September 21st, 09:26, Apartment of C. J. Everard, Aberdeen, Scotland Sol-Systems had skyrocketed into global celebrity over the course of a day, and it wasn’t the sort of inconsequential niche eminence she had once enjoyed in online techno-mystic circles. The readership of her blog eclipsed most nation-states, and people would probably give her grotesque amounts of money if she asked for it. If. The force attempting to communicate with her might not take kindly to such flagrant abuses of her position, Caitlyn thought, lying amidst pseudo-sedimentary note-litter and staring up at the ceiling of her apartment. She was trying to ignore the cat to her left, a creature which couldn’t possibly have slipped through the gap in her amateurishly-fixed door frame, and which could therefore not possibly be real. Non-real critters had been an issue in the past, though it would be unbecoming of the sun’s chosen ward to give in to such delusions, especially since parts of the internet were already calling her crazy again, and not in the maverick sort of sense, or how Ronald D. Laing and his successors occasionally saw messianic intensities pulsing through her unconventional perception-space. The most recent excuse they had capitalized upon was her attempt to read the lengths of non-blink intervals during the first day in units of blink lengths (~0,38065 seconds) as their corresponding UTF-8 characters. This seemed sensible, since storing cryptographic data in the varied length of blink-absences as opposed to the fixed-length blinks themselves greatly increased the possible information density. The downside was that it yielded rather large numbers, which couldn’t easily be mapped onto anything that wasn’t a massive character-set or a list of coordinates. Both approaches proved minimally fruitful, in addition to only working for Tuesday as well as the last half-hour, but not for the short, regular patterns of Wednesday. These could be understood as keys to be applied to the number set in order to avoid careening into artless two-system explanations, she thought, though technically she was working with a two-systems explanation already. The very first signal after all was obviously an un-coded attention-flare, and some of the others might also be. Caitlyn exhaled forcefully and blinked a sky pattern at the ceiling in hopes that the floating shapes before her eyes might reveal some mysteries trapped therein. The Unicode idea wasn’t even that bad. It had potential once shifted or reordered through some decryption key, but media sentiment turned against her when Caitlyn had pointed out that the “^^^” sequence, which occurred once on Tuesday corresponded to the element of earth in various net-based ritualistic codings. The simple observation was not taken seriously to put it lightly and even the far more relevant point that such a clustered repetition of any symbol should be rather significant was mostly tainted by association. As if in sympathy, the unreal cat licked a tear off of sol-system’s face, tempting her to start believing in the creature slightly more. The smell of its breath indicated that it had been eating some of the meal-remnants strewn about on her floor. Another point in favor of reality. Believing in the cat didn’t much improve Caitlyn’s situation though. In fact it made it worse. She hadn’t much trusted the US-president’s press statement claiming they were not in fact trying to take her in. This was after she had posted her worries about it to Sol-Systems, and she hadn’t much trusted the Scottish prime minister either when she said the same. Intelligence agencies had far too long and storied a history of using animals in anything ranging from spy-craft to kamikaze bomb-delivery systems. Be it listening devices embedded into dead-drop rats, the ill-fated 1960s attempt at an acoustic kitty, or micro-cameras attached to pigeons; the belief that any creature proximal to locations of interest is in the employ of a government seemed to be a good baseline assumption to the reasonably careful. That wasn’t even mentioning the use of donkeys, bats, oxen, dolphins, and dogs as living explosives in a number of conflicts, which still fueled Caitlyn’s paranoid fear of most of these animals. Especially dogs. At least cats didn’t yet have a history of artificially induced spontaneous combustion, though a wire or camera would still be an issue, as well as a major violation of privacy. The woman sat up, looked deep into the creature’s eyes and blinked slowly, attentively scanning for signs of hesitance in its subsequent reciprocation. None. Though this might be the result of improved training over the past seventy years. Caitlyn still elected to thoroughly examine the cat which she now called Kuttadid; checking for scars left behind by possible implants, before providing it with a bowl of water. Kuttadid after the cyclic chrono-demon of precarious states. After all, there was still an inherent risk to keeping it despite the trustworthy