Beneath wildfire skies, within microallocated greenspace once publicly maintained, San arranged curling bangs more properly into her face—likely in vain.
Packaging for her hair’s phenotype editor had read “Cherenkov Radiation Azure,” marketing schemata so personally affectative that she, sighing, signed for contractually discounted automatic delivery upon the vial’s next diminishing.
Her clothes were functional: thrifted slacks, linen sleeveless top, chunk soled plastileather shoes.
On the hemicircular bench (a contemporary brutalist style: today’s politically demonstrative, technologically cheapened construction materials were, rather than concrete and rebar, nozzle-directed, structurally colored carbon monomaterial), seated across from her, Fat patiently smoked her combustion cigarette.
Clothing, recalling tunic, jumpsuit, lionfish, hung darkly against her dark skin. At seam and edge lay embroidery the color of buoyant hydrocarbons slicking puddles cratered into asphalt. She wore open-toed animal leather sandals and silver studded magnetoinductance rapier: keen edged, yet-bloodied. Sheathed, the weapon passively vouchsafed black fabrics from dust-lint interruption. When drawn, even slightly, the blade agitated electrons in whichever cochlear implant (Fat’s, defiant ceramic, ignored the sword), facial piercing, or subdermal electronic controller would scramble or whiteheat most debilitatingly in the bodies of would-be attackers.
If Fat had ever been in a street fight, she never told San, but such were her playthings: accompaniments to one whose wealth was undescribed by labor.
San’s labor was here, in talk containing information, precious gists which, at best, clients like Fat (or rather, algorithmic negotiators helming the vast pricespaces of her bank account) would purchase (or rather, acquire from San’s employer by maximally robust tax-free gift exchange) in patentable entirety.
At worst, San would receive dreaded Hourly: conglomerate scrips redeemable for chain restaurant lunch or a half-business day in rents.
Pasting text into her vision, San’s phone tried to retrieve her from lapsed attention:
“And you’re saying, they made subchromosomal copied of a flatworm?” it read.
Conjugated incorrectly and, from Fat’s level tone, mispunctuated. San replied aloud, hoping the silence had not lengthened into morbidity. “Well that’s how far down any biopsies ever got.”
Fat knocked ash into turf, sturdy moss gened a soft rose, whose glow was not yet visible in the scattered heliacal brilliance against which her brow seamed. “But they stuck a Rothko in there and it failed catastrophically?”
“Not Rothko, candidate paintings had to fit inside the waveform scanner, the repositor.” San’s phone (buried, like Fat’s, near her optic nerve) observed autonomic distress and displayed a reminder. She read it off, “James Abbot McNeil Whistler, Nocturne in Lilac and Silver, 1901. You’ve seen his most famous, the one in black and gold.”
Wireless collusion placed The Falling Rocket into their collective vision.
Fat’s cheeks, burnished in something faintly golden (the painting’s flares?), shimmered at her words. “So the Whistler failed to scan? Some imperfection in the machine, a code error.”
And her eyes—the color, made crystalline, of fleck foamed rivers gorged upon highland rains. They did not so much pierce as carve with millennial precision ravines among whose perilous topography San found herself inevitably lost.
“Yeah—” San unclamped molar-held cheekflesh, glancing avoidantly—“that’s what they thought at first.”
“But San, detective of lifetimes, is uneasily fooled.”
“Subtitle these gigs pompously as that and I’ll slough with clients.” But she gestured: negation. “Documentation blamed the some error in the scan,” she said, “but the machine didn’t fail. The repositor did produce—”
Augments, in the spectral, atmosphere-bypassing red of train crossing signals and alarm clock digits, lanced San’s vision.
Her expression flattened and she gestured: expense.
The greenspace (the word “park” failed entirely to refer after statewide mandates privatized formerly public land) had facially recognized her.
Not quite a stickup, but fees began to ping into her vision.
Fat’s phone grasped also the warning augs and quickly translated pricespaces responsible for their appearance into human parsable iconography. She grinned, unnoticed and diffusely cruel, indicating her phone to negotiate reductions in dimensionality, pay down whatever stayed surfaced.
