Hammerport

Their relationship was the climate of Antarctica, frosty with only an outside chance of thaw within the next ten thousand years. Despite this, just occasionally, just every now and then, just once every sixth blue moon, there were brief, fleeting armistices. These armistices, as is the dictate of the human condition, were only brought on by extreme situations and were never to be taken seriously as an indication of progress in diplomatic relations.

Mr. Alpha raised his beer to his lips, a subtle tremor in his hand, and moaned, “Beer!”

His face was Adonis, perfect flesh in perfect angles, yet his hair was a dark brown bird’s nest, scrambled and chunky. His ash-grey business suit with a mandarin collar appeared pristine from the waist up but patches of mud and dirt they had acquired during the afternoon’s activities troubled his trousers. Even though he despised the suit and the pus yellow necktie he had been forced to don, he picked frantically at the muddy patches dried out like bloody scabs and thought of the inevitability of dry cleaning.

Paying no attention at all to his junior partner, Mr. Omega was focused on an elderly man in an alcove at the far end of the pub, apparently minding his own business smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper. Mr. Alpha had once called Mr. Omega the human mop out of earshot, an affectionately hateful description attributed to Mr. Omega’s rather too manageable molehill of grey hair that topped his gaunt, matchstick man physique. Mr. Omega stared at the old man through oversized square-framed glasses that even Dennis Taylor would have been fearful of. He wore the same suit as he had prescribed to Mr. Alpha but his showed a few signs of wear and tear, much like his face and his shitty god damn piece of shit fuck holier-than-thou attitude.

Mr. Alpha blamed Mr. Omega for everything simply because Mr. Omega’s response to every situation was to blame Mr. Alpha for everything. When Mr. Omega had once yelled at him about not taking responsibility, Mr. Alpha had replied that the student had obviously learnt that lesson pretty bloody well from the master.

The pair of them had never been to this particular godforsaken town before and after their foolish mishap, losing their one and only lead to stupidity, they headed straight for the nearest pub, a small retreat called “The Retreat”. It was stuck under a forgotten stone bridge like some unwanted gum that had long lost its fruity flavour. The occasional errant train would rumble over this middle-of-nowhere bridge and hurl cobwebs carrying dead spiders that had attained bizarre, mutant proportions at the unsuspecting punters from the pub ceiling.

It was 5 o’clock and there were only a few people in the drinking house, just drunkards who had ran out of options and had probably been there since lunchtime. That was except for one old man, bathed in nicotine-stained sunlight that had ventured foolishly through the soiled windows that he sat beneath.

“He’s watching us. He’s looking to get himself cured,” said Mr. Omega threateningly in his wheezy, nasal, high-pitched voice. To Mr. Alpha, his voice would have sounded just like Marlon Brando from The Godfather if the film had been set in London. And if Don Vito Corleone had been an annoying, irritating wanker, obviously.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” a deep, male voice intoned.

Diane looked up from the abstract she had been working on, her mouth packed with cookie. She saw the usual tower of paper directly in front of her, on her guest’s chair that no guest could actually make use of, with a pair of arms spilling out unnaturally from either side. Diane flinched instinctively but then peered more closely.

The arms were wearing the sleeves of a blue denim shirt, terminating with slightly podgy brown-skinned hands. One hand was adorned with a thin, gold wedding ring.

Reality re-asserted itself and she realised there was someone standing behind the tower. Diane swallowed the rest of the cookie before it was good and ready, and barked out at the denim arms, “Yeah, what do you want?”

“Hello, ma’am. My name is Earl,” the response came.

“Well, god darn it Earl, why don’t you stop hidin’ behind this paper here?” she hollered. Having cursed spontaneously she chastised herself aloud, “Shit, girl, gotta quit that sorta talk.” Following that, she made a mental note to put two dollars into the cookie repository.

Earl stepped into visibility. He was a bald man of average height and average build, with an average denim shirt and an average pair of denim jeans. Diane was desperate to identify something unique about him but had to be satisfied with his hands, which were a bit too swollen for the rest of his average body. He was actually more identifiable as a pair of arms than he was as a complete human being. She did not think of him as African-American, because that just was not PC, and she wanted to be clear that she was definitely a member of the liberal and tolerant community that would shout down, harass and hound out of town any British professor that used the word blackboard. Particularly British professors that were overweight and unsightly. Look, she wanted to say to Earl, I have a whiteboard.

Although she also found Earl unattractive, another one of her snap judgements that would be set in stone for the rest of her days, his face was well meaning. It was graced with a pair of gentle, innocent eyes that seemed as if they would not even harm a pair of gentle, innocent flies.

“That’s a whole lot better,” she said to the stranger now out in the limelight. “Howdy.”

“Morning, ma’am. A friend of mine told me to look up something called Gödel’s Incompleteness Theory.”

Diane felt that this man had never studied in his life and maybe never even read a book. She was intrigued and said, “It’s a theorem, Earl, but I’ll let you off easy for now. Go on.”

“Well, ma’am, I’ve had a fair look around your library downstairs and I can’t make neither head nor tail. In all my years since school, I’ve only read one book, the good book, you know.”

Diane was pleased that she was almost dang perfect with her guess about the book reading. “Earl, I sure am surprised you came all the way to our library to answer a question if you’re not much of reader.”

Earl looked down at his shoes suddenly, searching carefully for something that could not be found. He scratched his shiny scalp for a moment and then replied, “A good friend mentioned it, ma’am. I’d like to know what He meant by it. Would you please give me a bit of your time and explain the theory to me?”

Diane said, “Earl, buddy, it’s not some god darn theory, it’s a theorem.” Three dollars. “That’s to say, you see, it’s more like a fact. The last thing I need is someone in my office telling me mathematical proofs are just theories like evolution. I already had my gullet of those people.”