look which might have been meticulously engineered over decades by US-scientists. Perhaps a vestigial semiotic Schrödinger-ness negatively impacting certainty-assessments with regards to all members of the species. Who knew. Kuttadid blinked again, and it worked perfectly. The gray being was already becoming part of the family. Her, the cat and the sky all blinking in unison. Even Caitlyn’s laptop, which sat amid a salt circle, mostly out of habit and partially out of fear, seemed to crave joining in on the fun. Ominous. There had been a saying among them. “Them”, before such a term, over the course of internal disagreements, ceased to include her; “It’s unsurprising that there are spirits in the web. The place is after all utterly inhospitable to anything that isn’t.” So much still felt true. She minimized the window in which coordinate-locations lay connected by myriad different, equally meaningless patterns, though she might as well have discarded it. Below the noise-like striations and vertices rested a yet-mounting pile of notifications about missing or possibly-missing persons compiled in real time by her followers. Many of them believed they were contributing to a ledger of abductions or possibly raptures. Possibilities not to be entirely rejected, though Sol-Systems herself was looking for likely kidnapping-victims. A lot of people had gone missing over the past two days. Snapped, overdosed, ran off into the woods or died amidst the panic. Some intentionally, some not. Professor DeVries on the other hand was unlikely to die, unintentionally or otherwise. She never seemed like the sort of person capable of traditional mortality, so when her blog, which was exhilaratingly insightful, despite what one might assume from the ivory-tower consensus-philosophical drivel that were her mainstream publications, went dark; the only reasonable explanation was that she had been taken in by any of the agencies which claimed to have no plans of doing the same to Sol-Systems. If Caitlyn were a state, she would certainly want DeVries on her staff, though as a state it would be unlikely to get her cooperation willingly. Now; a post about this explicit hypothesis would be suicidal of course. You never play with open cards under these circumstances, so Sol-Systems had simply asked for any and all apparent disappearances and written a program that automatically checked the responses she received for names of people with Wikipedia-entries. A lot of the hits Caitlyn got were irrelevant celebrities, though some could plausibly be actual victims of the conspiracy. Links were clicked and notes taken. This one was interesting: Tara Keene who had apparently not been heard from since yesterday when she missed an interview in Paris. Sol-Systems hadn’t really been looking for journalists, but her specific niche made this particular case a different matter. Even if Keene wasn’t herself useful; she was highly connected to the sorts of people who were and therefore was someone who might take note if they disappeared. At the very least a circumstantially related assassination was quite plausible, so Caitlyn scrawled the name onto a post-it. More intriguing yet; the source claimed to have been keeping an eye on Keene beforehand for non-disappearance, though very much blink-related reasons which they refused to disclose via mail. It smelled like a trail. Sol-systems sprung up to look out of her window, where for almost an hour now blinks had been occurring at a rate comparable to Tuesday. She had considered moving her base of operations anyway, just in case someone ended up choosing blunt force and dragging her out of here. Hiding did seem wise, and she had also considered gathering the sorts of allies who wouldn’t cooperate with states, though there was always the issue of trustworthiness. She mimed the position in which she had received her first message from the sun, clapped her hands together above her head and asked “should I go?”. The response was instantaneous. Kuttadid did not know what was happening to him as he was picked up and carried out of the door by a sickly looking woman with a travel-bag, sunglasses and a dull-ish kitchen knife in the pocket of her vest. Caitlyn did not exactly know it either, but this was the sun’s wish, and she would not argue with that.