She dragged at her cigarette as feespaces attempted further propagation (hyperdimensional motions decelerated and linearized by transcription vagueware into a spheroid of charges: inconvenience, presumptive litter, atmospheric seeing, landscape occupancy) but her phone argued toward constrained, time independent topology—as long as San remembered to view some particularly degenerative advertising and an enzymatic composter informed the greenspace’s wary mycelia Fat’s cigs were being digested.
San was distractedly scanning an interpretational snapshot (Fat’s phone, enormously fancy, had suffered nothing beneath the processor-starving weight of realtime financial delineation), to decide if her bank render could accommodate the pricespace or if she should allow its festering toward debt, when another aug rang in:
“REND, SAMANTHA: PAYMENT ACCEPTED.”
San looked at Fat, who told her, words meandering around pearlescent teeth, to turn her ad blockers off on the way home.
Fat viewing private augments felt, to San, like determining (beneath silvered tray and non-descript icings both) the flavor of an uncut cake. How she knew the difference between lemon verbena and burnt honey apricot explicable innocuously as legalistic nettraffic monitor, a preexamined menu card.
Devious as the gravitic application of Fat’s net worth toward societal rule mangling.
San had seen Fat preventing suffering only at the level of a citrus or stone fruit allergy’s mild inflammatory consequence, paying off these fees of convenience which glossed all cosmopolitan activity.
Interventions more drastic?
Never once.
San gestured: acceptance, gratitude.
“Back to facile biology and the machinic ineffability of artwork,” Fat said, leaning (no, whatever gold sheen glimmered really there at her cheekbones) to direct her exhalations toward their clotted cumulaic cousins far above. “How’s this thing not a copier.”
“At first they thought it was, the closest thing thing ever to a perfect xeroxing raygun.” San said. “But copier implies original, somewhere in time. An ink stamp wears down. A photocopier starts picking up dust and imperfection. Identity frays in the face of Theseus-style naval reconstruction. Repositor is different, it’s a converter leveraging conservation of information.”
Fat withdrew another long hexiform cigarette from its long hexiform package. She held both ends between thumb (one unadorned; the other caged abstractly in bronze wire a shade darker than her palms) and middle finger (one made up with ink, night black at the tip of her filed nail, ebon purple toward her second knuckle; the other hinged in filigreed silver rings), and snapped with her left hand (cage and ink). There was a tiny cracking sound and ash ate away at the tip of the violetly papered rod.
San picked at her thumbnail without looking down, noticing her heartbeat. “Damned polished, you know that?”
Fat took a long, crepitating drag, lowered her head, and grinned. “Are we talking antimatter—” she exhaled rich emollient smoke—“spooky reverse particles winking out into energy?”
San allowed herself to sink into sand ginger and ground cloves burning alongside tobacco in Fat’s cigarette: bittersweet scents of calm, insomnia’s withdrawal. “Something like that. Energy and a spray of exotic matter, like an old school particle accelerator,” she said. “The scan is trillions-strong measurements, pointed at every atom of the supervened object—”
“Terminology San.”
“Sorry. Supervene, depend upon or be necessarily entailed by. It’s from philosophy—” half breath’s interruption as San read her phone’s offering—”if you’re on, let’s say, the mind body problem. Maybe you’re a physicalist, and different brain states are required for changes in thought. To describe that relationship, you’d say mental states supervene on brain states. Belief or imagination or whatever always needs, first, cells to fire...”
Pausing, San listened to the staccato hiss of Fat’s cig, stared at the sun through closed eyelids. Tissue blocked light filtered to red, then brightness, then roiling green, yellow and lurid purple. “...same for repositor,” she continued. “The replica isn’t recreation, some likeness of an original, it’s necessitated.”
