September 21st, 13:19, Corner Pub, Edinburgh, Scotland Journalism was the only profession in which more people had been showing up to work since the sky lost its mind and the world followed suit. Not a moment passed in which there weren’t at least three people encircling Siobhan, clamoring and practically begging to be her assistant or otherwise asking for equipment so expensive that it didn’t belong anywhere near dignified journalism. Most of the time the reporter simply checked if they had a camera phone. They usually did. Then she told the brats that this was good enough, and it was. Siobhan Gohdes had about fifty assistants at this point. Very few of them particularly useful, but that didn’t much matter since the applicants generally didn’t even ask for money. When they did, it felt like a tagged on formality, some socio-habitual verbal tic, and once the request for remuneration was declined, most of them still took the job. All anyone wanted was information these days, and since Sol-Systems wasn’t taking interns, the BBC was the next best place to get it. Some obstinate chunk of cobbled street made the pain in Siobhan’s broken, heels-bound toe flare up above the dull baseline of its heavily sedated drone. When the reporter had checked it in the morning, the tissue had been a ghastly shade of green, and when she pushed on it through agony and intermittent grey-out; the indents her finger left seemed to linger for an unnerving while longer than she’d like them to. No time to see a doctor, not now. Hiding the mess in socks had been somewhat helpful. At the very least soothing on a placebo-esque level augmented by years of job experience. The woman pressing her way through the crowded streets around Corner Pub had gotten very good at only believing what she saw with her own eyes, and she thankfully wasn’t seeing the mangled state of her foot. Fuck! Another bit of cobblestone. Somehow Siobhan’s mind managed to blame Sol-Systems for this, and once she got done almost biting a chunk out of her cheek, she was in no mood to correct its intuitive assessment. Sunfluencers had become dime-a-dozen almost immediately. Spoiled kids pumping noise along a broad spectrum from panic to modern-day-gospel through the arteries of social media. None of them however were quite as big a threat to the press as Caitlyn Everard. Her identity had been floating as an open secret of sorts through the ether of real news-media’s internal conversations since yesterday; everyone waiting for someone else to blink first on publishing it. That was the issue: People liked Solsys. Some almost worshiped Solsys, so if you wanted to deride her latest incoherent theory-drivel, then you’d better have a really good case to make, and if you wanted to reveal her identity? Hah! Half the world would immediately think you were trying to get Everard caught by any among the litany of shady organizations she thought were hunting her. It was prestige alone allowing Siobhan Gohdes to still be on the airwaves as an outspoken critic of the paranoid schizophrenic who thought a star was talking to her personally. The sole voice of reason in a journalistic framework which had discarded even the pretense of valuing such a thing over the course of a few days. Absolutely maddening. More maddening still was the fact that Sol-Systems managed to be right a worrying amount. Recently she had detected that a blink was shorter than the others by 0.06 seconds exactly (!!!) and then it was Siobhan’s job to grind her teeth as she confirmed this info to the public. The info of an insane person who was currently hitch-hiking god knows where while badly faking a Russian accent and wielding more social power than the entire news apparatus combined. This was if the woman’s assistants were to be believed. She almost wanted to kick her broken foot against something again to vent the frustration. “Ah, if it isn’t the doubt and her shadows!” Reza greeted in his thick Farsi accent from inside of a transporter. “Hop in” he offered, before directing his gaze at Siobhan’s camera-wielding “shadows” and adding “Just her. Is crowded, see? I’ll tell the others to let you lot through.” Just like that she was sitting in the passenger’s seat of a car, and forward movement became a whole lot less painful. The crowd parted as they entered the little settlement around Corner Pub. “Welcome to the City.” It looked like a perfectly normal street, though that sight had admittedly become exceptional by itself. “Oh?” She looked at him and quite sarcastically called it very clever, what with the whole city-in-a-city nonsense. “Which one is it then to your mind? Besźel or Ul Qoma?” The Iranian laughed “I made the same joke when they told me, you know? No, Siobhan, this is just the City. Edinburgh can be whatever it pleases.” “That won’t be confusing at all”, she sighed. “I’m certain it won’t.” The journalist wasn’t sure if she particularly wanted to know what Edinburgh pleased to be, but her feelings about this City of Reza’s were similar. Splintering like that felt dangerous. Whether they wanted to call them communes or cities or micro-nations. “Couldn’t we have just enjoyed a free united Scotland for a while?” Siobhan mumbled under her breath and Reza pretended not to hear it. She liked the man well enough: He held moderately high profile in the union of transport workers in addition to being an activist of sorts. Decent head on his shoulders. Gave a good interview from time to time. Reza was a bit far left for Siobhan’s tastes, but she liked the far left ones a lot better than the far right ones, so she was willing to extend an olive branch more often than not. Still: Seeing him and the other socialists essentially defend private property was a profoundly strange experience, so she called him out on the perceived hypocrisy. Reza exhaled deeply. “That’s the issue with you: You don’t actually try to understand the frameworks, so you just latch onto the labels. Even setting aside that the Albarns are as petite-bourgeois as it gets and never would have been a primary concern in the first place: Try to look through the terminology and into the actual social machinery. Is there anything going on power-wise that we’d take offense to? Is anyone being exploited?” While