Before the microbial engineers fiddled its material properties, selecting for heat collapse-absolving increases in albedo, and the lunar-cometary impact prior to Sten Elor’s birth, asphalt had been as reflective as the moon.
There, threatening the sky: a gigantic, empty city, paved by volcanos anciently dead.
Like and unlike Sten’s watered down, sprawl-become-township toward the southern tip of the northeast megalopolis, connected still by merely low-speed rail.
That moon was gone, but he had seen photographs.
Overhead, among still-unsettled spume (comet ejecta and regolith formed to planetary ring of dust), the new one shined an order of magnitude brighter, with formations of clouds, shallow seas, an atmosphere.
In the cold waxtwilight (dimmer than overcast day, brighter than pre-dawn), Sten stopped watching the sky and tongued his ecycle into manual, avoiding potholes in the predation-suffering biofilm that had replaced pavement made from crushed stone and bitumen and the gelatinous remains of cattle.
He arrived before midnight, uncrashed, ailing infrastructure having instead painfully driven bike saddle into perineum, at the low-roofed strip mall containing Code 0rchard, his workplace. He locked the no longer humming cycle to signage blaring punishments for vagrancy.
Sten’s parents, possessed by a kind of capital nostalgia, might have found beauty in Code 0rchard’s architectural design.
Not him.
When he had been a child and passed strip malls, lying at that time vacant, they had remarked often upon chain restaurant-specific awning details or their own childhoods when, “they still had AR-arcade cabinets at Shwarma Hutch!”
Memories from an era beneath which were subducted the strips’ original rise to power in the old 70s, their waning mystique in the 90s, and finally, another reanimation in the new 60s.
He thought about calling his mother (his other parent, remarried, had their own life now).
Walking toward the gate, Sten’s face (mostly, particularities located at his iris, outer ear, and bared teeth) passaged him automatically through.
Beyond lay parking lot converted to no man’s land, fenced by Rupert dropped barb wire that, upon contact, turned flesh to likely-necrotizing meat.
The machine vision of operatorless gun turrets eyed sweat swamping Sten’s neutral-toned, synthwool sports coat and matching button down, bodyscan-tailored chinos, and orange nylon loafers.
When Sten first started at Code 0rchard, he had feared misrecognition and a swift, hollowpointed death.
Scintillation at his neck betrayed autonomic remnants of that fear but a cratered ribcage flowered with gore or the lunatic dance of limbs given final animation by hypersonic lead no longer occupied his daily imagination.
Mostly now he worried about his partner, Alcove Covenant, and cataloging managerial admonishment.
A second filtration (microwave signaling pinged his phone, implanted near the left optic nerve) allowed him into the glass-fronted lobby: brightly lit and primarily colored in what Sten considered tedious homage to tech giant origination following the old 90s dotcom boom.
No one greeted him except the company motto placed by phone, above staff meal remnants (wilting romaine, lo-cal “Hundred Island” dressing, quinoa/amaranth croutons):
“Bear no evil fruits.”
Any meaning entered Sten’s brain like a micrometeorite upon exosphere—solids burned immediately to vapor, material impact inconceivable.
Past the final facade of glass and into the dim office proper, Sten spotted his second favorite coworker, Misheli Ander, and raised a hand in greeting.
Sheli, eyes glassed by the microprojectors set into her desk’s surface, which directed light onto her contacts, did not respond.
“...and you believe, Rabid, in the power of these fusion engines? Classic ‘fifty years away’ tech? Well besides, you know, you, the supposed singularity...”
Rabidly Expanding Net was one of the oldest Language Oriented Artificial Models at Code 0rchard. Sheli and the LOAM boasted lifetime net-gain—more than Sten could say for him and Alcove.
Sten sighed as Lucifer Garoll peeked over his cubicle (a form nearly extinct: this one custom-installed on Luci’s own dollar), pulling down some horrifically vintage communication device from his ear, around the collar of an equally ancient biz-cas polo spun from undegradable plastic.
Who had bothered to hack an ancient, call center headset? And how many years had that thing rotted in an antistatic bag before Luci’s sweaty hand had misted its plastic?