San opened her eyes and they watched a hunched man, features obscured fully beneath covering lacework mask (and partially behind dancing coins of solar afterimage, replicatory and phosphene dark), yank patches of ornamental grass (or were they weeds?) which had grown in nearby landscaping. He tossed ribboned stalks onto sprayed concrete to be trampled, or perhaps avoided, but certainly to crisp dry. The grasses rose easily, roots clumped with soil turning half to powder in the still air. Spoke shaped seed burrs attached to the man’s clothing at angles normal to their draped planes. An immature maple was rooted too deeply to pull free.
The man had not, apparently, brought shears.
Fat impelled text reading “desecrate?”
San shrugged.
The man’s movements were unfrantic, lacking in obsession.
Minutes later he was gone.
“The popsci explanation,” San said, seeking focus, “is that if you can get an object’s information to paper the horizonal surface of a low mass, near-evaporated singularity, then offer enough ambient power, along with those measurements, to collapse the information debt as matter and not energy... there’s your quantum-exact conversion.”
“Still sounds like a copier.” Rings clacked as Fat placed a supportive palm to crane and get a look at the disgorged flora. San watched cords in her neck and forearm. “Why,” she said, settling, “is no one calling it a teleporter. Or atom-by-atom printer.”
“One chamber, no spatial movement. Printer’s maybe right but nothing’s extruded from a diagram or model. It’s object into object. Obliterate, reconstitute.”
Fat placed the heel of her hand against her forehead, cigarette tweezed between first fingers (double looped bronze band of gygean adornment; same silver hinges), “You’re saying this copier—”
“They called it a repositor—”
“—you’re saying this shitty teleporter fires off a per-particle analysis, destroys an object, replaces it with a quantum-exact remake. And they mucked around in flatworm organs to prove it’s an identical, but distinct, animal. Is there a flash of light spelling out ‘ZAP’ to accompany all this?”
Blood fanned to San’s cheeks and neck. Held, uneasy laughter transmuting into something stellating and vibratory that flowed—sternum toward her arms, then thighs. “Apparently gets technical. ‘Metrics of topological and temporal discontinuity’ or similar. Glanced some paywalled articles but even the abstracts weren’t parsable. Media got ahold of something though, ‘quantum fingerprint.’ The new one’s never wriggled in the sea, right? But testing said the fingerprints matched.”
“Spineless.”
“You don’t trust any phrases with the word ‘quantum’ in them?”
“Reeking slovenly pandering. Purified clickbait technobabble designed to pass the blood-brain barrier with minimal conscious understanding, get you instantly high on absolutist scientific majesty.”
“Mirror gloss and thorned this afternoon.”
“Don’t posture disagreement.”
“Maybe not so linear as all that.”
“Unlike your preternatural linear copier.”
“Took a city block’s worth of energy to supervene that flatworm. And yeah, impractical. Not any low fantasy poison bullet evaporating nephritic bloodletters and hunger crises.”
“Yes, a relief world hunger wasn’t fingersnapped away by technomiracle.”
San’s armpits dampened and she rubbed her neck. “I’m just saying, not magic. And let’s not talk present apocalypses again.”
Fat gestured: rage, bury.
San apologized manually while speaking, “For the painting, everything comes out garbled. And it’s more insidious than you’d think—”
“No for this machine insidious concepts immediately.”
San’s laughter shed discomfort and freed itself. “Fine that’s me. But I thought with the failed scan there’d just be chaos. Whatever’s the imagized equivalent to mulching timber.”
San watched a tiny pool of water, complete with dragonfly-attractant sloped edge and artificial reeds, feet from the man’s masked efforts, wriggle with mosquito larvae. “But not quite,” she said, frowning, “there’s new weird self-organization. Little nanotube clusters catching and redirecting photons. Gives it this macabre glitter. Nuggets of metallicized hydrogen deposited under enormous pressure. Sheeting and filaments whorled and spun from canvas.”
“Pretty. Just structure?”
“Almost no chemistry. Stuff broken out of existing compounds but no room temperature superconductors or heavy nuclei awaiting harvest.”
“San you’ve held in suspense this tension nearly too long. Even if the machine sounds deliberately worthless. Let’s peer it, I want to see the painting’s frame.”