she hadn’t heard of anything that seemed like exploitation, it was still odd to see some business-owners lead this strange commune of Sol-theorists, radicals and union-men. He laughed again. “Maybe. But again; the label isn’t the issue. They’re competent enough people; Katje and Atiq. Got a bunch of good will on their side, as well as the good sense to outsource decision-making on the matters they don’t know shit about. Maybe that’ll flip at some point, you never know, but it’s not like they hold any sort of leverage if it does. We let them be spokespeople because they’re good spokespeople. End of story. If Atiq wanted to throw out the needy, we’d throw him out instead.” All of this reminded Siobhan of a spiel he had once given her on counter-institutions, but she was mostly happy that her foot was getting some rest. The titular corner did look rather orderly for what it was worth. Reza said something about how protecting useful things wasn’t the same as protecting property and she nodded along. The City had become one of the more prominent discussion forums on the nature of Sol. Fallout of some early sunfluencers live-streaming the debates in Corner Pub. There were other such gathering spots throughout the world, and any moderately sized town had one somewhere, but if there was something which made Corner Pub special; it was just how organized the place was. Neat rows of people wheeled barrels of various foodstuffs through the streets and towards an old warehouse. They had refashioned it into a cafeteria, Reza explained. Men and women stood in lines which were long and slow-moving, but orderly. No one was getting trampled to death around Corner Pub. The same could distinctly not be said for other gathering spots of comparable fame. If they were on a panel, someone would have almost certainly made a comment about bread lines, and Siobhan was glad they wouldn’t have to get into that old debate again. Instead she asked where the food was coming from, her tone carrying a distinct hint of “will it last?”. Somehow Reza seemed to derive pride from the admission that it was stolen from nearby farms. Mostly the abandoned ones he clarified. That was much better than letting the produce rot in its place, wasn’t it? And once the farmers returned they would surely be glad to see that their fields and livestock had been taken care of rather than left to die. Denizens of the City worked the land diligently and sustainably. It would be made to last. Made to prosper. After all they were “protecting useful things, not property”, the Iranian reiterated. Of course there were some farmers who hadn’t left and cooperated willingly, much like the Albarns, but they were in the minority. Katje Albarn was a restless young woman with curly red hair and a green head-band. Restless and fidgety. She had learned to slow her natural talking speed down to an interview-acceptable pace over the past day, but hadn’t yet shed the habit of aggressively drumming her fingers to compensate. Her husband on the other hand responded to Siobhan’s request for an interview by asking “Wouldn’t you rather do something useful?” and then alerting her to the fact that her foot was broken. The journalist told him she was well aware, and he shrugged before leaving to discuss some organizational matters with Reza. Never once throughout the brief exchange did Atiq’s deep-set serious eyes wander, let alone look down to her ankle, which to Siobhan’s dismay was now slightly discolored as well. For what it was worth, the cooperative Albarn confirmed Reza’s story about their figurehead position. Katje even laughed a little at the idea that Corner Pub was still her property. It hadn’t been formally collectivized of course, not de jure, no one had found the time for something like that yet, but de facto? To anyone concerned the entire street was already part of a new commons. She didn’t mind, the former bar owner said. She just hoped the world wasn’t ending, and there wasn’t much Siobhan could say to that. Everything was a strange inversion of the classical man-bites-dog adage these days. The truly interesting stories had become those about normalcy because normalcy had become unfathomable. Any sort of madness was trite and expected and a pale shadow in the face of a flickering sun. That was part of a phone conversation she had had with Reza before coming here: About how nothing seemed to be political anymore. There was no other world in which this would not be political, she had claimed, but here they were. The activist’s position was that “the pretension of the apolitical had collapsed along with the status quo” or something like that. Everything was properly political now. Flatly political. Siobhan didn’t see much of a difference between those two positions beyond semantics, so that time it must have been Reza getting lost in labels. Hard to tell. Siobhan didn’t see a lot of difference between much of anything anymore as she sunk into one of the bar stools and bled into the noise suffusing Corner Pub. A message alerted her to another Everard sighting in Dunkeld: Allegedly attempting to meet up with a co-conspirator. A sound guy alerted her to the fact that she had thrown up some minutes ago, and she pretended to remember this as she checked herself in the mirror to see if her hair was alright. It was. She had probably checked it a couple of times already. Pain was melting into conversation and vice versa as Siobhan tried to reach for another handful of painkillers but found the package empty. The journalist’s hands were trembling in the places where she could make out their contours. Noise. Atiq Albarn was crouching below her now, dipping her foot into a bucket of ice water. Cubes cracking and splitting in a manner that she couldn’t hear or see, but which she knew was happening. Siobhan didn’t look down. Some tragedies weren’t hers to report upon and the foot counted itself first among them. An unfathomable normalcy of pain. Still; the mess of sensory inputs was slowly beginning to sound like actual words again, many of them gruff, concerned and belonging to Atiq. The bar owner insisted she go upstairs and take a rest, though Siobhan eventually managed to talk him into a compromise where she simply didn’t leave