On the next episode of Ironborn: Dean hardens the fuck up.
Ahh, to be drawing trees and grass again. All this featureless white stone gets to you after a while. Anyway, next week we’re in for something completely different.
Here’s another half-interesting thing: you’ll note that there’s actually a person walking that dog, hidden behind Dean’s gargantuan speech bubble. When fun details like that get lost (which they nearly always do) I tend to like to get them into the little Latest Page image. The upshot of this is that if you’re paying the frontpage any attention at all, it grants you week-exclusive cropped footage of interesting little bits of ceiling or tree or rooftop.
Hope I didn’t keep you waiting with this one. It went up late last night because I’d been with some friends doing batique coloring. Guys, I ask you, how did batique coloring ever go out of style.
You’re being treated to a lot of troubled and bewildered faces here, I know, Ironborn thrives on them. There’ll be other stuff soon, though. Been worse; I had to cut out about six uses of the word “well” from the script for this scene. The things’re like cockroaches, they get in anywhere and breed.
There’s some new stuff! I replaced the cruddy Résumé page with a proper cast page, which can be found under Info. It’s rather strange; I drew it mostly in one sitting, and scribbled bios directly on the picture. Enjoy my handwriting. Secondly, I’ve resolved to dump some old and half-old stuff on the Extra page, starting with a couple of short stories.
This is where David was: he was on a train, which was in turn on a bridge, heading out of the city to attend a meeting in a neighbouring municipality. It was a work-related meeting, late in the morning; lunch would be served, and the atmosphere would be amiable and productive. He was going to have a good day.
This is what David was: well-groomed, quite young, healthily ambitious. Probably he held a creative position as a key developer for a software company, or as a representative of some public relations firm. We can presume he was not married – at least not with children, going by the hectic tempo of his career – but there would likely be a special somebody that he’d have texted that morning or phoned the previous night, not to mention a wide circle of friends to give color and meaning to his life.
We can be loose with the details, because precisely who or what David was on the train that morning is not important. What’s important is this: at the end of the day he was it no longer.
The yellow warmness of early spring sunlight washed over David’s face as he sat by the window of the train, looking down at the grey water of the bay rolling past beneath him. The sun had not been up for many hours, but rush hour was over, and commuters were pleasantly sparse. An atmosphere of sleepy everyday contentedness seemed to blanket the train car as the sunlight rolled through it.
It was a long bridge, and from his seat David could see a lot of things happen before they reached the middle. He saw a middle-aged woman idly flick the pages of her gratis newspaper. He saw a little girl pick her nose. He saw a gull cruising alongside the train, seemingly motionless in the air. Little time passed, but time passed nonetheless. David found himself lulled and comforted by it all. He smiled despite himself, and as the train passed the center of the bridge’s span, he closed his eyes.
It was then that the train lurched, and –
– the train stops.
Gradually, David becomes aware that something has happened. Like a noise you aren’t aware that you were hearing before it stops, it creeps over him: there’s a difference in things. It’s that curious sensation of inertia when a bus or train brakes, but applied to the entire world around him, as if he kept going while everything else stood still.
He doesn’t think too much about it right now, though. He opens his eyes.
The first thing he sees is the gull, hovering motionlessly relative to him, against the clear blue sky. Oh, he thinks, so the train is moving again.
The second thing he sees is the railing of the bridge. It, too, is motionless. How strange.
David turns his head to look at the other commuters: none of them seem to have noticed anything odd happening. In fact, they sit completely motionless as well. The woman is staring blankly into her newspaper with a bored expression on her face; the girl has her finger jammed firmly up her nostril, her face set in the concentration of a child.
David counts to twenty, and neither of them moves, and he begins, slowly, to panic.
He stands up, looking left and right along the still and silent car. People sit looking out the windows, paused in mid-conversation, listening to music, all of them completely rigid and unblinking. Along with the train, they have all utterly… stopped. David walks among them, trying to catch their eyes; he calls out, but gets no answer. He is afraid to touch any of them. He wants, badly, to get off the train.
By each set of double doors, there is an emergency hammer set in a glass and metal cabinet. David reaches for the closest one before even checking whether he can open the doors. He hacks away at the door’s window pane, shattering it, knocking every sharp splinter out of the bottom frame. Then he hoists himself up and out through the window, and jumps onto the gravel at the middle of the bridge.
The power lines are suspended above the train, so he is in no danger of electrocution, but despite the fact that he can hear no traffic, David is uneasy about walking on the rails. He keeps himself to the central aisle, running, stumbling over planks and hatches and maintenance equipment, retracing the train’s journey back across the bridge as if trying to undo the strange and horrible thing that has happened. He wants back to the city, he wants home, he wants to start over.
At the end of the bridge is a tunnel mouth and a platform filled with living statues. David isn’t as concerned about touching them now; he pushes and elbows his way through the unresponsive crowd, heading for the stairs, heading for the streets above. Dimly he feels that whatever mad urge is driving him now, whatever mad flicker of hope, is waning fast, and as he emerges again into sunlight in a frozen tableaux of cars and pedestrians, he doesn’t walk far before collapsing onto a chair at an outdoors café.
He tries to breathe deeply, partly to calm himself and partly because he is short of breath from running and shouting. First he tries to think nothing at all, and then, failing nothing at all, he settles for taking in and assessing the information that each of his harrowed senses is giving him, one at a time.
This is what he sees: women and men, young and old, briefcase-carriers, dog-owners, a café waitress bending over a table, a road worker leaning on a shovel, every one of them utterly still and unmoving. Cars not rolling, trees not waving, clouds not shifting, a leaf hanging eerily half a meter above the sidewalk. David tries closing his eyes, but then he feels like he’s trying to uphold an illusion, so he opens them again and instead concentrates on what he can hear.
This is what he hears: his own breathing. His heartbeat, far off and muffled. The uneasy scrape of his shoes against the pavement. No wind, no engines, no voices, no birds. He slams his fist hard on the table beside him, and listens as the noise is absorbed into the air. There is no echo.
This is what he smells: very little. Mostly himself – sweat and anxiety. As he turns his head the fumes of the city and the scents of the baked goods inside the café behind him return, but only for a brief moment, as if he quickly consumes all the smells in his small space of air. He wonders for a moment if he might run out of air by sitting still, but quickly loses his train of thought and reassembles himself. He continues his exercise.