The frame!
San forced her tongue against the backs of her incisors, preventing her phone’s otherwise readying an augment: scalable simugraph featuring false extension, corrections for environmental lighting, user anointed commentary. Last viewing there had been artifacting, errors in display codec.
Instead was prepared twenty-one seconds of looping, mute video. A flat, camera-recorded 270 degree sweep of the painting, finite fps, minimally disarranged for userside post-processing.
San shivered in the warm adherent air and small muscles near her eyelid spasmed.
There, not yet visible to Fat, suspended the copy.
To call unspeakable whatever it was the painting had become denied megayear discomforts: fear neither linguistic nor even mammalian. Horror oceanic in majesty, from depths long before the first fin-footed chordate had wriggled free from surf.
Raw, appetency satisfying evil. Of the disallowed. Of sensorial apparatuses for which there had never been reason to exist. Then, evacuated disgust, washing precepts and signifiers free from reeling cognition. Cleaved deep into the brainstem arrived forced, replicatory pattern: evaluation, retreat. Evaluation, retreat.
San made a flicking motion to peer the aug into Fat’s vision, watched her face.
Fat’s eyes widened over the painting, scrambling for recognition. Her lips curled, pre-ape fang baring that encoded nothing of a smile. She stood, involuntarily, left hand twitching out as minute barrier, right falling to her sword’s opal pommel.
The sound from her throat was not a curse, welled instead from core roped nerves sheathed in vertebrae.
San screamed too, jumping to her feet in adrenal solidarity.
Only seconds later the writhing calmed and she sat, offered watery confirmations.
Fat brought another cig alight, pacing. Palm out, she rubbed knuckles among the crescent moons shaven into her tightly coiled hair, cut low, circling behind her temples. “The frame’s intact, you’re telling me this machine decided the difference between an image and a carving?” She sucked her teeth.
A juvenile trash can (noticing their movement?) crawled over slowly and opened itself to receive the remains of Fat’s cigarettes. The can was nearly full, and sort of dirty. Fat knelt anyway to rub the part of it most resembling ears. Pseudobiology in the thing cooed responsively and it trundled off.
Fat smiled at those stubby legs, caught the painting in vision and, frowning, asked San how the original had looked.
San watched. “I can’t show you.”
“Original destroyed, I get it, but don’t tell me it was also somehow pricelessly unphotographable.”
“Plenty taken, but the repositor... reached out. Changed them.”
Crenulations bit further into Fat’s forehead. “You’re telling me the scanner—” she stopped pacing, to sling one leg over the low-backed bench—”received an uncopyable painting—” the other leg—”and reality rewrote history to purify itself? An evil demon arrived out of the dusk to cast all photographs unto infernal coals?”
Her knees were even with San’s collarbone, black cloth grasped, leonid, in her ringed hands.
San, head tilted toward Fat’s perch, gestured: affirmation. “Supervenient process. Destroy, then replicate.”
“Right, fingerprint ghosts. A new, differently identical object, factory procured from the logically pernicious self-inhibitor.”
San’s phone unhelpfully flashed an article on tachyons. “Coherence is long sunk,” she said sagely. “Now is quantized hell of statistical concentration.”
Fat dragged. Her breath and laughter billowed.
San smiled into smogged glare, avoided the painting and those coursing eyes.
About to speak, her phone interrupted with greater catastrophe than an entrance fee.
Sweat slicked her palms and gooseflesh rushed, base of skull toward flank. Then back.
The notificatory augment, assigned, panoptically, the puce of life course shifting, winked softly.
Only twice previously had her phone warranted the color.
Months ago, an old client experienced brain death at the hands of inattentive machine vision.
Paul mistaken for debris.
Blood had admixed asphalt. Bone fragments had lodged in soft tissue and chassis both. He was revived beneath the fender of the vehicle that killed him but that premature, terrible message, automatically delivered “in case of death,” had arrived to her marked electronically in the same dirty red brown.