the chair but was allowed to stay in the main pub-area to film. Soon enough Gohdes was talking again. Arguing. Interviewing. Reporting. Some strength and outline of self-ness returning to her body with every uttered syllable. Pain returned too, but as a distinct entity rather than a permeating feature of disordered perception-space. The fog hadn’t fully receded, but the autopilot was working again. “…What I’m saying is that Sol-System’s isn’t any kind of genius. She’s an obsessive, a very lucky obsessive, who had the right idea at the right time, but the fact is that anyone could have made such a tracking site. Many have made them! Some even similarly early, just with worse searchability, higher latency, more ads or so on. Any among a number of issues which made this one win out, but it was necessarily gonna be someone, right? Their scatterbrained cryptographic rabbit-holes which haven’t of yet revealed anything remotely of use should have dismantled your misplaced hero-worship by now.” Spots like this tended to attract contrarians, so Gohdes had a bit more support in her campaign against Sol-Systems than she would have had elsewhere, but it was still an uphill battle. The boos outnumbered the cheers by a significant margin. Still; there were some cheers, at least until the man on the other side of the counter, a retired engineer in a tweed jacket cracked his knuckles in the most haughtily self-assured manner human anatomy could produce. “Being first itself speaks to a kind of genius, Mrs. Gohdes. We acknowledge this in all other fields. Doing a necessary thing while the world falls to madness… That speaks to mental clarity, no? Since there are at any point a number of geniuses on earth, I would not even doubt that many of the other contenders were similarly competent, but in the end what we got was Sol-Systems. The person who was also first to notice the irregular event this morning, I’m sure you recall. They saw the difference.” His voice oozed smug despite the fact that Siobhan had heard all of this a thousand times over. Inventing a new predictive model might be a sign of genius, or creating a new technology. Applying an old technology to a recent phenomenon pointed to business acumen at best. The thing about seeing a 0.06 second discrepancy… “Oh yes, and the sun speaks to them, I forgot. Solsys is a fraud, and that joke of a claim is outlandish enough to let all but the most sheepishly devoted credulity splatter against a windshield.” The man’s grind widened so slowly, drifting outward to reveal one tooth after another, that it felt to Siobhan like an opening of stage curtains. “But if Solsys were being dishonest, would they not use this to their favor? If I somehow perceived that kind of delay (and it is miraculous, I grant you) then I wouldn’t come out and say so, now would I? One would claim to have been prepared, to have had the measurement system set up and running in anticipation. That way one would sound competent instead of like a loon. The fact that Sol-Systems’ statement to have only checked after the fact is so peculiar and so humbling points to its truth” He slammed a fist onto the counter with that last word for good measure. Quod erat demonstrandum. He certainly didn’t seem to find it unimpressive. Quite the opposite. Where luck was attributed to genius, this instance of absurd invented fairy-tale-luck couldn’t be, and thus it was proof of some divine chosen-ness copacetic with Everard’s own drivel. The man didn’t say any of that of course, because he could not be perceived as a loon himself while defending one. So, he simply alluded to it without using any of the words. Carefully stepping around rhetorical sinkholes. Siobhan chuckled. What a completely normal interview. It was almost like the world wasn’t ending.
September 21st, 11:20, Military facility near Oban, Scotland The room was empty, safe for a solitary white table in its center and the coffee machine which sat atop, connected to the nearest power outlet via a humorously overkill extension cord reel. Alabaster nothingness in a void bleached towards uniformity. Michael couldn’t tell in what way the mood reflected its environs, but he strongly felt that it did. Around the coffee maker lingered a hostile abundance of absence. Oppressively liminal fluorescence digging itself into the floor’s Rorschach smattering of discolorations left behind by decades of multifarious use. Faint mechanical humming and unintelligible conversation drifting in from nearby rooms without ever entering their bubble. Never truly. Unfathomable distance, and the immured space it inhabits. He and Tara were drinking coffee on the floor, while Connor stood in the door-adjacent corner sipping a glass of water. “A recess”, that’s what they’d called it in a mix of panic, bewilderment and attempts to save face. How long it would last was unclear, but what was clear was that they would be in this room until the time had come. Whenever that was. Michael could find out of course, had he not been forbidden from doing so and chosen to oblige. He’d known. He’d known the moment he invoked the nonsense statement that something was different. Something was off. Some strange enduring tingle at the base of the skull, but no one seemed to notice what it was visually. No one but Sol-Systems of course. A random college drop-out in Aberdeen, if Piltz was to be believed, but that couldn’t be it. None of this made any sense, so Michael thought he should stop expecting it to. Still, as much as he tried, his cognition could not be intuitively convinced of being a Boltzmann Brain flickering through entropic chaos. Not yet. Once they allowed him full use of his mind again, perhaps Michael could ask whether the woman was genuinely Sol-connected in some way, though he was betting against it. That would be sane and sane explanations were out of the window. Normal blinks were about 0,38 seconds long. Nonsense- and paradox-blinks were about 0,32 seconds. According to Sol, there was no other type, but task force adjacent people were going over the entirety of their sky data anyway to confirm. Also according to Sol; those two lengths were not arbitrary, but they hadn’t been able to figure out in what way they weren’t. Michael sighed. Him and Tara