The year ended and left Calliope with one less friend than at its advent. What could she do about that? Very little, it turned out: sure, celebrations for the New Year were more subdued, parties at Annette's were more infrequent, and Erika settled into a more detached mood of workaholism as a coping mechanism… all leaving Calliope with nobody to talk to. By the time the calendar rolled over all of them had gone to visit a perennially catatonic Sawyer in his room at the hospital a few stops down the Orange Line, and came away a little more grim–well, all of them but her. How could she, she couldn't face that! Not when it was her fault and especially not after Erika brought back Sawyer's beted Christmas gift to her with tears in her eyes: a LEGO model of an Apollo Lunar Lander. She'd always wanted something like that, so then there were tears in her eyes too. Maybe one year she'd find the strength to put the thing together, once grief and guilt stopped pulling her apart.

  Like gravity's relentless action on a pnet, though, It ensured she couldn't come unraveled from any ordinary influence. The difference between her sense of solitude and actuality was never greater. One solitary mental image summed it up quite nicely: Annette's house, one minute to midnight on New Year's Eve. Everyone was counting down to a pixeted projection of the feed from Times Square, New York, on the back wall of the living room. Everyone but her, and someone else: when she looked over at the armchair, Esther was standing there smiling at her without a word. The facets of the Times Square Ball fshed pink and reflected in Its eyes as it descended in slow motion. In that split second between years, Callie could only wonder what Ettie thought about it all. What could petty human horology and the life of one grad student matter to a God, anyway?

  But for Its part, Esther had been acting… fine. Just fine. It didn't gloat or make light of what happened–but neither did It mention Sawyer at all by name. Callie tried to stick to her belief in Its absolute, inhuman apathy. But that was difficult. More than once when she thought the grief might overtake her–whether in Cosmic Latte's backroom or her bedroom–her tear ducts would dry up just before they should've overflowed. The sudden drought was accompanied by a rushing in her head that whisked away the brunt of the emotion, like a tissue picking up a stain. Like a ghostly hand wiping away the tears before they became real.

  Calliope fucking hated to admit it, but she relied on that–on It. She couldn't be breaking into sobs while on drive-thru duty. It made no sense for Esther to be both pain and analgesic, but It was. It was nonsense disincarnate, after all, and too convenient for her to give up even the possibility were offered. Ettie had Its high-contrast hooks in her: It helped her sleep, It stemmed her tears, It provided conversation, It kept her mind from spilling out all over the floor like pink spaghetti. She just wished It hadn't also killed her friend.

  It did seem impatient for her to move on from that. Today's was a dreary January afternoon, and a cold rain had washed away most of the snow outside, and Calliope was sitting on the sofa on her phone, trying to wash away her thoughts by reading inane online chatter. Esther lingered behind her in the space between furniture and the wall dividing them from her bedroom.

  "So," It purred, peeking around her left shoulder, which as usual sparked a jolt and a skipped heartbeat, "do you have any New Year's resolutions?"

  Once she recovered Calliope rolled her shoulder to shake off Its touch, immediately regretting doing so: the hand It offered had been warm and gentle. When did she become such a creature of instinct? Her subconscious continues to deny her conscious any say or comfort… How did they diverge so far?

  Oh, she knew: trauma–obviously–and her response to it. Dissociation was a dangerous addiction, infinitely more so when there was another will looming over hers just itching to take over when she psed. She'd have to force herself to put more effort into being present, to consider her actions before taking them. Maybe next time she'd let the hand remain atop her shoulder.

  "That's one resolution." Ettie interjected. It phased through the back of the sofa and sat cross-legged, at her immediate left and bringing new meaning to the former word; they were as close-to-touching-but-not-quite as physics would allow. Practically adjacent atoms, Its ankle brushed against her thigh. Such a small but still nonzero distance made it clear that for actual contact, she'd have to ask–and like hell was she going to do that. But she'd py along in conversation–a separate kind of contact–anyway. It looked at her expectantly.

  "Okay, you got me. I'll try not to zone out as much this year… seems hard, with all the horror you put me through daily." She quipped. Her eyes darted leftwards to reassure her that It wasn't angry. Ettie smirked back.

  "Variety is the spice of life, and I've kept yours reasonably seasoned."

  "Okay… but fucking why? I'm not a spice freak like you. Tell my stomach that the shit you eat is 'reasonably'–"

  "Oh, just out of the goodness of my heart." It replied, closing Its eyes–giving Callie a brief reprieve–but didn't let the grin drop by a millimeter. She swore that It was always fucking smiling.

  She took a deep breath. "I've seen your heart, remember? It's bck, and there's nothing good in there."

  Eyes opened; static resumed. "Bck just means it's colorful–every color blended together. There's goodness in that just as there is everything else."

  It had her there; why did she even try to argue? Oh–then it came to her:

  "Okay, well, it's still not even a real heart, anyway. There's no blood, or veins, or any of that."

  Esther pouted at her. "Hmph. Rude. Aren't you going to ask me about my resolutions?"

  Calliope exhaled. Always the threshold of lip It'd accept remained elusive, but It hadn't yet smote her where she sat. She loathed to ask what It could possibly have pnned for the coming year, when in a quarter of one It'd whipped through her life and that of those around her worse than a tornado.

  "No," she sighed, "because you'll just tell me anyway."

  "Clever. I did know you would say that. I know everything you are, and yet I still waste my time conversing with you when you won't cooperate."

  Her mind reeled: one eye saw Ettie's human form leering at her while the other saw the barest edge of a bck, fractal limb moving towards her field of vision. She moved to close that eye out of fear, but found she wasn't able–it was stuck open like a camera shutter set for long exposure. Panic rose–higher, higher–then fell back, as It closed the lenses back together.