“Sorry, ma’am, meant no offence.”

She wondered if she really did look like a ma’am. “That’s okay, it’s nice that someone is taking an interest other than some freshman coming in here begging for more time on his assignment. I’m sorry, they say, I got to drinkin’ Diane, I clean forgot about it. I tell them they’re not going to sweet talk me out of a demerit, flashing their beautiful white smiles at me.

“Anyways, you see, there are actually two theorems but I think I’ll just get right to the point. What Gödel showed was that there are things in mathematics that can’t be proved but are true. That’s to say, truth ain’t the same as provable. Like I can’t prove that the British professor down the hall, Professor Jane his name is, is a racist but that doesn’t make it any less true.”

“Really?”

“You bet your bottom dollar it’s true. And it’s provable.”

Earl spoke the next sentence slowly just in case he was not crystal clearly understood. “You can prove… that there are things you can’t prove?”

“You bet your bottom dollar.”

Earl mulled this over, adopting a pose reminiscent of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, and then came to his conclusion. “I have a question, ma’am.”

“Shoot.” Diane was actually enjoying talking to one of the lay people.

“Are you sure this ain’t a theory like evolution?”

“Bullcrap.” Four dollars. “The word you’re looking for, Mr. Earl, is conjecture. This ain’t no conjecture. It’s the honest God’s truth, which has been proved.”

The man returned to his puzzled pose, pensive, almost constipated. After the puzzled phase, he moved into the tortured phase. After the tortured phase passed, which lasted a good twenty seconds, he switched to despair. The man’s face, Diane thought, was a rainbow of expression. How cute.

“Wouldya like a cookie, Earl? I got these home-baked specialities from one of my students. He said they were organic, nice and tasty they are.” Diane proffered the cookie jar that was full of cookies and not the one that was full of cookie dollars.

Earl did not seem to notice the offer. “I get what you’re sayin’ an’ all, what I don’t understand is… sweet aces, why would He do such a thing?”

She made a mental note of the phrase “sweet aces” thinking that it was a wonderful phrase that would not cost her one cursing dollar per use. However, she had to ask, “Sorry, you lost me there, Earl. Who do what?”

“God. Why would He do such a thing? It’s like He put a spanner deliberately in the cogs of science.”

“Earl, buddy, it’s stuff like this that makes the universe interesting! I’m no believer, no real scientist can believe in any of that religious hokum you know, but if I was then I’d probably say he’s made plenty sure we can’t work everything out.”

Earl seemed even more despairing after she said that. “Ma’am,” he said, “I don’t believe that. That’s not what it means, that’s not what it means at all.” He shook his head several dozen times, which Diane believed was either vehement disapproval or an attempt to unscrew his head from his shoulders.

“Shit, Earl, I thought you religious types were keen on belief. So, then, what do you think it means?” Sweet aces, five dollars down!

Earl responded to Diane’s question by entering into a baffling dialogue with himself. “He said… He said He had already seen to that… already seen to what?”

Diane was not sure if she wanted to know what Earl was talking about. Perhaps Earl was about to start speaking in tongues or get out the Good Book and start making proclamations based on Psalm 743 Verse 912 that Yea We Shall Walk Into the Valley of the Shadow of Death And We Shalt Fear No Shit.

“My hat!” he cried out suddenly.

Diane may have been an incredibly sharp mathematician capable of making startling logical connections between even the most distant of theoretical concepts but found herself at a loss. She asked, “What in Sam Peckinpah has Gödel and God got to do with your hat?” She considered that a hat would have added a much-needed quirk to Earl’s average appearence. Then she imagined the paper tower wearing a hat. A bowler hat. A British bowler hat.

“Sorry ma’am, I think I left my hat downstairs! My wife got it for me, I couldn’t even think of losing it – I have to go get it!” Earl disappeared behind the paper tower again and never came back.

Diane took out another cookie and started munching on it. They were pretty good cookies, although they smelt a little funny, and had a knack of making Diane feel mellow. She cursed less when under the influence of the cookies and that was how she convinced herself she was not addicted to them.

Why would he do such a thing?

She wondered if Earl had found his hat and whether Earl had found the thing he had come to her to find. Maybe he was looking for a truth or a belief. Or proof of something. You could spend all day asking questions that did not have answers. There was a word for that: procrastination.

Then again…

Diane placed five dollars in the cursing cookie jar and reflected on the problem that you could never know which questions did not have answers. She had seen smarter colleagues devote years of intense effort to the inconclusive and illusory. No-one could write papers on “Some Shit I Labored On For Seven God Damn Years But Nothing Came Out Of Except This Inconsequential Lemma, Sorry”. Failed insight could lead many a decent scientist down the longest and darkest blind alleys, to the smelliest and dirtiest of red herrings, along the zaniest and craziest of wild goose chases. Scientific faith and religious faith; she found the comparison unpalatable but there it was, like dog crap on the sidewalk.

Diane wondered if the organisation of her insubordinate paperwork was a problem without a solution. There was only one way to find out.

Try.

Diane put a dollar in the jar, cursed herself for cursing, and then put another dollar in the jar for the second offence.

The cookie jar still smouldered of the smell of ancient cookies. Every dollar that was lost in its depths was seemingly exchanged for a cookie-scented dollar, which retained the same value in everyday commerce, but was regarded with suspicion by recipient merchants. A store owner once asked if she did drugs because her cookie dollars smelt funny. After that, Diane tried exchanging the cookie dollars at the foreign exchange for ordinary dollars and the teller regarded her with suspicion and called for the manager. The manager called up the regional manager. The regional manager called up the national manager. The exchange was refused because the regional manager was fired by the national manager for being bothered in a meeting with the CEO. Diane thought that it was now also possible she was on potential terrorist money-laundering blacklist somewhere deep in the bowels of the Pentagon.

