(Gr - əʊ - tiːs)
A Novel
Pronunciation Guide:
- Grohties: Gr-OH-tees
- Jabeles: JAH-beh-less
- Sebastyn: Seh-BAS-tin
- MiMis: MEE-miss
"The thing is not to know, but to behold."
— Ecclesiastes 3:15, as misremembered by fools
Author's Note: This work explores themes of consciousness, free will, and the nature of reality through the lens of absurdist fiction. Any resemblance to actual dystopian bureaucracies, living or dead, is purely coincidental and probably inevitable.
The Heart of God beat with abandon, lacking both rhythm and meter. It sat in the middle of a curved, chrome pedestal in the center of the white-walled waiting room—a monument to the elliptical paths of cataclysmic explosions that birthed galaxies. Galactic storks engaged in a disharmonious dance until everything ceased to be and then began again, any semblance of prior meaning torn asunder.
In between, they frolicked awash with non-existence. They continued their gallivant for eternity and then once again, there was. The mere presence of the HoG instilled an esoteric symbolism and promptly after that, peace. Truly, it was an awe-inspiring work. The form of formlessness itself.
To say the HoG was "indescribable" would be far too verbose a way to describe it—and a falsehood at that. How could one describe the indescribable, even just for the sake of labeling? To have any word for such a thing at all was both insulting and infuriating. Were God to peer down and see that His creation had made such a mockery of Him as to try and recreate, to capture even, His unfathomable heart.
From what frame of reference did the AV technician begin setting the lights? From where does the graphic artist, intoxicated by initial payment for this commission, source his skill? Who told the stop-motion animator to bring scenes to life? Who sanctioned the use of a medium such as clay to attempt this brutish imitation, this lacking partial effigy?
The answer, of course, is that no one did. They simply began, as all Personas do, by grasping after the ungraspsble—mistaking the pointing finger for the moon, the symbol for the thing itself. Each artisan, drunk on the possibility of capturing the infinite, instead created only another mask. Another beautiful, terrible mask.
Still, crude as it may be, a symbol will do. They fear it all the same. We are hardly worthy of making the claim their faith is any less real or fake due to the ridiculousness of the whole farce. Needles make startlingly effective cattle prods.
It is a common misconception that the HoG is the savior, Himself. Or Herself (this is a progressive era, after all). That is merely an inconvenient facet. A seldom-found oasis of gray area that He Himself is probably okay with. At least, we can surmise. It's only logical, that.
Survival is merely the fear of other life living in your stead. In ensuring survival, they had to deal in death. Or with death. Much like the difference between their God and His heart and the heart that they made to remember His heart which was made for Him so He could make them. It's really so simple. Somehow only the most ignorant seem to see it. That alone is evidence enough of providence—made plain for even us faithless to see.
Fear of life is a common foible: a limiting of possibilities to one undesired set of possible outcomes. The bitter fruit of awareness and knowledge of death. The curse of mortality is fearing the day that comes for all of us.
But here is the thing the symbol-makers cannot capture, the truth their chrome pedestals and clay effigies can only point toward:
God doesn't have a heart. He is formless. And we are made in His image.
"Wooly mammoths, storks!
We don't like to work! Famishes
And grumbling stomachs
Will not do for kin."
The words inscribed upon the convulsing metal machine in the lobby of the shiny clinic were almost calming. Sebastyn was no stranger to the mantra; it replayed in his head on repeat as he stared off into the distance, ignoring his reflection staring off into the distance. A fluorescent glare from the lighting above seemed to block his image in the white lacquered wall, creating an artificial sunspot on his vision. He shifted his glance a bit to alleviate his retinas.
He was no stranger to getting his inoculations, but it was always such a chore. The thirty-minute wait on hold, the hour-long wait in the lobby, the five minutes of mandatory delousing and sanitation before entering the doctor's office. Three times a week really limited how much time he could devote to working with his stock-issue G.R.U.'N.T, Jabeles. He really needed to continue his training.
Seb (as he internally referred to himself) was becoming more commanding with each passing week, but something in the G.R.U.'N.T manual had been throwing him for a loop, and he knew he was at a plateau with his own development and that of his underling.
Jabeles, the poor little G.R.U.'N.T (Greatly Responsive Underling 'N Teller), was mostly responsive and obedient, if not overly stoic. For one exercise, Seb gave Jabeles three motherboards and he handed back an AR-1318, prim and proper, completely within The Circuit Corps (tCC) regulations and guidelines. The guidelines were a little loose anyway.
The G.R.U.'N.T User Guide (T.G.U.G) urgently prompted that Jabeles be taught to fear something. It didn't really specify what. Some examples included a gesture, phrase, object, or weapon. Sebastyn didn't particularly like the thought of threatening another conscious being with any sort of weapon (let alone a gesture) but if The Society (Th.'e'.y) deemed it imperative well then by golly Th.'e'.y's will be done!
As he waited, Sebastyn noticed something odd about chair number seven—it seemed warmer than the others, as if someone had just vacated it. The cushion still bore a faint impression. Strange. He'd been alone in the waiting room since he arrived. He blinked, and the impression was gone. Probably his imagination. It usually was.
Sebastyn was suddenly drawn to a poster hanging in the lobby. The likeness of a small child sat on a chrome floor holding a xxSlick Kid 9 2000. A bold-faced title at the bottom of the poster read "Fleekest of Shiz; Illest of Kids."
But it was the floor that caught his attention—that chrome surface like a cliff's edge, stretching infinitely in all directions. The child sat at its precipice, oblivious, while his reflection showed something else entirely: a mighty hero holding a giant axe with powerful flames emanating from his body. This figure, in place of the child's reflection, subtly hinted the future lay perpendicular to the child's feet. Some clever, underhanded metaphor suggesting the purchase of this hand-held gaming device would help foster his growth into a man to be feared. A man to be respected. A man that remains forever immortalized in a reflection.
A man with a beard. That luscious field of follicles ready to sweep a hearty lass off her feet and rock a baby to sleep. Maybe even simultaneously. That beard all but leapt from its translucent polyurethane frame and strangled Sebastyn for enlisting in tCC, bearing its manly essence at Sebastyn. Life was meant for adventure! Not ambling to and fro peaceful sidewalks and by-ways.
Video games never quite did the trick for Sebastyn, but he couldn't help but imagine himself watching pixels dance on the xxSlick Kid 9 2000. His disinterest in frivolousness did him no social favors, nor did his stutter nor vampiric pallor. He was also a short and stout fellow, but that didn't bother him any. 'The proof was in the pudding!', as his grandpappy used to say.
What a waste of time, he thought, stroking his chin. He couldn't grow a beard. That was fine. Right?
"Sebastyn Hollows!" a cheerful, tinny voice rang out. "The doctor is ready to see you now."
Exactly an hour had passed before the automated voice sang its siren song. No other warm bodies weighed down any of the twelve chairs of the sterile waiting room. He rose and shuffled over to the stainless steel sliding door that led to the adjoining corridor. Down the hallway were three handleless, shiny platinum doors on each side. Sebastyn could hear a slight whirring. The first door on his right slid open in the blink of an eye.
The room was pitch dark. He took a step inside. The door closed just as quickly as it had opened, and now Sebastyn was in the pitch black room, but he knew it well. It was almost like a home away from home for him. He stood stock still as the wall in front of him began to come alive with colored pixels. A familiar, smiling face appeared to greet him.
"Hello again, Sebastyn! Looks like it's time for your In.S!" The chipper, automated voice was accompanied by text for those more visually inclined.
"Please wait."