  "And even I don't understand why." Its gaze moved off her to the TV as Callie tried to slow her breathing. "With more experience that could change, though. That's my first resolution: I need more."

  "How–" Callie coughed. She tried again: "How? Loser buffet isn't enough for you? Ate enough Szechuan food? Or… don't say cannibalism, please, I don't want a prion disease–that'd kill me, and you don't want that, right?"

  "No. I don't." It answered. The television flickered to life across from them–its remote all the way over on the coffee table, proving it as nothing more than a hallucination, whose purpose was more important than its nature. "The first resolution is an end, the second is a means."

  Onscreen, a twister was touching down in bck and white: the ground was white, the vortex bck. The earth itself spiraled up into the funnel's grip as dust and chunks of topsoil. The scene changed, and suddenly the Wicked Witch of the West flew by on a broomstick, before it changed once more to a musical number. Despite the erratic editing and her spotty recollection, Calliope recognized the score as cut from The Wizard of Oz:

  I could while away the hours

  Conferrin' with the flowers,

  Consulting with the rain;

  And my head I'd be a scratchin'

  While my thoughts are busy hatchin'

  If I only had a brain.

  "By the end of this year, this will be real." Ettie grabbed at her face without warning, middle finger centered on her brow. Her mouth was muffled by a palm. "Mmf!" Calliope protested.

  The hand twisted slowly round, past where a real wrist would have broken, until it was upside down. Each finger pulled at her skin as it went. Her eyes took her mouth's role in being covered–she was free to speak again, but not to see.

  "Ettie, I really don't get what you–"

  Hush.

  Just to register emotion, jealousy, devotion

  And really feel the part

  I could stay young and chipper

  And I'd lock it with a zipper

  If I only had a heart

  If I only had a heart

  If I only had a heart

  If I–

  The screen powered off, and with it, Ettie released her face. The hand that held it pulled back to Its shoulder; its fingers rolled once in a wave before It lowered the arm back to Its side.

  "A body, Callie. My second resolution is to have a body."

  "What? Why?" She rubbed her temples to try and readjust the skin that felt pulled out of pce like taffy–to limited success. To Esther she was so much soft and malleable jelly… but through the gaps in her fingers, she saw Its face harden in determination.

  "There are entire categories of existence I cannot experience through you." It said pinly.

  "Oh. Thanks. I suck, huh?"

  "No. You're only human. You said it yourself: you're only one human. To touch you with your hands is reflextive, it's one side of the equation. I require both. I require multiple perspectives. I require a body."

  "You don't actually require shit. You'll live." She jabbed.

  "I'm not alive: I don't reproduce, or rest, I'm older than this universe and cannot die, and in every narrow branch of my extension there isn't a particle of tangible matter, organic or otherwise. I don't live."

  Callie returned her hands into her p. She rolled her eyes, "Oh, please. You still eat, don't you? Gods, people, who knows what other shit. You don't even have to! But you do, so: you're alive. What do you even need matter for?"

  Esther's eyes moved down to center on her shirt. The blue-red NASA logo was crumbling over a white backdrop, which itself was rather thin; Callie relied on the evergreen fnnel to cover for its translucency and her neglect to wear a bra in her own home. But Esther's eyes pierced all mediums, all yers; she was suddenly self-conscious.

  "You would understand why, by analogy," It said. "You were less than happy with your arrangement before you started hormones."

  Calliope crossed her arms and looked away to hide a blush.

  "So… that's you coming out, then, huh?" She joked. Yes–humor would help her stay aloof, aloft.

  "Prior to three months ago I had no need for an individualized identity. There was no closet for me to come out of."

  "Yeah, try the one in my nightmares," she grumbled, "but… true. And I guess you're, like…" she examined the slight form perched beside her on the sofa: chiaroscurous in the alternating darkness of bck tights and dress and hair and the lightness of pale skin and eye-whites; fantastical in the potency of colour pouring from those eyes. Beautiful and terrible in equally excessive measure.

  "...female. I think. I mean, I assume." She added. Of course Its gender could be an illusion too. How strange that she never really questioned it until that moment.

  "Almost everything that's ever lived on Earth is 'female'. What else would you call it? Anisogamy is a recent development, only a billion years old. Before that, life reproduced alone, or like with like. I have no need for reproduction, but I understand why something like you might be drawn to a binary perspective."

  "Ettie, I'm trans. The fuck's that supposed to mean?" She asked, already dreading the response.

  "Humans are oogamous: a rge, immobile egg and many tiny spermatozoa paddling about to seek it. Many try, but only one squirming little pest is admitted to communion; imagine its euphoria when it succeeds."

  Calliope gagged. "You're literally comparing me to a fucking sperm?!"

  Ettie grinned sardonically. "All of you. Insects are too eusocial an equivalent. People are more like sperm: selfishly wriggling through life, obsessed with finding meaning. But there won't be any fertilization. I don't require hominid genetic material, not when it's so redundant anyway…"

  "That was NEVER on the table. I–you know how I feel, I'd never wanna–"

  "Just three billion base pairs… with so much genetic simirity, do you think I could turn an ape into a banana? I'd like to try."

  "G–you're so fucking weird. All I asked was if–"

  "Yes, you may think of me as female," Esther finished. "The same way as the moon. If you were in error I would've already corrected it. I can enforce my preferences."

  Callie let her mouth loll open. Mentally, she was still on the egg thing, and the discomfort reminded her of the first time her parents tried talking to her about the birds and the bees. She was disheartened to learn about her nature then the same as now. But a twenty-three year-old could no longer cry under the covers about the role biology prescribed for her… so she composed herself, swallowed her spit and pride, and continued. "Okay. Thanks? Again, sorry I asked. At least there's no hormone therapy for you to turn into some weird-ass humpty-dumpty thing." She hoped, she prayed, that some things were still impossible for It.