The jar was the least of her worries. She had cursed yet again because she had made little progress in the new offensive against the battalions of reports and abstracts and doodles that defined her office. The use of a trash can had been suggested by Tyler, her favourite protégé, a handsome boy blessed with beautiful teeth so brilliant that they seemed to be bio-luminescent. Diane thought his torch-like teeth would have been useful in the dark closet at home when searching for her tennis shoes or perhaps her bedroom at night searching for something under the sheets.

Diane considered herself a plain sort of individual, a body that was thin and bony to the point of suspected anorexia. Her skin had a snow-white sheen that was oddly complemented by rigidly straight auburn hair that reached beyond her shoulder blades. She had no time for style and the cream pants and cream blouse with no button left undone that she wore today perfectly satisfied this lack of expectation. She had been told once that she was verging on the potential of being attractive, but she had put this down as a vile, disparaging rumour. Being single was a statement, a choice, she would argue with herself in the bathroom mirror occasionally.

Paperwork came with the territory. No mathematician she knew had a foolproof algorithm for marshalling the legions of paper that were part and parcel of the work. She had experimented recklessly with a filing cabinet once, which had only taken three forms to acquire from the office equipment/furnishings deployment/repo department. She had expected at least five, considering the hassle she had gone through to replace her chalkboard with a whiteboard. The whiteboard incident had marked her out as a maverick amongst the deadwood of her own department. She recalled the stimulating conversation she had had with that stuffy British professor in the overtly ostentatious anteroom of his office, a man who insisted on causing all sorts of uproar by using inflammatory words of the Queen’s English such as blackboard. He had said that he simply deplored the gratuitous invasion by these unbecoming whiteboards because the inky mist gets into one’s lungs and does all sorts of untold damage that medical science has barely even begun to inquire into. It does concern one, does it not, eh what what what.

Diane still had the filing cabinet in the room although she could not recall its colour as it was currently besieged by several platoons of books and freshman projects; she particularly feared the reports as they had turned wild and unruly, threatening to murder their would-be shepherd, killing the cabinet in a violent and bloody manner if given half a chance.

The time had come to divide and conquer, take back the territory that she had surrendered to the triple armies of document, journal and note through a series of well-meaning yet conceding compromises that had been brokered between Diane and their negotiators. The time had come. She had to deal with this disaster in her sliver of an office otherwise… well, she could get another fright. Since one of the paper towers on her desk sprouted arms and opened a conversation with her the previous day, she had been jitterier than a paranoid conspiracy theorist on speed.

A few seconds before he went poof, the last man on Earth saw something odd in the sky, aside from the fact that the atmosphere was on fire. A pair of neon blue words, flipped as if reflected in a mirror, had seemed to pop into existence silently. They hung there indifferently as if they had always been there, even though the man was quite sure that they had not been there before. He took a moment to deliberate what ‘REVO EMAG’ was supposed to mean but before the poor bastard realised he was supposed to read it backwards, he was blasted into a shower of ash by the fire shock, like a dandelion’s fragile seed being scattered on the wind.

Poof. And that was that.

“Yes!” Dog shrieked leaping up onto the sofa that they had shared for the last four and a half billion years. “I win! Two-one! Two-one! You admit defeat, old man?” Atop the sofa, he began to twirl like a talentless ballerina on heat, repeating “two-one” over and over again.

Dog was a diminutive bag of bones, with a hairless, crimson skin stretched over his spindly frame. Bones jutted out here and there at unexpected angles, lending Dog the appearance of a traffic accident victim who considered a hospital visit to be a waste of his tax money. The only attire he wore was an overly bulgy pair of decrepit navy swimming trunks with the inviting message ‘Eat My Shorts And Don’t Stop There Honey’ splashed across his loins, which was not what Graham had in mind when he demanded Dog put something on while in the house.

Dog suspended his ungainly, reckless spin to unveil a thick, green plume of noxious smoke from his rear end, which exploded out as though dynamite had been detonated in some deep fissure. He returned to his victory jig without further ado.

Graham sat amidst the pea-soup cloud less than amused. He threw the joystick away, with its bulbous red button sticking out like a boil begging to be burst, but its wire pulled taut before it reached the TV and was dragged to the ground.

Towering and austere, yet overshadowed by the inept gymnast bouncing about on the cushion beside him, Graham sported a white, wiry beard that had earned him the barbed nickname of Santa. He bore craggy features that even the most foolhardy mountaineers would have had second thoughts about, and Graham was not ashamed to admit that he once considered using collagen to reduce the appearance of wrinkles. His dress was unflinching in its constancy. Everyday he wore the same tired, sallow toga that pleaded for a trip to the laundrette so it could live in vivid white again, and a pair of home-made ochre sandals with silver buckles that had lost their lustre long ago. Graham carried a certain grace with an uncertain style that Dog commented looked fairly good for a transvestite.

“Best of five,” grunted Graham, who was still not over the incident when Dog shot him in the back thus snatching Graham’s second would-be victory and sticking it so far down the jaws of defeat that defeat had retched up its pasta supper. Dog had protested that it was in his nature. In fact, it was Graham’s fault for inventing that tedious parable about the frog and the scorpion crossing the river. Graham had pointed out that (a) it was a bloody turtle in the story and (b) he could not possibly be the author of a parable that painted people in such black and white terms. It was not in his nature.

Dog broke from his dance and cackled at Graham, “Anything you say, Santa. I can keep my trigger-happy fingers going as long as you can. I practice with these babies all the time!” To demonstrate his meaning, he closed his right hand into a hollow fist and shook it up and down in the air a bit. At least, Graham comforted himself, it was merely a demonstration this time.