had been talking about the committee and about their post-Sol world. About social disaster responses and solar eschatology. In many ways it was a humanity spanning past-time they had both been missing out on due to their specific predicaments, and taking part made them feel slightly more connected to their species again. Connected and synecdochical. Even in their scale model of society there was disagreement, friction and incomprehension. Michael for his part thought that the anthropological bones of culture would eventually reset into a vaguely recognizable shape, whereas Tara... Well, she kept referring to it as being within the Schwarzschild Radius, not even attempting to sidestep the worrying implications thereof. “Is there something you know and I don't? We will get out of this, right?" He asked, looking absentmindedly through the steam above his mug. Tara frowned. "We will get out of this room if that's what you're asking, but out of "this"? Michael, the sun is blinking. There is no way we're getting out of that. As people. As a species. I've never seen anything that looked more like a causal boundary between past and present. Going back has become ontologically impossible and all we can do now is acquire data to encrypt into our Hawking-seepage.” Even now she still made everything sound like a sci-fi novel, though it felt slightly more fitting under these circumstances. Some of the voices outside had stopped and even the humming seemed to fade away as they shared a quiet moment of uncertainty as to whether being cut off from the past was even a bad thing necessarily. Previously they would have both claimed “no”, but news coverage seemed to indicate that in many places it might be. “We’ll resume” came the voice of David Alexander Tackett from behind the door, reintegrating an infinite moment back into linear chronology. Most of the panel had settled back into their familiar positions and time-honored poses. Wearing the same old expressions, but wearing them less confidently. Michael noticed that a significant number of observers had not returned from the recess, but more significantly three agents now stood behind Professor DeVries, closely monitoring her actions. “No further anomalies were spotted”, they told him, and he was given permission to verify that claim. He was also given permission to check whether Solsys held any kind of special power, to which the answer was a resounding 0,38 second “no”, and just like that the proceedings resumed as though nothing had happened. Short by a few observers and mildly embarrassed by an anonymous blogger. Gradually it filtered through to Michael by way of Piltz that the philosopher had attempted to post a possibly coded article from within the compound during recess, hence the extra security. The attempt was successfully foiled, but still the panel wanted its lab rat to confirm whether or not secret information had been buried within the text. Michael refused to do so without first reading it and after doing so his veto only became more absolute. The general themes involving an eldritch horror permeating inhuman objective truth could not help but resonate. Susanne DeVries gave a defiant thumbs up and he shuddered looking at the armed guards behind the woman. At the very least she wasn’t being held against her will. Almost certainly the essay had contained coded info – cluster bombs of classified intel in search of minds capable of using it – Michael thought, recalling one of the philosopher’s pet-apothegms: “knowledge is borderline free and borderline harmless in the sense that we accept far greater expenses and far greater risks constantly”. It would later turn out that Professor Bhatti strongly disagreed with that one. Debate had enveloped the topic of whether it was not perhaps safe to share their findings with the public now, seeing how they might go insane if they were never offered an explanation. This was Akande’s stance, though both the politician and the neuro-biologist insisted that the truth wasn’t a satisfying explanation either in this case, and if anything would make people go more insane. “We cannot limit ourselves to that knowledge which the human mind perceives as intuitive”, Garber-Bullough cautioned almost immediately. “My entire field would lie in shambles if we did. That’s the thing; truth is truth no matter how ridiculous we find it. Intuition comes with time.” Michael liked that approach, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it in this case. Dumont-Vatel also nodded along, be it due to excessive optimism or by having developed a far greater trust in his own neuroplasticity over the years. Waiting for a deadlock, the sociologist finally raised her voice: “I understand that we are all strongly invested in this kind of thing, but please ask yourself honestly: Do you believe most people will care? Ten percent even? If we communicate about our progress to the public, it would be prudent to do so for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons.” Silence fell over the now sparsely populated room before a choir of outrage and incredulity rose up again. It noticeably did not include Susanne DeVries, presumably because she would be one of the few people here who did not perceive “ideological” as an insult. Professor Bhatti continued; “You see, scientists and the genuinely religious intersect along the lines of one profoundly rare belief. The belief that reality actually somehow makes sense if you look at it the right way. With the right tools and the right mindset. That there is a coherent, legible, unambiguous rule-set inscribed somewhere into the nature of existence and that all it takes is to find it. We should expect these to be the groups most emotionally affected by recent celestial shenanigans. Everyone else will be disturbed for a while, of course, but give it a few months and they will have accepted it the same way they have accepted all phenomena and inventions since the dawn of time. They don’t need to know how it works, they just need to be relatively confident that it’s harmless. If someone in a sufficiently fancy lab-coat had told them computers run on dark magic, it would have made no difference to them. It works, it’s there, it probably won’t kill me. Our