  But Ettie was determined. "What I will, becomes manifest. I will have a body. I won't go back to blindness."

  Its doggedness puzzled and perturbed her. Calliope would've welcomed Its detachment from physical reality if their positions were reversed. Maybe It couldn't drink as wide a stream of consciousness without access to a physical mouth, or mind, but peace and quiet sounded quite agreeable to her. Not having a body to feel unpleasant in sounded rather pleasant, really. Plus, in their current situation with Ettie sequestered in her brain, she could attempt to keep tabs on Its activity, and one further benefit was that someone with authority could sequester her if the need arose to save the world from Its designs. If It were walking around, separately embodied, all bets were off. Well, except for one: It probably wouldn't look the same. There wasn't a human on Earth that had proportions that perfect without the aid of Photoshop. Esther's curves were as smooth as hot blown gss and would probably burn her just as much to touch… if they were even possible to touch. Would It ever render such a thing, or was it all just feminine artifice to taunt her, like a shimmering mirage on the event horizon?

  Fata Morgana, those were called, she recalled. Morgan le Fay… if that was Ettie, did that make her Its Green Knight, bound to test the bounds of chivalry? All that Esther tested was whether with persistent performance one human could distract divine interest from the world entire, from the macro- to the microcosm, like diverting a foul-flooded Euphrates from garden-girdled Babylon. What was that line from Macbeth? "Fair is foul, and foul is fair," she'd written an ill-conceived rap around it for a tenth grade English assignment–and it fit fairly well, because the fair form before her hid foulness beyond fathoming. But why, and how: Calliope let her eyes trail down from that solitary fuchsia orb, past the nose curved like the edge of a brys and to naked lips that pursed ever-so-slightly. Esther knew about cosmetics and still chose to leave those bare, which could be no accident. As she stared within their vermilion border, Callie couldn't help but wonder: if their lips touched, if they kissed… would it hurt? How badly, it might be worth it… and what would she taste like? Clove, marshmallow, mosses, maybe. Or nothing at all… she'd pass right through into thin air, and Ettie would ugh at her for ever expecting otherwise.

  Oh–no no no–had she been thinking all of that out loud? Esther had said nothing the whole time. Calliope looked right, towards the TV, clearing her throat. "Ahem–so, what, you're just gonna possess somebody else?" She croaked. Somebody better, maybe… once It no longer needed her, she'd be set free, or else taunted by the things she'd seen and learned and lost forever, like the ant clinging to memories of that lithographic byrinth. But even if she were the ant, she'd still be free to dream: free to fantasize about that face, those eyes, those lips, with wild impunity. It wasn't entirely a bad dream.

  Thankfully, Ettie chose not to comment on her extended perversity, instead clocking the minute of sapphic catastrophizing as only mild inconvenience. "My connection to your senses is a finger-width of what it could be. Anything more and your mind would fail–disintegrate, and your body would follow not long after. I need a vessel that can support more bandwidth without burning out like that. I can't imbue myself into an empty shell."

  The Ozian tornado swirled in Callie's mind. It too was a finger descending from the heavens, like the digits It kept plugged into her head. True, being Its conduit was already degrading and probably damaging her brain, but hearing the word ‘vessel’ made it sound so much more dehumanizing. Though… she supposed It hadn't specified that the body would be human.

  "Why don't you build a robot, then?" She suggested. Certainly It would be capable. At worst–or as a start–It could animate a toaster before building something humanoid. That would be rather cute: Ettie as possessed household appliances. She knew the reality would more likely be an army of drones, androids and/or killer power tools… but she could dream of friendlier electric sheep.

  Ettie got to her feet, with Callie averting her eyes as the dark form swayed her hips one way, then the other in an exaggerated stretch. "No, a robot won't work." She said, pensively. One hand gravitated to her hip while the other fell sck to her side; It feigned to stare off into the distance. "A robot doesn't think, doesn't dream, it casts no mental shadow. I require the infrared of flesh, with its disgusting moisture. I require neurons and their brine–for now, anyway."

  A seething mass of amorphous hypodermis, a bubbling of protopsmic eyes: a shoggoth. That was the form she imagined It taking when all was said and done. The Thing which sought to walk would learn to crawl, instead, and make nightmares real again. Based on everything so far, Callie knew she'd end up having to host the shambling mess within her bedroom, too. It'd probably eat stray cats and dogs, or feed off decomposing wood like a fungus–wood she'd have to replenish from a hardware store with her meagre sary, there being few true remaining forests within Boston. She shivered–the false firepce on the left wall could offer her no comfort.

  Soundlessly, Esther headed for the hall, maintaining Its solidity except where there were obstacles. "Where are you going?" Calliope called after her.

  It was rhetorical. "We're hungry. Let's go out." It answered. Even before her stomach growled in affirmation It was already window-dressing Itself in a bck turtleneck and overcoat to match. Callie yielded. Okay… she could eat.

  ﹡﹡﹡

  New year, new me. Ha–that was a truism if ever she heard one. One could never step in the same river twice: the self was in constant renewal, even if it appeared to get stuck at times in wells of low potential–it'd always tunnel its way out eventually, barring an early demise. But that was of its own doing, and nothing and no one else's–certainly not the insipid New Year's.

  Peridot pondered all of this as she tapped her foot impatiently on the elevator floor. Yes, the revolutions of the pnets had no effect on the everyday lives of ordinary people, even that of the blue marble they were all bound around. The fixed stars held even lesser influence, the seasons were mere side effects, and people were masters of their own fate. Exercising her free will, she timed her taps to coincide with the 'click' of floors passing in ascent; numbered button lights flickered on one by one. She was the same Peridot this side of the New Year as she was the previous, except… maybe a little more tired. A little more harried. More determined–or more desperate–than ever to prove herself correct. If she had to pry a wriggling, reluctant Practice from the aether into a hypothetical machine to disprove Theory, she would–without hesitation. Hm. Maybe she did have resolutions after all.

