She never actually lost consciousness. No, oh no, she wished. The callithumpian parade of signs thundered through her head unceasingly, blocking out all else in its excess–but for all of its excess she was aware. She knew just two other things: pain beyond pain, and being carried, and maybe a thin third one of orange-blue traveling beside her as she went, twitching, unable to move even her eyes. There was nothing she could do: Its hold on her was absolute, Its cws immovable as they pried back her eyelids and forced her to look, to know. Her mind y naked to the void, and the void poured in in viotion.
But for all its agony, it didn't feel malicious, any more than a live wire could conduct ill will; Calliope's mind couldn't help but try to process every image speeding through, despite being hopelessly outpaced. Compounding it all, though, was the maelstrom of emotions percoting within her: Ettie's insistence, Ettie's excitement, wild and nigh-orgasmic in its intensity. Too much… far too much, in every sense, and she'd never felt so certain she would die–even as she'd never felt less certain of who, what, when, or where she was.
But then–mercifully–it stopped. Ettie seemed to countenance her, finally; seeing that the gss was well and overflown, she drew back and stemmed the torrent. Calliope gasped and sputtered as what felt like a feeding tube departed from inside of her skull and her pupil closed again and she could see–though the afterimages, thousands and thousands of them, still lingered in her vision. The only thing she could compare it to, maybe, was what she imagined waking from the womb must have been like: the loudest fucking sound she'd ever heard within her brain, a blinding light, all a terrible, terrible disturbance into which she had been thrust for a lifetime and could not retreat from. She wanted to sob like an infant, too. Awareness was a curse beyond endurance, and God hadn't yet mercifully wiped the memories of this new rebirth from her mind.
A fsh. Her eyes flit over to her right, where above her, a male figure in hospital-blue scrubs loomed. She glimpsed the thinnest film around his mind as Ettie did her work: he was concerned for her and the impending end to his shift. Then, to her left…
Another fsh. Sawyer James, looking at her with less medical, more personal concern, but: just for a moment. The din she caught when Ettie dove to clear the red from her eyes for him was nothing compared to what was swirling in her own head. Swirling, screeching, still… but settling, like sediment. Soon she might even be able to speak again.
"Callie? Can you hear me?" Sawyer formed words first, of course–that slightly annoyed her as she stared upwards. His face was waxy, too surreal–was that what human faces looked like? No… or maybe? It was difficult to remember… not when the horrid visages of every creeping creature detailed in the Necronomicon competed for her attention. They weren't drawings–oh how she wished they were just–but instead ‘mere’ descriptions, written in the purplest of prose. A lesser imagination wouldn't have been disturbed by simple text, but she was entangled now to a greater one which could correte the terrible contents, to her terrible detriment. Ettie could assemble somethings pictures-perfect from the author's words: phantasms of chuffing ungoleths, succubous-limbed agec-waifs and other chittering, crawling, unpleasant unnameables, all haunting the corridors of her brain. Sawyer was just another monster in that vein. He was fleshy, shaggy, and a sickening coral pink–alien like all the rest. Forget speech; she should scream instead, scream until her lungs colpsed and the walls colpsed around them, and–
There was a pale hand on the railing, to her right, nearest her head. Glimpsing it drove the lesser terror from her mind like zebras from a lion, and she became aware of her surroundings. She was in a hospital bed–that made sense. The hand belonged to Ettie–that made sense too, the dark dress and tights she wore wicked too much light out of the room to clothe anybody else–but she couldn't see her face. It was turned away, Ettie wouldn't show it… something pricked at her conscience, and she knew: It felt remorse.
"Y-yeah, I can hear." She managed, with a wavering smile. The pair of men above her shared a sigh of relief.
"How do you feel?" Sawyer asked.
She tried to sit up, pushing against the sheets with her elbows, only for the man on the right–who she assumed must be a doctor–to reach out and stop her. As he did so Ettie deferred, retreating from the bed railing so as not to spoil the illusion.
"Just take it easy for now, please." He said.
She gnced down as his hand repced Ettie's on the sidebar. The Monster herself came to rest against the wall, and finally acquiesced to turn her head to meet her. Calliope's eyes met hers: the strange colour slurred impossibly deep below its corneas, but any meaning there was impossible to parse. Her ft expression gave no clues either, even though it belonged to a face that seemed more human than Sawyer's, despite being more fictional.
She looked back to compare. Sawyer's face had never really changed, only the way she'd perceived it did. He was no longer so gross to look at, now. The terror faded as the images rattling around her skull were drawn back by a great force. It was sweeping and corralling them into darkling corners and under metaphysical rugs; if she went looking she would see them, find them in the most inopportune thought, but they no longer imposed upon her vision. She had no intention of seeking such intrusive thoughts. A face was still a fleshy mass with odd wrinkly protrusions and twin white orbs cracked with red… but it was a face, again. Small comfort.
"Where am I? What happened?"
"MISC Medical, Urgent Care. It was just the closest pce, they had to put you on a stretcher after you started… well, you know."
At that moment Sawyer's face was an open book, on which were written the wrinkled marks of worry and relief. What had she said–or done–while It'd forced the entire contents of the codex on her mind? "What do I know? What did I–"
The other man shifted, and she stopped. "Calliope? Hello–my name is Dr. Dugai. I'm going to take your vitals now, and I'll expin as best I can."
She turned from Sawyer, then. Calliope only had daggeresque eyes for Ettie as she allowed her arm to be lifted and the blood pressure cuff fitted around it. Tension slowly rose within; her heartbeat became audible within her head, but still It didn't say a word. At least Ettie was still pleasant to look at, if she ignored everything else: the bck dress cinched at the waist with a still darker belt, rising up into a ruffle at her chest and covering only a sliver of the arms below her shoulders. She tried not to stare at the patches of pastel skin it revealed, and averted her eyes downwards.
