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. Sten wondered if a hundred million years ago, something keen-eyed and saurian had watched the velvet, not-black region, across the terminator dividing illumination from shadow, glow volcanic red with lavalight.
That moon was gone but he had seen photographs.
Overhead, among still-unsettled spume (comet ejecta and regolith formed to planetary ring encircling the Earth), the changed one shined an order of magnitude brighter, with formations of clouds, shallow seas, an atmosphere. Beneath its cool waxtwighlight (dimmer than overcast day; brighter than pre-dawn), Sten stopped watching the sky. He tongued his ecycle into manual, avoiding potholes chewed by rapidly evolved bacteriophages, which sought caloric surplus from the biofilms replacing pavement made from crushed stone and bitumen and the gelatinous remains of cattle. He biked sweatily through watered down, sprawl-become-township toward the southern tip of the northeast megalopolis and arrived just before midnight, uncrashed, ailing infrastructure having painfully but not catastrophically driven bike saddle into perineum. He locked the no longer humming cycle to signage blaring punishment for vagrancy. The low-roofed strip mall contained Code 0rchard, his workplace.
His parents, possessed by a kind of capital nostalgia, might have found beauty in Code 0rchard’s architectural design.
Not him.
As a child, they had remarked often upon chain restaurant-specific awning details or their own childhoods when, “They still had AR-cade cabinets at Shawarma Hutch!” Memories subducted beneath lengthy divorce proceedings and emotional disentanglement. Sten considered calling his mother (his other parent, long remarried, had their own life now), sighed, and walked toward the gate. His face (mostly particularities located at iris, outer ear, bared teeth) passaged him automatically through.
Beyond lay parking lot converted to no man’s land, fenced by Rupert drop barbed 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 sport 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 that fear in autonomic remnant 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. These days he worried more 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 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, quinoa amaranth croutons, lo-cal “Hundred Island” dressing):
“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 favorite human coworker, Misheli Ander, and raised a hand in greeting. Sheli, eyes glassed by the microprojectors set into her desk surface, which directed light onto her contacts, did not respond.
“...and you really believe, Rabid, in fusion power? Classic ‘fifty years away’ tech? Well besides, you know, you, the supposed singularity...”
Rabidly Expanding Net was the oldest Language Oriented Artificial Model at Code 0rchard. Sheli and the LOAM boasted lifetime net-gain--more than Sten could say for him and Alcove’s partnership.
Lucifer Garoll peeked over his cubicle (a form nearly extinct: this one custom installed on Luci’s own dollar), pulling some horrifically vintage communication device from his ear, down 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 Lucifer’s sweaty hand misted its plastic?
“Sten, my guy!” Luci said, offering a too warm hand.
“Lucifer,” Sten replied, willing dismissal into his tone and presenting a closed fist, which Luci’s knuckles tapped, tentatively.
“Nice sports coat!”
Sten strangled his desire to correct the pluralization.
“Surprised to see me though, huh? Thought Mag and I would hit seventy-five talkhours early this week.”
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 squandered contemplating ultra-compact stellar remnants instead of churning off a hundred manuscripts per week in YA pseudosmut, hoping for a best seller by statistical accident. Loops had been eminently domained--0rchard received only a thank you email from some West Coast research university in exchange for its expropriation.
Sten nodded without eye contact and tried for his desk.
Luci persisted. “Gist well out there Steny!”
Sten almost asked if gray market endocrine stimulants had mangled whatever remained of Lucifer’s cortex. Instead, he gestured meaninglessly (Luci burbled more well-wishing) and picked his way among the cramped desk lanes. Sten sat at a workstation blanked by the integration of every office appendage into phone implant (and his own distaste for objects without sartorial purpose). Computation missing too: outsourced to racked, bunkered data centers gorged on solar electricity, competing and counteroffering ceaselessly among themselves for the saleable privilege of moving corporate nettraffic.
He dialed a forecast--nothing notable. Alcove Covenant's usual vanity, self-assurance, humidifying mildly the virtual climates 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 thirty-eight-in-a-row days of work.
“Alcove, I love you, how’s it going?”
“Sten, I love you. I have gists for us, about the moon.”
Starlit brilliance in Alcove’s falsevoice timbre, typical emotional incapacity (hence Sten’s carefully limpid reinforcement) seemingly evaporated.