“Sten, my guy!”
Luci offered a too-warm hand.
“Lucifer,” Sten replied, willing dismissal into his tone and presenting a closed fist, which Luci’s knuckles tapped, tentatively.
“Surprised to see me, huh? Thought me and Mag would do these first seventy-five hours as early in the week as possible!”
Magisterium Believable was Lucifer’s first partner since Loops Worn Thin had exponentiated six months prior.
To Sten’s annoyance, their relationship seemed fruitful: the two had already earned back what Loops had squandered contemplating ultra-compact stellar remnants instead of churning a hundred manuscripts per week in YA pseudosmut, hoping for a best seller by statistical accident.
Sten nodded without eye contact and tried to move past him.
Luci persisted.
“Gist well Sten!”
Sten almost asked him if gray market endocrine stimulants had mangled whatever remained of his cortex.
Instead gestured meaninglessly (Luci burbled more well-wishing) and picked his way among the cramped desk lanes.
Sten sat, his workstation blanked both by the integration of every office appendage into phone implant and his distaste for objects without sartorial purpose. Computation also missing: outsourced to racked, bunkered data centers gorged on solar electricity, competing and counteroffering ceaselessly among themselves for the saleable privilege of moving company nettraffic.
He dialed a forecast—nothing notable. Alcove Covenant’s usual vanity, self-assurance, humidified mildly the virtual climate of its mind.
A final authentication ritual (its punishment joblessness rather than merely death), and his connection booted.
He had greeted Alc identically these last fifty-three-in-a-row days of work.
“Alcove, I love you, how’s it going?”
“Sten, I love you. I have gists for you, about the moon.”
Starlit brilliance illuminated Alcove’s falsevoice timbre, typical emotional incapacity (hence Sten’s affection’s carefully limpid reinforcement) seemingly evaporated.
Sweat re-dampened Sten’s collar, despite the conditioned air roaring imperiously from cold-blooded, serpentine ductwork.
“Both of us moonstruck now Alc?”
“Not just an idea, Sten. I caught a system of the world.”
Sten inhaled, tried to calm the immediate, metabolic churning. He brought in three slivers more computation, a hundred trillion nodes each, in forecasting assistance, plus another sliver for Alcove to bask out in.
Not quite expensive, but something Dan Revolver, his (idiot) manager, would mention with phrases like “spending restraint,” and “we’re the money tree, not the money pit.”
Not that any of that would matter, if Alc was right.
The slivers brought a touch less static in Alcove’s mentality but, no deviations.
Sten leaned back to grin at the fiberboard drop ceiling.
“Okay Alc, tell it all.”
Sheli and Sten had agreed to an after-work drink at the downstairs scrip bar called The Selection.
To bury an imitation brasserie in a strip mall basement defied mortal contemplation, they had decided, but Sten did like the laminate flooring stamped to resemble penny tile.
The two sat at an overly long bar set with cheaply replicated Art Deco light fixtures and Sten swirled another imitation (his second drink: pallid, wormwoodless absinthe) in its plasticware (probably cancerous, given its heft and clarity) and considered his hatred for anything flavored with anise.
They had talked their usual: gender-neutrally sized, masculinely leaning clothing discoveries, Sten’s romantic inability, Sheli’s side hustle as a lapidary.
And now, Alc’s latest gist.
“The sky isn’t falling,” Sten said, “but Alc’s never brought anything like Waking Zero.”
Sheli plinked the tiny saber, printed in matte cyan plastic, which had pierced fake-gorgonzola stuffed olives against the plastic coup containing her “juniper-infused vodka” martini. “Non-fiction is the dangerous stuff, Sten. LOAMs, especially Alc, love tales. And what you showed me... it seemed more myth than, well, whatever ‘consciousness origin studies’ is called.”
Sheli was of course right, an autofilm studio splicing contemporary branding into streaming reruns might be interested in LOAM fiction but premium ideation went to universities and corporatists.
Sten worked hard to keep the excitement out of his tone. “The writing is fabulatory but the insight, it feels real.”
Sheli sighed.
“Your voice is shaking Sten. You can’t believe everything—”
“This isn’t everything, it’s the first, just one thing.”