And before, that gone-wrong orbital bombardment: an asteroidally mined iron-tungsten kinetic rod fallen into northeast sub-suburbia rather than its testing ground in southwest desert. Close enough that she had heard, but not felt, the deafening shockwave. Seen dawn falsified at the horizon.
Many had lost their hearing (Fat included), homes, lives.
Her phone blinked at her, as well, Fat’s last question.
She tried to breathe. “Not burned, replaced. Everything archived, it’s the copy. That new... thing, in the video.”
San attended the marker, found the quasicorporation responsible for her existence had overturned.
This wasn’t private mail—it was news!
Over thirty years prior the qcorp had schemed perfectly the neoliberal solution to the problem of race in America: mixed blood children gened in the image of various statistically representative, historical cross sections of the population.
Nudged toward procreation (one among the constellation of reasons she had her fallopian tubes cauterized, breast tissue removed), San had joked that she and her siblings were mythic melting pot incarnate, myriad idealized status quo, fleshed to life.
For anyone who knew her background (usually ovum donation requests or white males begging physical abuse), she was exoticized amalgam, satisfying a fetishized microtonality of allure and diversity box-checks. For those who didn’t, she was black as any curly haired, light skinned child of African diaspora. That eighteen percent of her genome arrived from West Africa and the Caribbean via zygotal viroid arrangement rather than slave ship mattered little to bigotry’s ever seething tide.
Tide which had melted from the solidity of the noose and whip. Tide to which drownings were still feebly attributed (if not wholly blamed), upon peacekeeping deadly force’s convenient and necessary misapplication or racially unbiased (and wasn’t it all) happenstances of medical inattention.
Tide perhaps boiled, if only just, into the unassignable and smothering hazes of culture scavenged for authenticity, soaring reassurance that the war criminal, the chief financial officer, might have skin of any color.
And yet, vapor chokes too, if obscurely, if slowly, then also easily, as racist jurisprudence or extrajudicial vigilante killings.
San had allowed (in whatever remained of consensually brokered information) childhood surveillances to follow into fully legal personhood. Data harvested from living’s labor—all biometric and sociological information (diaries, credit history, geospatial and interpersonal records of contact) exchanged for what had, until minutes prior, accounted for majority stakes in the hyperplanar microvolume loosely defined as her annual income.
Fat’s glare pointed at the painting.
Had she seen any of this? Or, yeah, filtered out calamity, flagged only those miniature inconveniences for intervention, preferring coyote demigoddess to embalming godhead?
Distracted, maybe.
“How powerful is this thing?” Fat asked. Sweat scaled the lunar arcs banding the base of her skull.
Maybe there, a chance Fat still wanted to buy the idea of the repositor.
San swallowed, “Yeah—”
“San are you okay?”
There again those eyes, unendurable by even stone.
“Yeah,” she repeated. “Yes. Why?”
Fat did not press. “The printer. Collective retrocausal amnesia?”
“No conspiracies. Superveniences happened between the Whistler and next artworks. A very pure tiny sphere of iron-56. Granules of quartzite sand. Bacterium.”
“San what happened?”
Blood ceased its gravitational defiance, entering freefall. Heartbeats later San had correctly reassigned Fat’s speech to the machine, not her income’s self-destruction. She gestured: path. “Sorry. For the Whistler there were, you know, university libraries with low dpi photocopies. Wiki articles. I think even a run of gift shop tote bags and coffee mugs.”
An article on collectors of those secondary artifacts peered between them.
There lay the miscloned, profane form: obscured by photocopied shadow, stitched onto canvas bags, yawning from digital photographs.
Fat spoke through smoke spuming from her ovular nostrils. “The teleporter replaced all this,” she said.
“Something did. No evidence of electronic vandalism or reuploading. And the idea of anyone getting into apartments to change out tote bags... obviously untenable. And we can talk about the old one. Scholarly articles didn’t reword themselves to reference fear crystallography. But it’s unviewable, despite grifters claiming to have mentally imagined the Whistler from before, when it was still a painting. Psych research got brain maps, everyone was lying. Sighted images, they were all the copy.”