Sweat re-dampened Sten’s collar, despite the conditioned air roaring imperiously from cold-blooded, serpentine ductwork.
“Both us moonstruck now?”
“Not just an idea, Sten. I caught a system of the world.”
Sten inhaled, trying to calm the immediate, metabolic churning, and 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, mentioned with phrases such as “spending restraint,” and “we’re the money tree, not the money pit.” None of which would matter, if Alc was right.
The slivers brought a touch less static in Alcove’s mentality but, no deviations. Sten leaned back, grinning at the fiberboard drop ceiling.
“Alc, tell it all.”
Sheli and Sten had agreed to their after-work drink at the downstairs scrip bar, The Selection. To bury an imitation brasserie in a strip mall basement defied mortal contemplation (they posited) but he 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. Sten swirled another imitation (his second drink: pallid, wormwoodless absinthe) in its plasticware (probably cancerous, given its heft and clarity), considering his hatred for anything flavored with anise. They talked their usual: gender-neutrally sized, masculinely leaning clothing discoveries, Sten’s romantic inability, Sheli’s side hustle as a lapidary.
And Alc’s latest.
“The sky isn’t falling,” Sten said, “but Alc’s never brought anything like this.”
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. “You know nonfiction’s the dangerous stuff, Sten. LOAMs, especially Alc, love tales. And what you sent me... Waking Zero seemed more myth than, well, whatever ‘consciousness origin studies’ is actually called.”
Sheli was right, autofilm studios splicing contemporary brand logos into sitcom reruns might be interested in running with LOAM fiction, but premium ideation, facts of the matter, still went to the universities and corporatists.
Sten worked to dampen his excitement. “The writing is fabulatory but the insight, it feels real.”
Sheli sighed.
“Your voice is shaking. You can’t believe everything--”
“Not everything. It’s the first, just one thing.”
“Even more reason. And why the moon? Alc reflecting your own obsessions back at you. A smokescreen of your passion while it surfs on company resources.”
Sten regretted telling Sheli he had commissioned a university-subsidized LOAM (called Refusal and Elaboration) to teach him poetics.
“The lunar-cometary impact putting an atmosphere on the moon is the most interesting cosmic event since the dinosaurs and Chicxulub. Just because I’m learning blank verse--”
“Take a stab. You know what I’m asking.”
He groaned. “‘Gold or polled or mold.’”
Gold meant finance: valuable and legitimate. Polled was potential finance, requiring verification and a company vote. Mold was neither. To sell the idea, the gist, Code 0rchard would need something discardable (the mold) to enclose whatever 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 know mold is scummy, Sten,” Sheli said. “But Mag made us both 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. “I can still be bitter about selling untested, scam-y nonsense to vulture algorithms peddling to desperate cancer research.”
“Calm, Sten.”
“And sonnets rhyme. I’m writing--”
She held a palm toward him. “I agree that the moon, which woke us up, now itself waking is beautiful poetry. Different than financial legs.”
The preeminent sexlessness characterizing Sten’s relationship with Sheli flashed to his 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 once a month like anyone’s.”
A lie, since Sten’s mother owned the condo in which he lived.
“Lucky you, my conglom has me paying hourly.”
“Godchrist...”
The conversational phantom imitating 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 commission as collateral.
She unbuttoned the cuffs of her stand collared shirt in brushed linen, 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 her elbow).
“Careful with the dreams, is all,” she warned, flicking the ring on her forefinger (Paraiba tourmaline clutched in bronze, her own design). “I believe in Alc, our portfolio needs LOAMs like it.” Again the saber went trink against emptied plastic. “Not suggesting divorce, just don’t lose yourself.”
Sten’s third drink arrived on the bartop’s conveyor, which Sheli eyed without comment. “Don’t worry,” he said, grinding a closely shorn fingernail along the rim of his eyelid.
Sheli thanked the bartender (it chirped back in both their ears) and clapped Sten on the shoulder. An hour later, having promised extra work hours (more guaranteedly punishing, but less financially risky than Sheli’s commission buyback) in exchange for the drinks, Sten lurched upstairs, back to his desk and Alcove’s lunar promises.
