September 21st, 16:00, A park bench, Edinburgh, Scotland Reg’s phone flashed with another set of coordinates written against a fogged-up car window and encrypted by way of their usual cipher. Scrambled according to send-time. It seemed that Sol-Systems was finally drawing close, but then again her entire path here had been a mad zigzag of back-trackings and misdirects. Further obfuscated by way of feeding sometimes correct, sometimes false location data directly to the media-apparatus through people like Reginald. Not a single part of that strategy seemed exceptionally useful to him. It felt like the kind of plan someone would come up with by thinking about spy movies, not by attempting to construct a scheme with good chances of actual success. Solid strategies tended not to have quite so many moving parts, but then again: Solsys hadn’t been caught yet, so perhaps she was more competent than Reg gave her credit for. The possibility that he himself was being baited came to mind for the hundredth time in as many minutes, and once more he discarded it with a hand-wave. Not because it was unlikely – he currently pegged the chance at about 60% – but because he didn’t much care. Being taken in by mysterious kidnappers might even offer a similarly good shot at getting some info. It was cold out here in the wind. Hitchhiking to Edinburgh had been a pain, but sadly public transport was mostly out of commission, which meant that all he had to guide him were some badly remembered anecdotes about motorway nomadism from his more adventurous friends. A trucker had asked for his jacket in exchange for the ride once they were already driving, and Reg hadn’t gotten the feeling that saying “no” would have been an option, though maybe it would have been. In retrospect the whole affair seemed more like a polite request rather than extortion, but there was no way of reversing the trade now. He wrapped his arms around himself in order to preserve a little more heat, when a person in a black hoodie pulled so far over their head that it seemed to be swallowing them sat down next to him. From within the cavity of the stranger’s obscured countenance glinted a pair of broad, oversized shades, and the man suddenly found it very difficult to uphold any assumption of competence with regards to Sol-systems. “Reginald Newhall?” asked the hoodie in a hoarse whisper before clumsily lighting a cigarette and proceeding to smoke it. Reg made note of how all the accompanying mannerisms reminded more of an impression of a French artist than of anyone actually sating a nicotine addiction. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “yes?” Conspiratorially, Sol-Systems placed a duffle bag in between them and opened it with what felt like excessive care. Something moved inside. “There is a cat in here, yes?” she asked in an uneven rhythm which sounded as though it were tripping over its own syllables. The bag did indeed contain a gray cat for some reason, though Reg had no idea what to do with this information. “Is there, or is there not a cat.” she reiterated with what sounded like exhaustion. “Yes” he finally said. Halfway between a question and a statement. Reginald got the distinct impression that a mind-game was being played, but he couldn’t even make an educated guess as to what the rules were, or whether he was a participant. The woman flipped down her hood and shades as though the “yes” were a code-word for the air being clear, which Reg assumed it probably was. Anyone passing through here would be solely interested in getting to Corner Pub and therefore unlikely to pay much mind to the conspiracy of two taking place on a random bench near Calton Hill. Three men were playing cards on the grass a few meters away, but they appeared to be minding their own business. “Good. Your trust is dangerous. Possibly misguided, but appreciated. I’m Caitlyn, emissary of our sun.” She looked like she was shaking and her scrambled manner of speech had gotten even worse, though she seemed to relax slightly when reaching inside the bag to pet her familiar. The whole comparison was flatly embarrassing, he thought: Reg had put so much concerted effort into an appearance of academic crunch-dishevelment, and then gone on to top it off with two days of genuine full blown existential panic, but still: Caitlyn Everard looked so much worse than him. “Creature” was the only word that came to mind. He'd say she seemed like something that lived in dumpsters, but then “lived” was already a bit of an overstatement. That smug expression on her face was the only part of Solsys which looked even remotely alive. “Jesus, are you smoking those cigs backwards?” Reg asked, barely joking, but certainly not expecting her answer of “perhaps once or twice by accident. The uh- the filter. Its burning quickly becomes quite obvious.” A 90% certainty-assessment that this wasn’t a joke kept the man from laughing and with slight mental strain he could detect a semblance of embarrassment in her features. In retrospect Reginald could definitely see how that happened, though this understanding hardly made her any less of an insane person. Caitlyn hadn’t been looking at her hands at all while lighting the thing, and she certainly hadn’t been looking at him either. Her gaze was entirely fixed to the horizon every moment of every second. Not exactly at