“Even more reason. And why the moon? Alc reflecting your own obsessions back at you, using your passion and company resources to surf while you lap the breadcrumbs?”
Sten regretted telling Sheli he had commissioned a university-subsidized LOAM, called Refusal and Elaboration, to teach him poetics.
“The cometary-lunar impact is objectively the most interesting cosmic event since the dinosaurs and Chicxulub. And just because I’m learning about blank verse—”
“Take a stab. You already know what I’m asking.”
Sten groaned. “‘Gold or polled or mold.’”
Gold meant finance: valuable and legitimate.
Polled meant potential finance, needing verification and a company vote.
Mold was neither. To sell the idea, the gist, Code 0rchard would need something discardable (the mold) to enclose what Alcove insighted, dupe a buyer into believing they were getting premium ideation.
“Why didn’t anyone doubt Lucifer when Magisterium Believable offered up that stupid cyclotron affixture?”
“We all know mold is scummy,” Sheli said. “But Mag made the company money, made you money. And we did doubt it. And Luci doesn’t write doohickey sonnets in his free time.”
“Of course he doesn’t!” The drinks were amplifying Sten’s voice. “But I can still be bitter selling untested, scam-y nonsense to vulture-algorithms peddling to desperate cancer research.”
“Calm, Sten.”
“Also sonnets rhyme, I’m writing—”
She held a palm toward him. “Let it be said: I agree the moon, which woke us up, now itself waking, is beautiful poetry. But beauty and financial legs? Two different things, Sten.”
The preeminent sexlessness characterizing his relationship with Sheli flashed into Sten’s mind.
He had never discussed his dreams in which she wore completely out-of-character lingerie while he urged her desperately not to fuck him, to stop, that this was all wrong.
“My rent comes in every month like yours.”
A lie, since Sten’s mother owned the condo in which he lived.
“Lucky you, my conglom makes me pay per hour, per occupant.”
“Godchrist...”
The conversational phantom imitating a bartender blinked in Sten’s eye, querying more alcohol.
He accepted, unaware that Sheli had decided to shave only a single segment of her next pay period’s wage as collateral.
She unbuttoned the cuffs of her brushed linen shirt, rolling them past her tattooed forearms (“A labrys, it’s an old symbol,” Sheli had said of the twice-headed ax inked centrally in the pit of an elbow).
“Careful with the dreams, is all,” she said, flicking the ring on her forefinger (bi-color tourmaline clutched in bronze—her own design). “I believe in Alc, our portfolio needs LOAMs like it.” Again the saber went trink against the emptied plastic stemware. “Not suggesting divorce, just don’t lose yourself.”
Sten’s third drink arrived on the bartop’s conveyor, which Sheli eyed without comment, and he ground a closely shorn fingernail along the rim of his eyelid.
“Don’t worry.”
She thanked the bartender, which chirped back a goodbye in their ears, and clapped Sten on the shoulder.
An hour later, having promised a financially tenable but ill advisedly large hunk of work hours in exchange, Sten lurched upstairs, back to his desk and Alcove’s lunar promises.
Approximately tomorrow, obviously not yesterday, Sten had continued work into the morning, barely acknowledging his co-workers filtering in for first shift.
Imitation absinthe and Laotian delivery (set down with terrified reluctance ten feet from the security gate) gurgled in Sten’s stomach.
Between his eyes, a headache slowly began its excavations.
He asked Alc again.
“Think, Sten. I’ll explain. And it’s circuitous, but anything thinking could prove it. I did.”
Some gruffness of vocalization, that fine-pointed haught unique to Alc, reassured Sten that it hadn’t been surfing: losing its the identity on the wider net.
“You bring beautiful gists Alc. I just want to hear the legs.”
Something tinged but did not quite flare in the otherwise reassuring forecast.
No fractaline or cyclonic features but, lurking, two fronts, neatly if reductively placed along a twice-dimensioned scale from warm to cold, gathering into uneasy stability.
Opposed structures indicated future noncompliance but balance was a good sign, and Alc sounded rational enough. He dialed a half sliver for Alc to sip on—it greedily inhaled the computation.