September 21st, 09:41, Military facility near Oban, Scotland The cosmic intelligence on the other end of the line claimed to not engage in anything humans conceived of as actual time travel. Michael had been cautious to explicitly think “humans” and not “people”, a mistake which he’d made before and which, due to his own lenience with the concept, had resulted in finding out that a lot more “people” were able to observe the phenomenon than there were humans on earth. In other words: He had been given confirmation that there were indeed aliens with telescopes pointing this way, a fact which he chose not to reveal to the council, since it technically wasn’t about Sol. Dumont-Vatel nodded as everyone else attempted to determine whether this answer was more or less terrifying than the alternative. Most decided “more”. A number of visibly shaken, respectable looking men in respectable looking suits seemed to trickle out of the room with every new question and no one present could exactly bring themselves to blame them. Professor Georges Akande, who had finally wrapped up his private dispute with the philosopher, raised his voice over the general murmur: “How well versed are you in the field of mathematics, Mr. Lowe?” His go-to answer would have been “relatively well”, though “relatively” in the presence of a world renowned expert meant “not at all”, so Michael went with “not particularly”. “Does the Seifert-conjecture mean anything to you?” Akande kept going and Michael shook his head, relieved to not have overstated the depth of his knowledge. “The Poincaré conjecture?” “Only the name”, he replied and the Mathematician smiled a brilliantly wide, toothy smile. “Not a problem. None at all. According to the Seifert conjecture, all 3-manifolds which are closed and simply connected are homeomorphic to the 3-sphere. I will explain more if necessary, but please try it once already; “the Seifert conjecture is true”.” Something felt off as the question seeped out of Michael’s mind and into the void, though Sol responded with a blink either way. “Astounding!” Akande laughed and it took a moment for him to calm down. “Now; I am not frivolously tasking you to solve the mysteries of my field. The conjectures, Seifert and Poincaré, are already proven to be false and true respectively. I apologize for the bit of deception. The aim was not to test Sol’s mathematical skill, nor was the experiment even my idea, I just chose the examples. Susanne, would you explain?” “Of course.” Professor DeVries smiled very much unlike her colleague. It was the sort of smile that made flowers wither and gave small animals heart attacks. “If Georges followed my stipulation, and I assume he did, then his explanation of the Seifert conjecture was in fact an explanation of the Poincaré conjecture, correct?” Akande nodded. “Yes, the true Seifert conjecture claims that all vector fields which are non-singular and continuous have a closed orbit” “Good. I have no idea what that means, but good. Does everyone here see the relevance? Sol assessed the Seifert conjecture, which is false, as false, despite the thing which Mr. Lowe thought was meant by it – the Poincaré conjecture – being true. If the subjective data which is contextually provided is meaningfully wrong, then Sol will defer to the objective set of word-data which it apparently possesses. This set seems to include knowledge about what the Seifert conjecture really is.” Michael desperately hoped that “knowing what something really is” meant “knowing what the relevant set of people referred to with this term” and not that mathematical objects had objective names somehow stored in concept space, though at this point he was willing to bet that the most horrifying option was always true. “This seems like an absurdly strong claim going by so little evidence, Professor DeVries” Alison Garber-Bullough interjected and some others voiced approval. The philosopher sighed. “We can just ask. You’re all aware of that, right? Please do go ahead and ask. Still; the truth of this should be obvious from Mr. Lowe’s report on Sol’s use of explicit contextual information. Sol, if it seeks to be perceived as trustworthy, needs to be experienced as correct. If it is willing to claim that Mr. Lowe will be fine on any given day, then it HAS to implement this mechanism, since humans are more often than not incorrect in their models of themselves. If Sol made a judgment based on Michael Lowe’s explicit thoughts about what “fine” constitutes, then it runs the risk of him experiencing the prediction as wrong. He might not feel fine despite his explicit model predicting that he would. Sol needs to run the genuine factors as opposed to the imagined factors. It needs to check actual fine-ness and it needs to check the actual Seifert conjecture.” DeVries paused. “I didn’t see anything on the screen, so I assume I’m right?” She was, though Michael was still awestruck by her confidence in the hypothesis. “Are we all convinced? May I proceed?” All parties pretended to ignore the rather loud gum-chewing sounds coming through the philosopher’s microphone as she spoke. Garber-Bullough ignored it most fervently, as the tiny woman straightened her lab-coat in order to project some authority. “For the most part, yes. You made your point, but might I have a small additional experiment?”