What he tastes: blood. This confuses him for a moment, before he realises that he has been biting his own tongue to keep himself from screaming. He releases the grip, gently, and licks his lips. Sweat, again. Drying. He is almost calm.
What he feels: hard polished wood under his bottom. Worn asphalt through his soles. The light pressure of the clothes on his body. Gravity tugging him down, reassuringly. Temperature? This is a puzzle. Not as warm as it should be, given the strong sunlight. Not as cold as it should be, given the lingering winter chill – there is still snow in the shadowy corners of the street. He feels no temperature, really. David takes his jacket off, half-consciously, and it seems to make no difference.
He folds the jacket on the table, thinks for a moment, then takes his valuables from the pockets and leaves it there as he gets up and begins to walk the streets.
David thinks as he walks, trying his best to assess the situation logically. Of course, the situation by its very nature quite defies logical explanation, so his reasoning doesn’t get very far before he resigns. What does he know? Time appears to have stopped for everyone but him. What doesn’t he know? Everything else. How is this possible? Why is it happening to him? Is he alone, or are there others who have been spared this inexplicable stasis? There is no telling, no guessing. All he can do is walk, and look, and wait for something to happen, and so this is what he does.
David’s panic has now been replaced by frightened acceptance, which is slowly giving way to curiosity. David is an optimist, and he knows that nightmares don’t last forever. If he waits and searches – he tells himself – explores his strange new existence, then sooner or later he must find a way to get out of it, get the world moving again, get on with his life. Panic, at least, will do him no good. After an hour’s worth of walking (or perhaps several hours; it is hard to tell) David begins to look at the frozen world with new eyes, sees its bizarre beauty, starts to experiment.
Having a methodical and inquisitive kind of mind, he quickly uncovers the laws and conditions of his interaction with the surroundings. They are surprisingly arbitrary, more a matter of convenience than logic. Objects react to his actions as they would normally do – flying when he throws them, falling when he drops them, breaking when he breaks them – only to return to their inert stillness when his attention wanders. He tries tossing a ball in a park and turning around, to find it hanging in the air a short distance away when he looks over his shoulder; he tries the same thing again, to hear the thump of the ball against the grass behind him. Most of the time things are frozen until he touches them, then mobile until he leaves their side – the exact parameters seem to vary with his intent and his mood, but he can’t find any reliable pattern in it.
Electronics and other technology work without protest, as long as he intends to use them; lights switch on, automatic doors open, TVs in store windows shine on although the images they display are static. Living creatures, meanwhile, seem to be in a complete state of suspended animation, not moving or reacting, neither limp nor deathly stiff, as he discovers by gently poking and manipulating birds and other city animals. He limits his interaction with the frozen humans to pushing them when he wants to get past, feeling that to experiment freely on them without their knowing would be rather rude and disrespectful.
When David’s thoughts first turn properly to the people he knows and loves, it occurs to him to try to seek them out, to find out how the change in the world is affecting them, to meet and to gain some kind of comfort from them. Happy with having a purpose and a destination for the first time since the incident on the train that morning (is it still morning? The sun hasn’t moved) he sets out to try to locate a few acquaintances that might be in the area.
He finds a close friend, enjoying his day off in his apartment home a few blocks from the park. He seems to be having a late breakfast, coffee cup paused halfway to his mouth at the table, his eyes resting absent-mindedly on the rooftops outside the kitchen window, his petrified thoughts perhaps considering the prospect of walking down to the store for a magazine and a packet of cigarettes. David unsuccessfully attempts to achieve contact, to attract the friend’s attention, then sits down resignedly and watches him for a moment. It occurs to him that perhaps he should eat something, and he thinks that he would be more comfortable with taking food from a friend than with stealing from a store or restaurant. (For who could accept his money, if all the clerks and waiters are frozen in time?) He produces a small meal from the contents of the fridge – omelette, sandwiches, a can of beer – and eats at the table, opposite his friend, feeling in part sad and lonely and in part strangely self-conscious. Then he gets up, washes and cleans up after himself, bids his friend a quiet goodbye and leaves the apartment. He wants to lock the door behind him, but he hasn’t got a key. He goes back outside.
Time passes. Or, more accurately, it doesn’t. David continues his lonesome journey through the eternal spring morning, the bustle and flow of his life now feeling more distant than before, like a school that he has long since graduated from, like a song he cannot quite recall. He stays at his home for a while, eating and sleeping and looking through his possessions, calling random numbers from his phonebook without response, then realises that he’d rather leave and start walking again. Only by keeping in motion can he instil some sense of time passing in this timeless world, force his surroundings to change, break the relentless stasis.
He wanders the city, the suburbs, buildings and highways and country lanes, through miles of forest, over acres of farmland, into new villages and cities full of frozen strangers, and he sees many curious things. On occasions he walks into rain, strolls through sections of air scattered with stationary droplets – though of course the stillness of the clouds allows him to circumvent foul weather, when he can be bothered with the detours. One time he chances upon a hawk stuck in the process of attacking a shrew in a field; its talons are a hand’s breadth away from the hapless rodent. After some consideration David decides to move it out of harm’s way. It is not often that he interferes in this way.
He leaves, on the whole, as little trace as he can, eating small meals in grocery stores and fast food joints, sleeping in parks, under trees, on benches and in open cars, even on rooftops. He takes a liking to department stores: he can sleep in their beds, eat in their restaurants, listen to their music, even watch their films and play their videogames if he feels like it (though he seldom does). It’s like a temporary home, but completely indifferent and impersonal, perfect for his vagabond’s lifestyle.
He never sleeps in the same spot twice, and having visiting a few more friends and loved ones and tiring of their blank stares and his own unanswered greetings, tiring of the familiar and his lost life, he prefers now to walk roads he doesn’t know, seeing places he doesn’t recognise. He keeps moving, always moving, measuring out his life in steps and kilometers instead of minutes and days.
Is it time at all, the thing that he lives in? For all he knows, he might have been travelling for years. He looks himself in the mirror, and apart from the steady growth of hair and beard, he cannot honestly tell if he is aging. But he thinks less and less; he surrenders himself completely to his walking.