  She scoffed at the idea. At st the elevator dinged and deigned to open onto her destination floor. Silver-mirrored doors hid her bored expression from her when they parted. Thermos in hand and unadorned ptop bag over her shoulder, she stepped out into the Anomalous Operations hallway.

  Said hallway was itself (anomalously) mundane. A tinny, refrigerated hum y quietly over the white tile floor, forming the foundation for white drywall inset with white doors beneath white fluorescents whose card readers at st disrupted all that purity by showing red. The points of charcoal stilettos punctured the white silence over and over as she set off down its length. She couldn't see another soul.

  That was probably intentional. AO was the end-all be-all, Alpha and Omega, the Agency's darling, and sugar demon babies were well-spoiled even as they were slowly smothered. Where for other departments open cubicles would've sufficed, here each employee got their very own room isoted from all others. That isotion was intentional for another reason too, she thought grimly: if ever a researcher went mad, sequestering them would be made easy. The pce was designed to quarantine a mental epidemic before Patient Zero ever reached the hallway. Hedging against an inevitable human fuckup seemed logical to Peridot… but then again, there was also the risk of losing one's mind not from exposure to some B-movie monster but from good old-fashioned stir-craziness, because she doubted the hermetically sealed offices she passed had any windows. Treating fire with fire would just fan the fmes of insanity in that case; she figured madness must be the only thing to burn brighter the less oxygen it got.

  And on madness: she turned the corner to arrive at the home of its chief architect. In the center of a gore from which one hallway forked off into two, the portal to Argus Sharrow, Ringmaster's office stood silent guard, where at the leftmost tine's extremity nondescript chatter drifted over from a nondescripter cafetorium. Bleached white like everything else, the door's only adornment was a brass pque showing 'Argus Sharrow; Department Head', and below that an amusing paper clipping from Dante's Inferno in Comic Sans, then Wingdings: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

  Dot rolled her eyes–repcing the green with more setting-appropriate white for a time–while raising her hand to rap against the door. For a moment, nothing; then a meek voice strained out "Come in", and she tapped her nyard on the reader to unlock the door into oblivion.

  Inside was more of the same, just with the added half-twist of a closed timelike curve. All surfaces within the office were equally as white as those outside, though the topmost of them–the ceiling–retreated six or eight feet further, making it much more spacious than the hall. Up there, rge square panels mimicking skylight made the shadows of objects especially crisp and dark. But amidst all the modern, minimalist trappings (or the modern, minimalist ck thereof), there were a number of anomalies: clocks, lots of them. High shelves were filled with timepieces of the arming variety, while lower ones were ticked with cuckoos and duodecimal faces of various types. In the far left corner was the chiefest of them: a grandfather clock, its pendulum swinging the way a real patriarch might rock in a chair, its dark wood grain seeming all the more antique in its sterilized surroundings.

  But she hadn't trekked up there for the godforsaken clocks; she was here for the man. At a white desk centered a few feet off the far wall Argus Sharrow sat hunched, tenting his fingers. The dispy of the Apple monitor to his left was the only dark thing in the room, but light swirled within the lenses of his gsses: he was lost in virtual reality. Peridot cleared her throat; she approached the desk.

  Sharrow's head lifted; she saw the glimmer of one eye for a moment. "Oh, Dot! My apologies." He said. Fingers tapped his temples twice, and they made eye contact once the projection had diminished.

  "Hi, Gus." She shifted her weight from heel to heel, unsure how to proceed.

  "Please, sit." He gestured to a white office chair on her side of the desk. She took it, crossing her legs tightly.

  Silence… or not quite. Everywhere there was a staggered ticking, as a few dozen timepieces all asserted their imprecise and irretive thinking.

  "So… I'm realizing that I've never visited your office before. What's with all the–"

  "Clocks, yes? Well–" Sharrow covered his mouth with a palm and looked shiftily to the side, "I find I can never have enough time."

  She followed his eyes: on the left wall behind a bookshelf she saw part of a mattress poking out, the result of an haphazard stowing. So the rumors were true.

  "You're insufferable," she scoffed.

  "Thank you!" Sharrow smiled. "I'm quite gd my humor doesn't cause any suffering."

  If looks could kill, even a st-minute Schr?dinger's transformation wouldn't have spared Sharrow's nine lives from her mortifying gre.

  "Ha-ha. If that's the case, let's not waste any more of it. You remember why I'm here, right?"

  Sharrow knit both hands behind his head and leaned back with the sound of reticuting pstic splines. "Of course, of course. Your crypto-anomaly, manifested in the form of one Calliope Mondegrene–which is a fascinating name, by the way, I believe of French origin? Or perhaps I've misheard–"

  "–I don't care about her name, Gus. I care about what she's been up to."

  More silence perforated by uncertain seconds. Sharrow released a small sigh, leaned forward, and tapped away on his keyboard. "Of course." He ticced.

  "How did the investigation go?"

  His face twitched, making a strange, strangled humming sound. One hand spun the monitor to face her while the other pressed a nail to its surface: royal purple. She clocked the nailwork as immacute; she'd have to ask Sharrow for the business card of his manicurist. Where the nail pointed onscreen, there was a false-color scan of a Ziploc bag, inside of which was a tab a few inches wide and a small, squat semi-opaque bottle, both containing pills.

  "Uneventful, I'd say. We did find these, which I've sent off to be analyzed further. That may take a little while, because I didn't mark it urgent, and what with the new year and all… I find the uh, transition from one to the next has such an intercary feel."