Beneath it at the hem the darkness continued in the form of tights, clinging to the lithe curve of her legs, before disappearing into short boots that were also–of course–bck. They were posed so daintily against the ground it seemed she could push off and be weightless in an instant. Ettie fully looked the trope of the mysterious stranger at a funeral, who none of the family knew, and whose presence and absence of word was much discussed afterward. But Calliope was still alive, and anyway: she was sure that if the grim reaper dared show its skeletal and hooded face to cim her soul, Ettie would bst it into nothing more than ash and grainy, charnel crumbs. Surely It'd terminated greater and lesser gods than Death, if the vision she'd had ere coming back to lucidity contained even a grain of truth–one that no scythe could reap.
Ettie smirked at her, and that telltale bristling reemerged; It paid extra-close attention when her thoughts wandered in Its general direction. But before Callie could begin to form one that'd end in voicing her discontent, the pressure in the cuff released. The doctor administering her vitals demanded her attention.
"125/78, that's a bit high, but that's to be expected…" He said, undoing the velcro.
"I don't–I don't need to go to the hospital, right?" She was suddenly fearful. The walls of the room were familiar to her as belonging to the medical building at the east side of campus, where she'd been an outpatient several times back when she was still a student. The staff and doctors there were friendly then, even if the dose of hormones they prescribed her was ultimately insufficient, and she'd ter taken matters into her own hands. Probably, they wouldn't bill her for much, as long as she didn't stay for long. But a visit to the emergency room? That was an entire universe outside of her budget.
Dr. Dugai stood and frowned at her. "You've just had a seizure. The normal procedure would be to call emergency services. But, seeing as you are awake and alert, this is the first such incident, and your vitals aren’t concerning… the decision to do that is up to you."
She stared past him, off into space. A seizure? Something seized her… was that how the episode pyed out in the real world? She raised her left hand to her head and ran it through the crop of browning purple. No anomalous bumps or pulsing psychic tumors to be found. It was all in her head; the true horror of the incident remained her exclusive purview.
"Yeah, I'd really prefer not to, if that's alright..." Towards the end, her voice hitched, without intention; the two men shared twin looks of anxiety.
"Cal…" Sawyer began.
"In that case, I should still ask," Dr. Dugai finished, "is there a history of epilepsy in your family? Typically, a diagnosis would require two seizures presenting in the same way, so I can't tell you anything for sure. But you should ask members of your household to be aware of the signs, in case this were to happen again."
Calliope fought back a ugh. Again? She was sure that if ever Esther tried anything of the sort again, there’d be nothing left of her brain able to form a coherent thought. She'd spend the rest of her life rotting in a hospital bed and drooling into the sheets while Ettie fucked off to who-knows-where in the realm of abstraction that included in reality's crystal. She had no intention of becoming a vegetable, or informing Erika, or anyone else, of what had just transpired.
"Sure. I will. And no, 'far as I know, my family's pretty healthy." She returned. That was a lie–Ettie even tilted her head to acknowledge it as such–but it wasn't worth getting into. Her parents were physically healthy, after all, whatever their emotional ills.
"Thank you. I'll return with some paperwork for you to take home." He spun on his heel and exited, closing the door behind him. That left her and Sawyer, alone… and also Ettie, in her current role of Beelzebub-against-the-wall. Wallflowers were oft-magenta-colored pnts, weren't they, after all?
Immediately after his departure, Sawyer began pressing her focus to more mundane matters. "Cal, you sure you don't wanna go to the ER? I was… I mean… that was just scary to watch. I was really worried! If you're not okay, then–"
Her head shook with nervous vigor. "No, no, I don't want to, it's fine! Sorry, Sawyer, I just… it's fine. Okay? It'd take fucking hours, I'm ft broke, and–" Wait. She remembered. "–Don't you have a flight to catch, anyway?"
Sawyer hissed; his eyes shifted in guilt over to the wall where Ettie lurked, invisible to him. "Well yeah, I do–sorry–but… I'm sure Erika or Annette or anyone would be fine going with, once you tell 'em." His eyes looked back at her. "You are going to tell them, right?"
"Er…" She already knew the answer–and just from her hesitation, Sawyer surmised the same. He opened his mouth to speak again, probably to try and argue with her… but she'd lost all will to engage. Her coffers of attention and giving-a-shit ran empty.
For better or worse she needed Ettie. The Thing had got her into this mess–the least It could do was get her out. If not, then she was going to start crying, and tears were the st thing she wanted to dispy in front of Sawyer James, or worse: some total stranger of a doctor or nurse.
"Please, I can't… I just can't deal with this right now." She said, turning and trusting to Ettie–as she did there was a slight glitch when the movement rotated from real into imaginary. Ettie heard her plea: the fps of Sawyer's mouth ceased to move, frozen in time, while her window of perception lengthened. Wider… wider… until the present moment hitched within the Kleine hourgss's neck and Ettie moved from her position at the wall. Without a word she extended a perfect, pale, luminous hand out over the bed. Calliope took it; expecting to be burned by Its angelic flesh, she braced herself. Their fingers csped and interleaved and…
This time it was instant. Her fingers closed around a metal pole, cold as she'd expected but firm, unlike flesh. All the world hurried back into her senses. The arrhythmic ctter of a subway train, ascending in a tunnel… she swayed a little bit to keep her bance. The rest of the car was completely abandoned, its ancient upholstery sitting empty, and stripes of red paint spread horizontally across the length of each wall to split off and form various accents. The only signs of life were herself and Ettie, who also grasped a pole opposite her a little to the left. The emptiness struck her right away as strange. As the train exited onto the beginnings of a southeasterly bridge, the view of the window across from her was one of dusk: beautiful hues of purple and pink and orange swathed pillowy clouds to smother the sun down against its bed. Rush hour–or close to it–on the day before a day before a major holiday. The train car should've been absolutely packed.
It's just you and me right now, Callie.
She jumped; her face flushed anew with nervousness. Her eyes flew over to where Ettie was standing, still with less apparent weight than a person, but unmoved by the train’s vibrations. It grasped the pole zily with an index finger extended upwards along its length; every list of the car was exactly countered such that Its gaze remained directly on her. It was smiling… but her lips were pursed, belying something more.
Do you prefer hearing me like this?
"Or would you rather we use words instead?"