First he walks aimlessly. Then he decides to pick a direction and stick to it. To the east, going inland – he thinks dimly that if he walks for long enough he will escape the sun, get to experience night again for the first time in who knows how long. Then the idea of walking through timeless darkness frightens him, and he turns ninety degrees, going south instead, towards other latitudes, other climates. His thoughts are dulled by the meaningless motion, and he starts to forget things. Who he is, where he is, what has happened – all he knows is that he is walking towards the sun, and gradually he forgets even that. And it is then, when he’s been touched by that first mindless indifference, that he meets the creature.
It comes to him at the outdoors table of a city café, nigh-identical to the one where he collapsed after escaping the train tracks – in a shock of recollection David thinks madly that he has walked in an enormous circle; that he has returned to the site of the start of his pilgrimage; that all of his walking has been for nothing, before he realises that they are part of the same chain of cafés. Same logotype’d awning, same green tables and chairs; different street and different unmoving people. He relaxes and sits down, his head swimming with confused and disjointed memories that had been lost for an eternity, memories of the timeless world that he had begun to take for granted, and beyond these memories, a shimmering, hazy image of a world full of time. He doesn’t know how long he sits there with his head in his hands – he never knows, of course, and it feels like he never has – but when he eventually glances up, the creature is sitting there on a sunlit table, looking at him.
It looks half-human, like a mythological something – devil, satyr, faun – with a curious, clever face and an unfathomable smile. David goes cold when he sees it, because as he sees it he knows two things. The first is this: the creature is moving. It is sitting still on its table, crouching comfortably like a big cat, but its ears are twitching, its tail is swishing lazily, and its eyes (though they steadily meet his gaze) are blinking. The second, which follows horribly from the first, is that this creature must have something to do with what has happened. It must be responsible for the state of the world, the state of David’s mind, the sorry wandering nothing that his life has been reduced to. He feels that he should be angry, but his feelings are so weak, worn so thin by the ceaseless walking, worn like the soles of his shoes. He stares at the creature, feebly.
“Hello”, says the creature. “How are you getting on?”
“It’s you, isn’t it?” David asks, slowly. It is long since he last used his voice, but it doesn’t fail him, he doesn’t rasp or cough or falter. “It’s you. You did this. You stopped time. You stopped everything.”
“Everything,” the creature says. It seems to like the sound of the word. “Yes. Except you. I didn’t stop you, and you seem to be making the most of it. You’re keeping in motion. I’ve been watching.”
“Watching me?” asks David.
“Watching everything. But yes, mostly you. I’ve been ever-present.” The creature pauses, scratching its chin. “Ever-present,” it repeats, chuckling at its own joke.
And now, like the far-off rumble of water in a tunnel, David can dimly feel his emotions returning from the depths of his soul. There’s anger in there, relentless fury and sorrow and loss, but leading the way is a tiny, desperate trickle of wanting. He wants…
“I want it to end,” David says, looking into the creature’s eyes, realising this as he says it: “I want it to end. All of this. Please.”
At first the creature answers this only with a smile. It could be a friendly smile, or a pitying smile, or a malevolent smile; it is impossible to tell.
Then it says, “It can be done.”
“How?” asks David.
“There are rules. Conditions to be fulfilled. They are quite simple; you’ve already figured some of them out. It is up to you to go the rest of the way as well.” It hesitates, thinks for a moment. “Don’t limit yourself, that is the key. But you’ll see. We’re only getting started. It’ll be so much more fun once you know the rules.”
David just stares, lost for words. And as he stares, the creature nods encouragingly and disappears into nothing, into nowhere.
David feels himself fall apart. His emotions burst forth from their dark tunnel, flooding him, drowning his thoughts, and he crumbles onto the ground beneath his chair, and he lies there until he’s stopped shaking.
Afterwards, he tries to kill himself. The thought hasn’t properly occurred to him before, even after all that was his life had wasted away, because he had lost so much of himself that there was no drive in him left even to commit to such a decision. But now it’s all come back, it’s all on top of him, and the singular wish to leave this ghost’s land behind is pulling and tugging at all of him, body and soul. The encounter with the creature gave him no insight, no understanding, only frustration at the cruelty and unfairness of it all. He can barely piece together what was said. Instead he walks whatever city his feet led him to last, taking care in selecting the tallest building, and makes sure that he leaves its top-story window with his head pointing to the ground.
There is no death. There isn’t even any pain. He thuds dully into the gravel, flops onto his belly, and lies there uselessly, like a discarded toy.
He remains still, where he fell, for what feels like an eternity. There were moments in that past life of his – long, anxious waits, love-drunk embraces – that he thought, at the time, felt like eternities, but the difference is that now he knows exactly what an eternity feels like.
When he eventually gets up, something inside him is irreparably broken. Something, even if it wasn’t his skull or his spine or his life, something broke in that fall from the building, and as he gets onto his travel-worn feet and walks away, he finds himself thinking strange new thoughts. He doesn’t for a moment consider trying to take his life again. It obviously wouldn’t work, it obviously was against the rules, and besides, he can’t really bother. He knows that he’s good at walking. Perhaps, he thinks, he ought to walk some more.
David leaves the shadow of the tall building and walks off into the silent streets, he sets off into the world again, to new cities and distant wonders. He resumes his vagabond’s lifestyle, but in a different way – he travels with less carefulness, less thriftiness, less hesitance. At first he just allows himself luxury, then gradually he allows himself flamboyance. Instead of walking painstakingly across miles of country roads, he drives cars at breakneck speed through the wilderness, hijacks buses and lorries and construction vehicles, crashes airplanes into mountainsides. Instead of taking only what he needs from the department stores, he lives large, eating lavish buffets, consuming staggering amounts of alcohol, dressing himself in outlandish fashions. Instead of cleaning up his tracks, he leaves a mess, dragging a trail of excess and destruction behind him on his joyride through the lifeless world.
He resumes, also, the experimentation and exploration he allowed himself so long ago, but this time he doesn’t stop at throwing balls and carefully poking wildlife. Now that nothing matters anymore, now that even his death has been taken from him, David has no respect left for the world, for himself, for its helplessly frozen inhabitants. He dresses and undresses people on the street, puts them in absurd poses – as for the animals, he sets fire to them, picks them apart, drops them from bridges – he does all of these things to himself, as well. He takes up an artist’s way of life, a bizarre bohemian constructing abstract monuments out of rubble and people and animals, painting pictures on the sides of buildings, on the streets, on entire cities. He creates enormous crop circles in fields, just to amuse himself. He has all the time in the world. Nothing is important, nothing is sacred, all of existence is just a grand old joke, and if the joke’s on him, then all the funnier it is for that.