  "That's it?"

  Argus' eyes bounced back and forth between the screen and hers. "Y-well-yes, mainly. The loose tab is a loose match for LSD; the bottle is likely ordinary ibuprofen. A visual inspection was performed while they were collected from Miss Mondegrene's apartment, but they found no anomalies."

  "Did you look through her room? Her computer? Any other hardware?"

  "All non-anomalous," he repeated. "And I'll remind you that going through her normal belongings isn't my department."

  Her eye twitched. "Gus, I really hoped you'd be thorough with this." All he'd found was acid and Advil? Dot found that hard to believe.

  "I was! I suspected there might be ordinary technology hidden away, so I pulled blueprints for the building itself. There's a room marked there that the field agent didn't mention. But on a second inspection I discovered it's just leftover space from when the dumbwaiter was removed in renovation."

  Peridot chewed on the inside of her cheek, in imitation of a ruminant. For a dumbwaiter to require the space of a room, what kind of victuals could it have served? Kegs of beer fit more for giants up a beanstalk in the sky–or for rambunctious college students of the type who rented in the Mission Hill area to handstand on? What Sharrow was saying made little sense, but the prospect of a hidden room intrigued her; she'd pull the building details ter and get a second opinion from herself.

  Her skepticism must have shown on her face, too, because Sharrow took one look back at her and rushed to keep her faith.

  “Anyway, as I mentioned: no anomalies original to Miss Mondegrene.” he assured, sounding disappointed. She prodded at the gap in his assessment:

  “What about unoriginal anomalies?” she asked. Damn it–weren't they all? She knew–and wished to know–very little about the entities Sharrow dealt with, but her opinion of them was even littler. Banality was a feature of evil, not a bug.

  Sharrow's eyebrows raised; his finger shook and erected; he nodded vigorously. “Nothing ever gets past you, does it? Dot, I'd like to show you something.”

  He wheeled about in his chair to face the wall. Both hands fiddled with his spectacles out of her sight in concert with the humming of a broken tune, seeming to alleviate anxiety. She listened to the ticking of the many clocks and waited, for inexactly thirty seconds.

  "Okay… what is it??" She queried. Still Sharrow made no moves. Without turning, he waggled his finger at the left arm of his gsses, and she understood. "Fine," she muttered, flipping the switch on her own, to enable virtual reality.

  Everything was bck for a moment as their headsets interfaced. Sharrow’s voice reverberated over her. "Sorry, but I really can't show you in person. It's protocol, you know, and also several different locations–you need the full picture."

  "Argus, it's fine, just show me."

  "Just a moment!"

  Darkness became light–a blinding white, so that for a second she thought she'd returned out to the hallway. Her vision became like compound-eyes as it was pressed up against a grid array of monitors. Each square took up about a tenth of her field of view and opened on an examination room. All were simir: white tile, stark furnishings, little else besides a bed with cloudlike pillows in the center. In all of them a person tossed and turned dressed in white scrubs. Taken together, her first thought was that it must be the security feed from inmates' cells in a mental hospital, or maybe former AO staff who'd actually gone off the deep end, but retained too much esoteric sanity to be allowed to spill it to the public.

  Sharrow crified the situation: "As one of AO's satellite programs, we conduct various sleep studies continuously. At first we let outside clinics decide on the environment, but eventually we figured out that consistent results demanded consistency there, too. The entire program was consolidated under the internal acronym GODS-I–the Geopsychic Oneiroi Distributed Surveilnce Instaltion."

  Though none could see it, Dot still rolled her eyes. Scientists and their terrible names: every euphemistic bel a contrived backronym formed out of what passed for humor in a research b. She wasn't impressed, and a little disturbed.

  "You watch people sleep. For a living. Not creepy whatsoever." She jabbed.

  "For all of our livings; for science!" Sharrow insisted. Dot wasn't convinced. "How much does all this cost?" She wondered aloud, trying to count the number of squares and determine the magnitude of actuary-ethics viotions.

  "Not as much as you'd think. These clinics would do these studies anyway: to help diagnose insomnia, sleep apnea, problems with patients' mattresses. We just provide the equipment, standardize the tests, and collect the data."

  A middle-aged man turned over on one screen, and she noticed them: twin electrodes snaking from his temples over the bed's edge into a panel in the floor. "Why catch these people's dreams? To what end?" She asked.

  A giant pause icon fshed over the array. "To a new beginning."

  The view went dark again. In front of her now were countless pin lights drifting in the void like someone tossed a bucketful of glitter to the air. They almost looked like stars. As they winked out, then in, she realized: they were not lights, but eyes, eyes into the–

  "Er… behold! The noosphere; the collective unconscious of humanity, conveniently visualized in 3d space!" Sharrow excimed, with obvious pride.

  "So… it's like a map? An expensive map made from watching people sleep. I suppose privacy really is dead. Why does it look so… stelliferous? Like a gaxy?" She fixed her eyes on a cluster of dots that flew together in an arc like boids, before breaking off again.

  Sharrow ignored her off-handed digs in favor of the excavation at rge. He was like an archaeologist excitedly showing an artifact–one widely believed to be cursed. "Sure… a map. And stars are an apt comparison! Every dot you see is an impression. As all our dreamers dream, their minds wander, and we get a little cone of view into the way it's all id out. To integrate the data is a nightmare in itself, but the product is a little timepse, eight or ten hours at a time. Oh! Certain patterns reoccur." A white hand cursor bordered by violet circled a particurly dense dust cloud. "These are all dreams where the subject is falling from a great height–we think."

  "What about there?" She pointed to a void on her right about four feet in diameter, the edges of which the particles seemed to avoid, in the vein of ferromagnetic repulsion.