. There was some poison to the sweetness, a counter-toxin to DeVries’ condescension, and Michael wondered when this had turned into a power struggle whose factions he couldn’t quite make out yet. The philosopher and the physicist were on different teams at least, so much was clear. With a vaguely “eh”-like sound and a wave of the hand, professor Bullough was allowed to make a move, though she appeared extremely displeased about the manner in which this was conveyed. “You are unfamiliar with the proton spin crisis I would imagine?” This was Michael’s time to shine; he was in fact familiar with a fair bit of particle physics by way of Reg. “Proton spin not being entirely the product of quark spin right? Like only by about half and the rest is maybe orbital angular momentum of the quarks or some gluon property?” There was an approving eyebrow-raise and maybe a hint of a smile before the physicist continued. “Yes, well there is another similar phenomenon called the Smith-effect. Some people do not believe it even really exists, you see, since relevant events at our current energy-capability are staggeringly rare… so: Would you please try “The Smith-effect does occur”?” Nothing happened, but Connor looked worried for some reason. Helena DeVries simply seemed annoyed “And how exactly was this relevant? Just another name-swap to make really sure?”. Apparently feeling like she won something, the physicist went back to a more neutral tone of voice: “Not at all, I’m just testing the limits a little, when it comes to true names. To my knowledge, and the internet would seem to agree; there is no such thing as a Smith-Effect, despite how common the name is. This leaves the possibilities that there will be a Smith-effect, or that someone called Smith privately christened their own phenomenon and we don’t have widespread records of it. Either way it’s interesting.” Michael added in his head “or there is a property of reality objectively called the Smith effect, regardless of what anyone calls it.” and felt a shiver run down his spine. A few places over, DeVries looked unconvinced. “This time it’s you jumping to conclusions with insufficient evidence, no?”. Some heads turned towards her. “This is something I’ve been wanting to test for a while now. Mr. Lowe: “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”” There was a brief look of recognition flickering across Tackett’s face before he slammed his hand down hard on a button affixed to his desk and everything went to noise. Screeching pandemonium tore Michael’s consciousness to ill-formed tatters that felt more like primal instinct than anything his mind usually produced. Clutching his ears barely did anything and through his vision, which also seemed distorted by either synesthesia or tears, he could just about make out the comparative calm of the panel. Some looked angry or confused, but they didn’t look like they were hearing the worst sound ever concocted. Thought-disruption. A neural misfire which almost managed to resemble a full-fledged idea grasped on to the hypothesis for dear life and followed it along the sensory maelstrom. They were trying- but why? Michael’s brain had scrambled its way back to the nonsense-statement, and not knowing what else to do, he simply screamed it onto Sol’s altar, hoping it would somehow save him. The slightly-off feeling brought about by the process hardly managed to distract from the noise at all. Nothing distracted from the noise. It was moments after this resigned acceptance that Piltz tackled his charge to the floor and everything was quiet again. Four men shaped like bodyguards and dressed like secret agents lay groaning along the route that Conner would have had to take to get here, and the faces of the committee-members went from confused and angry to significant worry. At this point it was clear to Micheal that a number of speakers must have been positioned just such as to constructively interfere exactly where he used to stand behind the podium, and also that his thought-disruption idea was in all likelihood correct. The panel was worried about how Sol might react to a nonsense statement, and they thought this could stop him from the attempt like a barely-more-humane shock collar. “Do they take me for this stupid” flashed through his mind, and he had only just regained enough composure to not put the question directly to Sol. Sprawled out on the polished wood of the stage, Micheal didn’t even know what would be worse: Them believing that this was good enough to keep him under control permanently, or them not believing that it would work, but implemented the system anyway due to a lack of preferable alternatives. “You could have simply told me not to! Do you really think I’m an idiot?” Everyone on the unnamed panel seemed frozen in shock, though Ernest Clin, the Neurobiologist who had looked like an anthropomorphized time-bomb from the start, was finally ready to explode. “Excuse me, Mr Lowe, but you ARE an idiot and the associated inability to acknowledge this fact poses an imminent danger to all of us. We have just witnessed this danger thanks to my apparently suicidal colleague.” He glared knives at Susanne DeVries. “You can try to disagree here but it really would not be wise to. Whatever force chose you as its plaything has made that into a testable claim. You