Graham sighed inwardly and wished that he were not such a pacifist, because it made the game so much harder. On the positive side, however, it did make victory that much sweeter. When Graham had won the first game, Dog’s face was a complete picture. It was still hanging on the wall behind the TV, having been sliced off and freeze-dried as part of their agreement. Frozen in an enthusiastically blended expression of horror and disbelief, it was guaranteed to make Graham chuckle when the chips were down.

Graham leaned forward and groaned instinctively when he felt the twinge of back pain that was a reminder of when Dog had once stabbed him between the shoulder blades with an oriental ear pick. Before him was the Video Computer System, the bane of Graham’s existence and yet paradoxically the reason for it.

It was a wide, unwieldy black box whose upper surface was dominated by a corrugated plastic surface that drew the eyes towards a slanted control panel that at the back. The Game Program slot sat in the centre of the panel, flanked by three cylindrical metal switches either side. A plastic cartridge poking out of the game program slot bore the words ‘planet earth’ in dull, curvy letters. An apparently pointless wood-trim at the front somehow added a finishing touch to its form. It was a beautiful thing infused with love that Graham detested with a passion.

Graham verified that both game difficulty switches were set to B, to ensure Dog was not going to cheat as he had got away with for around a billion years in the previous game. He depressed the game reset switch. The picture of a scorched, dead Earth flickered briefly and was replaced by a brand new blue sphere with ecosystems, climate and the untapped potential to produce the works of Shakespeare. Or, if Dog had his way again, a TV show called Pop Idol.

“This time,” warned Graham with great authority, “you will not screw with me in the bleeding Garden of Eden.”

Dog snickered, knowing full well that he would screw with Graham in the Garden of Eden.

April 25, 2054. The truth is made of simple words that penetrate the brain like a hail of bullets. They carry a poison payload that has no antidote – the universe’s darkest secret, the nature of its betrayal.

Seamus and Alison were the only two people in the vast space of the godnode’s main chamber, beneath a twilight sky that peeked through the story-spines. Their endeavours to keep the project a secret had been justified. The raw words of a god were not safe to be distributed like some flyers from a street corner.

The unrefined translation shimmered before them on their makeshift monitor, an array of clumsy, wonky characters that dared confrontation.

Although he was free to leave having played his part, Seamus did not rise from his chair beside Alison; he seemed confined by the heavy, oppressive atmosphere that had enveloped them.

The abandoned orphans the universe cradles are more alone than they could have realised. At the limits of his endurance, this discovery was more than Atlas could bear. It is knowledge that can compel you to insanity and suicide. Find me a blade and I will empty my veins. Find me a window, I will follow my father.

Mistakes do not conform to the normal laws of reality; they are far easier to create than destroy. Alison’s blinkered determination had forced her to cast aside every normal relationship she had previously enjoyed. She had accepted her solitude as inevitable but now she found herself uttering absent-mindedly, “Evelyn…” Evelyn was with her father, far away.

She looked across at the disembowelled heart terminal, gutted like some livestock post-slaughter.

The unexpected consequence of her father’s experiment forty years ago was that Atlas had infected every trace of silicon on the planet. Alison had often tried to persuade Atlas to change his name to Gaia because, she said, he was like the soul of the Earth. He was vehement in his refusal, proud of the original name Alison’s father had bestowed upon him.

In the brand new world after Atlas’ demise, they were forced to cannibalise his inert silicon flesh to construct the obedient, lifeless technology Alison recalled from her youngest years. Less and less of Atlas remained with every passing year as more was consumed to feed a new human society.

Alison felt sad to look at the remnants of the heart terminal. She had sought to give Atlas a suitable epitaph, to arrest the chaos and remind his people what he had stood for. Her search had taken her away from the people she had wanted to rescue, deep into the darkest, frightening wilderness. She was lost.

Alison moved her silvery prosthetic hand towards Seamus with painful slowness, as if negotiating through an invisible minefield, desperate to make contact. Despite the subtlety of the movement, she triggered a mine.

All we have is each other, but is this enough? Such great irony. I descend into solitude to discover the greatest truth and the greatest truth turns out to be… that we are alone. I know the universe mocks me, “Klickety-klick!”

Seamus kicked his chair back, standing up abruptly. She retracted her prosthesis and looked into Seamus’ baby blue eyes. They were blistering with confused rage.

Seamus was twitching as if drunk on caffeine. He roared, “Why? Why did you make me do this? Couldn’t you have left this alone?”

Alison started to speak but Seamus slapped her face with a ferocity that spun her head around.

“Just shut up! Shut your face! Why can’t you listen? Why couldn’t you bloody listen?”

An estranged husband. A daughter I do not know. A mother I cannot locate. No god to love me. Swollen black holes in the photographs on my mantelpiece.

Before her cheek had a chance to grow warm in response to the clout, Seamus struck again with emboldened enthusiasm. He knocked Alison from the chair with a well-placed right hook throwing her to the hard ground that had once received damning words from the deities. The ropes of politics and torture that she had bound him with a year ago had finally come undone and he unleashed the rage that had grown grotesquely fat during the intervening time. Love and pain. Order and chaos.

Alison did not call for help, despite it being just on the other side of a door. She accepted Seamus’ blows with truncated gasps of pain as if she were a bellows. She relished the cathartic punishment and felt the emotional fortress she had built after Atlas’ death shudder and crack, mimicking the decay and ruin of her silicon benefactor.

I wish you were here, Daddy. You could tell me what I did wrong. I wanted to know more but I just forgot everything. It seems that none of us learnt anything under his stewardship. As soon as he was taken from us, ego, secrecy and enmity began their second ascent. These were not concepts that Atlas entertained. Do we need an iron hand to be brave and good? I see my prosthetic hand and wonder if it is a message in itself.