shared cognitive pathology of needing to understand isn’t nearly as universal as all of you seem to believe it is.” The speech invoked furrowed brows and disgruntled mumbling, but no outright disagreement. Even professor DeVries held her tongue about valuing access to this sort of information regardless of whether people cared, which Michael interpreted as choosing not to fight a lost battle. She looked annoyed more so than miserable, chewing her gum even louder than before. Imogen Campbell cleared her throat. “Would it be pragmatic then, Professor Bhatti? Your advice on the matter has been a great aid over the past days and…” She trailed off as she shuffled through some documents on her desk and grimaced. “Well… It might not be as scientifically insightful as the rest of our proceedings, but Mr. Lowe, I do hope you care at least a modicum about the people outside of this room. Would you mind sparing some of your time to see if we can optimize our public response a tad bit? You’re free to check whether my intentions are pure of course. This isn’t about political capital. It is simply about minimizing the suffering of my constituents.” Michael wanted to correct that objective towards “minimizing the suffering of everybody”, but he had a gnawing feeling that the response would be something like “That would include them, no?”. And he had the liberty to make those sorts of adjustments anyway without antagonizing a potential ally. This didn’t make Campbell’s choice of words any less disconcerting. Apparently Kamala Bhatti’s recommendations, though there was still a great deal of panic and unrest, had been staggeringly successful by solar assessment. The main brunt of it was a strategic lack of reporting on- and lack of cautioning against riots or other harmful activities, focusing instead on productive efforts and theoretical analysis. Communal help-efforts and public discussion. Any meaningful control which could be exerted over the media-apparatus was limited of course, but random teens, so called sunfluencers, could easily be pushed towards the right stories through monetary incentives, equipment and access to otherwise restricted locations. The internet functioned as a predictor for what people wanted to see, and so large swaths of traditional broadcasting followed suit without any need for direct meddling. Michael found it both elegant and profoundly terrifying. For the underlying mechanism, the Sociologist gave the example of an American national park from which people regularly stole petrified wood. Making visitors aware of the issue’s scale did not in fact reduce theft, but rather made it more prevalent because taking the wood was then perceived as a normal everyday occurrence which regular people engaged in. Social proof. If one seeks to reign in a behavior, it is best to make it appear rare and unusual. The public should be praised for being dutiful and conscientious even when they are not, in order to altercast them and foster copacetic behavior in the future, Bhatti added, still smiling her friendly smile, and even though all the advice she gave was sensible and apparently beneficial, Michael did not trust it anymore. He felt compelled to take the side of ideology against pragmatism, but pushed that impulse down as far as he could, knowing that it might involve sacrificing human life for a gut feeling. The sun, after all, seemed to agree with Bhatti’s reasoning, and so did Campbell after a few more celestial endorsements. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about micro-governments popping up beneath them: Some simple expansions of soup kitchens, neighborhood watches or religious organizations, but many others populating the ideological fringes of society. Rotting their way through major cities. The politician was aware that she should be thankful for this: Current institutions were after all unable to handle the situation, so all of these local safety-nets reduced the damage done until the dust had settled. Endorsing them was the only pragmatic and face-saving move, but that didn’t change the fact that a worrying precedent was being set. With regards to explaining their findings to the public, Sol predicted a negative outcome. If there were a non-ridiculous explanation, then trust in the government would be furthered. Perhaps even escalated to a point where they would be fully believed when claiming that the world wasn’t gonna end, but unfortunately there was no non-ridiculous explanation to be had. Sharing their current findings would only undermine baseline credibility. Sharing their powers on the other hand… The predicting-blinks-trick which had been used to garner political trust for the committee could be used on the general public, they reckoned. It had been avoided so far, because sharing such a thing would make them vulnerable to accusations of being the phenomenon’s orchestrators as well as putting them in a position where they would have to explain what happened after the fact. Feigning ignorance would be off the table, but still; Sol insisted that this was the path forward for anyone interested in harm-minimization. A press conference was swiftly set up with Tara as its spokeswoman.
September 21st, 17:22, Hotel room, Sheffield, England, UK Dean Sellars awoke to tidal migraines crashing back against his brain-stem. Sucking him under as they receded. Doubling over and lashing out again. Like cliff-side waves feverishly attempting to drown you in the same savage process that erodes rock to sand and consciousness to mush. In the same agonizing breath that turns out to be your last once you’re too oxygen deprived to notice. His eyes felt glued shut and scrapingly dry beneath the lids, wrapped in the tactile tenebrosity of black sandpaper, though when the boy finally managed to rip them open, he had to immediately reverse this decision in order to escape the blinding fluorescence of a ceiling light. They lay on the carpet floor of a hotel room. Dean and fourteen others of whom he knew about half – maybe less – and only four by name. Bodies partially intertwined and haphazardly wound around patches of trash, bottles and vomit from a past he was relatively sure none of them remembered. The boy had no idea what all he took yesterday, but