On his spiralling descent into madness, like a train breaking through barriers, David breaks all the restraints and restrictions that have bound him throughout his life – in the world where he was born and raised, and in the lonely world that followed. One by one the commandments that were etched into his mind are chipped away: do not waste, do not steal, do not harm… He defies these limitations now because he knows that his life is a game, just a game, and in a game, we do what we are allowed to do. Can is will, might is must. It isn’t just that nobody is stopping him. It’s that he isn’t stopping himself.
The limitations are firm and deep, and breaking them takes time and effort; for all his rampages and destructive sprees, there remains a shield around David that is hard to get at, a tightly wrapped layer of convictions, an indestructible bastion of sanity and reason and love. It is the only part of him that still thinks coherently, that still cares at all, and it is telling him that his actions are permissible because none of the damage he is doing is truly deep, truly lasting. Nonetheless, he is chipping steadily away, peeling away bits of himself, stripping himself down to a bare creature of desire, and he is slowly closing in.
And so it happens, as David walks through a colorful crowd on a bright shopping street, at the end of that endless spring morning, that he chances upon a beautiful woman. He has passed many beautiful women on his journeys; thousands, tens of thousands perhaps, but this time something is different. Something within him is calling out, aching, wanting, and some cracked and crumbling wall of restraint is finally giving way. David stares at her. He picks her up, clumsily, and carries her to the nearest bench. He lays her down, he takes off her clothes. He takes off his own clothes. And then – uneasily at first, because this is another emotion he has long since forgotten about, another thing that he has long since forgotten about doing, then with increasing enthusiasm and intensity, he begins to have sex with the woman –
It was exactly like turning a key in the ignition of a car; the metaphor grotesquely completed itself. With an overwhelming roar, like the revving of the engine of the world, the noise and life of the city around David surged into him, into everything, as an entire universe burst into motion. Everything pressed in on him. Through a wall of sound and impressions he was made aware of his naked back hitting the pavement, a rush of bodies, people talking and shouting, music playing, the screech of tires and the rumble of traffic, a shrill voice screaming somewhere nearby… perhaps he blacked out, or perhaps he just screwed his eyes shut. Someone was tugging on his arms, dragging him away, and he followed unresistingly. It was almost a relief to have someone else decide where he should go, for a change.
When David’s overloaded senses returned to him, he was in a car, a moving car. A man sat on either side of him, eyeing him warily. Clothes… they were wearing blue clothes. He was wearing no clothes, but someone had given him a blanket to cover himself.
Guarding. The men were guarding him, making sure he didn’t get away. Making sure he didn’t do anything he wasn’t allowed to. He was… he had… he had done…
David was taken from the car, led through rooms, clothed, talked to. Perhaps shouted at. Time passed. He could almost feel it: time passed. He was put in a room with white walls, and a woman behind a desk asked him questions. He answered the questions that he could remember the answers to, and as he talked he found himself remembering more, and suddenly he was telling the woman everything. He told her of time stopping. He told her of standing alone in streets full of people, talking to friends who could neither listen nor respond, walking through a deadland without end, spending a dozen lifetimes on foot. He told her of meeting his captor, the creature with the strange smile. He told her of failing to take his life, and of the mindless odysseys of indulgence that followed. He told her of finally, inadvertently, breaking his curse, and returning to the world an outcast, a criminal and a rapist.
When David had finished telling his story, his head was between his knees and he was crying for the first time in a dozen lifetimes; crying for the first time that day. He cried from the depths of his being, desperately, hopelessly, ceaselessly, and wherever it was that his guardians brought him next, there he cried himself to sleep.
David was put in a closed home for the criminally insane, for punishment, recovery and rehabilitation. For having been found defiling a woman in the middle of a crowded street, he was a very calm and obedient patient, diagnosed by his surveyors as clearly having a ravaged psyche but no apparent further violent urges. He had only a vague recollection of who he was, but his identity was eventually deduced and ascertained to be that of an aspiring young man who had last been heard from only a few hours before the assault, in a city on the opposite end of the country.
When questioned, none of his acquaintances and relatives could explain his sudden fall into violent insanity. They visited him, but he did not appear to recognise them – in fact, they could scarcely recognise him either – and after a while they visited him no longer.
David didn’t mind; his loneliness was no longer a curse to him, it was part of his being, it was all that he knew. He treated the company of his doctors and guardians with mild-mannered acceptance, made no attempts to socialise. He was content, in the spare time between his psychiatric sessions and exercises, with sitting in his little room, comforted by the movement of the world around him, occasionally reading a newspaper.
Newspapers had a profound impact on David in those early days of captivity. The first time he was presented with one after arriving at the institution, he broke into tears at the front page, moved to his soul by the headlines chronicling events that he had not heard of, the top of the page announcing a date that he had not already seen – not, as he was used to, the same issue repeated endlessly, the same date forever and again. Here in his hands was the condensed truth of the passing of time – every day a new date, new headlines, new events. It was the proof that his torments were finally and completely over.
He barely considered it at first, but the newspapers told nothing of crop circles or plane crashes or city-wide destruction. There were several pieces in the local news detailing the incident with the woman in the shopping street (along with a brief notice in the national news) but apart from one horrified woman and a shocked crowd, no trace seemed to remain of David’s chaotic journey through the timeless world. It was if the whole thing had never happened.
Of course, according to his doctors, it hadn’t. For whatever reason, his mind had snapped, gone into a fugue, and his memory had constructed an elaborate story of time-stopping creatures as if to fill the hole, to motivate the violent acts that followed his short spell of madness.
Gradually, he believed them; there was little else to do. It was almost a more comforting reality to have gone mad than to have truly suffered through those eternal wanderings.
The truth of the rape remained, though, and it was this that now tarnished his soul, that weighed down on him in the darkness of his little room and in the lit white corridors of the asylum. He had committed an unspeakable wrong, had scarred and torn the life of a fellow human he did not even know. He was taking his punishment now, locked in these white halls of penance, and he was serving his sentence with grim dedication.
As has been mentioned, David was an optimist at heart. As time rolled by, calming his being, filling him with a certain feeble strength, he came to see his treatment at the asylum as a course to follow, the promise of eventual recovery a distant reassuring goal. If he could purge from himself the insanity that had led him to his heinous crime, perhaps it could serve as atonement.