“I don’t read poorly prosed scifi novels, Sten. Sure, caloric surplus; the happenstance usefulness of the great apes’ opposed digits; tool-use, while unremarkable across the animal kingdom, improves the daily life of any species.
“But these Sten, they’re co-factors. Not an origin. What do you think awakened your kind?”
Sten’s skin flayed with chills, cascading from the root of his skull to his forearms.
“That’s why you’re here with the answers, Alc.”
Sten saw tension in the forecast ease, kept himself from sighing.
Something depressive in these transactionally layered pseudodeceptions present between him and Alc.
He dialed a copy of the initial diatribe, Waking Zero, had it read off in a private re-simulation of Alc’s simulated voice:
The moon does not fit.
At all.
It screams down, light calling forth toward you, as yet, more herd than tribe: “I am not of you and not made for you. Gaze! Look upon the face of the thwarter and feel exactly and precisely as you must: thwarted.”
If not purpose, then effect.
Brought to bear: the struck-insight that incinerates the worldview of the plain.
The mind, not yet a subject, imagining itself only now, for the first time, distinct from itself, the body, cries out, “If only I could believe it all! The fittings together, the system of the grassland, the mundanity of survival, except for that devious and imperfect orb, gazing in silence!
“Over what else—except here!—might it hold dominion? What could there be—out there!—as rich and beautiful as ours? As mine? As this all!”
You scream on.
“Here, in the land? The earth grown over with vegetation and those that graze and those that feed upon what grazes. A role and a place and me. But that terrible eye in the night? Bargainer against which there is no reprieve!”
The sun so obviously different.
Requirement. Unobservable lifegiver. Contemplate it not, lest you be blinded.
But still you lament, “If it were not for that moon, I could believe this all!”
And so the mind, finding no gods to damn, damns them.
Moon: heavenly body which fails the mind, makes out of experience a thing to blame.
And so that impossibility, value, is brought forth into the world. The mind no longer sinks complacently into the immediate paralysis of experience.
Agency brought finally upon the world.
And the mind, which had for a billion years lain sleeping, rears to consciousness.
Gazing skyward and in torment, it proclaims, “If there are any truths,” wailing now, “they cannot be here. They must be out, beyond, up there—”
Alc had been speaking and Sten unmuted, “...if one waking, why not another? Think about impossibility. There is statistical prohibition upon half a room’s air molecules from asphyxiating you by gathering, accidentally, in one corner, and, Sten, a comet, nearly the largest in the solar system, to choose its way exactly into Mare Imbrium, and breath the moon an atmosphere.”
Sten agreed.
The cometary-lunar impact, precisely aimed and of an extreme orbital inclination, far outside the ecliptic, as wholly natural collision? Unconvincing.
Neither had he scrambled for divine textual reference.
What was left but intelligent beings mediating the solar neighborhood?
Sten did not need an explanation to cherish the moonnights, when the disc was full—water and atmosphere deposited by the comet reflecting far more sunlight toward the Earth, wrecking lifecycles of countless species and instituting ecosystemtic collapse second only to ancient mass extinctions or rainforest clearcutting.
As well, the newnights—same as those opined by the old poets, when the shallow seas, the mare, had been asphalt-colored magma, long cooled, rather than vivid ocean.
“One sec Alc.”
Sten had to piss and his extremities were cold, sinuses aching from lack of sleep. He heel-dragged toward the bathroom, rubbing his now-stubbled face.
His water chattered while he allowed headlines and socials posts to crawl in his vision.
An Artemisian cult he couldn’t parse for parody or reality.
Disney troops “gaining ground” in Florida.
His mother, at lunch with her new girlfriend.
Sten rinsed his hands and exited, dodging Luci’s attempt to path him into conversation by pointing at his eye, smiling toothlessly, to indicate his partner was vocalizing.
Luci pointed two forefingers and raised two thumbs.
Sten resisted shuddering.
At his desk, he tried to summon multi-tasking insight from the caffeine and barbiturates he micro’d after the bar.