Calliope looked away, back to the window. The repeated rattling of the train as it crossed the bridge, coupled with the sight of the incredible sunset, sufficed to calm her.
"I think I could use a bit of… normal. After that."
Ettie sighed–a performative sound, given her stature, but everything the illusion did was a performance, anyway. "Yes, I know." Calliope knit her brows. Do you, really, though?
Yes.
The word was sudden, hot, insistent–like she'd pced her hand directly on a stovetop burner. She recoiled and looked at Ettie with wide eyes; the anger she expected to glimpse there was utterly absent.
"I’ll also offer you an apology." It said, more coolly and sweetly–’twas the season for peppermint approaching, after all.
"It's kind of a bit te for that, I think? Thanks for getting me out of there, though. And for not killing me, I guess."
"Killing you was never the intention."
"...then what the fuck was?"
"Experience." Callie rolled her eyes. "Oh, please." She still kept anticipating anger in response to her insolence, but there was no punishment at all; instead It exuded an aura of unnatural calm throughout the subway car.
"I became excited, and in my excitement I disregarded your limitations." The dreamy voice went on.
"By putting the whole fucking book in my head? Yeah, it fucking hurt!"
"Do you want me to make you forget about the pain?" Ettie mused. Something sparked within her eyes, and the dreadful cold spot began to grow again under Callie's scalp.
"No, no, stop!" It shrank to nothing. "Just–quit messing with my head, right?"
A pause. The train went over some small bump, and they'd reached a halfway point–the bridge was spanning much longer than she remembered. Perhaps Ettie had lengthened it to have no end, or at least spaghettified it to fit the breadth of their conversation–however breadthy It intended that to be.
It didn't allow the silence for nearly as long. "Oh I promise, your identity and memories are fine, Callie. I did have to discard most of the fourth grade to make room for the Necronomicon, but the impact was quite small overall."
Calliope turned as pale as she could manage beneath the scarlet sunlight. "Wh–what?!" She wracked her brain back, back, into the lonely well of grade school memories…but emerged with pyrrhic victory, somehow, with the mind's eye image of giving a book report on Thomas Edison, complete with a small electrical demonstration. The circuit she'd presented then was worlds away from the one she was wired into now… but the memory had grown no less clear even after Ettie's words. It had always been truthful to her, even if the truths were twisted up in dimensions she couldn't see… how could she remember something It cimed to have erased?
"Wait, but I can… I can remember the fourth grade. I mean, barely, just bits of it really, but still…"
Ettie's eyes narrowed. "Did you think I would just throw them away? I'm holding them, for you. Any access to memories of that year passes through me, now. Rest assured."
The truth was, of course, more terrifying–she should've expected as much. That well of memory was very deep indeed… Calliope shuddered knowing that if she dared to peer over the lip of it, she’d see right through across the intervening nothingness with no filter whatsoever. That watering hole was telescopic, magnifying her a thousand thousand times within Its sight, and acted as an axon to extend her mind right up to the edge of Ettie's alien domain, where inconceivable notions reigned noisily within a congeries of spheres. Part of her memory lived within that chaos… she imagined the year's worth of recall as a gss marble, nestled jealously within Its array of rays–like a hard candy held against the cheek and slowly melting away to nothing. Where Ettie wrenched it from her mind there was a wound–raw, but no longer void: she’d injected every character on every page into it until it began to swell. The tumor strained against the remainder of her brain; could such a thing ever be benign?
If she wanted, she could recall any chapter of the Necronomicon at will with eidetic accuracy… but she didn't want that! Who the hell would? Callie didn't want the memories of a whole year of her life held inside Its complex, either. All those recesses she'd spent in solitude were now poisoned retroactively: if she reminisced in them, she expected something horrible to peek out around the corner of the schoolyard. No. She didn't want any of that.
She forced her mind to tear away. Dwelling on it would only cause her further pain.
"Ettie… that's so fucked up. You're so fucked up." She whispered.
It turned away, Its face pointed at the same sunset she was watching. Spidery fingers gripped the pole tighter until the knuckles turned even whiter than white.
"Unfortunately, I won't be restoring them to you."
Callie'd already surmised as much, but the curtness surprised her. "Why not?"
"You would have another seizure. I won't risk your life for something so trivial."
"It's–trivial?!–those are my memories!" She blurted out. Unbelievable. "You've gotta be able to do something, right?"
Ettie's head turned right, just a hair. A thin crescent of magenta became visible. Even cking a pupil, she could be sure: It was looking at her. But then, It never really stopped looking at her, did It?
"And now they're mine, too. Just like you. Didn't I promise not to eat you? They're safe. You're safe. Promise. To restore them safely would require a brief suspension of your consciousness. And I will not go back to my old suspended life of blind, slow feeding for an instant."
It did little to reassure her. The mention of consumption and cessation conjured foreign memories of wailing and mentation, of the elegy of a lost people. Calliope fixed her eyes on an especially fluffy cloud. At least she hadn't yet shared in their fate.
"In that chapter–the one with the fairy-people… that was about you, wasn't it." It was not a question.
"Yes."
"But you said you'd never met, like, a person, before me."
"Yes."
"But–that's–if you ate–no, killed–all those–"
The crescent waned and waxed open again. "Gods aren't people, Callie. They were caricatures–too insubstantial to think anything of. So I didn't think anything of them."
"Okay…" She wasn't sure if she could call it arrogance. Was it really, if Ettie really was above it all? Wasn't it just natural, then, predator and prey? No… Esther was crueler, surely. Nature was a discord of many little wills: no matter how much malice one possessed, they were forever misaligned, in competition. Esther was more like a meteorite made of something ferromagnetic: below a certain coldness, symmetry was broken and every arrow became parallel. It could direct evil at a scale hitherto undreamt of by mortals; It ate for pleasure, not survival.
Calliope took a deep breath to calm herself. "Okay, but, what about at the end?"
The train lurched forwards, and a glint of sunlight bounced off the sliver of iris she could see. The colour of it was stranger than usual: warmer, more orange, more like the sun, den with forbidden spectra. If she could only see an arc, then a direct view must appear as a ring around a shadow. An eclipse; a contracting circle; a colpsar… a whirling chant descending to devour.