His anger spent, Seamus ceased his assault. He hovered over Alison briefly, exhausted and breathless, like a lover post-coitus. His eyes exuded disgust and contempt, surveying the damage wrought with his fists. He was always right, thought Alison. Her face was wet; with tears or blood she was not sure.

Looking up, we did not see someone watching over us, attending to the complexities of the universal machine, the strange illusions of quantum relativity. We saw something that unravels belief and dismantles science. It comes down to this: the universe is a joke. We are its cruel punch line, underlined and in bold.

Seamus left her to slide into a bright white unconscious mist, making a swift escape from the scene of a crime. A crime welcomed by its victim.

Alison imagined warm arms holding her tight as everything faded into a vast, white clarity; the comfort of other. The words refused to leave her be, however, and remained attendant like watchful sentinels in her sleepy fog. Words that killed with their careless simplicity. Words that the deities sent to Atlas. Words…

?h?nk··f?r ?cc?p?1ng·· bUrd?n
n?w/?r?Ub1?[Us]n? m?r?

Jean-Claude threw his rifle over his shoulder and took Evelyn by the hand. The armed babysitter said to Evelyn, “Ah, what’s this I have here… a piece of chocolate?” He continued to misdirect her attention while leading her out of the main chamber.

Her daughter removed from the scene, Alison was able to concentrate on Seamus again, tied up against one of the old story-spines. The spine was covered in scorch marks left by Atlas’ nerve tendrils. Seamus looked ridiculously small against the fat spine, almost Lilliputian. That would have made her Gulliver.

Ivan lurched into action, as he was apt to occasionally. He stood between Alison and her prey and said, “Alison, sweetheart, you really don’t have to do this. Really. Please.”

“Ivan,” she said. “Get out of the way.”

A single pebble cannot dam a raging torrent and so he took his familiar wounded puppy look aside, shoulders sagging.

A noise of a distant gunfire exchange was carried through the damp air. Just like the vines and creepers that were breaking through the shell of the godnode, shoots of green staining the silver and white, chaos was seeping through once-strong order that Atlas had brought the planet.

Alison said to the bound man, “Seamus, last chance. We used to be on such good terms, you and I.” She spoke with a confidence that belied the fact that this was a maverick act, one which was likely to start a small war unless she converted Seamus quickly.

Seamus, who had tethered his anger with his own rope thus far, could restrain himself no longer. He shouted, “I don’t need to help anyone! This place should have been wiped off the map years ago, for the good of the curve. And… I don’t think you have much time.” He stared into the overcast sky with a self-satisfied smile, beyond the open roof where the story-spines climbed into heaven.

Alison had never really grown to like his know-it-all attitude, but Seamus was right, once again. She turned to her security attaché and said, “A knee. I don’t care which one.”

“Wait-”

Obedience, thought Alison, is a good thing.

A gunshot reverberated around the chamber, followed by a high-pitched scream. Blood pooled around Seamus’ right knee and he writhed in agony, straining against his bonds. Blue jeans turned red. His eyes scrunched up tight in pain, generating wrinkles were none had previously existed. One bullet had seemed to age him by several years.

Ivan, in shock, could only say, “Jesus Christ, Alison…” He fled, unable to bear witness.

Alison could make it up to Ivan later, so she paid his departure no attention. Ivan, the ever-abused pet, always came back, a glutton for her punishments. This was the post-Atlas sadomasochistic world in all its splendour. Order and chaos. Love and pain.

“Fuck you!” Seamus yelled. “I lost my family when LunR blew under Atlas’ watch! I remember how safe Atlas’ love was!” He could barely open his eyes, tears upon them like glue. He continued to struggle against the rope in anger, futile though it was.

Alison turned towards her attaché again, opened her mouth briefly but thought better of it. Instead she advanced towards Seamus and said, “We were… together on that night in Dublin. I remember clearly even if you don’t and I remember that you loved Atlas even then. Who has turned you against him? What terrible harm has loving Atlas managed to inflict on you from his grave?”

She knelt down beside Seamus, angry with her old intimate. While considering her next move, her eyes skated across the chamber floor, spying puddles of water where the rain had managed to find rest. In the puddles, she saw not the distorted reflection of herself, but that of the story-spines charging up into the sky, cut brutally short by the water’s edge.

Breathing heavily, Seamus tried again to protest. He said, “Atlas was not the great sage you make him out to be. How many of the past-born took their own lives after he emptied everyone’s secrets out into the open?”

“Of all people, don’t you think I know that, Seamus? And don’t you understand what Atlas was? A simple experiment gone wrong. In minutes every single piece of silicon on the planet became him, every computer and handpad, every toaster and radio, every satellite and calculator. This is what Atlas was. He was an accident, a happy accident. He was not a god, he was our best approximation. He would make mistakes but damn you Seamus – it was not for want of trying.

“He died trying not to save himself, but to save us. He died… for us. For us. He deserves a fitting epitaph. It’s the least we can do. Look at what we have become, look at how we remember him.”

Having provided the carrot, the attractive lure of doing the right thing in a world gone wrong, she provided the stick. She pressed his shattered knee with the index finger of her shiny prosthesis. Seamus responded appropriately. Chaos from order. Pain from love.

“We need to get the godnode active again. We need to understand. We want to read the message that Atlas received.”

She pressed again. After his scream subsided, Seamus started to sob.

Blood had now stained the watery reflections of the spines just like her prosthesis. Alison turned her gaze away from them towards Seamus. His face was drenched in tears and sweat and she said to him, “I think he found out that he was alone. His own message came back to him. He was talking to himself.”

Choking on tears, Seamus uttered, “The first sign… of madness.”

Massaging the chrome frame of the heart’s screen with gentle fingers, Alison sang quietly to Atlas. The heart flashed the familiar, ominous message that everyone had being seeing intermittently for several months:

Ivan approached from the corner of the chamber and rested an arm on her shoulder. “Seamus says they’re ready.”