So he was a model patient, a model inmate up until the point where he was an inmate no longer – he was moved to other, more open, institutions as if climbing some ladder of recovery, his slow return to sanity an uncertain but tenacious career to mirror that of his forgotten past. He wanted to be sane; however little was left of him, he wanted it to be whole and clean and working. He pieced himself back together, bit by bit. He persisted.
After a number of years, David’s surveyors judged him to be ready to return to society. He was given a small suburban apartment in a quiet area, and small but steady monetary support, so that he may fend for himself and build for himself something resembling a normal life.
David lived there, alone but at peace, doing his shopping, his cooking and his laundry, taking his medication, reading newspapers and watching television, enjoying the simple luxury of being able to read and watch new things every morning, going to bed in a slightly different world every night.
He took walks, but he kept them quite short, and he mostly constrained them to the same little area – he took care to learn every corner and tree and stone along his route, his own little world that was sometimes light, sometimes dark, sometimes dry and sometimes wet. He watched the passage of the seasons with great reverence. In the mirror, he watched himself slowly, slowly age.
His was a very frail existence, he knew, but he went about it with a small but strong glimmer of pride, with the knowledge that he had taken his combined punishment and treatment as had been expected of him. His insanity, his terrible crime, still haunted his sleep, but as long as he was awake he was free.
Arriving at his home one evening, depositing his bag of groceries on the doormat, David was struck by a feeling that he could not at first properly define. His brow furrowed as he slowly took off his shoes – David did everything slowly these days – was it a smell? Something familiar was in the air. Or perhaps, he realised, something that was immensely familiar to him was missing.
He paused after hanging up his coat. He was – yes, that was it – he was not alone in the apartment.
How strange.
He picked up the bag of groceries and carried it into the tiny kitchen. He put it aside and began to unpack it. As turned to the fridge, a bottle of water in his hand, he looked up toward the other end of the apartment, and he was utterly bewildered by what he saw.
In defiance of sense, in defiance of reason, in defiance of the pills that David had taken that morning, the creature was sitting on his sitting-room table, idly scratching its neck.
“Oh, hello again,” it said. “Congratulations on your recovery.”
David could not speak. He could not think. He could not feel – at least not at first – and then he felt very much all at once. Fear and devastation, a relentless cold, and rage: surging, seething, storming rage. All that he had fought for, all that he had painstakingly rebuilt had been shattered in a glance. He had nothing left. There was nothing left of him now. He was only anger.
“You’re back,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here. I beat you; I beat your horrible game.”
“Yes,” agreed the creature, cocking its head. “You solved the puzzle. You figured out the rules. Good work.” It smiled its unknowable smile at him.
David, overcome with hate and sadness, screamed something wordless. Dimly aware that he was still holding the water bottle, he flung it madly at the creature, who caught it unblinkingly and took a sip. The nonchalant gesture punctured David’s spirits, left him to stand limply, shuddering with fury.
“Don’t look surprised,” it chided him. “If you’d have thought for just a moment you’d have known I would be coming back to you.”
“But you were done with me,” David whispered. “You tortured me. An eternity, alone. Wasn’t that enough for you?”
“Enough? That was only the warmup. That was… phase one. It would’ve been completely meaningless without what was to follow, you see. But you know that already. I told you, don’t you remember?”
David didn’t want to remember. He had had enough. “Out of my home,” he shouted. “Leave me alone!” Finding his strength anew, he lunged at the creature, throwing himself body and mind and soul at this smiling devil, this odious architect of his personal hell. Eyes screwed up in anger, he staggered as the world lurched around him and –
– he falls blindly forward, gripping madly at thin air. He flails wildly around him as he falls, but his enemy is not there, the creature has left him, and with nothing to support him he crashes onto the floor and rolls onto his back.
David lies still, eyes still screwed tightly shut. His anger flows out of him like water out of a fractured vase, leaving him broken and completely empty. As his body relaxes, helplessly, his eyes slide open, and he stares up at something quite near his face. It is the water bottle that the creature has been holding, and it does not fall, will not fall, not unless…
Lying there, staring blankly at the still and static glass, David hears the words of the creature ring through his empty mind at last.
“You’ll see. We’re only getting started. It’ll be so much more fun once you know the rules.”
“You have perhaps heard the phrase that hell is other people? In time, you will learn that it is wrong.”
Terry Pratchett – Small Gods
I am old now, and frail, and clinging on to what little I have left I wonder if I will make it for long enough to see my work come to fruition. Millennia of planning, one small, perfectly calculated push in the right direction, and a long, hard wait…
I think it was the waiting that got to me in the end.
Little light reaches me here, in the trench at the rim of the world, but I can scent them below me in the gloom. There is no place left now where they will not go; they have long since bent whatever limits they could not break. I spent a few relatively peaceful decades in a cave in Antarctica once, but even there…
Of course, it would be quite silly of me to expect to avoid them here of all places. It was here, after all, that their conquest began – no, of course not exactly here, but in a similar place, now long forgotten, sealed up, subducted. Somewhere dark, somewhere hot, somewhere wet, the location is arbitrary. Smoke in the depths, a spark, and everything changed.
No, I did not come here seeking to avoid their company. My motives are purely nostalgic. I enjoy the smell of this place, the dull heat, the thick, sulfurous fog. It reminds me of the primordial ocean, of the old world – the way it was before they claimed it, rebuilt it, remolded it to fit their purposes. It reminds me that I was not always a stranger in my own land.
An eel swims up to me where I stand, his movements curious and predatory. He sniffs at my half-presence, glares at me with eyes pale and sunken, almost vestigial. His skin is luminous and see-through; most of his body is a mouth. He is most extraordinarily ugly.
I reach out, gingerly, and break his neck: a purely symbolic gesture.
I tire of this half-light, this bleak and dark and morbid world in the depths. It is time for me to spend some time among my own creations.
***
Life has always frightened me, from that first frail, flailing chemical construct to the swimming, crawling, scuttling, swarming things that followed. Life is an anomaly, a fluke, a distortion on the fabric of reality, something that should never have been. It surges ever outwards, defying entropy, fuelled by the sheer virtue of its existence and the mindless reproduction that is its function and its being. Life is its own purpose, and it changes irrevocably anything that it comes in contact with.