  A pause. "Hmm. Again, you're too sharp, Dot. Quick deduction isn't always a bonus in this field. You might intuit something that could hurt you." Sharrow's voice grew low. Dot ignored him; she watched as a single speck of dust crossed the void's boundary… and disappeared.

  "That is one of the reasons my entire team is medicated on oneirosuppressants." Sharrow's voice echoed.

  "I find it difficult to believe you don't have dreams, Gus." She remarked, recognizing the word's root. It was a compliment; his voice brightening afterwards told her he understood it as such.

  "Not while I'm sleeping, sadly. Though, that might be changing after–well normally I wouldn't be able to tell you any more, without requiring you be given a prescription, too."

  "I'd really rather not–"

  "–that's okay! It won't be necessary. I'll expin."

  Dot leaned back in the office chair and resisted the urge to point and prod at the simution. "Let me guess, first. It's a bck hole, or an equivalent; knowing about it makes it worse?" All the more reason, she thought, to ignore such horrors, if researching them increased the risk. Understanding didn't influence the world directly–there was always gravity before Newton or Einstein happened to describe it–but it still mattered to the mind. When standing on the shoulders of giants to see farther, one had to be careful not to be taken in by mirages or let the ego glimpse a Brocken spectre. She preferred to keep her feet firmly on the ground.

  "You're not far off." Sharrow seemed hell-bent on taking their conversation well off-pnet, though. "We call it the Egl?che, from an Old English word that probably meant 'fearless'. Fear-less–as an imperative. Or it could also mean 'monstrous woman', we're not entirely sure…"

  Egg-less, she thought, reminded of the distant spectre of menopause. She disliked having so much of her biology dedicated to inedible caviar. "Isn't it kind of unwise to name something that's not real? I thought names had power, in your field. Why can't you just give it a designation instead?"

  Sharrow audibly sighed. "We didn't pick the name. And the gods–these entities, the oneiroi included–are very real, at least in terms of their psychological effects. Names do have power; neither are they neutral. Some concepts require nomination, while others abhor it."

  "Nobody believes in Zeus anymore, doesn't that make Zeus less relevant? Give it a name like that, that no one cares about anymore?"

  "But everyone believes in fear, no matter what we call it. Most believe in madness, too–what we believe shapes our mental ecosystem and vice versa. We're thinking creatures, after all. And it's important to note that even when a given complex becomes less relevant, it doesn't disappear; it just gets less accessible. These things have a persistence to them."

  "So Zeus isn't dead, just sleeping."

  "Sure–perhaps–or more on an extended vacation." Sharrow waffled.

  "Okay. I can picture him in a Hawaiian shirt in Maracaibo, sure. But tell me more about this void. What does it have to do with Calliope? Is it–" she watched another spot of dust wander too close and vanish, "is that it eating people?"

  "In a manner of speaking." His voice was dry and strained. "We had an attrition rate of about one percent per month. This is an accelerated time pse."

  "So someone in your sleep studies dies every so often. You don't think the study could maybe be facilitating that?"

  "We do controls from time to time. The rate is usually the same for those, within a margin of error." He was talking faster, now, indicating a loss of confidence. Peridot desperately wished she could sip her coffee while in VR without risking it spilling all over her top.

  "So, where was I? The Egl?che… all ideas begin as grains, really, even the really nasty ones. They're nascent dreams or memes generated spontaneously, by zero or a handful-less of people. The vast majority don't ever attain anything approaching intent or awareness–there's no god ruling over when you're falling in a dream, for example. But some do, whether through interaction with sophonts like us, or independently. The Egl?che is the second kind in both cases. It's ancient and has existed close to its present size for longer than life on this pnet… and all the evidence suggests that it hates life, on a level we can barely even imagine."

  "Why?" She asked; it was half rhetorical. Hate was too predictable; she hated it right back out of spite.

  "Er–we don't know," Sharrow continued. "We actually know very little about the motives of these entities that have them, beyond the basics. The dark spaces in this map show pces where human thought won't–or can't–safely go. It's an unknown; If we could see into it we could divine some kind of intent. But anyone who tries is quite literally scared to death! Personally, my theory–and it might be a tad anthropocentric, I guess–is that it has a complex or personality disorder. Like some people. Hate isn't rational, we might hate cockroaches for any number of reasons; we don't think about how the cockroaches feel about it–"

  She raised her eyebrows. "Misanthropic much?" She flinched–if that wasn't the pot calling the kettle bck. "You said people all believe in fear. Maybe. So it's a sentient nightmare that terrorizes people to death, because it hates us."

  "How much of it actually depends on fear, I'm not certain. More likely fear is just a useful weapon for it. People have been dying of night terrors as far back as we have a historical record. But yes. It is a sentient nightmare that frightens us to death, as you put it."

  "Stupid and cliché," she spat. "I hate the noosphere."

  "It only seems cliché because you've seen the manifestations all your life, and only just now have seen the irreducible pattern that generates them! Engrams of the Egl?che appear in mythology again and again. That being said, though, I'm far from a fan of that one. I think you'll like this."

  "Like what?" Dot echoed. At first it seemed like nothing changed. But as time psed on, the void to her right became less so. Flicts of dust arced across it without disappearing: blue like Cherenkov radiation, then red like a hydrogen ser. Soon it was difficult to tell there'd been a void there at all as its density slowly filled in.

  "Oh. The hell happened there?"

  "This recording isn't live–integration isn't fast enough for that, not even close. Sometime very te st year, the noospace the Egl?che formerly occupied became vacant. I've never seen anything like this before in years of research. I'm still wrapping my head around it. But it would appear that our 'cliché' is dead–or inactive–or disincorporated. Choose one of the three at your will."

  Peridot extended a finger; she prodded at the newly-nonempty space. "I thought you said gods couldn't die."