"Do you know what pop rocks are?" Ettie asked.
"Uh… yeah?" It knew everything she knew, and still more; what was It pying at?
"Adapted to taste, they would have a ‘Puckish’ fvor."
Dread. Would that her empathy stopped at the skeins of things that were human, because she could imagine it: an awful, biting revetion, spreading from one mind to the next like lightning, and like lightning also those it touched dropped like stones the second they became aware–or moreso that Ettie became aware of them. The Pucks had thrown a rock into the dragon's den and woke it–at their peril–and with no offering as a distraction It'd blindly chosen them instead to burn. It'd been over in an instant; she realized she was very, very lucky that her first encounter hadn’t ended simirly. But something still didn't add up.
"They were people, weren't they?" Of course they were; how then could Ettie cim their meeting was the first?
"When you eat something, do you consider that an introduction?"
The hypothetical distracted her a bit from the grimness of it all. In a literal sense… yes? But vore wasn't exactly a conversation starter… or maybe she was just being pedantic. Picky though she was, she'd never considered whether a dinosaur nugget, a sprig of broccoli, or a melting blob of cheese atop a pizza had anything approaching a rich inner life. So:
"No?" Callie ventured. "Sort of how you don't, uh, meet everyone when you're on the train. Just being closeby isn't enough." Ettie smiled with closed eyes at her response; that sparked a flutter of giddiness within her stomach. Oh. It was praising her.
It expined further: "I thought nothing of the contents of their minds. I didn't consider the implications–that they were connected to something real."
Calliope ughed–she couldn't help it. In that moment Ettie reminded her of herself: smart–intelligent, allegedly–but clueless when it came to social interaction or how the world worked. It was at once so far beyond her, grand and terrible, and yet terribly naive. Could an alien be autistic, in Its own alien way?
"Ha, so you cannibalized a bunch of gods, and thousands–" no. Millions. "–of angsty fairies, and you still never figured out they all came from the same pce? Damn."
Ettie turned to face her; surely now it would show anger in any shape, way or form. But no. It was unperturbed; its smile was slight and a little smug.
"You don't know where your eggs come from." She pointed out. "And it's not cannibalism, either."
"You're eating your own kind, though?"
"It's a difference of degree. There is nothing else like me; there can be nothing else like me. That I know of, anyway." She smiled a sad smile.
"Yeah–you and me both, then." Silence. Calliope contempted it. Yes, she carried the unlucky curse of being the only human among billions to py host to It, but even before that she saw herself as weird, queer, strange, et cetera. Exceptional didn't cut it–exceptionality implied something positive, unless it was followed by the word freak, creature, or simir. Now she knew a dozen more Necromantic terms for half-real things with which to describe herself, if she so wished. That was something–maybe. There was always a silver lining with Ettie, even if–as with the sunset at present–the silver was washed out with iridescent purple.
"The sunset's really beautiful, anyway." She said, returning her eyes to the window.
Ettie hummed. "You live in an interesting world for it."
A pang of… sympathy? Or something… Ettie's tone had shifted wistful. It struck her that this was one of the first sunsets It had ever seen, and definitely one of the most colorful… and wasn't that kind of sad? Something rger than the Earth, rger than stars, rge enough to engulf the sor system all the way out to the heliopause… a bck hole could swallow untold light but would only ever see a sunset of a certain kind–one of death, with no rebirth. One had to be pnetside, and human, or at least mortal, to appreciate that. Sunsets were the pleasure and sorrow of things that crawled up from the dirt and wondered at the firmament from below, instead of looking down from above. Ettie could only witness such a thing indirectly, at an incredible distance, and only through the fickle sensors she called eyes. Yeah, okay… she did feel sympathy.
"Does that mean you think so too?" She asked, curious.
Ettie turned, too, to the window. Another pause, another bump; the train was finally running out of bridge.
"I'm older than the earth and sun and stars, and you're still focused on the beauty of a sunset? You're funny." It said, looking back, and–oh–her face was positively radiant. Orange–purple–pink–a bouquet of colors fshed across it. Her eyes were deep wells of memory that threatened, as ever, to drink her in and spirit her to a pce beyond imagining. It was tempting; It was dazzling. Calliope was stunned out of word.
"I, erm, well–" she stammered. The blush crept into her cheeks again. "–but you're not, you know… real."
A shadow fell over Ettie's face, just as a cloud came over the setting sun.
"Well neither is this sunset."
Noise and chaos rushed back into the world while colour drained from it. Calliope found herself standing in a crowded subway car, packed to the gills with commuters, where the sun had already set behind ominous gray clouds, and where Ettie was nowhere to be found. The train finally passed over the edge of the bridge and descended once more into tunnels. She was left to quiet contemption.
And when she reemerged after transferring trains and traveling another few stops, she had fewer answers.
And even when she’d arrived at the forestep to the building she called home, she was none the wiser. She ascended the creaking flights of steps with what little strength remained to her. She again unlocked the heavy wooden door and prayed the key wouldn't again stick like it sometimes did–thank Esther it did not.
Callie blinked. Thank who?
"Callie! Hey, you're finally home!" Erika awaited her just beyond the door. For a moment her appearance disconcerted her–the rose-pink scrubs made her fear she'd never left the hospital bed–but her body and mind were running on empty and couldn't muster any fright. She gave a weak smile in reply. "Hey–yeah, I'm back."
"Where've you been? Girl, you didn't have to do all that!" Erika shuffled towards the kitchen–in bunny slippers, no less, funting a level of comfort Callie knew she could never achieve–as she shut and locked the door.
"All what?" She said aloud. Her stomach dropped; she wasn't beyond feeling dread, even now.
All that was waiting in the kitchen. Erika made a grand gesture to the table: upon it were littered a dozen emptied paper grocery bags, but upon them: a bouquet of colorful flowers, bright pink and red and purple and wrapped in green, nestled within a vase that definitely wasn't just a tall gss from one of the cabinets. All that looked rather expensive, too.