I have, on the whole, been avoiding contact.
Humans, now, I understand. I can sympathize with them; they’re craftsmen, like me, like my superior before me.
I walk among them now, on a crowded street in a crowded city. Look at them go: young ones, old ones, of all shapes and sizes and colors and smells, nearly every single one of them headed somewhere other than here. There is an overwhelming sense of business in this, their feverish struggle to achieve something much greater than the sums of the part, something large and strange and transcendent that they have as little real knowledge of as control over.
The relentless surge of bodies around me is like the welcome envelopment of a warm wind. It consoles me, but it is a different consolation from the sentimental smell of the deep-sea vents: this is the consolation of retribution, or an impending such. There have been disappointments, but I have hopes for them yet – more of this later.
A sight in the crowd makes me pause: a young man, slouching darkly past me, my picture adorning his black-clad chest (visually it’s far off, but the symbolism is what matters). As often happens on such occasions, I experience a feeling of somewhat bewildered appreciation. One thing I’ve come to marvel at during my long times of observing humans is their subtle sensitivity to things beyond their scope, on a level they themselves mostly do not understand. They obviously have some conception of my existence, for example, and others of my kind. The notions turn up in their cultures, in their art, in their philosophies, often quite skewed but always with a grain of truth shining through. They sense me, somewhere within. They sense the situation.
That’s a rather typical difference between me and my superior, by the by: of the two of us, I was always the one to understand art. The irony is not lost on me.
I walk among the people, and they barely glance at me as I pass.
I have reached a museum, a repository of knowledge. I approve of the idea, a product of one of the finest – and most surprising – qualities in humans, namely their never-ending curiosity and painstaking love for collecting what they’ve found, compiling it, comparing it, analyzing it to virtually no end. It stands in interesting contrast to how little humans actually ever learn, but that’s a different story, is it not?
As I enter, I savor the cool air and the quiet sizzle of history around me. The entrance hall is not part of any topical exhibit, the caretakers of the museum choosing instead to display here some of its most eye-catching and thought-provoking items, to pique the visitor’s interest. I linger at each showcase I pass: here the thighbone of a shambling human ancestor, here a model of the solar system, here a stone that fell from Mars.
All of them bring back memories.
***
You have to understand, there was never anything like a war. The conflict between me and my superior was only ever a philosophical one, a difference of mind that was subtly evident at an early stage. She – incidentally, that’s another point the humans often get wrong, although gender here is a property of character rather than anatomy – respected my opinions, and I respected Hers. It was not until Life came into being that I truly decided to go my own way.
I had been stationed to watch over Earth from the first moment – a promising world, my superior told me, whatever She meant by that. Like most of my kind I had then existed for a few billion years, brought into being to assist Her and to share Her watch over the maturing universe. There were many of us already, although not yet too many to count, and things were becoming very interesting. The early galaxies had been violent, chaotic affairs, but order and structure were now establishing themselves throughout creation, and stable planetary systems were forming.
Some of us were put to observe the swirls and hoops of galaxy clusters, some to plot the trajectories of dust motes in interstellar clouds, some to follow the first comets on their long and lonely journeys. But I was assigned Earth, and thus my purpose was set and my fate was sealed, insofar as I have ever believed in fate.
It was a good time I had there, the best time of what I, for lack of a better word in context, must call my life. Everything was new and exciting; I was able to watch from the beginning the startling emergence of Earth and its neighbors from the roiling, seething cloud of the solar nebula, watch as the dust cleared and the planets embarked on their individual orbital paths, watch as the Earth’s surface hardened and re-melted in a furious, restless volcanic dance.
Then came the vapors, the clouds, the rains. My world was small, but its composition was quite special, and I proudly showed my visitors around its hills and valleys. More importantly, the Earth was to me alone a home and a refuge, a place where I could wander freely and ceaselessly – watching, thinking, just being – and I was as happy there as I could ever dream to be.
This lasted for a little more than a billion years.
I have never been entirely sure of the nature of the part my superior played in the dawning of the thing called Life. It has to do with how little I, and presumably my peers, have ever known of the nature of our superior Herself. Her range of attention is evidently not infinite, but the extent of Her actual powers is beyond me to judge. Powerful enough to set a universe in motion? Maybe so. Powerful enough to govern the rest of its path? Maybe not. Whatever the case, Life arose, and it was I who notified Her of the course of events.
She was not surprised, at first, to hear of the strange happenings in the midst of the young oceans; I believe at this point She had already received some reports of the unusual molecules and exotic compounds that I had been observing, wary but not yet worried, for a long time already. She seemed to think that I was getting paranoid about perfectly normal developments for a world of my type.
So then I took Her to see the deep-sea vents.
Her reaction when She saw those murky waters, those proliferating masses of microscopic creatures scouring the rock faces, eking their sustenance from the whirling minerals, was one of puzzled delight. She observed it in silence, for some time. Then She told me that She was interested, asked me to keep Her informed, and made Her leave.
Her next visit was several hundred million years later, following some urgent alarmism on my part. The anomalies had spread across vast distances, and changed notably in the time between. Some had migrated upwards, adapting to an existence on the surface, and were subtly refurbishing the entire atmosphere with their metabolizing processes. The ocean, too, was changing. The entire outlook was changing. I was frantic.
I urged my superior to take action, to stop this process before it became irreversible. I told Her that Her “promising world” was spiraling out of control, and that we had no idea what implications this could have for the rest of the universe.
But She didn’t understand my reasoning. She suggested that maybe I was looking at things the wrong way. The development was simply extraordinary. Could it not be that this was the point of the entire endeavor? The meaning, even, of the universe? It was certainly one of the most intriguing aspects of the then available creation.
No, there would be no measures taken to try and prevent this process. It was almost unheard of for our kind to intervene on any large scale – as close to a taboo as it got, under normal circumstances – and anyway, She said, I should be thankful that I had been assigned such an exciting domain as Earth. My superior left me.
But She did not leave me for long. In fact, it came to be that as the flickering biosphere of Earth grew gradually stronger and firmer, as the world I had loved and taken pride in was taken over piece by piece, my superior came to pay more and more attention to it, to the point where She had relocated most of her activity there. Earth became the base of operations, and I became its grumbling, discontented janitor.
***
Fire; fire from the skies.