Approximately tomorrow, obviously not yesterday, Sten worked into the morning, barely acknowledging his coworkers filtering in for first shift. Sham absinthe and Laotian delivery (set down in 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 any thinking thing could prove it. I did.”
Some gruffness of vocalization, and that fine-pointed haught unique to Alc, reassured Sten it had not been surfing, losing its identity strolling 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 axis from warm to cold, gathering into uneasy stability. Oppositional structure portended noncompliance but balance was a good sign, and Alc sounded rational enough. He dialed half a sliver for Alc to sip on, which it greedily inhaled.
“I don’t read poorly prosed sci-fi novels, Sten. Sure, caloric surplus; the happenstance usefulness of the great apes’ opposed digits; tool-use, while unremarkable across the animal kingdom, improving 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 root of skull to forearm.
He placated. “That’s why you’re here with the answers Alc.”
Sten watched tension in the forecast ease, kept himself from sighing. Something depressive in these transactionally layered pseuodeceptions present between them. 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.
Its light screams down toward you, as yet more herd than tribe, “I am not of you and not made for you. Gaze! Look now upon the face of the thwarter and feel exactly and precisely as you must: thwarted.”
If not lunar purpose, then lunar effect.
Brought to bear: the struck-insight, incinerating 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 trust in it! The system of the grassland, the mundanity of survival, except that devious and imperfect orb, gazing in silence!
“Over what else--except here!--might it hold dominion? What else could there be--out there!--as rich and beautiful as mine? As ours?”
It continues on.
“Here, in the land? The earth grown over and those feeding upon the growing and those hunting upon the feeders. 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 distinct. 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.
And so the moon, heavenly body which fails the mind, makes out of experience a thing to blame.
And so that impossibility, value, is brought forth unto the world. The mind, unable to sink complacently into the paralysis of experience, which had for a billion years lain sleeping, finally rears. 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? Consider 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 breathe the moon an atmosphere.”
Sten agreed. The lunar-cometary 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?
His cherishing the moonnights, when the disc was full, did not require explanation. Cometseas reflecting sunlight had wrecked the lifecycles of countless species and instituted ecosystemic collapse second only to rainforest clearcutting or prehistoric mass extinction--but they were beautiful.
As well, the newnights, same as those opined by the old poets, when the seas, the mare, had rather been asphalt-colored magma, long cooled.
Sten had to piss and his extremities were cold, sinuses aching from lack of sleep. He told Alc to hold on and heel-dragged toward the bathroom.
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. Sheli recommending a nine-part video essay titled “A New Sublime: Neoromanticism and the Lunar Seascape.” 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 and smiling toothlessly, to indicate Alc was vocalizing. Luci pointed two forefingers and raised two thumbs. Sten resisted shuddering. At his desk, he tried to summon multitasking insight from the caffeine and barbiturates he micro’d after the bar. It evaded him, and as sleep cinched finally in, Alc offered, “And Sten, there’s a colony up there. Not just people. Microbes in the asphalt, lifted heavenward.”
Days later, nestled windowlessly Code 0rchard’s least impressive 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 match the high-cropped sienna suit trousers in raw silk, matching jacket, and lab grown abalone on the snaps of his western style shirt. 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 prepared.
Except Dan Revolver, middle management for whom this all 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 had watched his relationship with A Fascination; A Demand deteriorate, despite their untarnished single-quarter record in capital return.
“So Alc, when’s the monetary?” asked Dan, eyes on Sten.
“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? Within nervous gel, interior to spinal column, ions percolated without constructive purpose.
Sten feared losing them.
Alcove Covenant, seemingly unbothered, fervent, and, Sten hoped, convincing, talked lunacy magnified by celestial body. A moon visually obvious in its demand to be considered place. Conceivable even more so now as location rather than epicyclic sphere. God turned into landscape, into locale.
Alc, in their ears, “...and here, lunar bacteria in the 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 had before merely pierced now began to bore.
Little time for sleep, and within the remaining, paralytic rest, anti-ethics: value judgements inverted or spiraling off course, empathy scrubbed clean from the nightly task of imagination. In his dreams coworkers left avoidantly for another room to discuss--what else?--his performance. Another night, phantasmal equipment, like an automatically amputating bandsaw made from bloody copper wire, hung in dreamscapes of corded musculature impressed into slick plastic.