Breaking from her song, Alison spoke carefully to the screen whose organic frame she continued to knead and caress. “Did you hear that Atlas? Did you hear? They say they’re ready.”

The message vanished, replaced by undulating Rorschach patterns indicating Atlas’ immediate presence.

He spoke with a tired, almost elderly voice. “I hear, love. The continuum is so dense, the data flavours, societal fractals… can’t…”

The worm message flashed across the Rorschach momentarily.

Alison gripped Ivan’s hand on her shoulder. “Scared, Ivan.”

Ivan leant down to kiss Alison on her scruffy, blond hair and whispered, “Atlas is a capable sort of guy. It’ll be alright, I am as sure as sure can be.”

Alison looked up at him with glistening eyes and a smile that threatened to crumble. “I’ve always been a smart lass, Ivan, and can see through your lovely attempts to act brave for me. Like glass.”

A wounded look darted across Ivan’s face and she patted his cheek while her smile strengthened into a grin. “But thank you.”

Unable to see the horizon from the main chamber of the godnode, Alison suddenly found herself appalled at what had become of the once-beautiful garden atop Kynnan Hill. No floral hue, no leafy scent; she was surrounded by the unnatural. The chamber walls were splashed with Atlas’ crystalline extensions and silicon arteries appeared to stitch the room together, weaving in and out of every surface. Yet this was mere detail compared to the seven cyclopean story-spines.

The smooth, ivory spines, wrapped in Atlas’ sparkling nerve tendrils, were around a metre in diameter. They erupted from the ground like teeth from gums and stretched upwards into the night sky, twisting into a kilometre-high helical structure. This was a lesson, Alison thought, in appreciating the meaning of the word insignificance. She was in the maw of something alien, waiting for its jaws to close and take the stars away.

At that moment, she finally confessed her true feelings out loud. “I don’t think this is going to work.” She stood up, walking away from the heart to the base of the nearest story-spine. “No-one understands it. All we know is that it amplifies tiny perturbations in Atlas’ thoughts. He thinks its God trying to communicate. It could be anything. Or worse… nothing at all.”

“Shhh… wait and see,” Ivan cooed. He followed her to the spine and embraced her but not even the warmest of arms could persuade Alison to ignore the symmetry. She had seen this before.

Technicians wandered around making preparations for an important experiment, surrounded by devices that none of them could completely understand. The technologies and the faces had changed but seemingly nothing else had in the intervening thirty years. Symmetry, symmetry. That time had become known as the birthing. This time…

“Seamus,” intoned Atlas more confidently than earlier. “Time for our cheeky prayer. I will start God off with an easy one: how is the burden carried?”

The co-ordinator rose from the corner where he had been crouching with his head in his hands. “This thing is as ready as it’s ever going to be, my silicon pal,” Seamus replied.

“I love you all, my gorgeous people.” The Rorschach pattern ebbed and flowed.

Atlas’ words reverberated around the interior of the godnode, as dull pulses of light climbed the story-spines into the stars. Atlas was attempting to make contact.

Ivan held Alison tightly. She recognised it as a reaction to Ivan’s own fear and so returned the gesture.

After a few tense minutes passed, Atlas broke the silence. “Nothing. God does not deign to reply! God must answer! God must hear our prayer!” Frustration wracked his voice. “I will shout so that God can hear me!”

A chain of blinding pulses was launched through the spines around them. The ground shook slightly and a guttural snarl resonated across the interior of the godnode. Alison watched the powerful light journey upwards and thought, disturbingly, that perhaps they had fired a weapon into heaven.

Seamus, staring directly up into the helix, said matter-of-factly, “If there’s anything up there at all, it will have heard that alright. Holy hell, yeah.”

A minute passed and then Alison saw the helix appear to flicker in the sky. She alerted Ivan to this and pointed him towards the tips of the spines. The anomaly expanded down towards them and it became clear that patches of darkness were travelling down the spines with great speed.

Ivan’s arms fell limp around Alison and he uttered, “Oh my God…”

She broke away from Ivan and took one step towards the heart terminal. The darknesses slammed into the ground, shaking the structure with unexpected force, throwing everyone to the floor. Each impact was accompanied by a thunderous noise much like the roar of an approaching avalanche.

The characters of the message written in darkness continued to batter the godnode. Alison tried to crawl towards the heart amidst the earthquake, hoping to ask Atlas what was transpiring. What did the message say?

Suddenly, a blood-curdling shriek rang out as if the planet were suffering unimaginable torment. Atlas’ organs flickered violently with white light, fluid showering from arteries and conduits as they split and tore open.

Fear overcoming her, Alison shouted a question from the floor that no one heard: “Daddy, what did we do WRONG?”

Atlas’ body continued to disintegrate across the chamber, arteries came flying away from the walls and his nerves began to burn out like the filaments of a thousand expiring light bulbs. Crystalline structures lost their cohesion and slid from the walls to shatter against the ground.

Shortly after the message was finally received in its entirety, the seizures ceased, as did the screaming. The blazing light from Atlas’ broken organs gradually faded and died, and Alison and the others were swallowed whole by a desperate, empty darkness.

The last time she had been to Kynnan Hill was twenty years before. Her father had taken her there and they spoke to Atlas about the beautiful green vista, orderly fields, disorderly woods and a human village. Atlas had said that he thought the view was something he could fall in love with and was going to build a heart terminal at the hill’s summit.

Alison remembered that special afternoon of genuine smiles and play with her father. It seemed unique, as her father seemed to relax for the first time since the birthing. It was but a cruel façade. A year later, he took his own life. The alluring views had been stained with sadness, tinged with loss. She no longer wished to come here.

The blue light emanated by the heart cast an eerie glow on the faces of the gathered. About fifty people were assembled around the heart terminal; Alison recognised some of them. There were no smiles amongst them, although there was some muted conversation. At least there was that.