"We have gotta get you and Sawyer together, already, if he's doing shit like this." Erika continued.
To say she was confused would be an understatement. Calliope's head was full of hissing, roaring static. She stepped over to the table and examined the tag attached to the bouquet.
To: Calliope
?
That was all it said, ending in a mysterious conjunction. "Shit like what?", she repeated, turning to Erika.
Her roommate put her hands on her hips and pouted. "Okay, first, you've gotta take those off, you look silly."
"I–" she reached for the frames, but stopped herself. There was no Ettie right now to guarantee hypnosis. "Nah, I'm good."
"Hmph. Whatever. Anyway–shit like this, Cal, he's sending you flowers! Like damn! He likes you!"
"H-he is? He does?"
Erika wandered to the fridge and, crouching, opened the bottom drawer that served as a freezer. Bck hair in a ponytail whipped back as she turned towards her. "Well, who else would it be? Also–"
Who else would it be?
"–not gonna lie I'm kinda pissed, though, cuz we were supposed to go shopping together and you fucking did it already? C'mon."
Eugh, her head was starting to reel again.
"Wait, what did I–"
Erika reached inside and produced a frozen turkey, still wrapped. "Like, this is kind of a lot for just the two of us, right?"
The bird only briefly caught her eye, but something near it found more success. On the counter next to the fridge was a small canister with text in a foreign script; its contents were sanguine, flecked with orange. It looked spicier than the deepest pit of Hell. That expined it, maybe: Ettie had gone grocery shopping, with her as an unwitting, possibly narcoleptic passenger, and hid the harvest in order to surprise her. The weirdest expnation was the most likely: the Thing without a body wanted a real Thanksgiving feast to dine on.
"Hey, I just figured we'd have a lot of leftovers!" She smiled. Erika looked at her, confused.
"Callie… you hate leftovers…"
But you are eating for two, now.
She winced. "Well…"
Erika returned the turkey to its penultimate resting pce within the fridge. "Anyway, thanks. How much do I owe you? Hell, girl, you even got me kimchi, I feel bad."
Already she was reaching into the pocket of her scrubs for her phone. That did beg the question: where had Ettie found the money to buy what must've been hundreds of dolrs worth of groceries? There was no way the money came from Calliope’s own account–it would've been overdrawn, for one. What the hell had It been up to in the dead of night?
"No, Erika, it's fine." She insisted. She ignored the smaller women’s protests. "Really, it's fine!"
Erika looked petunt. "Okay, well, seriously, thank you." The phone returned into her pocket. "I don't have work tonight, and I don't wanna make any of this stuff early; wanna just order food and watch that cooking show?"
The sea-beast stirred again within her stomach. Ettie would of course want input on what–or how much–she ordered. "Sure. Just…gimme a sec, okay?"
"Sure." And with that she shuffled off; a little while ter, she caught the whine of the television as Erika began to prepare it.
Calliope stared bnkly ahead, unsure–unsure of anything. The fridge hummed away on her left, the flowers drank their fill of water silently to her right, and on the windowsill ahead the succulent she kept forgetting to feed was thriving, despite it all. She envied it.
"I don't understand you at all", she grumbled.
Ettie lifted the little potted pnt with both her hands up to eye level. Pink sparks gleamed at her through the cactus’ arms.
"You're never going to–not completely. You're like this cute little pnt." Her thumb circled he pot's rim. "It doesn't know anything at all besides when it's fed. I'll keep you fed." At once, she opened her hands; the pnt began to fall. No. Calliope stumbled forwards to try and catch it, reaching out in desperation–
But Ettie got there first. Her hand csped around her wrist, and the skin tingled underneath. "...as long as you keep me fed, too. And you will."
Calliope arrived in the living room paler than usual. Erika patted a spot beside her on the sofa, and she sat, without a word. They ordered something from a pce that Ettie deemed suitably interesting, and spent the evening critiquing the minute mistakes of the professional chefs struggling to complete the TV program's challenges. Through it all, Ettie perched in an armchair to the side and ughed at all the right moments, made smalltalk about the events onscreen…as if she was a person. It was almost like a normal celebration. She supposed she should be thankful. No–she was thankful, actually… just still somewhat afraid.
﹡﹡﹡
Far away and engaged in far less celebration, Peridot Depore tapped zily at a keyboard terminal and continued to burn out her eyes with far too many consecutive hours of screentime. The coming holiday did not concern her, really, except for the reality that most of her coworkers would be away, which meant that perhaps–God willing, or Nature willing–she could get a solid multiple-of-eight hours of uninterrupted work done over its duration. Not that the work was all that engaging, anyway, since in her position as head of Cryptocurrency Fraud and Abuse Monitoring, there were decades where weeks happened and weeks where decades happened–and for months it’d been the former. There was little happening online that actually required her attention, so she had to make her own work to avoid going mad. That was why she was slowly redesigning the report spreadsheet tempte for the umpteenth time. Stars above, earth below, she was so fucking bored. And to top it off, she had another fucking migraine. Incredible.
She sipped at the mug of now-lukewarm espresso. Bittersweet, it'd darkened to match the roasted color of her hair, and would undoubtedly deepen the circles under her eyes to match the rims of her cats-eye gsses, but her dependence on caffeine had become a parasite she needed to feed regardless of its effect on her energy. She smirked at the notion, remembering the memo that had been sent out inviting employees to a medical trial where slow-release caffeine-producing patches would be impnted under the skin–a literal coffee tapeworm. It was intended to boost productivity. Definitely unethical. Definitely ill-advised. But the Agency–and therefore National Security–ran on java in more ways than one, so it was happening. Not that she'd ever trial such a thing–hell no. She didn't need any wacky impnts inside her body. She was proud to be only human no matter what anybody said.
Then, a shadow stretched over her back onto the central monitor in the cluster id before her. Such a distinctive rhythmic knock… someone was at the door, the office door she only left open in the first pce after management expressed "concern" about her working in the dark with only the light of screens.
"What's up, Wheeler?" She croaked. She swiveled around in her chair, and crossed her legs, bending the bck tartan skirt–the better to affect an air of imposition.