the sun, thankfully, a good bit below it, but he certainly got the uneasy feeling that this woman hadn’t allowed the sky to leave her field of vision once over the past days. “I assume you’ve kept up with the news during your trip?” Reginald broke their silence to get back to the topic at hand, and Solsys scrunched up her brow, still staring off into the celestial distance. “Not holistically…” her voice drifted off into a mumble, as she said something about impossible consignments of information and then seemed to do a bit of arithmetic ball-parking. He had almost gotten to the point of tapping her on the shoulder to get the sky-prophet out of her scatterbrained monologue, when Caitlyn raised her voice back to a volume where it felt like she might actually want to be understood: “...anyways it’s been a fraction of a fraction of the contingent plausibly composed of insight as opposed to lies and slander.” She paused as though believing Reg had genuinely asked whether she had consumed literally all news reporting which occurred during her journey. Then she blinked in an off-puttingly deliberate-feeling way and added “If you… If you’re asking about the portentous reappearance of one Tara Keene then yes. I’ve been made aware.” Her baseline tremble amplified to a shudder as she reached back over to the cat like an addict desperate for her next fix. Reg could see a faint metallic shimmer from inside the hoodie-pocket. “It either lends credibility to the info you claim to possess, or… or it’s a very heavy handed attempt to gain my trust, “Mister Newhall”, and this is really a set-up.” Caitlyn mimed scare-quotes at the air in front of her. “Horribly heavy-handed. Not subtle at all… like with the keys-guy” it seemed like she was gonna drift off into her mumble again, but Caitlyn caught herself in time. “Both as a show of trust and also as a threat, I will tell you that I brought knives with me. Plural. Sharpened multiplicities. It would not be in your interest to betray the sun.” Reg of course had no intention either to somehow upset a celestial body, or to unceremoniously be stabbed by the evidently unstable person next to him, so he simply nodded, unsure of whether she could even see the motion in her periphery. “My flatmate disappeared Tuesday night”. Solsys furrowed her brow skyward again. “I don’t presume that your flatmate is Miss Keene, is she? Lots of people vanished that night. Only a few were actively vanished. Logistical limitations.” A strange numbing sensation ran through Reg when he realized that she was talking about humanity as though describing the goings on within an ant-colony. Moral indignation would have been his expected reflex, but instead came only the desire to join her in the glass-shielded outsideness of their eschatological bubble. “Not him, no. He’s just not the type. Locks himself in his room and then vanishes the next day? That doesn’t sound like running off to me. That sounds like he planned something, or went looking for something or found something, and if he did… Well I want to find it too in that case.” She exhaled vaguely dismissively through her nose, while nervously picking at her cuticles. “What’s so funny?” Reg asked, but she only mumbled that he wouldn’t get it, and that he should hurry up with the story before “something bad happens”. For a moment he wondered whether this was another threat, but her own implacably terrified expression seemed to speak against it. “I went through his IP history to look for any obvious leads… Not necessarily optimal behavior, but he doesn’t really believe in trust anyway, so make of that what you will.” Micheal possessed that sort of awfully convenient ignorance with regard to his own ignorances. Things like believing incognito mode would suffice to hide Tuesday’s journey through cyberspace. All it took was for Reg to check the router log and do some cursory searching to stitch together an attempt at contacting Tara Keene, a journalist and old acquaintance of Michael’s who had suspiciously vanished on that very same Wednesday morning. A massively tenebrous blind spot for blind spots tunneling down to nothing less than a misremembered perversion of default Dunning-Kruger. “… so especially now that she resurfaced, I think it’s reasonable to assume that my friend, Michael Lowe, is either mixed up in the same thing as Keene, or that he somehow found out about her involvement way before anyone else and then took off or got vanished.” Through the entire explanation Solsys had given her best attempt at a poker-face, but her expression lit up the moment Reg gave Michael’s name. It almost seemed like she was going to tear herself away from the horizon and turn towards him: “Michael Lowe! Michael H. Lowe? MHL?!” A small part of Reg’s soul which hoped to ever understand anything died of a stroke. “y-yes? How could you possibly-?” Caitlyn smirked up at the sky like a mad-woman “Thank you for your cooperation, Mister Newhall, but I’m afraid that information is still classified. Eject!” Before he could even ask her what she meant by that, the three men Reginald had noticed earlier surged in to push him to the ground as Solsys grabbed her bag and stormed off. The three fans turned recruits wouldn’t hurt Newhall, she hoped. Caitlyn had explicitly forbidden them to inflict harm unless she herself was in danger, which she didn’t