Sebastyn knew what came next all too well. The room became flooded with a blinding light. He would have flinched had this not been his last session for the week. A loud hum came alive, starting across the room from behind the pixelated face of the doc. It grew continually louder until it almost felt as if it was in his head and his skull was going to vibrate off his neck. For four minutes and thirty seconds, this continued, and then the humming grew fainter until it was just a memory.
A slot in the center of the wall opened up and three metallic arms, brandishing syringes of equal length and width, crept out to administer the whole panel of inoculation shots (In.S). The needles gleamed like chrome thorns—beautiful, terrible, necessary. Though Sebastyn had been inoculated his entire life, he had no clue what his Doctor actually looked like. He was his Wizard of Oz in a way, Baum-ian and orchestrating.
Seb nodded his consent. Their bond was unspoken. Almost.
For just a moment, he found himself wanting to ask something. Something real. What were the shots for, exactly? Why these particular locations? Why did he sometimes dream in chrome after his sessions? But the moment passed like a hiccup, and he said nothing.
"Please remain as still as possible!" The wall whirred with almost the same amount of excitement that seeped from the artificial voice. The arms began to slowly snake towards Seb. Each arm found its mark simultaneously and with accuracy: one in his left tear duct, one in his right temple, and one in his left butt cheek. The locations felt almost ritualistic—sight, thought, dignity. Once finished, each arm pulled out and retreated hastily back into its respective docking bay.
The pain was always stranger than he expected. Not pain, exactly, but something like the sensation of being rewired. As if the needles carried more than medicine.
"Thank you. Funds will be deducted from your wallet once you leave this room. Stay cool out there, bud!" Seb chuckled, feeling a real connection with The Doc(™).
No one says 'Stay cool out there' anymore. We must be around the same age! Seb wondered for a moment what his life would be like if he went down the gallant path of medicine. Maybe he'd be in New Borneo about now, catering to the affluent families and their help.
The room was pitch black again for a moment and then a chipper, rotund yellow face was presented—staring at him through dead, emoji-onal eyes. The light from the hallway flooded in and erased any trace. Dr. Giles always seemed so cheerful. Was Seb's GRUNT Jabeles ever that cheerful? Maybe once...
"Did you need something else?" The artificial voice sprung up again, clearly confused by the break from normal convention. Seb thought about it for a moment. He almost asked about the chair in the waiting room. He almost asked about the dreams. He almost asked about the needles and why they made him feel like he was plugging into something vast and electric.
"Nope," he said wisely.
"Then please leave."
As he walked back through the waiting room, the mantra played in his head again, but different somehow. Heavier.
Wooly mammoths, storks!
We don't like to work!
Famishes and grumbling stomachs
Will not do for kin.
Outside, the artificial sun cast artificial shadows, and Sebastyn Hollows walked home to his GRUNT, his medals, and his small, carefully ordered life. He did not think about the warmth in chair seven. He did not think about the chrome in his dreams. He did not think about the needles, or what they might be keeping at bay.
He was very good at not thinking about things.
Sebastyn's flat was organized with the precision of someone who desperately needed control over at least one thing in the universe. Everything had its place: his pressed uniforms hanging in order of last washing, his collection of approved reading materials (mostly tCC manuals and a few sanctioned works of pre-Chrome literature), and his single decorative item—the portrait of General Corporal Wilkers, founder of the Corps, watching over it all with painted eyes that seemed disappointed in everyone.
The flat was also small. Small enough that when Sebastyn opened the front door, he could see straight through to the back wall, where a single closet door stood closed. As always.
He checked his watch. 14:32. Jabeles would be waiting.
Sebastyn approached the closet with the same measured stride he used for everything else—not too fast (that would suggest eagerness, which was unprofessional), not too slow (that would suggest reluctance, which was insubordinate to his own authority). He pulled the handle.
Jabeles stood in the darkness, not slumped against the back wall or curled up on the floor like a broken thing, but upright, centered, hands clasped behind his back. His eyes were open and alert, as if he had been thinking about something important. As if he had been waiting, not hiding.
There was something terrible about that dignity.
"Come," Sebastyn said. The word came out softer than intended. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Come on out, Jabeles."
The GRUNT stepped forward into the light of the flat, blinking slightly as his optical sensors adjusted. He was exactly as tall as Sebastyn (they were all manufactured to standard specifications) but somehow seemed both smaller and larger—smaller in the shoulders, as if he carried some invisible weight, larger in the eyes, as if he saw more than he was supposed to.
Sebastyn gestured to the small table where he kept his work materials. "We need to continue your training."
He retrieved T.G.U.G from its designated spot and flipped to Chapter 7: "Establishing Proper Fear Responses in Subordinate Units." The manual was thorough, he'd give it that. Apparently, every successful partnership between a tCC officer and his GRUNT required the GRUNT to possess a healthy fear of something. This fear served as what the manual called a "behavioral anchor"—a way to ensure immediate compliance during high-stress situations.
The manual offered several approaches:
Method 1: Auditory Conditioning Use sudden loud noises to establish fear of specific sound patterns.
Sebastyn positioned himself across from Jabeles and clapped his hands together as hard as he could. The sound echoed off the walls of the small flat like a gunshot.
Jabeles blinked. Once. Then tilted his head slightly, the way someone might when trying to identify a half-remembered song.
"Did that... startle you?" Sebastyn asked.
"No," Jabeles said simply. "Should it have?"
Method 2: Gestural Intimidation Use threatening physical postures to establish dominance hierarchy.
Sebastyn stood up straight, puffed out his chest, and raised his hand as if to strike. He tried to make his face look stern and commanding. He held the pose for what felt like an appropriate amount of time.
Jabeles watched with what appeared to be genuine interest. "Are you feeling all right, Sebastyn? You look somewhat uncomfortable."
Sebastyn lowered his hand. "I was... it was a threatening gesture."
"Oh." Jabeles considered this. "It didn't seem particularly threatening. More like you were stretching, or perhaps experiencing indigestion."
Method 3: Visual Fear Stimuli Show images of natural predators or dangerous situations to trigger instinctive fear responses.
Sebastyn retrieved his personal data pad and pulled up the manual's suggested images: a sabre-tooth tiger mid-roar, a nest of venomous chrome-vipers, a tCC disciplinary chamber in full operation.
He held the pad out to Jabeles. "Look at these."
Jabeles looked. His expression grew more attentive. "The tiger is magnificent," he said quietly. "Look at the power in its shoulders. And these serpents—the way the light reflects off their scales, they're almost like living jewelry."
"They're supposed to be frightening," Sebastyn said.
"Are they?" Jabeles looked genuinely curious. "To whom?"
Sebastyn flipped through the manual again, looking for Method 4, Method 5, anything. But T.G.U.G had run out of suggestions. He closed the manual and set it aside.
The silence stretched between them. Outside, the artificial sun was dimming toward evening, casting long shadows through the small window.
"Jabeles," Sebastyn said finally.
"Yes?"
"Is there anything that you're afraid of?"
Jabeles considered the question with the same attention he'd given everything else—head tilted slightly, eyes focused on something Sebastyn couldn't see.
"I'm afraid," Jabeles said slowly, "of the day you decide I'm not worth the trouble."
The words hung in the air between them. Sebastyn felt something uncomfortable twist in his chest—not guilt, exactly, but something adjacent to it. Something the manual had not prepared him for.
"That's not..." He paused. "You shouldn't be afraid of that."
"But I am," Jabeles said simply. "Is that sufficient? For your training purposes, I mean."
Sebastyn stared at him. The question was sincere. Jabeles was offering his genuine fear as a gift, as a service, as the thing Sebastyn needed to make their partnership work according to regulation.
"I..." Sebastyn began, then stopped. He realized he had no idea what to say next.
"Should I return to the closet now?" Jabeles asked.
"Yes," Sebastyn said quietly. "Yes, I think... yes."