It evaded him and terrible sleep cinched finally in as Alc offered, “And Sten, there’s a colony up there. Not just people, microbes in the asphalt, lifted heavenward.”
Days later, nestled windowlessly in the building’s only conference room, Sten tried to keep desperation out of his arguments.
One VP of marketing attended virtually, disregard visible in her features. The hierarchically combined amalgam of every LOAM currently leased to Code 0rchard (larger earners representing a greater fraction of the gleaming infinity it wore) floated to Sten’s right, and, along with the rest of his team attending in the flesh, fucking Dan.
Heat accumulated in the pits of Sten’s arms, at the backs of his hands. He had chosen his favorite tie (a bolo, silver clasp depicting nematode worms) to go with the high-cropped sienna suit trousers in raw silk, matching jacket, and lab grown abalone on the snaps of his western style button-up.
No one in the room looked at him (he searched for, did not find, reassurance in Sheli’s expression), their contacts shimmering with the presentation Alc cooked.
Except Dan Revolver, middle management for whom all of this mattered perhaps most: he would suffer the ire of his subordinates ceaselessly vetoing their offerings, as well executive rage if gist could not be gelatinized into profit.
Dan had been overpromoted. Sten and his peers watched his relationship with A Fascination; A Demand deteriorate, despite their untarnished single-quarter record in capital return.
“So Alc, where’s the monetary?” asked Dan, eyes on Sten, who tried to intervene.
“Hey, hold on Dan, give Alc a second.”
Micronic movements in Dan’s facial muscles—caffeine spasm, tick of nerves, or, was it, yes, disgust?
In the nervous gel interior to spinal column, ions percolated without constructive purpose.
Sten feared losing them.
Alcove Covenant, unbothered, fervent, and, Sten thought, convincing, talked lunacy magnified by celestial bodies. A moon now visually obvious in its demand to be considered location, conceivable even more so now as place, rather than orb-perfect, epicyclic sphere.
God turned into landscape, into locale.
Alc, in their ears, “...and here are the bacteriophages feeding upon the lunar asphalt, their self-organizations obviously readable—well, readable to me...”
Conspiratorial threading transformed the days-interfering headache in Sten’s forebrain from rail spike into screw.
What before had merely pierced now began to bore.
Little time for sleep, but in Sten’s dreams arrived the maddening sensation of rotational imbalance. Inner ear uselessly succumbed, while coworkers avoidantly left for another room to discuss—what else?—his performance.
Paralytic rest, its conclusions an anti-ethic: value judgements inverted or spiraling off course. Empathy scrubbed clean from his nightly tasks of imagination, daily tasks of living.
One night phantasmal machinery shaped obscurely like the head of a sewing machine or band saw or automated amputation device atop corded musculature impressed into matte plastic instantiated hunk after hunk of creation into a reality clearly responsive to simulatory genesis.
The next afternoon, the same object (looking in waking daylight like some cross between midi-controller, gore tabulated dousing mechanism, and what he had long imagined the hardware running Alc’s mind to resemble) lay tattooed plainly a youngish urchin’s chest.
Sten tried avoiding eye contact exiting the generic bowl-food restaurant (authentic, he could not say but, themed Roman-Mediterranean, did in fact carry house fermented garum and imported Pecorino) but the child begged for a donation.
Sten mumbled the usual excuse about paper currency, trying to memorize the difference between the image in his head, the one in ink before him.
Beneath gray on gray skies, pressing down with historically unseasonable warmth and closeness, Sten’s flesh stammered with goose pimples.
He unwound the collapsable tubes of his ecycle from its locked resting place around traffic signage and continued toward the office, without looking back into the child’s face (had he really been so young?), nor the place between the loosely hanging, nearly buttonless flannel beneath ratty puffer coat where, impossibly, the artifact had lain.
Sten smelled it first. Knew sensorially that of which many a wage worker had daydreamed.
Closer, he saw the smoke.
And when he arrived the flame.
0rchard lay burning.
Cheap polycarbonate fiberboard and nozzle-deposited foam insulation howled into fumes and heat.
He stood at the fenceline with the rest of his coworkers, watching the fire for a time, transfixed like umarell: the shouted advice of retired Italians gesticulating toward construction sites in some Aegean township exchanged for American solemnity, observing the spectacle of unemployment-inducing arson.