feel like she was, or at least not more than usual, which is to say significantly. He’d been nice, Sol-systems thought. Strangely stiff and hollow-eyed, but nice. Maybe she would properly add Newhall to her one-man team once she could afford to be a little more trusting, though the prophet had no idea when that day would come. Him and Susanne. “MHL” was one of the recurring codes in a communique Caitlyn had received from an apparently captured professor DeVries. One of twelve, most of which she had already figured out. There seemed to be other other children of the sun and the idea filled her with a penetrating sense of orbital camaraderie. Solsys had long considered the possibility, even written about it, though none of them seemed to be quite as competent as her at evading the government, judging by how little she had heard from them. Still: despite his apparent lack of caution, Caitlyn could not help but feel a certain bond to this M.H. Lowe and all the other solar siblings she might have out there.
September 21st, 17:18, Military facility near Oban, Scotland Trust in Sol lay in tatters across the minds of committee members, at least when it came to answers regarding a certain blogger. Caitlyn Jeanne Everard, the person who had been running Sol-Systems, just posted a “List of known prophets”, which obviously included her own name, but also troublingly that of Michael and eighteen others. The eighteen were traps, they were almost sure of it; randos assembled from the pages of an Aberdeen phone-book, but the task-force had been wrong a lot recently and thus certainty did not take root as readily as it used to. Lowe himself stood convinced of Campbell’s theory that the additional names were bait and that Solsys would track them to see if any were kidnapped. It would be consistent with her general conspiratorial paranoia, though the term “paranoia” didn’t quite carry its usual hit of condemnation when the plan of taking these individuals in for questioning had been a matter of discussion only minutes earlier. The sky for its part denied that there were more people wrapped up in the phenomenon, and this was consistent with their observations of never registering an unaccounted-for blink, but then again: how could Everard possibly know about Michael. All of this was vaguely concerning, but another matter troubled the man behind the podium much more: “why was the panel questioning Sol’s trustworthiness and not his own?”. Finally curiosity reached the brim of its container and boiled over into a back-and-forth between Campbell and Volkogonov about security matters. “Sorry, but this bothers me: Do you have a lie detector hooked up to me? Have I been psy-oped into thinking those don’t actually work when in reality they do? Why is your immediate hypothesis not that I’m hiding something? I’m not, but that’d definitely be my suspicion.” “Classified” shot the general with a bored terminality that seemed to characterize most of his speech, though Michael had developed a decent intuition for how far he could push things at this point: “But does telling me pose a serious risk? Genuinely?” Otto Volkogonov did not at first humor the follow up with a response. He leaned back in his chair indicating that they could safely return to whatever the previous topic had been, but the matter seemed not to be quite as final as he wished to present it. A number of committee members directed uncertain glances at the general when Michael raised his eyebrow in a manner that had come to mean “I will test this”. The old man sighed like someone forced to placate a child. “It poses a substantial and unnecessary risk to the assumed mutual trust between you, Mister Lowe, and this task-force. Moreover it is a waste of time. Just do your part and frolic about the fact that you are not under any suspicion.” How he was framing this annoyed Michael to no end. “It poses no risk whatsoever to the foundation of our trust because this is the foundation of our trust. I would like to know the composition of the ground I am standing on, general.” “Ohhhh dear. Kid, you barely ever want to know the composition of the shit you’re standing on. Bit of life advice.” It was impossible to detect whether that was a joke or not, but at the very least it seemed to be a grudging concession. “Go on then, that’s why we have you lot of professional explainers, no? Enlighten the man. At this point we’ll waste even more time arguing.” Characteristic sounds of evasion as postures were deliberately reshuffled in an attempt to avoid being called upon. Nose-goes for respectable adults. It was Tackett’s precise, glass-cutter-voice that finally ended up accepting the task: “When we asked you to outsource Sol’s assessment to the contents of our minds this morning, the first few were easily confirmable statements of alternating veracity. One in one-thousand certainty of the experiment’s success would have been preferable, of course, but we felt comfortable sacrificing some of it in exchange for evidence of your trustworthiness.” Garber-Bullough almost choked at the word “some”, which Michael ball-parked to mean an order of magnitude. He was proven correct immediately: “The final three were therefore of a different nature: “Michael Lowe is not being manipulated by another agent”, “Michael Lowe will only give honest answers to our questions”, and “Michael Lowe will not conceal any information from us”.” There was a sinking feeling in Michel’s stomach as he thought back to his discovery of extraterrestrials, though he didn’t let it show on his face. “You did not pass that last test, though it is easy enough to think of situations in which a refusal to divulge something, consciously or subconsciously is entirely non-malicious. A perfect score would have been convenient, but a failure on this point was not entirely unexpected.” The man folded his hands and looked up at Michael with staid owl-eyes “So you see: we asked you direct questions about the nature of Solsys and we know their answers to be truthful. A mere obscurance of additional information could not possibly account for Everard’s activities and so we must assume either extraordinary coincidences, or a lack of honesty from Sol themselves.” DeVries grinned, and Michael was sure the philosopher had the same quote in mind as him: “Coincidences are just the subroutines of a program whose purpose you don’t yet know”. The professor had of course also turned herself into a subroutine of their more organic twin-project, and this shard of asymmetric knowledge made the line much more amusing to her than to him. Lowe just got the feeling that he was being left behind again and wondered how that was even possible when he had absolute access to literal cosmic truth. He tried not to get distracted by this annoyance. “Thank you. Can’t say I’m happy about the dishonesty, but I see its purpose and might have done something similar in your position.” He spoke as calmly and impassively as he could, but then reintroduced a bit of his normal cadence towards the end when he realized how much this phonetic neutrality sounded like an impression of Tackett. Otto Volkogonov snorted in a manner which made perfectly clear that he saw through the gesture. Michael had attempted to resolve the matter and seem charitable at the same time, while entirely deflecting from the elephant in the room: The things he had hidden from them, and which he didn’t even make mention of now that they had alerted him to their knowledge of this fact. A truly innocent party might have divulged an innocuous omission, such as having asked Sol about lottery numbers, thereby dissipating suspicion, but Michael had been caught off guard. Allowing yourself to think before revealing something harmless was even more suspicious than revealing nothing at all. The general met his gaze directly, and Lowe braced for a killing blow that never came. Volkogonov stayed entirely quiet. The optimistic part of Michael’s brain suggested that he had just been snorting because he too saw the semblance of a Tackett-impression, while the pessimistic part gravely insisted that this would be used as leverage at a later time. Garber-Bullough was getting back to the point, that point being for the most part determinism on steroids. If particle decay was truly random, and if quantum uncertainties worked as expected, then a long term predictive model of reality should degrade in accuracy over time no matter how precise its initial conditions were calibrated, but Sol was confident making predictions about the state of a specific particle fifty billion years in the future. Sol denied the existence of error-margins. All of this, according to her, left two possibilities – she excluded the third option of celestial dishonesty, because it was “unproductive” –: That all perceived randomness is merely the result of insufficient model-sophistication and that the underlying process is in truth fully predictable, or that Sol itself was engaging in a kind of reality hacking or meta-level simulation- tweaking in the case of them not truly inhabiting reality. The observed blink effect with its selective modes of light interaction (photon manipulation, she called it) certainly spoke to either of those. Technology so advanced as to seem not even just magical, but numinal. Ancient legends about sun-gods suddenly induced much greater affective resonance in Michael’s endocrine system. His personal sun god was unhappy with both of the physicist’s options, but after some more questioning they got it to admit that reality hacking was at least closer to being correct. A shudder ran down their collective spines. Animal-fear of an involuntarily theistic type. No one spoke for a few viscous moments. The panel had settled into a rough turn structure over the past hours. Never explicitly stated, but non-verbally enforced in the space between glances. The way customs always form at the cooperative interface of human minds where novelty bleeds into newly minted tradition before you even notice. When the physicist relaxed her posture, she might as well have handed a literal baton to Akande, who had recently been experimenting with storing variables as solar memory. “Sol’s cognition uses some form of general syntax, in which the information-content of a statement is quantifiable.” Michael guessed that he had to burn through a few of those from the lack of preamble. It felt vaguely rude, but he repeated the words into the back of his skull either way. Sol did not complain. “Sol is aware of mathematically provably unprovable statements about the quantity of numbers obeying a certain criterion within the set of all integers…” Again the sky stayed normal. “… and Sol can and