Aiden Wheeler stood tall–very tall, in the threshold, in silhouette. "How'd you know it was me?" He grinned sheepishly.
It couldn't have been more obvious. She swiveled back, taking another sip. "You always do that knock–it's very distinctive." Plodding footsteps told her he had entered.
"O-kay–but you're not beating the ESP allegations, Dot." She twitched a myrtle eye at the nickname, which wasn't even preceded by "Doctor" as it should've been, at the very least. Whatever. Wheeler didn't notice; on her left side he deposited a small family of papers. She sighed.
"ESP isn't real, Wheeler."
He was beside her at the desk, drumming his overlong fingers attached to overlong arms on the gray paint coating the wood. The man was so tall he resembled an Ent from Middle-Earth–probably Quickbeam, if her memory served. The young, foolish and earnest one, how fitting for Aiden. She kept her eyes fixed on the monitor array without gncing up into his boughs.
"Dot, we literally have psychics in the Agency." He tried again.
That finally convinced her to actually turn her head. As she did, the gold hoop earrings jangled wildly, and she gred at him. He flinched–good. Good that she could menace him despite his height, and cast any physical advantage as illusory. "Yes, I’m aware. But ESP is not real–it is an escapist fantasy, a departure from reality, and part of a wider complex of avoidant ideology that I will be gd to see leave this world before I do. Capiche?" She snapped.
"Capiche…" he sulked. The resignation in his voice was quiet, but no less perceptible.
They’d all received the memo, of course, just another in an unending line of them, because in their line of work there were always memos upon memos and paperwork stacked atop paperwork. This one had given her greater joy than most, though: Sharrow penned it, and his dejected and despondent tone was palpable throughout. The guy had probably watered his keyboard with tears writing the thing. Ha. According to his report, magic–his word, not hers–was dying, fast, in a surreal mirror of climate change, and the cause was, simirly, anthropogenic. Humans were killing it, choking the life out of idiotic practices like spells and charms with the sheer weight of mundane bureaucracy. Sharrow called it the Whir. Peridot called that kind of rhetoric the Whining.
Sharrow also in that memo recommended for the immediate dissolution of his own department, for the cessation of prescriptions for anomalous performance enhancers, and for a triaging task force to be formed. The man had balls, she'd give him that. Of course, the suggestion had no chance of being seriously considered. If one of magic or society had to die for the other to live, the higher-ups would choose humanity every single time. In a lot of ways, it would make their work easier–once the possibility of magical terrorism was removed from the world, for example. She wondered if Sharrow would quit work or even life once he came to terms with that. Hopefully not. She didn't hate his entire field of research and what he stood for enough for him to die, no. She wasn't that heartless.
"What's this?" She asked, examining the topmost of the papers Wheeler'd left her.
"Oh, just reports, before I leave for the holiday. Votility index is down, should be an uneventful weekend."
"Thanks." She sorted it into the top drawer. "I take it you're flying home?" The way Wheeler lingered at her desk indicated the need for her to make some attempt at smalltalk.
"Yeah! Been a while since I've seen my fam–Christie has a new baby, now. Her name's Ana?s."
"Oh. Congratutions." She wondered if Wheeler's niece would inherit his family's nky, treelike body pn, or if she'd grow up a shrubbery among trees. Either outcome seemed mildly amusing.
"And you?" He asked, as she picked up the next paper. Curious; that one was unexpected.
"No. What's this?" She waved it at him.
Suddenly there was a glint in his eye. "Oh, that. Just something I thought you might find interesting. Keep you occupied, since I know you never go home…you really should, though, sometime, or put in for vacation–"
Curious… but how, she wasn't yet sure. "I'm fine, I like working. What am I looking at?"
The page before her was a printout, its contents fairly ordinary to the average person or even the average agency staff member. Five consecutive cryptocurrency transaction blocks, the list of anonymous senders and recipients truncated except for the st–the wallet address of the one that processed it and mined the blocks, earning themselves a small amount of Bitcoin, and probably burning down half the Amazon with the processor heat it'd taken to do so. For each entry, part of the hash was circled in blue pen. The only thing that seemed at all out of pce was the fact that all five blocks had been mined by the same entity–but probabilistically, that wasn't that uncommon.
"Honestly? Not really sure. Kind of came across it by luck, 'cuz I had the hash viewer set to ASCII-ify hashes for some reason. Five blocks, all the same miner, right after one another, but–check this–" he pointed to one of her many screens. "Read the first five bytes of each hash as text."
She was skeptical. Reluctantly, she opened up a hex editor, and entered it as Wheeler said, once per line:
73 61 74 6F 72
61 72 65 70 6F
74 65 6E 65 74
6F 70 65 72 61
72 6F 74 61 73
Then, at Wheeler's continued urging, she converted it to text:
sator
arepo
tenet
opera
rotas
And finally, she understood what she was looking at–or not. It made absolutely no sense, just in a new, etiologic way.
"That's–"
"Weird, right? Never seen anything like it before."
Dot's brow furrowed so deeply she'd surely have permanent wrinkles by the time she was forty–which was after all, less than a decade away. Her mind at least was no less sharp; she hoped it was sharp enough to puncture through the veil of mystery Wheeler had cast over her face. Every transaction on the blockchain was signed and sealed with a promise, a cryptographic proof that the miner–who was really pying a glorified game of "guess my number"–had burned computational power to verify it. With acres of silicon seething within server farms, organizations toiled globally in a race to calcute the hash of the next block, which was made an essentially brute-force task by the unique properties it was required to have by the protocol: they churned through trillions and trillions of random numbers every second to generate it. Once they did, the number served to verify the st X minutes of cryptocurrency transactions and write them indelibly into the decentralized ledger–another link on the block-chain. Finding even just one number like that was difficult enough. But finding one–no, five–that when combined with the previous block's data produced recognizable strings of Latin text? That was fucking unheard of.
"This should be computationally impossible." She said, a little awed.
"Yeah, I know, right?" Wheeler's grin spread from ear to ear. He’d won, and he knew it; Dot would be able to think of little else besides the problem he’d just dropped into her p. Fuck; her migraine would definitely be sticking around.