  "They can't! They're like clouds, or an eigenstate–a collection–of points. They are interminable, but they can be transformed, or in theory disintegrated, and their constituents scattered and taken up elsewhere. Or maybe those separate points can be destroyed in sequence, one by one."

  Her head felt strange, and probably not because of insufficient caffeination; there was a nagging feeling at the back of it. Why did she feel anxious? "When did this happen, Gus?"

  "The evening after Miss Mondegrene was visited by Agents Barden. Sometime during that day."

  "Which–" she started.

  "–isn't just coincidence." He finished. "Part of his report indicated that she was restless in her sleep, murmuring something."

  Peridot imagined the purple-haired woman in pajamas–white scrubs, because of how fresh the invasive video feeds were in her mind–on top of a long and narrow twin bedspread, tossing and turning, incanting a spell in a long-forgotten tongue. Was that how it worked? She almost wished the field agent had taken pictures… but that was a bit too rge a viotion of privacy, even for a government employee. Calliope was still a woman, even if she was undoubtedly a witch; Dot couldn't justify photographic evidence that'd be indistinguishable from a stalker's peeping pictures.

  "Gus… what could she possibly have been murmuring to do something like that?"

  "Oh, I'd very much like to know! That single line of the report has kept me thoroughly interested."

  "It's like a bck hole, right?" She mused aloud, staring at the not-void, where spots of light swirled about, carefree. "What could destroy that? Entropy is too slow."

  In the distance she heard a click, and the simution freeze-framed. It was over. The projected reality dissipated and left her staring straight at Sharrow across from her. His eyes were wide; he leaned across the table and loud-whispered:

  "What eats at a bck hole? Hawking radiation–the most intermittently productive artist of all physics. It takes vigintillions of years for all but the smallest to evaporate. But of the four fundamental forces, do you know which a neutrino feels?"

  Dot blinked her eyes rapidly to readjust to the light. Physics hadn't been part of her curriculum since her bachelor's degree. "Uh–gravity, isn't it? It's always gravity."

  "Gravity is one. Neutrinos also participate in so-called weak interactions. Think about that! Every atom, every nucleus feels the weak force: in beta decay a neutron mutates into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. Even the proton might not be safe on long enough timescales–it could fork off into a pion and a positron. In the bitter end all matter might be broken up that way; heat death comes for everything, helped along by radioactivity. Like all forces it has a field and mediating particles… how does it decide which nucleus to decay next?"

  There Sharrow went again, ascribing intent to the processes of physics that were–if physics were a human body–nothing more than the unfeeling current of blood pumped by the heart, or the unthinking transmission of nerve impulses via sodium channel.

  "It's random, it doesn't decide. You can't predict something like that individually, only in aggregate." She countered.

  Sharrow twirled a manicured finger in the air. "Does that seem random, what you just saw? If one nucleus fissions, call it randomness. If a number of them the size of the Earth do all at once, that's intent! That's purposeful. It can't be coincidence. Dot, you agreed with me!"

  It very well could be, she thought, but the numbers were mind-boggling, astronomical. She couldn't grapple with the scope of it: Sharrow was implying they'd more likely be struck by lightning during a shark attack in which the winning lottery ticket was impaled on the shark's tooth, than to witness the spontaneous evaporation of one especially malevolent dream. She had only a weak retort to such outndish probabilities.

  "I agree that the timing with the field agent's report is suspect. I didn't agree that it means Calliope communed with your hypothetical Whatever. Isn't there some other way she could've managed this?"

  The Pyramids were built by humans, after all. Maybe she'd take a page out of Sharrow's book and apply physics to dream-logic, just with cssical mechanics instead of quantum electrodynamics: who could say that with an imaginary lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to pce it, one couldn't fling the noosphere from its orbit–or explode a god to the farthest reaches of noospace?

  "No." One word cracked her would-be seesaw right down the middle. "Over the years we've spent considerable time and money working out how to neutralize an entity so pluripotent–oneirosuppressants can be habit-forming long-term, so we sought alternative solutions. We never managed it, obviously–I couldn't drum up the astronomical financial backing we would need. There's no way Miss Mondegrene did this on her own."

  Peridot sighed and uncrossed her legs, only to cross them the other way a moment ter. "So God's fucking with us, then, and we all better figure out what religion to convert to."

  "Well, I wouldn't draw any dogmatic conclusions without additional data, but–"

  "You said that the Egl?che was hateful, right? Hateful people hate themselves, too. Could it have just given up?"

  "Uh… suicide would be unprecedented. Maybe impossible, too. Can God tie a noose so tightly even She can't undo it at the st breath? I don't know. It's an interesting theological–"

  Dot spread her hand onto his desk, a bit more forcefully than needed; five fingers touched the minated surface. "It doesn't matter! You said there weren't any anomalies original to her. Doesn't that disprove your theory? Talk about God-of-the-gaps, Gus, there has to be a rational expnation for this!"

  He flinched when she'd finished, only rexing after she withdrew her hand. Dot's outburst gave her little guilt: Sharrow just had the kind of aura that made her blood slow-boil in frustration. On the pyground he'd definitely been the geeky child who kept inventing new ways for his make-believe hero to survive and beat everyone else's, despite all odds. That rationalizing was better fit for comic books, creative pursuits, not the department head of the Natural Security Agency protecting Americans' psychic and physical well-being.

  The grown-up geeky boy found a spot of courage to stand up to her, though. Sharrow's tone became serious: "I don't have the answer for you, Dot. Just theories. Maybe her contact with Pnet Nine waxes and wanes, and we caught her at a new moon. Maybe It's an entity so subtle and purposefully inconsistent we can't yet detect It. I don't know! We haven't seen a proton decay, either! But I will contest that everything in the world mustn't have a rational expnation. We don't live in a rational universe; you merely live in a rational bubble."