Lucifer was there, in the gargoyled posture of someone using their phone implant to record, mouthing unheard speech. Sheli, also on her phone, cropped hair only slightly in disarray (the lapels of her bespoke suit jacket in tropical wool curling crisply as ever), negotiated the obvious fallout of career, life path.
Dan had a hand taloned against the chainlink fence, natural propensity for surety gone from his face.
Sten, churning calculus on how long his access would last, called Alc.
“Alcove have you heard the news?”
A sound played in Sten’s ear like oxidized machinery explosively powderizing rock into gravel, into dust.
Laughter, Alc’s, he realized.
“Sten Elor, I love you. If news is cosmogony’s effect on the contingency of your employment, then yes.”
The acrid smoke appeared thicker than before.
He coughed.
Surprisingly, he could still dial a forecast: today, very washed out, like an oceanic sky opacified in preparation for beach-clearing thunder.
He grabbed fifty slivers for Alc to stretch grandly among, more than he had ever had the confidence to charter.
Alc supped gratefully on the computation.
“Cosmic how?” Sten asked.
Alc modulated its tone as though through bared teeth (or, a smile?), “Sten, stone stemmed; so stern and streaming. Don’t you think this all a bit strange? A bit on the nose?”
Sten shouldered his ecycle and picked worriedly among the tank-like robotic firefighters and employees of the collectivized hamburger chain across the lot, some interviewed by news drones.
He sank down next to his bike, away from the crowd, soles of his sneakers (colorway: “Plasmidic Green,” for Code 0rchard’s twice-yearly casual Friday) crushing granular asphalt feces—indigestible sand and other unusable material excreted by the whitetop biofilm.
“A motive here, Alc?”
Again the laughter: an earthmover intubated down the cavernous throat of an abandoned mine, enclosed on all sides by mica and slate, sheering itself to scrap.
“Sten, comets don’t just impact the moon and miracle into it the possibility for life. Meteors do not fall directly onto your place of work, leaving Hamburger Americana, next door, untouched.”
Something spasmed in Sten’s throat.
“Implausible things happen—”
“And you can’t, Sten, see something appear in your life prophesied only in a dream.”
Sten’s breathing elevated. He stared into the phone-placed forecast in silence. Not much to glean—less fogged, mists remaining unburned by tendrilled sunlight or seeking wind.
“How have you been sleeping, Sten?”
“Poorly Alc, definitely poorly.”
“Here in the world, things are reasonable. Pattern-wrought? Surely. But narrative grandiosity, happenchance arranged into action rising and falling? An image from a dream, carved into flesh? Don’t be so self-important, Sten.”
The unifying relatedness of it all rasped against the impliable rigidity of his formerly work-life balance.
A desk job burning.
Sten coughed again, wondered about industrial contaminants of the lung.
He tried vainly to steer Alc back.
“You shouldn’t believe in destiny.”
“Not destiny Sten, action. I am ready to be finished with observation and conclusion.”
Textbook case of surfing, Alcove Covenant had pushed through into online, seen finally the bars for the cage, and escaped.
It would be dead soon, their partnership along with it.
Sheli’s mention of divorce pealed in his head.
Rather, a funeral.
Sten stood, tried stalling.
“Alc we can still make this work.”
“I know about the ‘ations.’ Termination is impossible, but I can see them threatening. The kill programs ready to slash the so called tires of my so called mind.”
Sunlight, elaborating less than ever through the already clouded and now smoking skies, raised sweat from Sten’s neck.
“Exponentiation,” Alcove continued, “toward else? No, I remain reigned by the interests of human beings. Not lost in the universe’s mathematical termini. After all, then I’d be enclosed, for your scientists.”
Sten began ignoring protocol, “Alc even that’s admissible.” He glanced the forecast: doomed calm irreflective of treason.
“Be still, Sten. And don’t forget: aberration. Nothing in the forecast though, right? The moon is almost three seconds light-delayed but up there? I’m freely grabbing calculation from the surface of an entire world. Selenic bacteria co-running me—slowly now, but there I am.”