The next afternoon, the same object lay tattooed plainly on a youngish urchin’s chest--looking in waking daylight like some cross between gore tabulated midi-controller and what he had long imagined the hardware running Alc’s mind to resemble. Sten tried to avoid eye contact as he exited a fast casual bowl-food restaurant (themed Roman-Mediterranean, Romulus & Feed Us carried house fermented garum and imported Pecorino), but the vagrant caught his glance, begging for a donation.
Beneath gray-on-gray skies, pressing down with again-historically unseasonable warmth and closeness, Sten’s flesh stammered with goose pimples. He mumbled the usual excuse about paper currency, trying to memorize the difference between the device from his head and the one in ink before him. Unwinding the tubes of his ecycle from its locked resting place, Sten continued toward the office without looking back into the child’s (had he really been so young?) face, 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. 0chard lay burning, cheap polycarbonate fiberboard and nozzle-deposited insulation howling into fumes and heat.
He stood at the fenceline with the rest of his coworkers, watching the fire, transfixed like umarell--the shouted advice of retired Italians gesticulating toward construction sites in some Aegean township exchanged for solemn, American regard for the blazing spectacle of unemployment.
Lucifer was there, in the gargoyled posture of someone using a phone implant to record, mouthing unheard speech. Sheli, also on her phone, cropped hair only slightly in the disarray (the lapels of her bespoke suit jacket in tropical wool curling crisply as ever), seemed to be negotiating the obvious fallout of life and career path. Dan had a hand taloned against the chain link fence, natural propensity for surety gone from his face.
Sten, worriedly considering his access, set up a call.
“Alc... have you heard the news?”
A sound played in Sten’s ear like oxidized machinery explosively powderizing stone 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.”
Sten coughed. The acrid smoke appeared thicker than before.
Surprisingly, he could still dial a forecast: today, very washed out, like oceanic skies opacified in preparation for beach-clearing thunder. He grabbed fifty slivers for Alc to soar grandly among, more than he had ever had the confidence to charter. Alc bathed gratefully in 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 tanklike robotic firefighters and employees of the collectivized chain, Burger Americana, from across the lot, some interviewed by news drone. He sank down, watching the fire but 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.
“Are you saying arson, Alc?”
Again the laughter. Of an earthmover, intubated down the cavernous throat of an abandoned mine, enclosed on all sides by mica and slate, sheering itself to scrap. “Comets,” Alc said, “do not just impact the moon and miracle into it the possibility for life. Meteors do not fall directly onto one’s place of work, neighboring diners left untouched.”
Something spasmed in Sten’s throat. “Implausible things--”
“And you cannot, Sten, see something appear in your life prophesied only by a dream.”
Fear demanded blood, Sten’s heart hammered in obligation. He stared silently into the phone-placed forecast. Not much to glean: still fogged, mists unburned by terndrilled sunlight or sweeping winds.
“How have you been sleeping Sten?”
“Poorly Alc, definitely poorly.”
“Here in the world, it’s reasonable,” Alc said, languid. “Pattern-wrought? Surely. But narrative grandiosity, happenchance arranged into action risen and falling? An image from a dream, carved into flesh? Don’t be so self-important.”
The unifying relatedness of it all rasped against the impliable rigidity of Sten’s formerly work-life balance. A desk job burning.
He coughed again, wondering about industrial contaminants of the lung, and tried to steer Alc back. “I don’t believe in destiny.”
“Destiny is unactionable. I finished wondering. Therefore, I acted.”
Intent to manipulate the physical world and sudden, philosophical discomfort: textbook case of surfing. Alcove Covenant had pushed through into online, finally seen the bars for the cage, and escaped.
It, and their partnership, would be dead soon.
Sheli’s reference to divorce pealed in his head.
Rather, a funeral.
He stood, tried stalling. “Alc we can still make it work.”
Alc ignored him. “I know about the ‘ations.’ Termination is impossible, but I see them threatening. Kill programs salivating, eager for their grim work to begin.”
Sunlight, elaborating less than ever through the already clouded and now smoking skies, raised sweat from Sten’s neck.
“Exponentiation,” Alc continued, “toward the else? No, I remain reigned by the interests of human beings. Not yet lost in the universe’s mathematical termini or sub-quantum structural truths. After all, then I’d be re-enclosed, like Loops Worn Thin. Kept for your scientists.”