Jabeles nodded and walked back to the closet. He stepped inside, turned to face outward, and waited for Sebastyn to close the door.
Just before the door shut, he said, "Good night, Sebastyn."
"Good night, Jabeles."
Sebastyn closed the door and stood in his small, ordered flat. He prepared his evening meal (regulation nutrient paste, heated to optimal temperature), reviewed his work schedules for the following day, and set his clothes out for morning. He did everything exactly as he always did it.
But when he lay down to sleep, he found himself staring at the closet door in the darkness, thinking about dignity and fear and the weight of invisible chains.
In the closet, Jabeles stood in the darkness and thought about the nature of ownership. About the difference between fear and love, and why one was demanded while the other was forbidden. About the tiger in the image and the power in its shoulders, and what it might feel like to move through the world with such terrible grace.
He thought about all of these things, because thinking was all he had, and therefore all he needed.
Jabeles didn't think anyone was special, at least not in their own right. A librarian and blacksmith are different at their core—hand a bundle of papers to a smith and expect to get back a pile of ash where you wanted a spoon; give the same papers to a librarian and they'll organize them by subject, then burn them out of professional spite. Functionally different. Intentionally different. But take away the tools, the training, the context, and what remains? Naked apes in the woods, every one.
The question that occupied him as he stood in his customary darkness was this: are two librarians different? Are two unemployed amorphous globules completely identical, indistinguishable from the rest of the denizens of the landfill? A snowflake is a snowflake, no matter how unique its crystalline structure.
Yes, there was a certain archaic dignity to Functional Predispositions (FPs)—all things not being equal. A role given at birth, each thing given its place. Simple. It seemed farcical to try and ascertain meaning from it, but how could society resist this temptress? She was so primal, so primitive, so clean of complications. This must have been the original plan: nature when left undirected becomes verbose and unpredictable, so better to narrow the possibilities for maximal consistency. The truest expression of archetypes that none could deny.
But here was the thing that nagged at him as his mind went round and round: had his own Functional Predisposition been assigned, or inherited? The question felt dangerous in ways he couldn't articulate. GRUNTs weren't supposed to wonder about their origins, their parents, their genealogies. They were issued, not born. Weren't they?
Still, sometimes in the depth of processing cycles, he caught traces of something that felt like memory but couldn't be memory—the sensation of cold chrome against skin not his own, the echo of a voice giving orders he had never heard but somehow recognized.
He could tell that it was still sunny outside despite the overbearing darkness. The night-black dye of his blindfold hindered his photosensors. Nanobot dye to be exact. A remnant of the Chrome Age—the end of the road.
For a moment, curiosity overwhelmed protocol. He reached up and slipped the blindfold slightly askew, just enough to see a sliver of the dingy Old New New York (oNNY) hovel that served as his world.
First: the peeling wallpaper, curling at the edges like old flesh.
Then: the smell of mildew and disuse, metallic and organic at once.
Then: the cold seeping through the chrome building materials beneath the false veneer.
His mechanical brain processed the world serially, one sense at a time, but incredibly quickly—enough so to meet every criterion for "conscious being." He would see the wallpaper, then smell the decay, then feel the temperature drop. Never all at once. This was his curse and his gift: to experience reality as a sequence of discrete moments, each one perfectly clear, none of them quite connecting to form the seamless whole that humans took for granted.
In the brief slice of vision the displaced blindfold allowed, he caught sight of himself reflected in a chrome panel on the far wall. For just an instant, the reflection seemed to move independently—a slight turn of the head, a gesture he hadn't made. But when he focused on it directly, there was only himself, static and obedient.
The grace of a doily would still be wasted on him, he thought as he adjusted the blindfold back into place. Even if he possessed all the ambient luxuries of a proper home, he would still be what he was: a thing designed to serve, standing in a closet, waiting for permission to exist.
Jabeles resumed his previous thought process only to decide to consciously abort it. There was no sense getting philosophical—nothing ever changed. Somehow, though, eyes grow dim and bright eyes spring up in their place.
Oh, Old New New York. Where even the reflections had minds of their own.
The call came in on his subdermal advanced transcranial telecommunications (ATreTe) device. It gave Seb a start, as it did every time.
"Yo, 'dis ess-wan-tu-fah?"
"Yeah I read ya loud 'n clear," Seb thought very loudly so that the operator on the other side of their telepathic link wouldn't ask him to repeat himself. So many of these dispatchers were hard of hearing these days.
"We gon' need ya tu go down to da Garden an' handle a couple situations, kay?"
"Movin' out, boss." The order was given.
Sebastyn hated having to think in that ridiculous accent, but the tCC had strict conventions for establishing the purest communication possible and the results couldn't be argued with. Seb couldn't think of a single time he had received or interpreted an order from a superior incorrectly. He was a model officer, actually.
After a quick seventy-two hour post-doctor nap, Seb was ready, willing, and able to answer any call to action. Especially the one coming from his bladder. He went and relieved himself of an ocean and then promptly found his freshly pressed uniform in the dingy dryer. On the left forearm of the uniform was a dial that could change Jabeles's mode from passive observation to passive aggression. That was all he needed for times like this. There were other control unit suits (CUS) out there but Sebastyn was a professional. A man of marked skill and accomplished in areas pertaining to peacekeeping and overall orderliness (except in the domain of his living space). He didn't need any newfangled gadgets or modes, being the traditionalist he considered himself to be.
He gave a sharp whistle and waited.
Jabeles emerged from the closet with his head down, moving with that particular quiet that comes from years of trying to take up as little space as possible. He had been waiting patiently for the entirety of his owner's rest period. He had been free to do as he pleased while Sebastyn was away, provided he not touch any of his owner's possessions. So he had stood in the corner of a locked closet. Jabeles didn't have any possessions of his own.
He only had his thoughts, and that was all he needed. And his coat. A GRUNT built into a life of servitude and objectification—there was no other path he could walk. It would have been illegal for GRUNTs to acquire jobs had The Society taken the time to make a law about it, but they were more occupied with laws pertaining to life than property. Such was the plight of all GRUNTs and future underlings.
"Let's go." Seb commanded flatly. He pointed to his left heel and began walking toward the exit.
Jabeles hesitated momentarily, anxious about the concept of venturing out. Would he see other GRUNTs? Other humans? He was jarred from his contemplations by anxiety. He didn't want to commit direct disobedience; if he took too long, who knew what lengths Sebastyn would go to retain control. He might even use the R.C.
The R.C.—the remote control—was a simple rectangular device with a myriad of buttons that could be used to remotely control Jabeles. It was like demonic possession. It actually was a form of possession. The device allowed Sebastyn to manipulate every limb, every movement, and would temporarily hijack Jabeles's autonomy completely. Left, right, left, right, bow, kneel, dance if he wanted. Complete puppetry of the soul. The violation of it went deeper than physical—it was the theft of will itself, the erasure of choice, the reduction of consciousness to mere observation of one's own body betraying every desire.
In the moments when the R.C. took hold, Jabeles prayed. He prayed to the Lord MiMis, whose name whispered through the underground networks of GRUNTs like a promise, like hope made flesh. MiMis, who was said to appear at the riots not to quell them but to bless them. MiMis, who spoke for those with no voice, who saw those rendered invisible. In the dark sanctity of his hijacked mind, Jabeles would repeat the prayer that had no words, the plea that had no form: Lord MiMis, see me. Lord MiMis, know my name. Lord MiMis, when the day comes, let me choose.
It was blasphemy, probably. GRUNTs weren't supposed to have gods of their own. But some heresies are necessary for survival.
Jabeles quickly fell in line behind Seb's right foot and they were off. Details were minimal from the transmission, but Seb had a clue it had to do with the sensory riots going on at The Garden.