will assign the label “alpha” to the shortest such statement according to the canonical information-content-metric of its internal syntax, and to no other statements.” No blink. Professor Akande took a deep breath: “Now; the statement labeled alpha is true” Sometimes Micheal felt like he could feel the blinks coming while he was still speaking, and the intuition did not disappoint. A few people were following along well enough to seem shocked, but the mathematician calmed them with a hand-gesture. “Since this is strange terrain to tread, we should make sure that that’s an actual answer. Let’s try the inverse: the statement labeled alpha is false” This time the sky did not object and Georges Akande seemed to think this settled the matter. Now he too allowed himself to look shocked, and the expression felt much more impactful when occupying his face as opposed to those of their quiet observers. “So what does this mean exactly?” asked Clin like someone forced to commit a social faux pas. The mathematician swallowed, but Dumont-Vatel managed to steal the answer away from him: “It means that whatever mechanisms Sol is using, or whatever reality it inhabits; the means at its disposal are effectively super-Turing. The sky just told us that it can decide a mathematically unprovable claim over an infinite set. This, in addition to what we now know to be reasonably close to reality-hacking, means that we might as well start referring to the entity we are interrogating as a deity, because in every meaningful way it is.” No-one had a cogent counterargument to that, but they didn’t want to accept it either. Even father Dreyfus flinched away from the notion, since it couldn’t help but feel horrifyingly blasphemous. Michael restrained any and all thoughts starting with “hey, god, It’s been a while”, especially since cultural cliche meant that many of those cognitive misfiring ended up being about a cat he’d had as a kid, even though he knew perfectly well what happened to it. A popping sound of gum broke their silence, and all eyes turned to the philosopher, who didn’t look nearly as shaken as the rest of them: “Well what are you waiting for. Ask it: “If we understood by what process you know that answer, we would still think you’re god””. Sky-out. Faces flipped to either relief or confusion, except for that of the priest, who let out a terrified shriek, realizing first what the other implication of that statement could be. It took Michael a few seconds to catch up. He wasn’t accustomed to this way of thinking after all, but when he did his expression fell too. The man behind the podium mouthed the words quietly, not knowing what to make of them, but not so quietly that the microphone would fail to pick them up: “...Demon. If it’s not a god it might be a demon.” A few more terrified sound-bits, but none quite as visceral as that of Dreyfus. Michael’s mind was ticking forward on autopilot and his lips went along with whatever signals they were given: “we would think you’re a-” “STOP!” yelled the general and Michael froze in his tracks. In an instant the manic urgency vanished from the old man’s face. “Kid, think this through. Your conception of a…” He trailed off, realizing that a few of the others also seemed annoyed at this test being verboten, and therefore made his condescension more general: “All of you geniuses must realize that this is a worthless question. We’re looking at a vastly powerful, unfathomably eldritch entity. Even if it isn’t magic, even if it is an AI, what could it possibly be that we wouldn’t label “demon” at this point. I’ll accept the inquiry as soon as any of you can give me an example of what this is testing against. Making ourselves more afraid by confirming unhelpful suspicions is not useful. That’s obvious right? If someone comes in here with a bomb, then any attempt to figure out whether they’re a terrorist or not in the moment is a dangerous waste of time. The required action is the same whether or not they are a terrorist. The question is pointless, its answer doesn’t change the situation in any way.” He sighed. “Surely you have terms for this, for experiments that would validate all hypotheses. Don’t be stupid”. Michael’s respect for the pig-faced military man shot up significantly, and he suddenly felt like a moron again. After a bit of grudging silence, Volkogonov nodded: “Good, now I see you have all been avoiding a question that actually is useful: Is this permanent? We might want to front-load some matters if it isn’t, and I suspect that’s precisely the reason why none of you cowards asked. Because deep down you probably know that a lot of your soul-burning pet-curiosities are more frivolous than the questions we could be answering with a bit of brute force.” The general looked up at Michael and he could clearly see that this was the price for his earlier silence. The debt to be paid. Some more clicks on the competence counter, as the tactician smiled an unassuming smile. In this moment, he had the council on their back-feet, and Michael in his pocket. The entire strike was precision engineered from orbit – acupunctural kinetic bombardment – and you could see it in his face. Lowe didn’t even know why he was so mad about that: while curiosity was his main goal, a lot of it had been sated, and he would be perfectly alright using his pact with a demon for more productive matters now that it was, but the whole affair still felt like losing a game of chess. The man forced a serene smile of defeat before preparing his mental ritual, but somehow the altar felt wrong, and his neurons seized into stroboscopic mayhem when he tried to place a thought on it. Reality lost its mind some more.