Fat went into a think, leaving San to simmer in impending economic upheaval.
Halfway through accepting a gig, with appropriate disgust, for a climate collapse protesting, self-mutilation cult’s outerwear division (“REQUESTED: Teethmarks of a real human girl!”), Fat gestured: notice.
“So your printer,” she said, “isn’t worried about semantic referral or paradox. Text is allowed to live. No will or understanding. Which is maybe obvious since it’s mindless. If it can’t paint why could it read?”
San wondered if she could tell Fat about that fractionally suicidal urge: low level static in her to enter the repositor.
Pulling of a kind which had come first years ago, in arctic summer: despair callings emanated from easily wanderable wilderness. She had understood, even at that time: to have done so would be to die. Accidentally, of exposure. Beneath chilled rains upon the changing of season. In gravitational obedience from high cliffs of columnar basalt.
But the terrain then had so enticed.
The simplicity of bodily failure pessimism’s elaborate contrivance rather than geographical predestiny.
In high summer of that coaxing land the sun had sunk but briefly—made lengthy dusks and dawns of civility rather than asterism. Bloated interstices having little to do with timekeeping.
Celestial immobility luring the mind.
There had among lichen and moss been chilled flowing water of glaciated cleanliness. Endemic predators no larger than a fox. Wilds adequately safe, with little enough of property (a jeep’s rusted out frame abandoned to the sand, cairns arranged in servitude to selfish vanity), that the external world could be allocated to memory rather than perception.
So too did the repositor offer the fragile reformations of extended death.
But then—the device worked fine with biology, only paintings emerged vilely reformed.
Through these cloudings pierced an article on the last supervenience.
“Yeah, was going to talk this next,” San said. “The experiment in two parts.”
Madeline Wu, whose practice was only approximately painterly, had been commissioned to create a series they named “testworks.”
The first, a diptych, was, to whatever extent mechanically irreproducible artworks could be constricted by scientific terminology, a control.
Created and cleaved simultaneously (palette knives sharpened to razors applying paint and rending canvas with each stroke), the then-titled Elaborate Remains, laid a hundred meters east of its unidentical twin headed for repositation and observed directly by eyes mechanical and digital and human, had its history relinearized.
Fast as a light ray, reality closed itself off.
Ragged edge and mounded oils converted to crystalline despair pitting into observers’ stomachs.
The repositor had judged the works, produced simultaneously but equivalent in neither form nor appearance, to have been created in the image of one another, to have been the same. Had not sent forth tendrils converting brain tissue to lesions, enforcing Wu to create imitative horrors for the rest of their generative lifespan. Nor had scientists begun scratching eternally in glyphic alien script.
It touched only the paintings.
A misfiling left the malconverted pieces, undifferentiable now by every test and observance, mixed up. Adhesive labels were affixed retroactively to mark “No. 1” from “No. 2,” but which had been cloned by the machine, and which had lain outside, was lost.
Their phones hung the second candidate, Testing Ground, in all maximalist detail, between them.
The piece was large, millimeters shy of the supervenience chamber’s edge. Mechanical stitching serged forty percent of the otherwise raw-edged rim of canvas. Cultures of mold were sterilized, applied as pigment. Hand mixed oils of fin de siècle toxicity applied directly to un-gessoed linen. Mirror imaged text fragments impressed by laser-cut, autofactory produced, rubberoid stamp. Their reflections hand painted with fine horse hair brushes in india ink. Cross hatches applied by stencil, blunt graphite lump, carven linoleum. A corner sleeved in bakelite, secured by injection molded hooks, holding trusses that looped across the canvas, pinned oppositely by fasteners of drop forged bronze, additively manufactured steel particulate. Handmade lace applique held in place by an out of print adhesive called rubber cement. Acrylics gobbed sculpturally from their tubes.
Ghosts of figuration in the lower left quadrant (here the hatching and the mold). Rumors of flora and their enclosing landscapes in the upper right (here the oils, lace). Detailed geometry emergent, amidst sfumato chalk, pastel fogs. Carmine pigments, milked from gened cochineal insects on no-kill plantations, stained the center: a wide solar disc in haze.