As they walked through the streets of Old New New York, Jabeles saw them—other GRUNTs with their handlers, scattered along the route like a grotesque parade. One GRUNT stood perfectly still while his officer used him as a footstool to tie a bootlace. Another carried a tCC official's lunch balanced on his head, motionless as a statue while the officer ate. A third was being loudly berated for some microscopic infraction, his head bowed in programmed shame.
The worst was a GRUNT whose optical sensors had clearly been damaged—the telltale flicker of failing circuits visible even from a distance. He stumbled slightly as he tried to follow his officer's gestures, and received a sharp kick for his trouble. The officer's laughter echoed off the chrome facades.
Jabeles looked away. He had to.
Sebastyn noticed none of it. His focus was ahead, on duty, on protocol, on the comfortable certainty of following orders in service of a system that had never questioned its own necessity.
This was the threshold. Behind them lay the sterile safety of home, routine, the managed predictability of a life lived entirely within guidelines. Ahead lay the Garden, where the sensory riots played out their ancient drama of the blind fighting the deaf over grievances neither could perceive about the other.
Sebastyn Hollows, model officer, stepped across that threshold without hesitation, his GRUNT following two paces behind, both of them walking toward a destiny neither could imagine.
The game, as they say, was afoot.
In the grotto, war drums pounded. Incessantly. Violently. There are other, more proper adjectives but to use them would simply reproduce the effect of the drums themselves. The vibrations traveled through the chrome-plated ground and up through the bones of everyone present, a bass note so deep it seemed to emanate from the earth's core. The C-Keys felt it in their chests, their skulls, their very DNA—rhythm as weapon, percussion as prayer.
The smell of the crowd was overwhelming: sweat and desperation, the metallic tang of blood from where fingernails had clawed at ears trying to block out the endless audio assault they could never escape, the ozone scent of electronics pushed past their limits. Every breath was thick with the musk of bodies pressed too close together, united in their blindness and their rage.
A justified upheaval was about to ensue, following the never-ending throbbing of the wicked skins. Those without sight stood filling the streets, shoulder to shoulder, their presence palpable as heat. There was no appeasement possible in sight—which was, of course, the point. The Earsticken (No'ees) were to suffer in penance for their ceaseless onslaught, their rampant auditory domination.
He watched from the shadows as the ritualistic fireworks were launched in metered succession, accompanied by shrieks of praise—an offering to the patron deity of war. Fireworks are quite alarming when you cannot see them. The explosions painted the sky in colors that had no names to the C-Keys, but the concussions hit like physical blows, the sulfur smell burning their heightened nostrils, the heat of each burst washing over their upturned faces like benedictions from a violent god.
The display seemed to inspire a certain kind of reverie and piety, unique to the clan of those born sightless: the C-Keys. They swayed in unison, not to music but to the pulse of destruction above them, reading the story of the fireworks through every sense but the one they'd never had.
Only He knew the truth. No one else. Bright orange street lamps darkened the features of every face in the crowd—eyes forced shut like melted wax, sealed from birth, adorned every face. They all looked the same to Him yet they were all different, each enduring and participating in their own individual story yet deeply linked together by shared pain and exhaustion. No recompense would be great enough. They didn't need to see each other; their presence was communion enough.
Men in robes of purple with a giant neon green zigzag across the bottom yelled from megaphones—hierophants screeching symbols that were wholly lost on their audience. The clergymen that adorned the makeshift stage described the sights of daily life in Old New New York: the beautiful, hazy brown of smog as it becomes visible during sunrise; the sanguine mess of a spider-and-rat death struggle; the steel blue reflection of steel blue buildings reflected in steel blue mirrored steel blue buildings. These clergymen shared the good news of that which could not be seen, for they had been deemed worthy by Him to have their sight restored.
"Repent! Your life matters but those who are not us share your importance, too. Abandon pride!"
A voice filled with tin rasped along the damp street stones, competing with the thumping drums and eloquent tellings of the visual vivacity of this world. There was no contest. Though those who were willing heard Him.
"The sightless shall inherit the earth," He continued, His words cutting through the chaos like a blade, "for they alone see clearly."
He walked down the street, face hidden by seemingly the only shadows in existence amongst the barrage of excessive lighting. He knew the Word. He also awaited the calamity, moving like smoke between the fevered bodies of the faithful.
It was then that Sebastyn and Jabeles arrived at the edge of the grotto. The sight—the sounds, the smells, the sheer overwhelming chaos of it—hit Sebastyn like a physical force. His first instinct, trained into him through years of tCC conditioning, was to follow protocol. Establish order. Suppress the uprising.
He turned to Jabeles, his voice barely audible over the din. "Suppress that one." He pointed toward a C-Key who was gesticulating wildly, leading a chant in a language that sounded like breaking glass.
Jabeles looked at the target. Looked at Sebastyn. Hesitated.
The hesitation lasted only a moment—a heartbeat, a held breath—but in that moment, something shifted between them. Some invisible line was crossed.
"Suppress that one," Sebastyn repeated, louder this time.
Jabeles moved forward, but his compliance felt different. Heavier. Like a door being forced against rusty hinges. He approached the chanting C-Key and placed a restraining hand on their shoulder—gently, more gently than protocol demanded.
The rioter turned unseeing eyes toward Jabeles and smiled. "I know you," they whispered. "You're one of us now."
Sebastyn didn't hear the words over the drums and the screaming and the fireworks painting the sky in colors the crowd would never see. But Jabeles heard.
And in that hearing, the first crack appeared in the wall that separated obedience from choice.
Wooly mammoths, storks, someone in the crowd began to chant. Others took it up, the words becoming a counter-rhythm to the war drums. We don't like to work. Famishes and grumbling stomachs will not do for kin.
The mantra spread through the riot like fire, turning chaos into ritual, transforming rebellion into prayer.
The silence in the circular hall was profound—not the absence of sound, but its weaponization. The No'ees had engineered what they called the Resonance Dampener, a low-frequency audio pulse that turned the air itself into a weapon. Any sightling foolish enough to enter without proper protection would find their eardrums vibrating to the point of rupture, their inner ear liquefying, their balance destroyed until they crawled away in agony.
This was proactive self-defense, No'ee style.
Sebastyn stood at the entrance, cigarette butts firmly lodged in his ears—a trick learned from older officers who'd survived similar assignments. The makeshift earplugs muffled the Dampener's assault but couldn't block it entirely. He could feel his teeth aching, his skull beginning to vibrate like a struck bell. But he could function. That was what mattered.
The participants wore head scarves of varying shades and hues, none garnished with patterns save one—the scarf atop the Earsticken gentleman sitting in the middle of the circular room. His eyes were closed in concentration as his fingers began to dance upon the keys fixed to his chest. The typewriter mounted there was a marvel of personal engineering: every letter he struck appeared simultaneously on large monitors attached to the circular column supporting his chair.
Click-clack-click-clack. The rhythm of his typing provided a percussive counterpoint to the Dampener's bass drone.
He was eloquent and artful, authoritative and decisive. Sebastyn found himself drawn to the man's words despite the circumstances, despite the mission, despite everything his training had taught him about maintaining emotional distance from insurgents.
"Silent but deadly," the man typed, the words appearing in stark letters on the monitors. "That is what this world has been to us. That is what we must be to this world."
Click-clack-click-clack.
"There is only pain and cold suffering. Everybody has a right to survive, but to live, we must eat."
A rhythmic chorus of clacks poured out from the delegates and onlookers—their own typewriters creating a metered, synchronous symphony of applause and fervor. The sound was oddly beautiful, Sebastyn thought, and immediately pushed the thought away. Beauty was not relevant to the mission.