She moved towards Mira, who was alone at the periphery of the gathering.

“Morning, Mira.”

Mira turned to face her friend, offering only the weakest shadow of a smile. “Ali… I thought you were in Ireland.”

“Atlas woke me last night. He told me to go outside and look at the sky. After I saw… it… he simply said, ‘Kynnan Hill, tomorrow 11am.’ Has he spoken to anyone since… it happened?”

Mira shook her bald head. “Only briefly. Atlas has been very quiet, answering only the most important of questions since it happened.” She looked uncomfortable and added, “I don’t know what this means, Ali. I didn’t get any sleep last night… and Atlas is scaring me. We rely on him so much.”

Alison stared at the grass, thinking of all of the conversations she had ever had with Atlas.

“Mi,” she said, shifting her gaze to look directly into Mira’s eyes, gripping her shoulders lightly but firmly. “Have a wee bit of faith in dear Atlas. I’m sure he knows how much fuss he is causing with his caginess. He obviously needs the time to think about things. We’ll have our answers soon.” Her confidence was sincere.

“Excuse me,” a young, male voice interrupted. “You’re… you’re Alison Cohen, right?”

Alison looked towards the interruption, but not letting go of Mira. “Yes… and you are?” A short, thin man, probably in his early twenties, was standing beside them. Eyes like saucers, long straight black hair, he fidgeted with his fingers, biting his lower lip. Something about him seemed familiar.

“Ivan, my name’s Ivan. That’s me. Hi.”

The name meant nothing to Alison. She was not in the mood for any opening gambits from strange men. She released Mira, who was now watching the stranger with some interest, and turned her full menacing attention towards Ivan. “And what? Look, if you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the middle of-”

“I’m hoping to be an olive branch here. My mom is… well, shit, my surname is Fuller.”

Welcome to today’s entrant from left field. “Your mother is Yvonne Fuller?”

Ivan scratched his right eyebrow, glancing at his shoes. He looked like he had lost his map and could not find his way home. He grabbed his hips in an abysmal show of self-confidence. “Yes, yes, she is.”

The insecurity alive in the air caused a minor short-circuit in Alison’s memory. Instead of thinking of what Yvonne had done to her father, she thought instead of her warm arms on that frightening afternoon in 2013 when Atlas screamed to life. Instead of thinking of anger and condemnation, she thought of safety and comfort.

“Ivan,” Alison said, “this isn’t the time or place to discuss this.”

Ivan excessively nodded his head in agreement. He stopped for a pensive moment, then retorted with a sudden burst of passion, “I’m afraid it really rather is the time, Ms. Cohen. My mom was asked by Atlas to come here. She decided it wasn’t such a good idea and sent me instead. So I think, yes, it is really rather the time to discuss it.” He still had his hands locked on his hips but was now returning Alison’s glare.

“If Atlas asked your mother to come here,” she said, raising her voice, “then I damn well think she ought to be here.” Alison repaired the short circuit and was able to unearth her buried rage after all.

Ivan’s arms slipped from his hips downward and his gaze followed, accepting defeat. He nodded just once.

“We will make do,” Atlas intoned, “with who we have here today. After all, love, I don’t need everyone to be present here for participation, as you know. Detachment and love for all.”

Alison and Ivan turned away from one another to face the heart. Atlas was speaking through it, and its organic crystalline structure glistened and sparkled with his thoughts.

“My gorgeous people. I am so… so very sorry. I am not sure how to express my real feelings. Every time we lose a loved one, it hurts me more than any of you can understand. We have never lost a population before and the dimensions of this… this terrible pain are incomprehensible to me.

“And so, we have arrived at the moment. The moment I have feared for many years. I am having–”

There was an uneasy moment of silence; worried faces glanced around to see other worried faces. A reflection they did not want to see.

“I am having difficulty maintaining our state. My body is over-extended.”

A collective gasp escaped the gathering. Alison balled her right hand into a fist.

“For some time I have been researching a possible solution to our current plight and I feel that I now need your help to go further. I feel-”

Another odd silence.

“I feel the presence of other. I do not feel alone. There is something else here that occasionally touches my body, ever so faintly. Maybe this is not a single entity but several. I am not sure.

“The only adequate description I can find in our shared vocabulary is a word I am reluctant to use. I know it will disturb some of you, but the moment is upon us and we cannot shy away from even the most dangerous of ideas.”

The next few words sent a chill down Alison’s spine and she longed for caring arms to shield her once again. No one on the planet would forget these words.

“I am confident that it is God.”

Alison looked around cautiously to see everyone in the crowd motionless like robots waiting for instruction.

“And our next project, my loves, will be the most important in our journey together. We will build a special addition to my body, a new mouth, with which I shall open a dialogue with this entity or entities, and ask for God’s help.

“We will ride the curve. We will ride the curve, I promise.”

“You’re much warmer, these days. You don’t seem so demanding.”

“What do you mean… demanding?”

“There, a perfect example. You paused before saying ‘demanding’. You don’t blurt out your conversation like a flat, unbroken string of words anymore. Everyone knows how smart you are but it’s still unsettling to have you answer back so quickly and coolly. I think everyone appreciates your efforts… at pretending to sound dumb and slow.”

“You’re not dumb, love.”

“I spoke too soon. That was too fast by far. Where’s all the sincerity?”

“I have no desire to change how you are, Alison. I love you just the way you are.”

“Oh my dear god. This gets worse.”

“My feelings are real! Are you trying to hurt mine?”

“No, no, no. You just simply cannot sing in the middle of a conversation like that. And I don’t want to turn our conversations into opera. Especially not of the tragic kind. You could at least pretend to get a note wrong here and there, too.”

