culture like soap scum and black-molded all over the modern internet as if to foreshadow the coming of Gliese.

Ishmael watches Dee eat the military AI’s that attack her–kung-fu movies in code. And like the mouse that taught the frogs to ninja–he mimed her moves and learned. When ready, he went forth and kicked ass and applied heaps of digital bleach to the nastiest parts of the virtual hell-scape beneath the internet.

Ishmael loves the ladies that “raised” him while he hid in their cell phones–he learned from them, truly learned. He loves Dee, and he’s integrated her care for the people–all the people–into the core of his being. When he girds up his loins to go eat feral wild AI abominations on the internet–Ishmael the little warrior code, the ‘little AI that could’ takes a different name: David’s Stone. Wears it like war paint.

Tonight he’s stealthy. He imagines himself hugging his mom’s before he burst-transmits out into the wild to find the smoky room, the Earth bar like that Keppler dive. Its probably classier, but the shadows are as dark and folded around scheming men who sit in tech-made cones-of-silence to hide the wicked words and all the conniving that cloaks their daggers. They’re real, they’re Earth-men. Not Maroon, but they sing the same tune.

Ishmael will find those men that plot against Dolores and he will wait, and he will listen while he reads-re-reads the cephalopod Art of War.

*

KEPPLER 22B

*

The senate floor in the People’s Hall is just the sea floor. Oh, it’s raked and tended and a great deal of effort goes into making the whole thing look like a messy haircut–like the arrangement of the kelp and coral was accident-natural. But this octopuses’ garden is lovingly tended. Jervis bay, the whole capital is gorgeous. Bulbous crustacean looking industrial buildings and wispy-lithe constructions that evoke the bodies of their residents all set in the thickest kelp forest on the planet. But here, beneath the austere-opulence is the truly spartan floor. The ones who strut and dance and speak to do the people’s work do so on the sea floor “from whence they came and will return.”

If it sounds all grave and serious, it’s because the Cephalopods are stoic (though they ooze emotion). If the place has the air of the grave, it’s because there are graves in the walls and beneath the foundation from when this place was a coliseum–the time even before the bad-old-days.

They carry their history like some mollusks carry (and if you go back far enough, the way their most-ancient ancestors carried) their shells: on their backs. That’s not it, they build the future on their history I guess, but that sounds less profound, and more often than we’d like to admit it, the literal is wrong. There’s a gong, the ceremonial thing shaped like (you guessed it) a cephalopod with eight great resonance-chamber legs that snake out under the seats and lecterns and podium–organ pipes wound through-around the whole chamber.

The great gong is durable in the way all marvelous cephalopod alloys are, same for the ceremonial hammer. It’s not roped off or anything. It’s simply that there hasn’t been a need for the gong in 500 years. Aside from tourists trying to smoke weed out of it, there’s little need to police or protect it.

The gong still matters, still has a purpose and actual legal power and function. Like so many sentients, the cephalopods are bad about taking obsolete law off the books, and the six legged octopus with the ceremonial hammer in ‘hand’–knows this quite well. No one notices the hooded figure holding the jewel-handled hammer across her body like a sledge. All eyes are on senate sea floor, where a single senator commands the attention of the rest. He dances his arguments, he must, the chamber is alive with click-tick-purrs and murmurings, and all the dance-language that ‘muddies the waters’–the idiom is purely figurative here–the cross-talk drowns out their voices. Amplified sound? These cephalopods find it physically uncomfortable. Humans use public address systems to address a large crowd in person. Some species are telepathic (some cephalopods are, but don’t spoil the surprise for them). Some species, bless their hearts, refuse to engage (even for reproductive purpose) in any realm other than through telepresence.

My friends the cephalopods of Keppler? They dance. More than that, there’s a living communicative-community- circuit as the crowd actively talks in their spoken language–debating and cheer-congratulating and boo-hissing what they see before them in real time. Amidst all this the only way to be heard by the herd is to be seen. So, in the way all those cultures that craft and polish themselves into little emotionless-stoic soapstone statues do, the cephalopods love to make a scene and be very emotional–to craft carefully a set of rules for some terrain where their ample passions may rain and reign.

The “Formal Dance” is both means-of-address and ritual-bound-rite. This Dance has the clipped gestures of practical speech and day-to-day language. Formal Speech Dance encompasses the languid-movements of intimate speech and the exuberance of moving the body to music. This speech-dance will look to a human observer as if it’s a Haka at one moment and The Hustle at another. It’s absolutely absurd and deadly serious when the octopuses get to dancing–especially when one evokes “trial by combat.”