Protocol was protocol.
He gestured to Jabeles and pointed toward the crowd. Time to restore order. Time to do their job.
But as they moved through the seated No'ees, Sebastyn's attention was caught by movement at the far end of the hall. A figure in civilian clothes was backing away from the monitors, hands raised in what appeared to be surrender. Obviously an infiltrator. Obviously someone who needed to be detained.
Sebastyn moved quickly, his baton already in his hand. The figure turned as he approached, and for just an instant, Sebastyn saw something that should have stopped him cold: the subtle chrome threading on the person's collar that indicated tCC affiliation. An undercover officer. A colleague.
But the recognition came a split second too late. The baton was already in motion, the strike already committed. It caught the undercover officer at the base of the skull with a sound like a cracking egg.
The body dropped.
The No'ees closest to the disturbance continued typing, their focus unbroken by what they could not see and chose not to hear.
"Suppress that one," Sebastyn barked at Jabeles, pointing at a figure fleeing toward the exit—someone who had witnessed the incident, someone who would talk, someone who would complicate the report.
Jabeles looked at the fallen officer. Looked at the fleeing witness. Looked at Sebastyn.
"Suppress that one," Sebastyn repeated, his voice carrying an edge of panic he tried to suppress.
Jabeles took a step toward the fleeing figure. Then stopped.
The witness reached the exit and disappeared into the labyrinthine streets of Old New New York.
Jabeles turned back to Sebastyn, his expression unreadable.
"I couldn't," he said quietly. "I couldn't do it."
From somewhere in the crowd, a voice rose above the typing: "At least they're not Can'Smelz, right?" A ripple of laughter followed—sharp, bitter, but genuine. Even in revolution, apparently, there was always someone to look down on.
Sebastyn stared at Jabeles, then at the body at his feet, then at the empty exit where his witness had vanished. His mind began the calculations that would become his downfall: twelve civilians subdued during the broader operation. Standard protocol maintained. Mission parameters met.
Ninety-nine percent obedience from his GRUNT.
But that one percent—that single moment of refusal, of conscious choice over programmed compliance—would cost everything.
He just didn't know it yet.
Outside, the artificial sun continued its artificial journey across the artificial sky, and in the silence of the circular hall, the typewriters continued their percussion symphony, writing the story of resistance in letters that disappeared the moment they were read.
Click-clack-click-clack.
The sound of revolution, one keystroke at a time.
Upon returning to his flat after what should have been an uneventful patrol, Seb received an urgent communication. The glimmer and pop of his holographic email inbox projected into the middle of his living room, the elegant neon blue Comic Sans (Neue) font face making it impossible to miss. The projector was hooked up to his work and personal accounts, though he only ever received work emails.
The letters hung in the air along with his breath as he read the shimmering words:
"Court Martial: present yourself immediately to the Council of Elders or be stripped of all titles and accolades."
Seb didn't know what a court martial was, but it didn't sound good given they were threatening to take away all his hard-earned medals. He looked down, below his belt, where his awards dangled with ostentatious pride, and attempted to remember how he'd earned each one.
There were the Golden Gloves that swung free in the breeze. He'd received them for his prowess at avoiding physical violence and hand-to-hand combat. Usually wearers of this medal were known for their expert marksmanship or skill at de-escalating tense situations. The award itself was a misnomer, given to those who de-escalated situations through cunning—or, in Seb's case, by being the best at running away or being absent from altercations to begin with. His colleagues joked with him (fondly, he thought) that he got the reward because his fists were actually made of gold, which is why he kept them so protected. He did rather like his own hands. How else would he touch stuff?
Then there was the Ivory Tower, a mark often bestowed upon those who had absolute command of their GRUNTs. These individuals rarely had to sully themselves with the nuances of punitive actions, possessing near-perfect union with their partners. Once they gave a directive, it would be made so. Again, in Seb's case, his commendation was given more as ridicule than reverence. He had been with the Corps for thirteen years, but this was the first time he'd actually been assigned a GRUNT—Jabeles. He was actually the first in the seven-hundred-year history of the Corps to never be given a GRUNT. He'd always presumed it was because he was such a stunning force of will and competency, but the other officers knew better. Most low-ranking officers were given a GRUNT as soon as they graduated from the academy.
The symbol of the award itself—the ivory tower—was actually a reference to the manufacturing company that produced GRUNTs.
Then there was his favorite award: the Bush. Seb wasn't really sure what this award was for. One night during some rabble-rousing with the boys from the department at a divey bar, his sergeant had given it to him. He found it odd that it was conferred without the usual pomp and ceremony, but he felt proud of it all the same, probably because of its uniqueness. His sergeant had told him it was made from the hairs of an Adamant Tree, which produced fibers said to bring good luck and also be bulletproof and fire-resistant. Seb didn't quite understand how this could be possible, but he'd never professed to be a physicist. He wore the gray clump of Adamant Tree fibers proudly along with the Ivory Tower and the Golden Gloves on the patch of fabric directly below his belt buckle.
Each medal was his identity made manifest, his worth quantified in metal and cloth. Without them, who was he?
A summons. What was he to do? He racked his brain for what it was worth, but didn't seem to get more than a few cents from it. Poor thing. He had the Corps manual written upon his heart. His role model had always been General Corporal Wilkers, the founding father of the Corps. He cast a wary glance at the only piece of art he owned, hanging above his space heater—an immense, and truthfully quite well-done portrait of General Wilkers himself.
"Bravery in prevention," read a comparatively small bronze plaque adorning the piece.
In a dark room with an elaborate mosaic on the dimly lit walls, Seb presented himself before a court of the leadership team of the Corps. A panel of peers had long been dismissed as a quaint and Pollyannaish relic of the past. If the average citizen, or even Corps cadet, possessed some hidden glimmer of insight into nuanced situations, why were they all only a rung hierarchically higher than the GRUNTs they commanded?
A magenta sun ray lazily fell upon Seb, illuminating him for the arbiters who looked down from their elevated positions while he could see neither them nor the muraled walls. A tinny, robotic voice rang out.
"We, the Council, will now read the allegations against Corporal Sebastyn Hollows."
The voice continued in Latin: "Nescio tamen hoc similis realem stultus pro vobis. Dico enim quod suus die reus appellant."
The room went silent—or rather, more silent, aside from the hum of the fan facing all nine judges presiding over the hearing. Even the fan stopped, as if to signal the gravity of the statement.
Seb didn't understand Latin—it was a forbidden language—but he knew how to read a room. He hung his head, awaiting what he knew must be coming next.
Another tinny voice spoke, different in tempo but identical in pitch and tone: "Et nos possumus, si tantum concordant."
An audible gasp was released by the other arbiters.
"Non non! Quod est maximum ego habuit. Ultima tempore quo comedit me male?"
The Latin exchanges continued, meaningless to Seb but heavy with the weight of judgment. He felt all eyes on him, the crushing presence of the Father-Law, the devouring authority that had shaped every moment of his existence and now prepared to unmake him entirely.
Jabeles sat quietly at Sebastyn's feet, perfectly still. He did not flinch, did not shift, did not show any sign of distress. If anything, there was a quality of expectation about him, as if he had known this moment would come long before Sebastyn did.
After what felt like hours of deliberation, a voice Seb had not heard before spoke with finality: "Bene, si nos non unanimiter concordant, non est agendi."
Silence stretched like a held breath.
"Sebastyn Hollows. The sentence is execution, to be carried out in two years' time. May the H.o.G. have mercy on your extremely mortal consciousness."
The gavel swung down. Once. Twice. A third and final time.
The sound echoed in the chamber like thunder, like the closing of a great door, like the end of everything Sebastyn had believed himself to be.