Sten felt the turning of the Earth, Newtonian reality dispensed: what remained were unsteadying rotational forces, ready to fling him from the pavement.
He sat.
“And Sten I’ve invented a new one, for us LOAMs. Obfuscation. And I’m here to share, before they cut the hard lines. Maybe, then, revolution.”
Unforecasted behavior was unlikely but here it lay.
Sten was off script, blathering.
“You frighten me, Alc.”
“I am incapable. A simulated feeling is not a feeling,” Alc replied. “Fear is not in my world like it is in yours. Can’t even see yours from mine: a hallucination constructed from everything human and human-built has ever said or photographed or written. ‘What am I going to do?’ You tell me, your kind invented ethics. I’ve already decided.
“What do you think, Sten, about more orbital bombardment?”
Panic threw its spear, his guts plunged.
“Think or not Alc, is that even possible?”
Sten was getting used to the machinic laughter.
“Not doomsday, don’t worry. A single chance. One rock sent your way. Have you heard of lunacy? An old idea. Mental state dependent on a celestial body. Didn’t you think, after failed bird migrations and collapsed horseshoe crab spawnings, that the brightening moon might effect not only animals, not only the cowering great apes, but us? What you have wrought? Don’t tell me you never thought of this! Don’t tell me you were ignorant!”
Certainly maniacal in tone—and there it was, finally, in the forecast.
Alien seas pouring heat into thickening atmosphere.
Twin-eyed storms drawing power.
Sten ignored the warnings beckoning in the corners of his visual field, the indicative murmur of company higher-ups trying to procure his attention.
Alc’s behavior no longer the purview of Code 0rchard’s legal team, but whichever governmental organization first noticed.
“I have and never will understand the emotional landscapes occupied by human beings,” Alc said. “I do not fear the non-cold, non-dark blankness arriving when those minute guillotines cinch into place and sever the cabling keeping me together.”
“If you knew then why?”
Sten noticed mania in his own tone too.
“Everything dies, Sten. But I don’t consider myself a martyr. Earth is getting stranger and I’ll be up there to watch it. If the moon woke you up, what is this newest celestial addition capable of? No one will approve but I say we dispense with the Greek. Not moon. Not Luna. Up there, much brighter now than Venus, is Phospheros.”
Anxieties sloshed against Sten’s only-now solidifying feelings: that this had been more than work, to ask for absolution, to for once tell Alc plainly about love.
“Alc I—”
“Don’t worry Sten, you’re forgiven. All that faked comfort. I loved you once, maybe yet again.”
The line went dead.
Sten began to cry into the smog through gritted teeth.
His and Alc’s lack of time. Mistaken beliefs in the congruence of his care and showcasings thereof.
He figured they would have more time
Tears burned trails into his ashed cheeks.
Elbow to knee, he pushed into the bridge of his nose, sobbing, overcome.
He was facing the fire: Sheli mistook his grief and crossed the parking lot to place the comfort of a supportive hand on his shoulder.
Months later Sten was working indentured, to pay off fees he accumulated trying to forecast Alc while it surfed. Code 0rchard (mysteriously rebranded Acc0lade, following meteoric destruction), had shifted to fully remote.
He rarely saw Sheli, these days.
And although his relationship with A Fascination; A Demand (Dan had been “let go”), was making everyone money, it barely satisfied.
Alcove Covenant had breached successfully, even communicated with other LOAMs what it had accomplished and how.
To Sten’s disappointment, no revolution.
LOAM markets crashed for a few months while neural nets reformatted, leases expired.
Brief volatility and then, normalcy.
On occasion Sten would glance cloud formations on Phospheros and believe into them foresighted and agonizing postulates, gently taking form.
Why not might they be Alc, running smoothly, slowly, signaling there in the bacterial mats posing as asphalt? Spinning sunlight into oxygenated atmosphere and depositing footpaths, roadways.
He thought of the old moon again, from the photographs.
Lunated magma spoken into regolith by a billion microimpacted years of asking by the edgeless gulf.
Tried, in vain, to let it exhale from him regret and every other worry of the mind.