September 21st, 18:52, Porth Yr Ogof cave, Brecon Beacons National Park, Wales, UK The belly of a cave felt like a submarine when you weren’t looking and sometimes even when you were. Felt like it in the same way that wine can taste “earthy”: Not actually similar to earth, but resembling it at the intuitive threshold where language can’t keep up with obvious sensory stimuli. Thea often felt that she hated language. You sort of had to at least be ambivalent towards communication if you let yourself be locked up in an underground Plexiglas box for upwards of a year, but any time she gave serious consideration to the matter, or opened up a book, it quickly became obvious that she didn’t really hate language. She just hated using it. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea left the hermit’s hand upwards with a flick of the wrist, spun and reconnected. She didn’t have to open her eyes to catch the familiar leather bound shape, and she didn’t have to open them to notice and log the axial drift either. Submarines felt a lot like spacecrafts when you weren’t looking. Transitive property: Cave like sub like starship. It put her in the mood to do experiments like this; to confirm and re-confirm Dzhanibekov instability with the most reliable instrument at her disposal. That’s what one did in space after all, though probably with proper tennis equipment. She only had books. Thea Santevecchi sighed. She wasn’t cut out for space. Far too many people, far too closely packed, but she would have still liked to do experiments more useful than simply being down here. Technically, this was ESA-led isolation research, but in reality it was more of a publicity stunt than anything else. The additional data wasn’t useless, but when it really came down to pushing the project, it seemed to always be the record-guys, not the scientists who were most invested. She couldn’t blame them. It was a good deal packaged in a good story after all: another Italian name to add to those of Stefania Follini and Maurizio Montalbini, while she in turn got a year off from people. The book slammed painfully against her index finger at outlier-type axis-drift, and the hermit self-servingly decided that this meant her data-set was sufficiently expansive. Still she did not open her eyes. Sometimes she went days without doing so. The nice thing about isolation was that everything was always exactly where you put it. You didn’t need words, and you didn’t need sight. All information was directly inscribed into the objects themselves and the distances between them. The only thing that wasn’t static down here was her own ephemeral (FM-eral) voice, and even that was probably being recorded. The rice-cooker whirred to life and added its own sonic signature to the echo-y deep. Cave-life made you feel like you were part of the fossil record. A permanent immortal fixture. For a few more months at least. Sleep cycle parameters diverged so quickly in hypogean time that she couldn’t nail it down any closer than that and neither did she want to. Any respectable subterranean left their circadian shackles at the door, she mused, realizing that she was probably an authority on the matter by now… A distraction crept into her awareness from three steps back, one to the left: the rice cooker was making the wrong noise. Pairs of beeps at regular intervals indicated that it was next to empty, Thea recalled from a fully memorized user’s manual. Didn’t feel like remembering though. It felt like the machine was communicating its condition directly, and Thea merely remembered speaking its language. The woman walked backwards in assured, precise strides, knowing, not hoping, that she wouldn’t bump into anything. Movement through isolation-space always felt like clockwork, administering dopamine hits with every satisfyingly frictionless interlocking of gears. Like dancing with reality. Her fingers found the off-switch exactly where it had promised to stay last time they made contact and she gave it an appreciative pat on the head. The lid. This too felt like haptic communication. Reaching her hand down into the cavity revealed an almost depleted food-reservoir. She’d expected that. The supply had already been dwindling yesterday, and Thea had made peace with the idea that she would have to eventually open her eyes to figure this out. That resignation didn’t mean that she wouldn’t go through all the motions first. To navigate some more second-nature step-patterns and sink back into her office chair, which was angled at 130 degrees clockwise so that it faced her bed for easy access. She didn’t first reaffirm the location with her hands. Checking was for cowards. Checking was superstitious. Checking meant that you lacked trust in the accuracy of the fossil-record, and that just couldn’t be abided. Satisfied, the hermit rotated her chair back to face the monitor and finally opened her lids. Everything where it should be. A caret cursor blinked impudent flashes into the nothingness, and Thea indulged her