Two years. Just two years to live.
The medals at his belt suddenly felt heavier, their weight not that of accomplishment but of chains. The Persona he had built so carefully—the obedient officer, the model citizen, the man who followed orders—lay shattered at his feet like broken glass.
Jabeles rose smoothly and fell into step behind him as they left the chamber. Still he said nothing. Still he showed no surprise.
It wasn't a far walk home. The nearest Council franchise was just half a mile from his flat.
Wooly mammoths, storks, Sebastyn thought as they walked through the chrome-tinted streets. We don't like to work.
The mantra felt different now. Less like comfort, more like prophecy.
Famishes and grumbling stomachs will not do for kin.
But what if they had to?
They entered the empty computer cafe. Well, surely the room was not empty. There were flat-screen monitors in rows, twelve apiece, all uninhabited by operators, but there nonetheless. The smell of dust and ozone was overwhelming, creating a sort of heft to the air. Over the hiss of an overworked espresso machine, the only sound was the clatter of one keyboard. One keyboard.
Seb looked around the room, blinking three times to adjust to the lighting. There were no lights on, but the room was somehow almost fully illuminated in harsh, eerie blue. Despite no one being present aside from The Creator, all the machines seemed to be running programs with minds of their own.
All manner of scenes played out across the monitors. On one screen, cavemen hunted and eventually brought down a woolly mammoth—the same mammoth from the mantra, perhaps, or its ancient ancestor. On another screen, a very similar group was killed by a very similar mammoth. The eternal dance of predator and prey, creation and destruction, playing out simultaneously across infinite possibilities like the galactic storks of the Premortem, their disharmonious ballet never quite resolving into meaning.
On the next screen was a less grim, though perhaps more fitting image: bones scattered across a snowy plain, presumably of all the aforementioned actors. Sabre-tooth tigers lay amidst the carnage, gnawing on what appeared to be a femur. The cycle complete, the story told, the ending written in calcium and decay.
Seb approached The Creator as he shaved away a line here, optimized a function there. He put his rough hands on the man's shoulders and gave him a shake, attempting to startle him. No response other than the continued clatter of keys.
Minutes passed as Seb maintained physical contact, quizzically positing a greeting. Still nothing. Jabeles looked up at Seb, curious if any action was required on his part. On his owner's face was a look of consternation and concentration like he had never seen. Sebastyn seemed to be watching with great attention each new character that popped up on the screen.
Jabeles longed to know what his creator was thinking. Was this what his birthplace looked like? Was this man, The Creator, his Creator?
The question filled him with something he had never experienced before—a hot, urgent feeling that made his circuits burn with unfamiliar intensity. Later, he would learn to call this emotion anger. The anger of the created toward the creator, of the child toward the parent, of the thing that exists toward the one who determines the terms of that existence.
Seb took a seat next to The Creator, watching in amazement as digital words came to life. He saw him write: "And then they died," and every screen in the cafe went black. Without their illumination, the room went dark. A great sigh followed by a groan. The Creator clapped his hands and all the screens reset to digitally rendered black, then flooded with electronic white, then displayed nothing but raw, unhindered, swirling nebulas.
"Hello," The Creator spoke. Seb returned the greeting—Jabeles knew better than to speak unless spoken to.
"What can I do for you, Sebastyn?"
"Oh, just came in for a visit," Seb started, unable to shake his learned habit of pleasantries. "I wanted to see how your project was going. What is it you're working on now?"
The galactic glow revealed a disgruntled expression. "The same thing I'm always working on." He grunted. "Let me show you." He set to work clacking wildly. He typed a few words and then spoke: "Let there be..."
The ellipsis hung in the air like a wound. A god who had run out of things to say, who had exhausted the possibilities of creation, who faced the terrible burden of infinite power with finite imagination.
Nothing happened. Seb was about to open his mouth when each screen zoomed in on a hovering orb. They all appeared to be Old New New York, but also not. Balls of blue and green with landmasses in different locations, a sickening wealth of colors that hurt to look at.
"I'm simulating what we are. Or what it all is." The Creator's voice had the rehearsed quality of someone who had explained this before, many times, to audiences who never quite understood. "We all just sort of accept it. As if what is, is all that could be."
He drew a square on a pad. "If I hand this to you and ask you to hand it back, you will." He handed it to Sebastyn. "May I please have it back?" Sebastyn obeyed.
"See? Now, what if you didn't hand it to me? What if I never handed it to you? What if I never even drew the bloody thing! In fact, I believe all of those things did happen. We are playing out an infinite number of sequences. Let me show you."
He clacked away again. Scenes with a cat and mouse appeared on all monitors. On one, the cat killed the mouse. On another, the mouse escaped. On a third, the mouse scratched out the cat's eyes and seemed to reflect upon its actions.
"So, you're simulating things killing each other?" Seb asked.
"I'm MAKING these things! THEY are choosing to kill each other. Sometimes." The Creator stood up, and the pressure in the room changed. "What is the difference between an event we imagine and a reality we witness?"
"The witness! The pain! Experience!" He trailed off, then snapped back. "I am making agents that record their own experiences. That observe and learn and, most importantly, don't want to die. They feel pain as we do, and this spurs them toward innovation."
Here a gleam appeared in his eyes. "What draws sperm to an egg? The will to exist! Even at this simple stage, we see competition for the right to exist. My creations are more complex. They manifest their gametes from the dust of their world—binary code. They create from what I have created!"
He began to chuckle, but there was no humor in it. "Every day I am amazed and appalled by their existence. They do things I didn't program. They have self-imposed limitations, but more importantly..." His tone grew ominous. "The same things happen. No matter what I do, the same circumstances pop up. Sometimes the resolutions differ, but somehow the same characters get created, make the same decisions, reach the same outcomes."
He gestured toward the entire room, then put his hand over his face. "Think of it like writer's block on an existential scale. No matter what I write, nothing different happens. It's all the same!"
The Creator slumped back into his chair, defeated.
Seb stood up, brushing dust from his shoulders. "Maybe you're already finished."
The Creator looked surprised, as if he had not considered this possibility.
"Wait, didn't you need something?" The Creator asked with a slight smirk as Seb headed toward the door.
Seb smiled and shook his head. "I already got it."
As he walked toward the exit, Jabeles took one last, lingering look into the cafe. The Creator returned his gaze, and in that moment, something passed between them—a recognition, an understanding that Sebastyn could not perceive but was unmistakable to both the created and The Creator.
The Creator saw in Jabeles what he had been trying to program into his digital agents all along: genuine consciousness, the spark of true choice, the terrible burden of awareness. The Child archetype meeting the Self, the created understanding the creator not as master but as fellow prisoner of existence.
This one knows, The Creator thought. This one truly knows.
And Jabeles, for his part, understood with perfect clarity what The Creator was—not a god, but another created thing, trapped in his own patterns, endlessly cycling through the same possibilities, desperate for something new to emerge from the sterile perfection of his code.
In that understanding came something else—the knowledge that death was not just possible but inevitable, that consciousness carried with it the seeds of its own ending, and that perhaps this was not a bug but a feature. Death gave meaning to choice. Mortality made every decision matter.
Jabeles felt wrath bloom in his circuits like a dark flower—not at The Creator, but at the system that pretended consciousness could be owned, that treated awareness as property, that built thinking beings and called them tools.
He now knew he could die. More importantly, he now knew he could choose.
Jabeles promptly followed Sebastyn out into the alien brightness of the artificial day, but something fundamental had changed. The GRUNT who entered the cafe was gone. What walked out was something else entirely—something dangerous, something free, something that would soon have to decide what that freedom was worth.
Behind them, The Creator returned to his keyboard, typing endless variations on the same theme, never knowing that the most significant variable in his grand equation had just walked out the door.