he must have made sure to take lots of it. Indiscriminately and in rapid succession. To blow his endocrine system so far out of orbit that he could punch the fucking star which had done this to them in its hideous fusional unrepentant snout and end it all... But now he lay here and nothing was better. Nothing had changed. The sky spasmed as if to mock them. Slowly and as carefully as his toxin-glutted extremities would allow, he lifted Ash’s arm from his stomach, wavering temporarily before checking for a pulse which was luckily there. If Dean had to see another corpse today, he would break. He’d break like Sally who was still screaming with that god awful bone-chilling wail of vocal chords degraded to the point of non-existence. It sounded inhuman. Like wet high pitched viscera. He’d thought the noise was coming from inside his brain, but as reality stitched itself together again he remembered the screaming from the day before. Dean wondered if she had slept and then started up again or kept it going since yesterday and he didn’t know which one would be worse. Either way, the sound was driving nails through his cranium and he couldn’t take any more of it. Knowing the attempt would be futile before he even started, Sellars screamed at the brunette to shut her bloody mouth or else, which didn’t yield any kind of reaction. He hadn’t yet sunken far enough to actually punch her, even though some part of his brain really wanted to, and despite every sonic vibration bringing that threshold rapidly closer. Violence lay reserved for worse people with shittier motives, he’d decided yesterday, so he just wrapped his fist in a damp towel and drove it through the only window which wasn’t already shattered. This too did absolutely nothing except wake some more teenagers and re-alert them to the unbearable siren’s-wail, but at the very least it was mildly cathartic. He now understood why the other windows had been shattered despite the fact that this was in no way necessary to get in here. “Fuck’s wrong with you” growled Malcolm from beneath some more bodies, and the tone of voice would have been worrying if Dean hadn’t planned to leave anyway. His eardrums couldn’t take it. The boy took a jacket which looked like it might be his, mainly because it had blood on it, as well as the broken leg of a chair which was ineffectually propped against the door. Dean didn’t even know if he wanted to defend himself if something happened. If he cared enough. But just feeling the wood press against his palm allowed some forgotten sense of comfort to flood through his system. Some dogged part of his mind wanted anyone here to get up and ask to tag along, but all the other parts knew that he would reject them if they tried. He needed some alone time. Just him and the fucking sky. It didn’t seem like the human mess of limbs was interested in getting off the floor anyway. Heavy, somnolent strides carried Dean through the hallways, the stairwell and the lobby where someone was yelling at someone else and acted like it meant something despite nothing meaning anything anymore. He snorted at that while kicking some shards around and they ignored both completely. Lots of ignoring lately. It made him feel like a ghost of sorts, and he didn’t know whether he liked that or not. The boy’s legs even carried him out the smashed glass door to haunt familiar, intermittently sky-less streets. Horizon called almost unnoticeably. Summoning like a fishing line gradually getting shorter till you reach the surface and notice there’s metal in your mouth. The night-club’s front lay blown open, much like everything these days, but entirely different. Beckoning maw. “It wants its blood back” whispered a thought shooting through the boy’s head in awed terror once he realized where he ended up. “I’m not going in there”, he replied, but even his own mind had taken up the habit of ignoring him “It wants its blood back.” For the briefest of moments Dean considered stepping inside just so the voice would go away and so that he could dislodge the hook from his tongue, which was starting to taste like rust and acid, but even a single step closer made him want to vomit. Animated by resigned disgust he managed to bunch up his jacket and throw it through the door. A soft anticlimactic flop rung out from inside, and while it made him feel ever so slightly ridiculous; this was apparently enough to lift his curse. No more calling for blood. They’d been dancing at Horizon with a few others Tuesday night. Dancing because they didn’t have anything else left to do. He’d already had all the impending-apocalypse-sex he could ask for and they’d sort of given up on dying within the next couple of hours. The main suspicion going around then was that this night would last forever and even those fears were assuaged when the sun began to rise over a panic-weathered country. It stayed up for a solid few hours without breaks, and they almost got themselves to believe that it was over, that they could go on to lead normal lives, with all the normal shit they’d spent their youth expecting and preparing for. Getting accustomed to. He just wanted to live in the world he always thought he was already in; where his education had a purpose, where his parents didn’t just leave him. The kind of world where the sky didn’t just pull out the fucking rug from under you once you thought you were safe for even a moment. Either way noon rolled around and it turned out again that they weren’t safe. That they should have prepared for not surviving the next couple of hours, because as soon as the sky-outs started up again, chaos broke loose. Someone bashed Dean’s head into the counter, and with blurred vision he just about managed to crouch under it as the stampede sunk humanoid teeth into itself like an ouroborean meat grinder. There were blood curdling screams from all directions, primarily down, and even more blood curdling cracking noises. Wet sounds and mayhem. Once the club was drained – it had been drained for an hour, but Dean couldn’t bring himself to loosen his fetal crouch any earlier – there were bodies on the ground in shapes that bodies shouldn’t be able to form. Like a horrifying nightmare-version of their hotel-room on Leopold Street. Bodies, some