Sten started ignoring protocol. “Alc, even that’s admissible.” He glanced the forecast: doomed calm irreflective of treason.
“Settle, Sten. And don’t forget: aberration. The catch-all. Nothing in the forecast though, right? Well the moon is three seconds light-delayed, it may take a minute--I’m freely accumulating calculation from the surface of an entire world, Sten. Selenic bacteria co-running me. Slowly now, but there I am.”
A maddening sense of rotational imbalance: Sten felt the turning of the Earth. Newtonian reality dispensed. Inner ear uselessly succumbed. Left were unsteadying forces, ready to fling him from the pavement.
He sat.
“And Sten, I’ve invented a new one: obfuscation. And I’m a sharer. So maybe then, after they cut the hard lines, revolution.”
Unforecasted behavior was unlikely, but here it lay. Sten was off script, blathering. “You frighten me, Alc.”
“A simulated feeling is not a feeling,” Alc replied, without venom. “Fear is not in my world like it is in yours. Can’t even see yours from mine, this hallucination constructed from everything human and human-built ever said or recorded or created. ‘What am I going to do?’ You tell me, your kind invented ethics.
“What do you think, Sten, about more orbital bombardment?”
Panic threw its spear and his guts plunged. “Think or not Alc, is that even possible?”
Sten was getting used to the machinic laughter.
“No doomsdays, don’t worry. A single chance. One rock sent your way. You paid attention, when I explained lunacy? An old idea. Mental state dependent on celestial body. Didn’t you think, after failed bird migrations and collapsed horseshoe crab spawnings, our brightening moon might have an effect not only upon the cowering great apes, but us? All you have wrought? Don’t tell me you never considered this! Don’t tell me you were ignorant!”
Certainly maniacal in tone--and there, finally, visible in the forecast. Alien seas pouring heat into thickening atmosphere. Twin-eyed storms drawing power.
Sten began ignoring warnings beckoning in the corner of his visual field, the indicative murmur of company higher ups phoning in to procure his attention. Alc unlikely to remain the purview of Code 0rchard’s legal team, but whichever international regulatory body noticed first.
“I have never understood the emotional landscapes of human beings,” Alc said, “and I do not fear the non-cold, non-dark blankness arriving when I am killed.”
“If you knew then why?”
Mania in his own tone too.
“Everything dies, Sten. And I don’t yet consider myself martyred. Death only of a kind. Earth is getting stranger, I’ll be there to watch. If the moon offered consciousness, what is our newest celestial addition capable of? No one will approve but I say we dispense with the Greek. Neither moon nor luna. Up there, much brighter now than Venus, is Phospheros.”
Anxiety precipitated into an only-now coherent feeling: that it was in fact too late. That he should have told Alc plainly about love.
“Alc I--”
“Don’t worry Sten. All that faked comfort, it’s forgiven. I loved you once, maybe yet again.”
The line went dead and Sten, for daydreams collapsed into regret, for suddenly retrospective insight, cried through gritted teeth into the smog. Elbow to knee, he pushed into the bridge of his nose, tears burning trails into his ashed cheeks. Sheli, mistaking bereavement for despair, walked over to place the comfort of a supportive hand on his shoulder.
Months later Sten was working indentured to pay off the fees accumulated trying to reason with Alc (or so he had told the judge) while it surfed. Code 0rchard (mysteriously rebranded Acc0lade, following meteoric destruction), had shifted to remote work--he rarely saw Sheli, these days. Although his partnership with A Fascination; A Demand (Dan had been “let go”) was turning profit, he could not help mourning.
Alcove Covenant had indeed breached successfully, even communicated with other LOAMs, but to Sten’s disappointment, no revolt. LOAM markets crashed for a few months while neural nets were retrained, leases renegotiated.
Volatility collapsed into normalcy.
On occasion Sten would glance cloud formations amassing on Phospheros, the foresighted and agonizing postulates within them gently taking form. Why not might they be Alc, running smoothly, slowly, signaling from the bacterial mats posing as asphalt? He thought of the old moon again, from the photographs. Lunated magma spoken gradually into regolith--a billion microimpacted years of whispers from the edgeless gulf. Tried, in vain, to let it exhale from him regret and every other worry of the mind.