might outwit the average Joe, but in the end, none of them would have been so mental as to even try figuring this out by themselves. As it stands you are far too stupid to be entrusted with your cognitive goings-on, let alone their fallout, and if your ego didn't so entirely dwarf your wit, Mr Lowe, you'd have gone to someone more qualified immediately.” The man took a moment to catch his breath without looking away from Michael for even a second. “I can see you restraining the thought. You know what would happen. You know this committee is far better suited to the job than you are, so who if not an idiot would spend an entire day messing with powers far outside their pay-grade, powers which affect all of humanity, without even attempting to get a second opinion?” There seemed to be at least a note of agreement in the faces of many taskforce-members, and even Michael himself couldn’t claim that the accusation was entirely unwarranted. Still; nothing happened. He didn’t break the universe during his day of private experimentation. He hadn’t tried paradoxes or anything obviously unsafe like that, so didn’t the very fact that this discussion was happening speak slightly in favor of his competence? Clin’s face only grew redder as he explained this. “Stop it with the arguments for dimwits. We aren't your drinking buddies. The fact that it's harmless as of our current understanding in no way justifies your earlier experimentation since you did not then know that it was harmless, Mr Lowe. Figuring out that a landmine was just a prop and not the real deal by stomping on it does not make one as terrifically clever as you seem to believe. It makes one an idiot with the luck to still be standing. Think of the universes you doomed in which it wasn't harmless. Are you a gambler, Mister Lowe? I'd strongly advise against picking up the habit. You would not fare well.” Michael did not know how to respond, though luckily Professor Dumont-Vatel coughed softly into the uncomfortable silence. “While parts of this are obviously valid observations harshly made; It is also true that this treatment of Mr. Lowe has not aided our safety. Not in this world at least, in which a significant number of landmines do thankfully appear to be props. The acoustic bombardment caused Sol to respond to a dangerous request, where simply asking Lowe to discard it might well have been more fruitful. Do you not think so, Ernest?” The Biologist did not respond. “Well, now that we know Sol to simply assess meaningless statements as false, Mrs. DeVries, would you care to enlighten us as to what you were trying to accomplish?”. Clin sank back into his chair, no less fuming, though some of his anger was now directed at the philosopher again. Mild surprise showed on Susanne’s face. “That’s obvious, is it not? I was honestly a bit taken aback when none of you objected to professor Bullough’s conduct. After all, we were explicitly forbidden from posing paradoxes or nonsense-statements without unanimous approval. Still: what if there truly was no Smith-effect. Claiming its occurrence or non occurrence would be nonsense, no? Apparently the good Mr. Lowe isn’t the only one stupid enough to miss these dangers, if we go by professor Clin’s interpretation, though I’d rather wager that we are simply all quite willing to risk disaster when tempted by curiosity. I know this about myself, and if we can bring ourselves to be honest here, I suspect that most of you do too.” She scanned her colleagues, all of whom were rather difficult to read except for Dumont-Vatel who gave a little chuckle that could only be interpreted as agreement. “There is this pet-phrase of Žižek’s, which he attributes to the medical profession: “Don’t just do something! Stand there!” as a simple reversal of its more common twin. Perhaps it is reasonable in medicine to wait and see before starting a treatment that might cause additional harm if the symptoms were falsely interpreted, but I for one have always found it a loathsome sentiment. Sol has given us no reason to believe that this inquiry is dangerous to anything but the human psyche, so if we neglect to use any and all tools at our disposal in a genuine pursuit of knowledge for reasons of misguided cowardice masquerading as caution, then I hardly believe this panel deserving of a title like task-force. We know now that the Smith effect does or will exist in some manner. We know now that genuine nonsense is judged as false. We survived discovering both of these facts, and I suspect we will face and survive more to come, so should we not perhaps consider taking off the training wheels and actually do our job? ”