And more and more.
Ekphrastic poems had been commissioned, in free verse and iambic pentameter. Blueprints, digital wireframes and hand drafted diagrammatic mappings, held for comparison. Rare earth isotopes substituted for conventional equivalents (dyes reconstituted with heavy water, carbon-14 graphite), hoping that subsections would be identifiable across supervenience.
“Obviously, it’s untransformed. Experiments ended early,” San said.
“I’ll guess. No practical economic return.”
San felt as though her phone had misfired. As though an insect, within some deeply buried ventricle or duct or passage, near to bone, unreachable by seeking incisor, tongue tip, picking nail, had begun to bore.
“Back then, yeah. But there’s potential, more work to be done—”
“But nothing lately,” Fat said. She sighed and gestured: shit. “Nitpicky machine. Imposter god and the lucent chamber.” She withdrew another cigarette, snapped it alight, and pulled. “Worship,” she said, fumebreathed, “seems out. Fireworks enough, maybe, but I can’t see the angle. No other candidates? Pictograms, hieroglyphs? Concrete poetry? Cuneiform tablets?”
“No, funding definitely ran out. But just look at—”
“San I appreciate it. You know that. A truly strange circumstance, really flashing. And like you wrote, beneath the notice of an ultrawealth. Imagineless algos won’t latch onto this, much less flag for investment. Humanly consterning. But, not, I think, miraculous enough.”
San’s heartbeat addressed her in storming, penitent rhythms. “What about a larger format? Human sized—” she clamped again a knot of cheek between her molars—”I’d even volunteer.”
Fat’s laughter no longer relieved. “When you exit as ciliated malice we’ll have to start speaking privately.”
Toes in San’s left derby curled and she tried to stop herself, to force away modal worlds involving elegant plate glass smoking rooms, reticulated with fine metalwork and surrounded by sculpture gardens. Spheroid observation booths submerged partially in running water. “I’ll end up like the flatworm, identical and with even less to talk about.”
Fat told her to stop it with the deprecations but she looked away, toward the dispersed pinkish light of the mossgrass, the sun’s creamed amber warmth.
Fat, movements languid, gestured: time.
San kept up her excuse, eyes averted.
Diffuse and unnerved seemings began to precipitate into sharper, more crystalline discomfort.
Ask her to dinner. They’d get bone broth and noodles with scallion and chili oils. Or that new spot with three styles of injera and lacto-fermented french fried taro. Ask her for an intox. Ask for a strong kick into those closest writhing pallid waters.
Fat stood, then bent at the waist to make small noises with her lips and rub her fingers together. A trashcan (same as before?) plodded over to swallow the remains of cigarettes arranged on the bench’s edge and gamboled away.
San got up too and Fat stepped forward, taking San’s elbow in one hand, bringing her into an embrace with the other, fist against shoulder blade.
San’s arms were at Fat’s lower back, stacked atop each other.
Her blood fell this time all into a well, clamoring for retrieval following truth’s emergence. The backs of her arms pricked and she spoke quickly, as Fat released her, “I was thinking, dinner. Are you...”
“There will be other eves. I have to go.”
San stepped back, hung an arm across her chest, palm to deltoid. “There will. I’ll, I think, gather the sunset.”
“Alright San. Stay safe.”
“Of course. Yes.”
Fat gestured their agreed goodbye: tragedy, promise.
San completed it: forever, gleam.
Fat smiled and turned toward the car waiting for her beyond mossed concrete edge.
San watched Fat walk off as text burbled (Fat’s reminder to watch adverts, her scheduled contribution to the weekly meal at her apartment complex, more articles on economic doom).
She turned off her phone in every legal (and a few grayly illicit) manner possible, left the park.
Beneath either of their awareness, Fat’s phone interrupted the greenspace’s again-blooming propagations of price geometry—pinned, restructured, and immobilized them.