  Dot closed her eyes, breathing deeply. "Fine." She stood. "Thank you, Argus, for your attention to this. If you could please forward me the data you've collected, I'd like to try and tackle this from inside the bubble."

  "O-of course." He stood, too, almost falling over himself to reach across the desk. They shook hands; Sharrow's was cooler and softer than expected. After returning, his arms twitched at his sides anxiously–the man looked out of pce not fidgeting or engaged with something or other. "But Peridot, you're not a field agent," he opined, in a verbal twitch.

  "I'm still capable of fieldwork. CFAM is slow this time of year. I'll be fine. I can mull plenty over at my desk, you know." She looked away.

  "Er… well, alright. Please keep me in the loop on this. I'll let you know of any further developments."

  "I will." She turned and walked out of the office, stabbing each heel into the floor with enough force to deal a deadly blow. Sharrow had only gotten her so far and turned up more questions than answers. The absence of evidence being taken as evidence, itself… she struggled to take him seriously as a scientist sometimes. At least there was one thread she could pull on: the missing room on the blueprints he'd mentioned. That was nicely concrete, because it was either there or it wasn't. She'd drill down to the bottom of it, absolutely; concrete stood up well under pressure, but not tension. Peridot would have to apply both.

  ﹡﹡﹡

  Their outing ran long, and by the time Calliope shuffled back through the front door it was a little bit past midnight. A new day in name only, because she was far too dog-tired to seize it: a meal had turned into street window shopping had turned into a visit to a cozy bookstore-and-café, and finally, a local ice cream parlor. She hoped her fingers wouldn't be too frostbitten–ice cream in January was fucking unhinged–but moreso she worried they might shatter from carrying the canvas tote of books Ettie'd purchased. At excursion's end It melded back into the darkness, and–infuriatingly–refused to let her read even the titles of the volumes present in the night's haul. All of them were blurred, repced with asterisks, just like the rest of Callie's future.

  She heaved the bag onto her bed in darkness. Something unanticipated cushioned it, silencing any groan out of her mattress. On closer inspection with the light on she discovered why: an unfamiliar pillow, long, white, and oblong cylindrical, rested underneath it on her bed. There was in accompaniment a note written on stationary featuring a parade of tropical fruits:

  Callie,

  This came for u today. It was big so I unboxed it. Sorry!

  P.S: u a FREAK!!

  She crumpled it. "Why're you buying me fucking body pillows, now?!" She griped into the empty room. No answer. Typical; whatever. Who cared what Ettie bought if it wasn't with her money or btantly illegal. Turning the pillow over made the thing marginally less cringeworthy too–at least it was bnk on all sides and cked a sexualized drawing of an anime character. It did look comfortable.

  She let the pillow remain while she executed her nocturnal rituals. There wasn't really a good pce to put it besides her bed–it being almost as tall as she was. The inconvenience of moving it eroded some of her resistance: by the time she fell asleep, all four of her limbs were wrapped close around the cloudlike cushion. With it embraced, the smooth clouds of sleep rolled over her mind easily.

  She woke in the dead of night unable to move. Usually sleep began with her facing out over the edge of the bed towards the door, and only ter would she toss and turn to a new orientation. She was now in the opposite direction, facing at the wall instead. Which meant she had no hope of seeing the malevolent presence that was definitely behind her in the doorframe; she felt It as surely as she felt that she had eyes, or skin, or bones. Was it good or bad that she was frozen?

  "Ettie?" She thought, unable to speak, too. The paralysis persisted; every step the Presence took closer made her heart pound harder against her chest. At this rate, it'd shatter her ribs before she moved a muscle.

  It was right behind her now. Whatever It was, It didn't breathe. It didn't blink. It didn't sleep. In her terror she breathed enough for the both of them, and blinked or slept not one wink. What could It possibly want? Was It just one of Ettie's pranks? Or–she felt panicked to consider it–did Marie somehow return and break through Its protection, and was now readying to strike…

  Then It disappeared completely, along with her paralysis. Calliope held the body pillow closer to extract as much comfort as she could. After all that, she needed–

  Her arms wrapped around Esther's torso instead. Her left wrist sank an inch against two soft mounds over her chest. There was warm bare skin against her knees.

  Calliope froze, this time of her own volition. She didn't dare let go and risk Its ire. She didn't dare pull It closer to her, either. Her mind was a jumble of fear and sapphisms: Why was It doing this? What purpose could Ettie have in taking the pce of the body pillow to pretend to be her little spoon? None whatsoever… but oh, she was soft. So soft; so sinfully soft. It wore a kind of bck silk negligee or nightgown that ended just above the knee, from the few angles she could see peering down Its shoulder. That expined why her lower legs were in sensory paradise: Ettie's were uncovered past that point and felt smoother than a sphere manufactured by a precision ser. So, so perfect. Calliope didn't deserve this.

  It thought otherwise: Ettie snuggled closer, still without a word, and she caught a whiff of a divine sweet scent in Its hair. Even a single hint of it made her feel drunk. Calliope allowed their hug to deepen, but only at the shoulders; she pulled her hips back so that they didn't touch between knee and waist. It'd be too awkward otherwise: despite knowing It wasn't real, despite knowing Its true nature, she couldn't help but be aroused at having an attractive woman in her arms. Her best bet was staying up and hoping that arousal went away by morning.

  Or… she could simply sleep. Esther was supremely comfortable in her arms. The fear was the only thing still keeping her awake, and once she heard Ettie release the tiniest contented hum it was hard to remain afraid anymore. Wholesomeness won out no matter how eldritch its origin. When she next fell asleep, it was with the Monster in her arms; she was embracing It.

  gremnoire