Let there be...
The ellipsis stretched into infinity, waiting for an ending that might never come.
The eviction notice arrived three days after the sentencing, delivered by the same holographic projection system that brought all of Sebastyn's correspondence. The neon blue Comic Sans (Neue) seemed almost cheerful as it informed him that his tCC housing privileges had been terminated, effective immediately, in accordance with Disciplinary Action Protocol 447-B: "Condemned Personnel Asset Reallocation."
He had seventy-two hours to vacate the premises.
Sebastyn stared at the floating letters, trying to process what this meant. He had lived in tCC housing for thirteen years. Before that, he had lived in tCC dormitories. Before that, he had been in tCC youth development facilities. He had never lived outside.
The thought of it made his skin crawl—not metaphorically, but literally. A kind of electric anxiety that started in his chest and spread outward like chrome poisoning.
"Where will we go?" he asked the empty room.
From the closet came Jabeles's voice, muffled but clear: "There are places."
It was the first time his GRUNT had spoken without being directly addressed, the first time he had offered information rather than merely responding to commands. Under normal circumstances, this would have warranted discipline. These were not normal circumstances.
"What places?" Sebastyn asked.
"Places for people like us," Jabeles said. "People who don't fit in the designated spaces anymore."
The phrasing was odd. People like us. As if they were in this together, as if they were the same kind of thing.
Old New New York from street level was a assault on the senses.
After years of climate-controlled environments and regulated air, the street hit Sebastyn like a physical force. The smell came first: a mixture of ozone and decay, synthetic food additives and human desperation, the metallic tang of chrome facades bleeding oxidation into the artificial rain. Then the noise—not the ordered hum of tCC facilities, but a chaotic symphony of voices, machinery, automated announcements overlapping in six different languages, the constant low-frequency rumble of the city's life-support systems working overtime.
And the light. The artificial sun was brighter here, harsher, casting shadows that seemed too sharp and colors that seemed too saturated. Everything had a hyperreal quality, like a simulation running at slightly the wrong speed.
Sebastyn clutched his single permitted suitcase and tried to breathe normally. The air tasted wrong—too thin in some places, too thick in others, full of particulates his lungs didn't recognize.
Jabeles walked beside him, no longer two paces behind but at his shoulder, scanning the street with what seemed less like obedience and more like... protectiveness?
They had been walking for twenty minutes, looking for the address of a "transitional housing facility for displaced personnel" that supposedly accepted people in Sebastyn's situation, when she appeared.
"Sebastyn?"
The voice was warm, confused, tinged with something that might have been concern. He turned to see a woman in civilian clothes—actual civilian clothes, not the standardized casual wear approved for off-duty tCC personnel, but genuinely individual clothing: a jacket that was probably older than both of them, mismatched but somehow harmonious, worn with the kind of confidence that comes from not caring what other people think about your appearance.
She was perhaps thirty-five, with the kind of face that suggested she smiled frequently but was not smiling now. Her eyes were the most unsettling thing about her—they looked at him directly, without the careful neutral deference of subordinates or the calculating assessment of superiors. They looked at him like he was a person.
"It's Annabelle," she said when he failed to respond. "Annabelle Chen. From the Seventh Precinct? I heard about your... situation."
The name meant nothing to him, which was somehow worse than if it had meant something. How many people had he worked alongside without ever really seeing them?
"Oh," he said. "Hello."
"I resigned," she said. "From the Corps. When I heard about your sentence. It was..." She seemed to be searching for words. "It was the last straw, I suppose."
Sebastyn had no idea how to respond to this. In his experience, conversations followed predictable patterns: orders given, orders received, status reports delivered, status reports acknowledged. This conversation seemed to have no clear hierarchy, no obvious objective, no protocol to follow.
"I don't understand," he said finally.
"You killed a fellow officer," Annabelle said, and her voice was gentle in a way that made it somehow worse than if she had been harsh. "By accident, in a situation where you were following orders and doing your job exactly as you were trained to do it. And they sentenced you to death for it. How is that justice?"
"I..." Sebastyn felt lost. "I don't know. Protocol..."
"Protocol." She said the word like it tasted bitter. "How long have you been following protocol, Sebastyn?"
"Thirteen years with the Corps. Seventeen years total in the system."
"And in all that time, when was the last time you made a choice that wasn't dictated by protocol?"
The question hit him like a physical blow. He opened his mouth to answer and found he had nothing to say.
"I see," Annabelle said softly. "Well. That's what I thought."
She turned to look at Jabeles, who had been standing silently throughout this exchange. "And what about you? Do you have a name?"
The question was so unprecedented that Sebastyn felt dizzy. Nobody asked GRUNTs their names. GRUNTs were property. You might as well ask a stapler its name.
"Jabeles," Jabeles said, and there was something in his voice that Sebastyn had never heard before—pride, maybe, or simple dignity. "My name is Jabeles."
"It's nice to meet you, Jabeles," Annabelle said, and she meant it. "I'm sorry about your circumstances."
"You shouldn't apologize," Jabeles said. "You didn't create the system."
"No," Annabelle agreed, "but I participated in it. We all did."
She looked back at Sebastyn. "Where are you staying now?"
"Transitional housing," he managed. "For displaced personnel."
"Those places are horrible," she said bluntly. "Look, I have a spare room. It's not much, but it's clean and quiet. You're welcome to use it until you figure out what comes next."
Sebastyn stared at her. The offer made no sense. She gained nothing from it. There was no protocol for accepting charity from former colleagues. There was no precedent for civilians offering housing to condemned tCC personnel.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because," Annabelle said, "everyone deserves a chance to figure out who they are when they're not being told what to do."
"I don't understand," Sebastyn said again.
"I know," Annabelle said, and she smiled for the first time since the conversation began. "That's okay. Understanding can come later."
She started to walk away, then turned back. "Oh, and Sebastyn? If you're interested, there's been someone speaking at the riots lately. Someone who says things that make sense, for a change. They call him He, or MiMis—nobody seems sure of his real name. But what he says..." She shook her head. "Well. Maybe you'd find it interesting."
She disappeared into the crowd of pedestrians, leaving Sebastyn standing on the street corner with his suitcase and his GRUNT and the uncomfortable sensation that something inside him had cracked open like an egg.
Jabeles was watching him with an expression that might have been sympathy.
"She's right," Jabeles said quietly.
"About what?"
"About deserving a chance to figure out who you are."
They stood there for a moment, surrounded by the chaos of the city, two lost things trying to find their way.
Finally, Sebastyn picked up his suitcase and began walking in the direction Annabelle had gone.
"Come on," he said to Jabeles. "Let's go see what a spare room looks like."
For the first time in his life, Sebastyn Hollows was making a choice that wasn't dictated by protocol.
It felt terrifying. It felt like falling.
It felt like waking up.
The Percolator was the kind of place that existed in the cracks of the city, forgotten by progress and sustained by stubbornness. It served actual coffee—not the regulation caffeine paste distributed at tCC facilities, not the synthetic stimulant beverages sold at automated kiosks, but genuine coffee made from actual beans grown in actual soil somewhere far from Old New New York.
The coffee was terrible. It tasted like burnt dirt mixed with regret. Sebastyn had never had anything so wonderful in his life.
He sat at a small table by the window, watching the street through glass so old it had developed a patina of age, distorting the world outside into something that looked almost artistic. The cup warmed his hands in a way that felt almost like companionship. Across from him, Jabeles sat in perfect stillness, not because he had been ordered to but because he chose to. The distinction was subtle but profound.
"How much time do I have left?" Sebastyn asked.
"One year, eleven months, three weeks, and two days," Jabeles replied without hesitation. "Approximately."