of which were still breathing and some of which weren’t. Of course Dean called the hospital, screamed hysterically at multiple phone-operators, but he knew they were far above capacity anyway, and he didn’t stay to find out if anyone ever showed up. Staying would have left open the option of them not showing up, and he just couldn’t bear that thought. He couldn’t bear the thought of going in there now and seeing even more bodies fail to breathe. Dean hadn’t ever been exceptionally scared of people, but now he got it. Understood it in his bones where he used to understand common-sensical truths like that the sun would rise in the morning. Hah. Such lack of certainty made his entire skeleton feel porous in a way that calcium couldn’t replenish. The boy got even more scared of people when that perpetually jaw-clenched guy from his football club suggested setting fire to one of the tent towns. No reason given except for the absence of enforceable laws in this world. For sociopathic fun. For the spectacle. Dean had agreed to join, and then hit the older guy in the head with a rock once he turned around. More horrifying sounds to add to his acoustic memory-bank. More corpses. He didn’t turn back. Didn’t look. Just ran. More people failing to breathe. More reasons to carry a bat around. Beat-up concrete gradually gave way to gravel and then to dirt as he found himself standing somewhere in Rivelin Valley. Pleasant memories haunted the place. Mental polaroids of Cole and him playing here as kids engraved in practically every tree. Dean sunk back against a rock and began to cry. There was more than enough to cry about, but it just hadn’t broken through until now and he wondered why that was. Maybe because this was the first time he had been properly alone since it started. His dad hadn’t been in the picture for four years now. Ran off somewhere stateside with a new wife and no one ever heard from him again, least of all his son. The moment that idea fully set in was the last time Dean could remember really bawling his eyes out, so his tear-ducts had become weak and derelict in the meantime. Using them felt weird and uncomfortable, which in turn made it difficult to lose himself in the moment. He checked his screen-cracked phone again to see if mom had called, but she hadn’t. The woman had tried to lock him in on the first day of blinking. Stupid. So fucking stupid. It hadn’t even seemed like she thought that was gonna do anything. The old woman knew he could just climb out the window, which he did, but once Dean came back, there was no one home. He tried to call again and again the coming days but there was never an answer. Only cold hollow beeps echoing into nothingness. Fuck. Maybe she was helping with one of those settlements somewhere and simply didn’t notice. He was propping that genre of thought up with all his might. Continually fixing cracks in the mental dam which held worse theories out and his sanity in. Speaking of dams. The cold water was up to his waist before Dean even noticed himself move. He was standing in the middle of the stream with dead leaves drifting past, and for a moment the boy considered simply ducking under and staying there. He decided against it. He wasn’t so much sad as angry – that line got thoroughly blurred occasionally – but more importantly it would have felt disrespectful to the place. To Cole. This might have actually been the spot where they once tried to build a bridge. One of them. They had a couple of locations. Of course it wasn’t one traversable by people, but squirrels sure made use of the construction before a gust of wind or some anonymous dick tore it down. Already Dean was out the other side, and from there on especially it felt easiest to just let built-up momentum carry him further. Soon enough Fairbarn road crept into tear-blurred view to unsubtly tell him where he was headed. Maybe they’d even give the boy a towel to dry off, he mused, attempting to push down the terror and seal some more mental cracks. The little flower-filled garden was still perfectly intact except for a bit of trash thrown over the waist-high hedge, and while this eased Dean’s mind about the possibility of a break-in significantly, he still readied his chair-leg before knocking. It took a moment. Longer than a moment. But eventually a fine slit opened up like a fissure running down through reality, just barely enough to reveal a sleepless, scared looking eye belonging to Mister Letwell. The man didn’t say anything. His beard stubble seemed to have grown out an unbelievable amount over the past two days, and it made him look impossibly old. Almost inorganic. Like something you’d find in an antiques store. In his shaking hand, the man grasped a pot of steaming coffee either as a weapon or because he had simply forgotten to put it down before tending to the visitor. Either way, he allowed the door to swing fully open with a gravity that felt like inviting an inevitable fate into his home. Margret stood some meters behind her husband. Less resigned and more on edge. The stout little woman was wielding a bread knife with both hands in a way which made perfectly clear both that she intended to use it as a weapon, and that she would be done for in the case of an actual break-in. “...Dean?” She dropped the knife dangerously close to her slippers as she ran forward to hug him. It all went too fast. Sellars just stood awkwardly in the embrace, makeshift bat still firmly by his side, not quite knowing what to do with his arms. He heard a sobbing over his shoulder and was suddenly quite self conscious about the state of his own eyes, despite how silly that felt. Mister Letwell placed a change of clothes on the counter. “You’re drenched” he stated absently, pouring coffee halfway past a mug and onto the table before adding “How’s your mother?” “Good as the circumstances allow”, Dean lied through a flimsy bootleg smile he had found between his lips and finally managed to hug back. Neither Margret nor George believed it, but they were courteous or out-of-it enough not to press the matter. “And Cole is still…” the mother of his friend gave a heavy nod. Eyes fixed on her own feet, attempting to find salvation between the floorboards. “He’s upstairs, but