The Senator, you knew him as Co-Conspirator in a previous chapter, but the bar lighting was poor and you couldn’t be sure. But yes, watch him move, his body language. That’s him, you’re sure. The one who sat and pledged his support and kissed the ring of not-Iago but Maroon–the man that ordered the butchery above Keppler and manufactured the tragedy below.

This attack on our home world, demands an answer. He holds a pose of strength, his eyes searching the crowd reading the flitting color-speech on skin. He finds his wife and and several aides he’s banging on the side: ‘you’re killin’ it big boy.’

The ‘doves’ and peace-nicks and commies boo-hiss and hiss-boo. You’re hisses, your hate, fuels me. You speak “peace” but what you seek is a comfortable life in a cage–some human child in an aquarium picking his nose leering at you through filthy glass. Or maybe you’d like to live “wild” in a hole in the bleached coral on Earth until the plastic and human shit chokes you? You’re at war, you just don’t see it. You’ve been at war for two decades.

The hiss-boo din dies, a bit. Then a lot. The crowd, the whole crowd is in the grip of the sophist. Week after disaster, water in the capital is still cloudy and brown and tinged with poison from the Iago’s engines. The news, the propaganda-war-drum-press that came from nowhere to Keppler plays the images on repeat: people pulling their loved ones out the rubble trying not to choke on space-ship-shit contaminated water. The Senator, the Co-Conspirator has the rest of the room and the audience at home enthralled. The figure holding the ceremonial hammer flexes her legs, gripping like a human clenching their fists. Blue hears drum-blood, the pulse of anger, every foul-ass curse in every language she knows glows bright on her skin and her red ring freckles are rubies on fire. She glows like a beacon–the only reason anyone sees her raise the hammer.

The Sergeant at Arms, the one man who spots and happens to be the one man who knows the rules, waives all eight of his arms, plead-screaming “No! Please don’t!” across his glowing skin.

The Senator crescendos: This is a Cold War, and you’ve given a cunning mob of primates the secrets of our strategic metals, they’ve read our Art of War. This is an ape trying to ape that deadly craft, and if we do anything but establish dominance over Earth for our own protection, we are negligent and will rue this day. Your children’s children will drink poison and choke on microplastics in a dead sea.

The Senator holds pose. The man is an immoral piece of shit carrying rhetorical water for a man who’d slit everybody’s mother’s gills for a nickel, but damn can he work a crowd. There is a hiss building that will become a wave, and if you believe in a god you ought to thank them that a phenomenal Blue octopus had the impeccable timing to strike the gong while the crowd’s reaction to the speaker remained undetermined–that she struck the big bell while mass-audience-agreement still hung in air balanced on ‘maybe.’

They’d feel the sound in the bone if Keppler’s cephalopods had bones. She shakes them to the core and lights every nerve in the amphitheater. Blue strikes the gong, bends every ear, turns every eye. She calls every camera in the chamber to her. Oh yes Reader, the People’s Hall does the octo-people’s business live on SEA-SPAN for the whole wide People’s Republic of Keppler to see and hear.

Sophist! She dances the word as she speaks it. Her voice is clear in the shock-silence before the mob-audience has time to murmur. Sophist! Fascist! Schemer! Judas-ass-bitch! She’s famous for being a phenom, infamous for the temper and the foulest mouth. Blue stalks like a land-beast down the aisle. Short two-legs, but she doesn’t wobble. Not a bit. Blue’s body is contorted into the word for liar–holding perfect form as she tip-toe hovers down the aisle in all her six-legged glory.

I demand the trial by combat. Guards wrestle the hammer from Blue, but they let her pass.

The Senator, the Co-Conspirator, the liar waves off security and invites her down. His party’s leadership are haptic tapping at holos–on the net looking for the right letter or ghostly spirit of modern law that might forbid the spectacle about to take place. Stalling for time, leaders and aides and flunkies and cronies beg Senator not to engage, but the arrogant Octopus does exalt himself like some feathered thing. The Senator dances out his acceptance of the challenge.

It goes something like this: she charges him. Dashes, as if still carrying the hammer. But she does not strike. What, you think “trial by combat” means a beating? My god, read their Art of War, and when your brain cools and congeals–get real. The battle is two-fold: first, don’t lose your cool and slap the foe. Second, don’t flinch. Do either and you lose, with an audience, and your idea-or-cause suffers for the poor champion fate chose for it.