"Maybe… if we have a breach…" she wondered aloud. "But no–"
"Nah, Byzantine Defaulter'd get it. Right?"
"Right…" she mused. The BD asterism of satellites in geostationary orbit–ostensibly used for high-resolution spacetime orientation in the Eastern hemisphere, but doubling as an wide-ranging fleece of disbelief–was a boon for the Agency's thankless custody of the natural order. The system she affectionately called a magical Bullshit Detector kept weird fluctuations to a minimum by power of consensus, but it wasn't and couldn't ever be absolute. Rogue waves and sor fres still occurred even in calm waters and atmospheres.
"Right. It can't be some magical asswipe trying to mine Bitcoin by chanting in Old Latin, or whatever. Maybe if it was twenty years ago–not now. You read Sharrow's memo?"
"Yeah. Magic dying, grim stuff. But it almost feels like… growing up, you know? Like losing that sense of nostalgia. We might not even need to repce satellites in a few years!"
"Mm." She grunted. An olive-green nail found her pce on the page as she entered another line of text. "Did you run a trace to geolocate the wallet address?"
"Dot, you know I don't have auth for that." His eyes danced around, nervously, when she'd finished typing with the intent of doing it herself. Her lips grew thin; she stabbed a button on the keyboard, and at once the central monitor flickered into privacy mode and projected the screen's contents onto the inside of her gsses. She disliked working in VR, but it would have to do.
"Well, I do." She said, and pressed enter to begin the trace. A spinning circle told her it was working–but it would probably spin for quite some time. Like most Agency tech the method was an abominable admixture of fantastic and mundane: several years back they’d contained (well, forcibly repossessed) a cursed 1990s PC tower with the ability to determine exactly where on Earth any particur computation had taken pce, even long afterwards, with GPS-levels of accuracy. The trouble was that–and she found it both bothersome and baffling–the programming nguage used to ‘persuade’ the damned thing was esoteric as all hell. The whole apparatus was hooked to a supercomputer with the sole purpose of compiling code in a derivative of fucking Malbolge to complete the trace. Ridiculous. But you could feed it private keys, public keys, even ordinary JPEGs, and it’d answer with a location accurate within tens of meters. Something about retroactive entanglement, quantum recoherence and error correcting codes–the physics was outside her department. Once, lured by its esotericism, Sharrow had requested funding to develop a way of expressing the shape of the universe in code, in an attempt to determine the meaning of life using the device, but the proposal was shot down as absurdly out of scope. It was a dumb idea, anyway; the meaning of life was clearly just: to live.
She'd live a little longer: barring global catastrophe, the trace would complete in a few minutes.
Peridot sat back in her chair and lifted the gsses up and away from her eyes to bring herself back into reality. All she needed to see right then was the printout. Beside her, Wheeler shifted his weight from one foot to the next, back and forth, a nervous tic. She decided not to comment on it.
"This is thousands of dolrs worth of crypto", Peridot pondered, "did you check to see how much of it was spent already?"
"Yeah, there were a few transactions, cashing some of it out, at a Bitcoin ATM in the Boston area."
She bit her lip. That made the identity and impetus behind the incident more indistinct, not less. Anyone with that much computing power, or–she worried, darkly–some sort of zero-day exploit breaking the underlying cryptography, would surely have been better about covering their tracks. The common pattern for cybercriminals was to under their crypto through multiple yers of transactions before cashing out, making it harder for CFAM to discover. Walking up to an ATM in some convenience store in broad daylight? That was the clock striking amateur hour. Oh–at least that was a lead.
"You remember which ATM?" She asked, already typing furiously.
"Sorry, Dot, my memory's not eidetic. You can probably find it if–"
"Yeah. Got it." She'd looked up the transaction herself and pasted the name and number of the ATM into the application that served access to security cameras the world over. After clicking past the customary 'ALL ACTIONS IN THIS APPLICATION ARE AUDITED' warning, she drilled down into it at st: some random 7/11 in Boston's Mission Hill district. The cashout had happened at a suitably criminal time–3:14 AM–so she requested only the surveilnce footage for the preceding and succeeding hour. That should be sufficient, but it’d take some time for the software to interface with whatever ancient surveilnce system the location used. Agency bureaucracy moved with the slow, automated inevitability of a gcier, and while having such unfettered access to domestic mass surveilnce gnawed a little at her scruples, she had to admit it had its benefits. When it was a lever whose full weight she could use to satisfy her curiosity, it was kind of nice.
"Uhh, should I be seeing this?" Wheeler asked with audible unease.
"Oh, probably not. But you found it; you want to see the perp, right?"
"Er–" he scratched at a freakishly long forearm. "Is there a perp, Dot? It's not fraud, just, weird, I guess. Right?" His eyes darted towards the door.
Inside, Dot groaned. Wheeler was nice enough–smart, too–but he clearly wanted to go home, and hadn't expected things to go on as long as they had. She tried to impress the criticality of the situation upon him:
"Anyone with the ability to do this could threaten the stability of the entire global crypto market, if they wanted. If some hacker cell is set up in Boston with a roomful of new ASICs swimming in mineral oil to run this thing, their hashpower must be unprecedented, enough to oust the majority of the network. This could be a test, or–or a warning shot, before the main event. It–" the pitch of her voice rose, "it, uh… the perfect time to strike would be over a major holiday! There has to be a perp."
Wheeler frowned down at her–ugh, that was annoying. "But we don't know if it's even illegal. And we have the microcode backdoor, we could just hit the killswitch on that–like with the Cicada hack–and figure it out after the weekend."
A sudden spike; her headache was worsening. She pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose and rubbed, hard, scrunching her eyes. The processes on twin screens continued to churn.
"First of all: you know I hate using tech that's gonna be obsolete in a few years. Making all cryptographic computation temporarily impossible with the backdoor is more magical bullshit–it's not real. It's not reliable. Secondly–" she cupped her chin, "That'd only work if they're actually using something on a chip, and not anything weirder…"
Wheeler ughed. "Dot–you're a genius, okay, but that's just silly. Look–I'll bet you five bucks this thing isn't the end of the world."