September 21st, 08:00, Office of Thomas Lamb, London, England, UK Scrolling down to the spot where the red line concluded its plummet took longer than last time, though not because the end-point had moved. New data hadn’t been entered since yesterday, and that made memorizing the slope easy at least. Zeigarnik-aided mnemonic obsession had made the stockbroker formerly known as Merlin by his peers into the foremost historical expert on the last 48 hours of an expired economy’s downfall from gradual corrosion to sudden multi-organ-failure in the blink of a sky. Whatever algorithm used to update the line had disassembled at terminal velocity, or, according to the “less dramatic” reports, which Thomas Lamb considered to be more dramatic; the people in charge of maintenance had simply shut it off when they judged the stock-market to be unsalvageable. He didn’t even disagree. The market was unsalvageable. Money had become worthless over night, which was for the best in some ways, since Thomas had sunk most of his stockpile into the biggest dip world history had to offer. The only thing left gnawing was a primal desire for pattern-completion as he scrolled up and down the sheer jagged drop representing the death throes of his former occupation. He’d been doing this for days now. Up and down and up and down again because he didn’t have the slightest idea what else to do. He’d continued to get up at five, do his exercise, take a shower and then head for the now empty sky-scraper that housed his office, only to sit there and stare desperately at a graph which wasn’t going anywhere. He’d called his assistant to ask for a cup of coffee, but he hadn’t picked up. The assistants of various acquaintances hadn’t picked up either. Just voicemail after voicemail after voicemail. This too wasn’t as much unexpected as inconvenient. Frustrated, Thomas had gone outside only to find shops closed for obvious reasons, entrances barred, small fires burning materials across a wide range of smell and toxicity. A cold breeze blew through the savaged streets of Canary Warf, carrying with it trash, smoke and shouting as he strode along them; royalty of a paradigm now rendered derelict. Some kids were discussing a drug deal. The sort which should have gone extinct yesterday: A substance of genuine material value in exchange for printed paper, though novel intuitions always took a while to take root. It’s not like Thomas himself had made the necessary adjustments to his auto-pilot, but still, the pretension that currency still meant something evoked a chuckle. The sort of amusement long practiced by someone who made their fortune from others incorrectly assessing worth. Low level stimulant consumption had been rampant across his field, though Thomas shied away from anything more potent than caffeine for the simple reason of how much it unnerved him that he could afford to get addicted. If there were breaks affixed to the runaway feedback loops of his cognition or a wall to run into, then the whole affair would be a different matter, but with his erstwhile fortune neither of those could be claimed to exist. Now though? It would only be a matter of time until the less cued-in portions of societal ruin realized the obsolescence of currency, so perhaps he could no longer afford to get addicted. Perhaps trying some substances presented a genuine option in Sol’s world. Thomas had only engaged with the train of thought half heartedly then, since he spotted old Barry sitting near a particularly noxious fire not too long after he did the teenagers. “Still here, eh?” The bearded hobo croaked through tar-black plumes of aerosolized carcinogen. Barry had been a staple of Canary Warf over the years: An old and weathered doomsday prophet, who suited the surrounding aesthetics as well as he ever had, though now by way of congruity instead of contrast. An electronic display behind him still rotated through out of date stock prices. “Still here” Thomas sighed as he sat down and threw his wallet over, but the vagrant passed it back without even looking inside. Silent agreement suffused the difficult-to-breathe air and for a moment everything seemed incredibly simple. The stock broker matched the direction of Barry’s gaze, which led him vaguely toward a flock of pigeons. “I fear the wizard does go down with his castle“. Somehow there was a smile on Thomas’ lips and he didn’t know why he had put it there. He also didn’t know why he should discard it though. From beside came a choking cackle which seemed like it might scare away the birds but didn’t. Normal reactions to normal stimuli. Bubble-ontology. They were part of an independent eco-system so accustomed to itself that nothing flinched when external reality collapsed. “I thought you hated that whole “Merlin” thing” True. Being called a wizard, even when it was meant as a compliment always seemed to credit to innate quality what was better explained by long honed skill. Thomas was never magical so far as he could tell. He was simply good at his job. “In the old world I hated it. But now that the magic is dead; being the sage of a lost craft seems fitting somehow.” A lone cloud drifted through the sky above them. Maybe this was melancholy; some vague feeling of loss submerged within ethereal calm. “How’s it feel?” he tagged on “being right?”