I remember watching the meteor fall: it was huge, the largest since the early days of the planet, the largest since the rock that tore the moon from the land, the one the humans call Theia. It ripped through the air, seared through the ocean, bored into the crust. The apocalyptic scenery mirrored the wildness I felt, gazing into the havoc, and I remember one pulsing, desperate thought: This will be the end of it. Surely Life could not overcome an event such as this. I would be free of it at last.
I was wrong.
Of course I was wrong. The impact was fierce, but it served only to up the stakes on competition, to wipe out the most fragile and select the most capable. It took a long time for Life to reestablish itself, but when it did, it was stronger than ever.
And yet the meteor provided the start of a new train of thought for me: in essence, it made me seriously consider the possibilities for exterminating Life altogether. If even an asteroid impact of that size could not do it, what could? Did I have any chance at all to affect it?
Over the subsequent ages, I kept to myself. My role as supervisor had largely become redundant what with my superior’s high level of engagement on Earth, and I was more or less left to my devices. I walked the barren places, staying as far from Life as I could, thinking, while the barren places became fewer and smaller and further between. Time passed, much time, but I was a patient waiter and had a task to keep my mind occupied.
Finally, after several billion years of quiet reflection, of observing Life’s advance across the planet, I faced the facts. Earth was a far too stable world situated in a far too stable environment for Life to be eradicated by any obvious external force. By now, my superior and Her closest associates were all but protecting Earth and its denizens, and any overt action on my part would not only be futile at this point, it would also snatch the Earth I was trying to reclaim out of my hands for good. My superior had to be completely unaware of what I was planning, that was the given first term. No mean feat.
But an idea was slowly forming in my mind (or as it seemed to me, was already fully formed and gradually uncloaked itself for my eyes); an unexpected solution which nonetheless was simple in its basic premise. I had seen Life spread and multiply endlessly – it was this which made it Life. What made it virtually unbeatable, though, was not only its endless self-reproduction, but the way in which it made its surroundings support it. Life would grow until it filled the vessels that held it, changing both itself and the vessel in the process, but the vessel would never break, because the same principles that allowed for the expansion of Life also urged it into a form of balance. Life and Earth formed opposite ends of a strange, dynamic seesaw, challenging and changing one another time after time in a wild, flickering dance. One would never break the other, because such were the rules of engagement that they themselves constituted.
But if I could somehow change those rules; if I could make Life so good at augmenting itself, make the push on its end of the seesaw so hard, that it would topple itself on the rebound… yes, it seemed to be the only way.
Join them if you cannot beat them, it’s been said, but I’m not sure if I agree. To my mind, the easier thing to do is help them get good enough to beat themselves.
***
It was not a pleasant prospect to face: to do what I was intending to do, I would have to get under my enemy’s skin, spend intimate time with the things I had to force myself to study even at a distance. On the whole, though, once my plan had properly formed, going through with it didn’t take me by far as much time as it had taken me to conceive it.
I cast around for appropriate candidates, quickly eliminating options like insects, reptiles, or even the very successful birds. I needed something complex, with complex needs. Eventually I found the primates, and there I called off my search. They were quite perfect: eager, adaptive, social, and above all clever. Because this, of course, was the path I had chosen: I would make them intelligent, like me. I would make Life aware of the rules, so that it could proceed to break them.
And now that I had found my champion, I could set to work. It proved to be tedious, but not particularly difficult. What I did not already know about the workings on Life on a small scale I quickly figured out, and this left me with the tinkering. Our kind have a certain amount of power over physical matter; I had seldom used it for much, but now I was prepared to use it to the fullest. What I did I would have to do stealthily, of course, to avoid the attention of my superior (or superiors, at this point, because it was now long since I had headed the Earth department, as it were). I moved a gene here, changed the course of a protein there, spent a lot of time carefully selecting out breeders from the population – and silently killing or incapacitating those unfit for my purposes.
Ages upon ages of patient work slowly bore fruit: the apes became smarter and yet smarter at a completely unprecedented rate. In two measly million years, the would-be humans’ brains more than doubled in size; I believe their scientists are puzzling over this fact even now, though I think it highly unlikely that they will ever live to discover the true cause. And yes, it was slow and dreary labor, but the enormity of what I was doing, the sheer exhilaration, was enough to keep me going. At last, and at least, I was trying to claim my right.
Was I selfish? I do not know. Ownership is a fuzzy concept, and humans read more into it than we have ever done. I suppose I felt that in giving me Earth my superior had also somehow given Earth me, and it was my duty to protect it, or even to preserve it in its immaculate original state. I could be the one to step forward and take action where my superior lacked the courage and will to do so. But these heroic ideas, I must admit, were secondary to the simple desire I had to take back what had at least once been mine. What’s more, knowing as I did that something might be done, I could not idly sit by and watch. So, for good or for bad, I acted.
Thus: I created the humans in my image, and sure enough, intelligent they were. There came a moment when I deemed them mature – and indeed when the effort I had expended in crafting them had taken quite enough of a toll – at which point I drew back, apprehensive, to watch nature take its course. Most of this course I imagine you know already. The humans developed languages, tamed fire, invented tools and learned how to grow plants to their benefit. Their technology, once kicked into action, accelerated at that alarming pace of growth so characteristic of Life, and watching them spread over the face of the Earth was both frightening and strangely gratifying, giving a sense that I had suddenly come to control and shape the thing that I had hated, feared and envied for so long. The humans mastered fire; I mastered Life.
The millennia crawled by, and the humans crawled onward.
Did I not say that it was the waiting that did me in? You must find this strange, coming from someone who spent a billion happy years on a lifeless planet, but believe me: these last thousands of years have been the hardest strain imaginable, each one worse than the one before it. You understand, I was weak now. I didn’t have much time left, and if there was one thing I had always had an abundance of before, it was time. My frustration at this was exceeded only by my boundless anxiety – first the anxiety that the early humans would not make it, and then the anxiety that I would not. I waited, and I watched.
My superior watched too, of course. She never took as great an interest in the humans as I, and although I cannot speculate about Her suspicions, She has never once confronted me about the cause for their sudden rise to power. But She did watch, and strangely enough the humans provided a reason for us to talk, occasionally, as we had not done for a very long time. In our discussions we both expressed a trust in the humans coming to achieve great and startling things, although in very different ways. She believed they could prove to become the crown of Creation, the logical fulfillment of Life and its journey through time. I was more inclined to think of the humans as something beside Life, not quite like it, although if this was bias or vanity on my part I cannot say. I maintained that the sentience of the humans, their understanding of their own situation, was what allowed them to step outside of the usual cycles and change the way the rest of nature worked, in a way that Life on its own never could have.