She raised an eyebrow. "Gambling with your superiors? That's awfully bold, Wheeler."
"That isn't a 'no'..."
Her eyes rolled in a full arch. "Eugh, fine. If I win…you have to call me Doctor, though. For at least a week."
He stuck out a hand towards her; it was rge and paddle-like. She shook it and thought of kayaking again. "Deal–but 'Dr. Dot' still sounds like a supervilin, I'm afraid." He gnced again at her array of screens. "Though, I guess you're dressing for the part."
"Maybe I'll be Victoria Frankenstein for next office Halloween." She joked. Wheeler's eyes widened; he shook a skinny finger at her.
"You should! And uh, let me know how this works out. But I do have a flight to catch… sorry."
She resisted the urge to chastise him. Not everyone could commit to her (perfectly normal and reasonable) work ethic. Not when they had families or friends or hobbies outside of work. Distractions, the lot of them; things lesser beings were subject to.
"See you next week, Aiden. Have a nice vacation."
She watched him go, complete with a little wave of goodbye which she returned, and that left her alone to contempte. Her terminal whirred uneasily in the background for a few seconds before something at st changed on the rightmost screen. She considered it a moment–then, she got up to close and lock the office door, before returning.
Sweet, comforting darkness, lit only by the eerie blue-white–just how she liked it. The surveilnce liaison program had finally pinged back with the footage she'd requested. She clicked py.
Her first thought was of annoyance at how shitty the quality was. At least it was in color, though barely, apparently containing only the most washed out hues from the lesser-used parts of the spectrum. The camera was trained on the main entrance to the store: an automatic sliding door, to the left of which was a bulky ATM machine and to the right of which was the store's counter, stocked to the gills with candy and other junk-food. Convenience store hotdogs turned in rotisserie upon it like they'd been there since time immemorial.
She skipped ahead piecemeal until just after 3am, when she assumed what must be her quarry would enter. At 3:10 a woman somewhere in her 20s passed the threshold, cd in a gray winter coat, dark jeans, and what looked to be worn Converse sneakers. Her hair was some unnatural purple color that was almost gray in the camera's footage. The whites of her eyes were visible; she gnced up at the camera as she entered. They made eye contact through the screen.
"Ah! Fuck!" Dot groaned; a sudden twinge in her left temple was the cause. She'd really have to do something about that headache… after she had solved this damned puzzle. She zoomed in a little on the left side of the screen.
Sure enough and as expected, the woman headed straight for the Bitcoin ATM. There was no hesitation in her gait, or how she held her phone–the screen of which was unreadable at this distance–while deposited the info for withdrawal. There were no furtive gnces around her that would signal an awareness of anything illicit, either. She just took out several hundred dolrs worth of cash, walked with purpose over to the counter, purchased a Slim Jim from the clerk, and promptly exited into the night.
"Hmm…" she grumbled to herself. Maybe she was overreacting, as Wheeler’d said. The young woman didn't fit the profile of a cybercriminal… but she could not convince herself that it was a coincidence. It had to have been purposeful. She half-intended to request further footage from the outside of the store, to follow the woman before and after her visit… but as she was staring at the paused video screen, an alert showed the trace had finished. That would tell her everything she needed to know.
Dot pored over the summary of information. The public key for the wallet into which the Bitcoin had been mined was generated at exactly midnight eastern daylight time, down to the millisecond. The machine responsible? Just blocks from the convenience store, somewhere within a triplex apartment building. The circle of uncertainty on the map slightly overpped with an adjacent warehouse… but the center was definitely in the apartment itself. If there was a mining rig in there, probably she could pull electrical meter records to confirm… but she only had eyes then for the woman. She had to find her.
Her practiced fingers flew over the keyboard. As a department head her access to information beyond that of the general public was extensive: it sufficed to find her property deeds, then records of leases, then cross-check the names… and then she succeeded in her quest.
Calliope Mondegrene, twenty-three, whose ID photo cked the purple hair but was a certain match for the woman in the footage. She had attended MISC, that was an eyebrow-raiser…but then taken a leave of absence… to do what, Dot wondered. Not some fancy startup. Work at a coffee shop? No, no, there had to be more…
But there was not. She slumped back in her chair an hour ter, defeated. There was nothing tying the girl to any terrorist or criminal organizations. There were no suspicious or electronics purchases from that location. She was a ghost, a phantom; if she was It, then she was very, very good.
The thrill of the chase rose up to overwhelm her. She made several rash decisions: First, her target had a ptop; Dot was already spinning up a secure virtual machine to patch through and connect to it. Second, she was alone, and the only other person on Earth who knew about the case was at that moment thousands of feet in the air en route to a family reunion. And third: her migraine had intensified past the point of being bearable, and she massaged her head with urgency…dropping her gsses such that the little box of circuitry that allowed them to act as screens impacted on the floor and shattered open.
"Fuuuuck…" she groaned, exasperated. She'd have to bring them to Repairs to be fixed, if there was even anyone there…and maybe she could also grab a non-anomalous migraine pill at the pharmacy along the way. She gave her terminal a sidelong gnce. It was still booting the VM and establishing a connection; that would likely take some time. She locked it, scooped the gsses and shards of pstic up, and headed out of her office.
Minutes ter, of course, what she didn't see–and might not have believed even if she did–was that the instant the connection was established, the screens began to flicker. Inside the rivulets of silicon a war of sorts was taking pce, but her security was overmatched. Malware escaped the virtual machine with ease and burrowed past the firewalls and antiviral measures like they were sheets of thinnest gossamer. It nestled in the terminal's core, victorious and brooding. She should have used a forensic machine with more hardened security, but by then it was too te. Those were protected in part by literal fairy dust, anyway, so they didn't exactly appeal. All six screens fshed a sickening magenta–a cry of triumph–before returning to their normal configurations.
When Peridot returned and began to snoop through the purple-haired woman's ptop, she found nothing unusual. That in itself was unusual. She'd have to investigate further.