. Barry looked almost hurt as he stroked his beard. “Thomas, I like you. You talk to me like I’m a person, and you’ve probably given me more money than everyone else combined, but there’s no reason to patronize an old man. I wasn’t right about shit.” It took a bit for Thomas to make sense of the rasp. “but the world IS ending” “The world isn’t ending. The world got a bit weirder. It does that all the time. If anything, it’s ending a bit less now that we’ve gotten rid of this shit.” He kicked at the wallet. “There are fires in the street.” Panic rose in the voice of the stock broker, who was slowly realizing that he had avoided thinking about this. Focusing on the financial meltdown and his daily routine had been decent distraction from the fact that a part of him, a quiet but insistent voice near the brain-stem, seemed to really believe this was the end of everything. “There’s fires in tons of streets. Always have been. The fact that this one hasn’t seen its fair share of smoke and flame is more surprising than any of the fucking rest. Light and heat are mankind’s friends. It’s a bad time to be forgetting that.” Maybe some fires, but the one that they were sitting around..? Thomas nodded in the thing’s direction. “This doesn’t smell friendly. Smells like it wants us dead.” Barry smiled as if to suggest that he’s had plenty of friends who smelled worse, but what he actually ended up saying was that this was a good deterrent against the really unfriendly people. The ones who kick your shit in before they take what little light and heat you’ve managed to find. There’s better fires for those who want to quarrel about them. Ones that don’t smell like death and the approach thereof. But the old man was fine picking the worst piece of flame if it meant he could leave his quarreling days behind him. The absence of his usual cushy chair was making itself known and Thomas folded his legs so as to sit more comfortably. “Can I ask you something?” His gaze was still locked on the pigeons, picking away at yet-unburned trash. “Why are you still here? I’ve got the office, and that feels more like home than the place where I sleep and shower, but you… I know they’re building little settlements for anyone in need of shelter from something or other. Heard it on the radio. Why aren’t you there?” Barry looked up at the sky. “Maybe I’ll join their little communes eventually. Not like I haven’t been thinking about it, but really my anchor’s sort of the same. This is my spot. Hasn’t even gotten particularly less hospitable to me, so why leave? Why abandon my post, when the world might still end from some shit or another. Old shit, new shit... There’s enough shit out there to do us in eventually. For now I’ll pick consistency over comfort. It’s a hobgoblin my little mind has grown rather fond of.” Maybe that’s what Thomas was doing too. Foolish consistency in the face of chaos “Emerson, eh?”. The old man shrugged “Don’t know, wouldn’t know. Just a sentence: Neither owned nor traded. Belongs to everyone all the same.” He smiled into the fire “You sure you’re not ready to join the anarchists?” “As sure as you are.” Thomas looked over at the vagrant “Am I sure?” His hands were trembling. “If everything is really coming to an end, and it does feel that way, then what could be more pathetic than simply following old patterns until I blink out of existence? This… This shapeless dread is so much bigger than any actionable thought I could throw at it. So big that I haven’t even noticed it in two days because it filled the entire shot of my mental landscape so much that it blended with the background. I even considered buying drugs today as though that was gonna do anything. Why not join the anarchists? So many frivolous little ideas running straight into nothingness.” The stockbroker was almost screaming by the point that Barry patted him on the back. “Drugs, huh? Like coke?” “I don’t really care” The old man handed over a thermos and Thomas took an enormous gulp expecting alcohol but getting coffee. Terrible coffee. Acrid and with a metallic aftertaste that overshadowed the entire rest of the flavor profile. The taste aggressively synergized with the smell of the fire to make it worse, but how bad it was only made it better in the moment. Tears were welling up in Thomas’ eyes, and he could have blamed it on the smoke, but didn’t bother to. “There’s different types of consistency, right? All those other suits around here; they’re also being consistent. Consistent with what’s expected of a person when the word’s ending. You scream, run, drink your brains out. You definitely don’t come to work… But that didn’t even occur to you, did it? You’re being consistent with the persona of the wizard. Hell if I know whether that’s a good thing or not, but it’s better than falling in with that crowd.” Barry finally met his eyes. “One of those settlements might need a wizard.” The coffee was still terrible when Merlin took another gulp “they might need an old prophet too”.