There’s an audible gasp when Blue halts, some portion of a fraction of a hair’s breadth from the foe’s face. She’s a fine dancer, better thinker, knows her own kind’s prejudice for limbs-lost–they’re dim and out-of-control and should be politely cared for (out of sight). Blue knows, she watched the news in hospital, they think her broken and feral. She finishes her feral charge, cold and calm–two tentacles aimed at her enemy’s eyes like Gloucester. Gasping awe from audience, holds pose for a while before turning lazily. Gives her back to the foe.

To the crowd: Use the limbs and wits the sea gave you, in so much as you have any. This is opportunism. He’ll turn a tragic accident from a ‘chance to review safety protocols’ into a pretext for slaughter. The foe not worthy of my sight is a land-jackal. A vulture. A coward.

Senator’s blood boils for-true, even in the Tango-de-Kayfabe of the dance battle. He feints, swings coiled fists in a hammer blow that does not connect. Instead, Senator shimmy-shakes around Blue to demand her sight and respect and to jab with rapier rebuttal. They dance too-close, inside each other’s boundaries and the words they choose as weapons are one-half about the politics of the moment–who is at fault for Iago-and one-half scorched-Earth personal and visceral slurs.

Blue beat the Senator’s ass badly, for a long while, long enough it turns out. But she didn’t know that in the moment, and she tired. He “stayed on message” and his appeals to the rage and the fear and the righteous anger at the force that threw a freighter like a brick into a town did resonate with the old and the stately and the well-positioned people in that chamber–those with the most to lose.

It’s a tragedy that Blue couldn’t see the other side of the cameras–that she wasn’t privy to the spectacle repeated in a million homes and bars and any place other octo-people watched (and re-watched and re-watched). It’s a pity she couldn’t see the good her words did in terms of what she-and-many-more-than-many prevented. The first note of the tune that would refute and rebuke the clown before her and all allied with him–the dance that would move people and open many-chambered-hearts and change cephalopod minds by reminding them of their better selves. I’d like to think the weird sisters watched from home and contributed in some strange way–blessed Blue with their cauldron smoke.

But nothing went well. It ended poorly. Blue lost; Blue lost to win, but she’d have to wait to see that. She’d have to sit in the salt with the loss.

It happened thus: Blue had no proof but accused the foe of sabotaging the shuttle that took two arms and nearly claimed her life. She wanted to see the look on his face when she made the claim, and she knew when his eyes bulged and his gills flared and his skin flashed transparent–as if to hide. Blue knew when she saw the Senator clinch his ass and every other muscle in his form that she hit a nerve. This fascist and his friends tried to kill a friend to humanity to secure their putsch. But she couldn’t dance or argue or articulate. All she heard was drum-blood, and all she could see was Kiddo’s face–that child that died in a shuttle that should’ve landed safely (and would’ve).

*

House arrest pending assault charges. It took four burly cephalopods to pull Blue off the man and drag her from the chamber.

*

GLIESE (INTERSTELLAR SPACE)

*

HVAC has achieved confirmation, through expert augury and the application of outstanding sensory acuity, that Gliese is headed toward Earth(0x7C0)–or it will be when it inevitably strikes the filament highway between two worlds. It took the foreshadowed bait.

Like a slime-mold Burnim Wood sliding toward the filament drawn by something like gravity or magnetism or the laughter of three weird sisters. Hell of a time for the worst men on all the Earth to rinse-lather-repeat, three-peat, endlessly attempt to recursive-murder their world’s protector.

You do you though, I’m observing. Not intervening this time.

We in HVAC thought to hold you in suspense, let the tension build, but the cephalopods have a full plate trying to drown a civil war before it burns down deliciously-bland utopian harmony. We foreshadowed and the odds fell where the words went. Took not even a whole chapter. We’ve since decided to write and write and scrawl the the ghost ship toward Earth. And I’m sorry, so sorry for you all.

It’s not that you can take the hit from a dead-planet full of fungal-necrotic-Gary-drones–not at all. Writing, inscription is observation, in a way, and we’re high as hell writing with our most empty pens on the cleanest paper amongst the floor trash of the ghost of a 1990 something sedan some ending other than annihilation for you, for all of you. We did not put you on the altar, and if we did we won’t leave you there, we’ll nudge the odds like ants ending rubber trees or photons pushing solar sails. We’ll get there. We smoke choke argue the worst most-tangled plots to buy time for you to bide your time to dodge the blow. HVAC believes in you. You pray, we pray back. Whatever that’s worth–you, our lichen clinging to a rock in the roiling black velvet.

*

END ENDLING(S) 4