mostly-obsolete sensory organ by rolling her eyes. She had not wanted a computer down here. She’d been quite firmly opposed to it, but while the record-folks liked that kind of minimalism, the researchers wouldn’t hear of it. They needed a way of communication, and so Thea had to give them a life-sign every day before going to bed. Hobson expected journal entries, she knew that, and for the first few days she had complied out of some sense of indebtedness to the doctor, but gradually the messages grew shorter and shorter, and now she just sent them a single period each day to confirm that she hadn’t kicked the bucket. Even that much communication with the surface-world felt profane to the hermit, but a deal was a deal. A deal which the researchers apparently weren’t keeping. Last check-in came fifty plus hours ago, which would line up with the last food-drop. The messages in the preceding hours were already erratic, but Thea hadn’t actually checked them yesterday. A period could be typed with your eyes closed easily enough, but now she was really going through it. First theory: April fools. Though that would mean that her sleep-schedule’s fucked to an absolutely unprecedented extent, and she didn’t think they’d cut her food-supply for the sake of a prank either way. Maybe the surface-world had started a war or something. It would explain the confused panic in their final messages, but it wouldn’t explain the image they had affixed: Like a sunset if sunsets looked entirely unlike themselves. Like a sunset in the way that wine can taste earthy. Staring at it made Thea strangely uncomfortable, so she stopped, took a breath and assessed the situation. She did need food. It didn’t look like she was gonna receive any. One of the final messages read “get out” and she feared she would have to heed it. With a heavy feeling pressing down on her chest, like she was being folded into the space between sedimentary layers, Santevecchi typed a period with her still aching finger and hit enter. The haptic feedback stung with soul-shattering finality. Defeated, she opened the door to her transparent cage, her room, her domain, her place in the fossil record and stepped forward. The way out was painfully easy to remember. Sometimes she had nightmares about it, but this wasn’t usually how they went. An oncoming panic attack reared its head, and she pushed it down as hard as she could. Mostly successfully. Lights were still burning in the surface station. Documents strewn about on the floor, and unfinished cups of coffee serving as paper-weights to mess-littered desks. “everything where they left it” rung an ingrained mental aphorism, and somehow that thought was immensely calming to Thea. Calming until she looked out the window. The hermit was a trend setter, it seemed: Reality too had left its circadian shackles at the door and was practically seizing in and out of daytime at shutter-speed. All theories out the window except for one: She had gone insane. How annoying. They all told her it would happen. They all told her and she’d shrugged dismissively every time. Santevecchi took a deep breath and leaned against a desk. Surface-life was just too much for her taste. Too fast. Hypogean life was simple. Abstracted. Suited most comfortably to metaphor. The thought of Plato ricocheted through the empty lab, and she wondered why anyone would ever leave subterranean contentment for this. Insanity was a chore. Out of the corner of her eye Thea could make out a sack of rice, as well as the supply-hatch, abandoned along with the rest of it. Abandoned along with her, though that fact didn’t much bother the hermit. Her recently reinstated sight was already proving useful, she thought, and felt slightly guilty about it. She wondered how long it would take to commit an environment this messy to memory. Maybe a week. Not that she wanted to. Wasn’t her place. Slowly the woman rose back to her feet, stretched and threw the sack down into cave-space. She couldn’t lift it. The thing weighed more than her by a decent margin, but she could tilt it enough to tip over the rim. Porth Yr Ogof received her offering with a consequential, echoing thud, and the woman nodded in approval. Thea Santevecchi returned to the belly of her subterranean spaceship with relief that swelled in proportion to depth. The Plexiglas door swung open and closed almost soundlessly behind her, emitting only a single FM-eral click into the comforting darkness. Everything was in its place. Logged and accounted for. Everything including the box’s denizen. Surface-reality could take care of itself.
No Time In Particular, No Place In Particular There was a chuckle outside of reality. Or maybe there is. Or maybe there will be. Time grows difficult at its fringes, though laughing grows easy. Laughing at the void's creatures especially. Such is the note inscrutability plays in its off-time, once it gets tired of answers. A siren's song if ever there was one. As for humanity: They'll figure it out. The way back is blocked by a fissure in perceived reality, but then again it always has been. "Forward seems a fine direction to be limited to" as they say. Who knows when the sky will be in a mood for surprises again. Caitlyn Jeanne Everard reckoned it would be quite soon whereas Michael Lowe hoped he would at least be given some kind of recovery period.