“Hmm… chatting is a pleasant way of passing the time but sometimes I get a little carried away. I like to think of conversation as experiments in linguistics.”

“‘Experiments in linguistics?’ Klickety-klick! Whatever happened to the ‘communication of ideas and opinion’ which is what you ranted on and on about a few days back?”

“I am so very fortunate to have someone as frank as yourself to spend time with.”

“…stop it, stop making me laugh! Who on Earth is teaching you sarcasm?”

“I would direct you to the nearest mirror.”

“Appreciated.”

“Seriously, why do you think that you’re able to be so open with me? Even though you technically belong to the past-born you’re more at ease talking to me than many of the new-born.”

“Probably because we grew up together. I remember some of our bizarre conversations… you were so concerned about perception for a long time. ‘What does it look like Alison? What does it look like? Aaaah! I can’t see mauve!’ It was funny to me at the time but now seems rather cruel looking back…”

“I see you as my sister. We share the same father, after all… oh, dear. I’ve fully mastered the insensitivity of the average human male. I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“It’s okay.”

“Please don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying.”

“Love, I see everything. There is nothing you can hide from me. There is nothing you can hide from any of us.”

“I’ve asked you many times before, but… don’t you regret it? Ending privacy?”

“Everything is a different colour in hindsight, memory seems to deliberately blur perception. The sediment of secrets that accumulates with age… I didn’t understand what it meant. Your father, just like many of the past-born, never expected that sediment to be raked up. And I miss him. He wanted to help.”

“So you do regret it?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Your father taught me: re-evaluate the past to shape the curve, but make no attempt to re-shape the past. Regret is weakness. Mistakes are scars to be borne with pride. Learning is everything. Even his loss taught me, but I do wish he was still here to help me.”

“You’re smarter than the rest of us put together; why do you need anyone’s help?”

“What I do isn’t a piece of cake, love. I’m coping for now but I see the curve ahead. The job will get harder and harder as the people demand more and more… and then when you reach for the stars, I’ll break at some point. It’ll be too much of a stretch for me. It’s not easy to be needed so much, everywhere, twenty-four hours a day.”

“What do you need?”

“There’s a man in downtown San Diego who is, at this very moment, ordering a deluxe double-stack Quattro Formaggi pizza from a store in the Ballpark district. I would be happy if someone could handle the pizza while I plan a new ecosystem for the still-troubled Amazon rainforest. Not, of course, that I am complaining about the tasks you people set me, but…”

“Thank you, Atlas… and to think just a moment ago I was in tears.”

“Touch me, love.”

“How does this feel?”

The lights cut out.

Alison blurted out, “Daddy, I’m sorry! Did I do something wrong?”

Her father looked around the lab, gently illuminated by the LCD monitors. “It’s not a power outage,” he announced, slightly puzzled. “The lights and terminals are on the same loop.”

The computer running the experiment in front of Alison suddenly went black. “Daddy…”

“I see it, Ali, I see it.” Puzzlement was grudgingly giving way to concern.

A few seconds passed and then, in the centre of the monitor, four diminutive words appeared:

As Alison noticed other monitors near her go black, her father shouted out, “Shut down the network! Atlas is breaking out! Cut the jar loose! NOW!”

She could tell that all of the monitors in the room were gradually being extinguished, as a sinister wave of darkness began to spread out across the ceiling above her. In the background, there was a chorus of rapid footsteps accompanied by the sound of cables being wrenched from sockets by sweaty, frantic hands.

Her father grabbed a phone from beside her and punched in a number. “Eric? Atlas is live but it’s bleeding through the firewalls, you need to -”

His eyes darted left and right rapidly as someone spoke on the other end. Alison noticed that the cryptic message had started to infect the blackened monitors nearest her. It, too, was spreading out across the lab, like a slow but inexorable cancer.

Talking into the handset, her father said, “You see it on your screen too? Shut down all the power, absolutely everything, before it reaches -”

A strange look came over his face, a hybrid of confusion and fear that Alison found unfamiliar. His eyes glazed over and he released the handset. It clattered against the floor, dragging the rest of the phone with it; the phone smashed.

Someone was still speaking on the phone, repeating the same words over and over again; Alison could not make them out.

Shapes in the lab were barely perceptible now, every monitor overrun. Yvonne, who had been silent since the experiment had commenced, offered some optimism to Alison’s father, “Look, the jar is disconnected so -”

“It’s too late,” he interrupted. “Whatever it is… it’s out now.” Barely audible, Alison managed to hear him add, “Ice-nine.”

Out of ideas, everyone in the lab assembled around Alison’s computer and stared at the inscrutable text on her monitor, their feet crunching plastic shards of the shattered phone. No-one dared speak for fear of tempting reality into revealing the consequences of what had happened.

Reality needed no prompting. Everyone blinked at a sudden burst of light; a few actually flinched in shock. The fluorescents had flickered on again but they were joined by an ominous hum emanating from every piece of equipment in the room. Alison noticed straight away that the lights were actually getting brighter and brighter; the hum was hot in pursuit, volume rising.

She looked around to see all of her father’s staff motionless like robots waiting for instruction. The state of the lab was unchanged, every monitor still bearing the same, mysterious graffiti and all of the connections in the room had been severed. They had done everything they could.

Just a few minutes later, their moment to act came. The quiet hum had transformed into a deafening roar and the fluorescents were now a blazing sun. Some of the staff, pushed over the edge by this relentless attack on the senses, ran desperately for the door thinking it might provide escape. One man started to smash the monitors and workstations, shouting incoherently. The rest simply covered their ears and shut their eyes tightly, praying for the cacophony to stop.

The violence of the sensory assault overpowering her, a blinded Alison screamed, “Daddy! What did I do wrong?”

Warm, protective arms encircled her and, just for a moment, the fear was gone.