I even touched, almost by mistake, on the idea of humans as bringers of destruction, although my superior did not seem to take that as a serious threat. And even if She would have, Her policy of inaction remained firm: this constant maxim of how Creation was best left to its own machinations, which I would then rather call weakness of character, although what I would call it nowadays I am not sure. I’m coming off as rather uncertain, am I not? There’s no point in hiding it. Certainty is a luxury which I can no longer expect of myself.
Eager to prove my superior wrong, I closely watched the humans’ societies develop, and I was rewarded in many respects. Their history is a bloody one, of course. Their aptitude for coming up ways in which to harm each other is one unmatched by any other creature on the planet, and although I was mostly interested in what harm they could cause to the rest of the living, the violence among them was still a powerful expression of their profound lack of insight into the consequences of their actions.
As civilization escalated, and especially with the dawn of global communication – not to mention global conflict – my role as an observer became increasingly strange and grotesque, as I silently urged the humans to aspire to greater heights while at the same time feverishly hoping for them to end it all, to go out with a bang and take the rest of Life with them. As the years passed, and my endurance with them, the excitement kept rising; the Cold War was a very interesting period, to be sure. I didn’t know quite what to wish for, unsure of whether the humans yet possessed the power to fulfill their work, or whether an accident at this point would merely undo them alone, ruining all that I had fought for.
But the imminent danger passed, it appeared, and cleared the way for newer, greater dangers. The humans proved time and time again their skill in doing what was bad for them, pouring filth in the oceans, raining radiation and liquid death over the land, heating the planet slowly but surely, tapping its rapidly waning resources to the last drop. I was comforted, because this was exactly what I had planned from the beginning.
And still my superior clung to Her firm belief that like all other Life on the planet, the humans would help themselves in the end. They were wiser than I gave her credit for, She told me. They had not yet reached the peak of their enlightenment, and every step they took toward ruin also took them closer to the understanding of how to repair what was broken. Every restoration, every replanting, every wildlife campaign, every peace treaty She would point to as evidence for the humans’ inherent capacity for betterment.
But I refused to believe her.
Or perhaps I refused to understand.
***
I have not spoken to my superior for a long time now. She began paying less attention to Earth halfway through the course of human history, and while She met me several times to discuss developments, She gradually shifted the rest of her attention elsewhere, and with it the rest of those who had watched over Earth with her. I am now once again the sole caretaker of this world, although it is a world I no longer understand any part of. I have spent my entire existence here; Earth is my entire frame of reference, and I have no perspective from which to soberly observe it. In that sense, my problem is the same as that of the poor humans.
I leave the museum, dive once again into the churning stream of the crowd, heading for somewhere cool and silent where I can gather my thoughts. I have had so many thoughts, in all the time I have been here – been in the museum, been on Earth, been in the universe. So many thoughts, and so few conclusions. So few resolutions.
I walk among the people, and from the darkness the questions assault me…
I ask myself if there ever was, in the endless swirl of my mind, the idea of leaving Earth. It must have been in my power to achieve it, at some point, even if this opportunity must quickly have been lost as I embarked on the exhausting enterprise of sculpting the humans. There must have been other planets much like the young Earth, with no Life to threaten them. I ask myself if they would have mattered to me, had I known of their existence.
I ask myself whether Life could have appeared somewhere else, anywhere else, in the great vast reaches of Creation, and I wonder why I have never asked myself this question before. The humans certainly have, although for them it isn’t quite the issue.
I ask myself if maybe something even greater and stranger than Life could form out there, something beyond my comprehension, and whether it is this that my superior has left to observe. I ask myself if normal Life wasn’t beyond my comprehension to begin with.
I ask myself if I was right, or if She was, or if it impossible for anyone to ever be completely right or wrong. I try to confront myself about the exact nature of the feelings I have for the humans. I love the humans, it’s true; they are my creations. But love for a creation is based in its purpose, and the humans were only ever meant to be, well, weapons; catalysts for destruction. And yet… I think about my superior’s ideas, how Creation would go about to sort itself out, beyond exact prediction; I think about how single-mindedly I have always opposed Her – not with regret, but with wonder at my own former certainty; and I think of the fact that I once was Her creation too, sculpted for a purpose, brought into being for a cause.
I ask myself: what is a purpose, really?
I believe, as I indicated earlier, that the humans form a whole which is much greater than the sum of its parts. I have said that they do not truly comprehend what it is they are creating, but here’s the important part: neither do I. It’s a form of resignation, I think. I admit to myself that I do not truly understand my own creations, just as I believe that my superior never understood Hers. Do not misunderstand me, please; I still wish for the humans to go through with what I intended them to do, I long for it as dearly as I have ever longed for anything. But the idea that even if this does not come to pass I will still have left my own unique, startling mark on the universe gives me what I suppose I must call a strange and twisted kind of peace. The humans are my sole achievement, and I had rather they were incomprehensible than a failure.
Is hope the last thing to leave one? I couldn’t say; I am not quite yet at that stage, I think. But I know that the years have dulled me, made me somewhat apathetic. I am less enthused by the triumphs now, less upset over the setbacks. I have lost much of my passion, then, some of my hope; certainly all of my strength; but my patience remains with me. Perhaps it is my last virtue. I will treasure it.
To humanity, if you are listening: whatever your vast enterprise, and whomever it will benefit – me, you, or anyone else – I wish it luck. You’ll want to give me an identity. Sadly, my original designation is arcane and no longer has any meaning to me – least of all to you – and your names for me were never mine, colorful as they may be. I think it will suffice for you to think of me as an observer, or an auditor. Not the maker of the watch but, in a way, the one to wind the spring. Not the first mover, but surely the first to apply any real twist to the path of events.
No matter. I am tired now, and old, and it may well be that mine was a lost cause; if not, I probably won’t last long enough to reap the spoils of my labor anyway. As has been noted, the irony is not lost on me. I can only hope that it is not lost on you.
For now, I watch, and I wait.
I walk among the people, and the hole in the crowd fills quickly behind me as I go.