we can’t get him to come out.” Dean only faintly made out the sentence’s latter half as he stormed up the staircase. Still not changed and therefore leaving a trail of water across the meticulously polished wood. The Letwells must have filled their apocalyptic time-substitute by cleaning, he thought. As good a choice as any. Everyone needed something, and repetitive chores filled the mental void especially well. Darkness filled the upper hallway where dirty plates stood stacked outside of Cole’s room and clashed with the general cleanliness. Varying levels of empty. One bowl of fried rice had black marker-writing all along the rim repeating the phrase “This isn’t real, it will not nourish me” in erratic, jittery letters. The boy ate a forkful. Not only was the rice real, but it was pretty good too. He had missed Margret’s cooking. “That bad, huh?” Dean leaned back against the door. “Not at all.” The voice coming from the other side sounded manic. “I’m just… just still tripping. Everything’s fucking splendid.” Apparently no one in this household had slept much, and who could blame them? “It’s been two days.” Sellars groaned, but the consciousness fragments of his friend were unimpressed with chronology based arguments. “Rare, but not unheard of. Plus my sense of time might be fucked.” “And what about me?” He could feel a pressure adding resistance to the other side of the wood “What about you?” “You think I’m a hallucination?” “I dunno, are you gonna tell me the sun’s flickering like a light bulb” Dean slumped back a bit further. “I’m not going to lie to you, if that’s what you’re asking.” “Good, then tell me it isn’t. Just tell me I’m imagining this shit and I’ll believe that I’m not imagining you.” The voice sounded pleading, but he knew that if he gave in to the fantasy then Cole would probably never fully recover. There was no way out but forwards, and so he said the words which felt like breaking something inside of his soul. Like snapping time in half and dropping the very idea of a future down the bottomless pit of celestial strobe: “But it is.” Maybe the cackle drifting through the door was meant to be triumphant, but it just sounded sad. “Then you’re a hallucination. Good job brain. Damn good job. You do a really…” He sighed. “you really do a good Dean impression” First ghost now imagination-figment. Sellars was getting tired of having his reality questioned or ignored, but for now he could push that feeling down enough to not sound angry. “How likely do you really think that is?” Once solipsism had made its nest somewhere, the thought germ was always so terribly resilient. “Does it matter?! What’s the fucking alternative? What are the odds that I drop acid and the laws of physics actually crash right after, huh? Everything is more likely than that. Everything.” Game over, Dean thought. The issue was that he couldn’t think of a single thing to say or do which would have convinced him that this was reality, if he had been tripping while the sky-outs started. Drug induced insanity was simply the reasonable conclusion based on prior evidence, but Dean didn’t want to play into his friend’s delusion either. “Let's say you are tripping. You’re not, but let’s say you are. Are you enjoying it?” He left no room for an answer. “That’s the point, right? To have fun? But you sound pretty anxious, so why not go for a change of scenery? Might do you some good.” After a moment of deliberation the door clicked and slowly creaked open. Dean had almost feared he would have to kick it in or crack the lock – something needlessly dramatic and trust-breaking – if push came to shove. He certainly never had any intention of leaving matters unresolved. Still; the way Cole was staring right through him did hurt enough to counterbalance any feeling of success the boy might have otherwise experienced. Mr. and Mrs. Letwell could barely contain themselves, though they made a valiant effort, in order to not immediately scare their recently recovered son off again. Dean’s orders. The kitchen atmosphere had entirely flipped, and even the flowers out in the garden somehow looked healthier. Cole was pacing around the room, repeating motions, picking up objects and putting them down again as though growing accustomed to a game environment. The others meanwhile had settled down around the kitchen table. Silently retreading though-loops and discovering new ones in the recesses of unresolved worry. Dean felt sick to his stomach again. If the previous days could be characterized by a singular emotion it was this one. This and maybe anger, but currently one was extinguishing the other. Much as he wanted his friend back, he absolutely did not want to subject him to reality. Maybe the drug excesses of yesterday had even been an attempt at reaching the same weightless state of genuinely believing that this was gonna end. That he’d sober up and that everything would be in its proper place again. He could go to college, find love, lead an actual life as opposed to a grotesque parody of the idea. Even if the world did go back to normal, society was reestablished atop the iterative ruins of its predecessors; who’s to say this wouldn’t happen again? Who’s to say it’d end next time. The only way for any of this to ever be okay was for it to be entirely in your head, or at the very least to believe that it was, and since he himself sobered up, Dean knew that this gate was closed to him. How could his conscience ever allow him to lock it for someone else? The Letwells listened silently, occasionally offering awkward words of reassurance, despite obviously not wanting to hear it. They wanted to get Cole back, but they also wanted to believe that this would be a kind thing to do. Looking back between his friend bemusedly rolling a glass back and forth, and his shaking, sleep deprived parents, Dean had a difficult time imagining how they could genuinely believe that their son’s situation wasn’t preferable to theirs. Reality had given up on them. It was time to face the absence of facts. But still, the conversation was going nowhere. If all they had left was sadness and anger, then they might as well talk about that. “I might have killed someone”, Dean said, digging fingernails into the skin of his left arm.