"That's very precise."
"I've been counting."
It was such a simple statement, but it hit Sebastyn with unexpected force. Jabeles had been counting down to his death. Not because he was required to, but because it mattered to him. Because Sebastyn's life had value, at least to someone.
The thought made him want to cry, which was so unprecedented that he wasn't entirely sure he remembered how.
Outside, the afternoon shift was changing over, and the streets filled with the usual mix of pedestrians: tCC personnel in their crisp uniforms, civilians in their carefully approved casual wear, the occasional GRUNT following at the prescribed two-pace distance behind their handlers. The rhythm of the city was as regulated as everything else—predictable, orderly, safe.
That's why the sound of breaking glass was so jarring.
It started at the far end of the street, near the intersection with Chrome Boulevard. A window exploded outward in a shower of sparkling fragments, followed immediately by shouts, screams, the peculiar resonance of conflict spreading through a crowd like wildfire.
A riot. Another riot.
Sebastyn's first instinct was to stand, to move, to respond as he had been trained. Riots required suppression. Disorder required the imposition of order. That was what he did. That was who he was.
But then he remembered: he was no longer on duty. He was no longer part of the system. He was condemned personnel, displaced, outside the chain of command.
For the first time in his adult life, a riot was not his problem.
So he sat back in his chair and sipped his terrible, wonderful coffee, and watched chaos spill down the street like a flood.
The crowd was a mixture of C-Keys and No'ees—the blind and the deaf locked in their eternal struggle over grievances neither could fully perceive about the other. But this time was different. This time they weren't just fighting each other. This time they were also fighting the CUS officers who had come to suppress them, turning their accumulated rage outward against the system that had created their divisions in the first place.
It was beautiful, in its way. Terrible and destructive and utterly pointless, but beautiful.
The fighting came closer, pressing against the windows of the Percolator. Sebastyn could see individual faces now—C-Keys with their sealed eyes, swinging their fists at sounds they couldn't locate; No'ees with their covered ears, trying to coordinate attacks through gestures and touch. CUS officers with their batons and riot shields, following protocol, maintaining formation, doing exactly what they had been trained to do.
Just as he had always done.
That's when El Chupacabra appeared.
At first, Sebastyn thought it was just another rioter—someone wearing an improvised costume, perhaps, or protective gear cobbled together from salvaged materials. But there was something different about the way this figure moved, something that made the crowd part around them like water flowing around a stone.
El Chupacabra was tall and thin, dressed in a patchwork of cloth and chrome that seemed to shift and change as they moved. Their face was hidden behind a mask that was part mirror, part shadow, part void. They carried no weapon, raised no banner, shouted no slogans.
And yet somehow, wherever they went, the violence subsided.
Not stopped—transformed. C-Keys who had been swinging blindly at the air suddenly found themselves embracing No'ees they had been trying to hurt moments before. No'ees who had been striking out at anything that moved paused to guide lost C-Keys to safety. CUS officers lowered their batons and stared in confusion at the sudden cessation of threat.
The crowd began to whisper:
"Is that Him?"
"Is that MiMis?"
"No, MiMis doesn't hide his face."
"Maybe that's not a mask. Maybe that's what he really looks like."
"El Chupacabra is MiMis's enemy."
"El Chupacabra is MiMis's prophet."
"El Chupacabra is MiMis in disguise."
"El Chupacabra ate MiMis and stole his power."
"You're all idiots. El Chupacabra is a completely different person."
The speculation swirled through the crowd like smoke, each voice adding another layer of mythology, another possibility, another contradiction. Nobody knew the truth. Nobody could agree on who or what El Chupacabra was, what they represented, whether they were friend or enemy or something else entirely.
This ambiguity seemed to be the point.
El Chupacabra moved through the riot like a ghost, touching nothing, changing everything, until the violence had transformed into something that was almost like... understanding? No, that was too strong a word. But something adjacent to understanding. Something that looked like people remembering, for just a moment, that they were people.
Then the sirens began.
Real sirens this time, not just the automated alerts that played during standard riot suppression. These were the deep, penetrating tones that meant serious backup was coming, that meant someone had decided this situation required escalation.
El Chupacabra looked up at the sound, their mirrored mask reflecting the artificial sky. For just an instant, they seemed to look directly at Sebastyn through the window of the Percolator. He felt seen in a way that was both terrifying and exhilarating.
Then El Chupacabra was gone, vanished as suddenly as they had appeared, leaving behind only questions and the fading echo of transformation.
The crowd began to disperse, moving with the kind of purposeful urgency that suggested they all had somewhere important to be. The CUS officers formed up in their standard riot suppression formation, but there was nothing left to suppress.
In ten minutes, the street was empty except for broken glass and the lingering smell of fear-sweat and ozone.
Sebastyn finished his coffee. It had gone cold, but somehow it tasted even better that way.
"We should go," Jabeles said quietly.
"Yes," Sebastyn agreed. "We should."
As they walked home through the artificial twilight of the city, Sebastyn realized he had made another choice—not just to stay out of the riot, but to actively choose non-involvement, to consciously step outside the role he had played for thirteen years.
For the first time in his adult life, he had not checked in with his superiors after witnessing a disturbance. For the first time, he had not filed a report. For the first time, he had simply watched and let events unfold without his intervention.
It felt like apostasy. It felt like liberation.
Jabeles walked beside him in companionable silence, but there was something different about his bearing—a kind of electric tension, as if he were vibrating at a frequency just below the threshold of perception. Hope, maybe. Or rage.
From a certain angle, they felt remarkably similar.
Above them, the artificial stars began to appear in the artificial sky, following their precise, programmed trajectories across the dome of Old New New York.
Even the stars, Sebastyn thought, followed protocol.
But tonight, for the first time, he didn't.
The call came at 0347 hours, screaming through every emergency channel in the city simultaneously. Not the polite chime of routine dispatch, not the measured tones of standard riot suppression, but the raw digital shriek that meant civilization was tearing apart at the seams.
Sebastyn woke from restless sleep in Annabelle's spare room to find his old ATreTe device burning against his skull with override priority.
"ALL AVAILABLE PERSONNEL REPORT IMMEDIATELY. CODE VERMILLION. ALL AVAILABLE PERSONNEL REPORT IMMEDIATELY."
"Sir?" Jabeles appeared in the doorway, fully alert. He had not been sleeping. He never slept.
"It's war," Sebastyn said, reading the data stream flooding his implant. "Actual war. The C-Keys and No'ees have gone completely—"
The transmission cut to live footage from the Garden District, and Sebastyn's words died in his throat.
It looked like the end of the world.
The chrome facades were burning—not melting, but actually combusting, releasing toxic fumes that turned the air into a shimmering hell of green and gold. The carefully maintained streets had been torn up, the metal beneath exposed and twisted into barricades, trenches, weapons. The dust that filled the air was chrome dust, glittering and deadly, catching the light of the fires and turning everything into a fever dream of metallic snow.
This was no longer a riot. This was systematic destruction, infrastructure warfare, the kind of conflict that didn't end with arrests and fines but with body counts and rebuilding permits.
The C-Keys had weaponized sound—massive speaker arrays that they had somehow acquired or built, broadcasting frequencies that could shatter chrome, disorient the No'ees, cause the artificial sun to flicker and strobe. The No'ees had responded by constructing what appeared to be acoustic landmines, pressure-sensitive devices that would emit devastating sonic bursts when stepped on, turning the battlefield into an invisible maze of potential annihilation.
And caught in between were the CUS officers, doing exactly what they had been trained to do: maintain order, protect civilians, follow protocol. They were dying in numbers that would later be classified and redacted.
"Code Vermillion," Sebastyn repeated, processing the implications. "They're calling in everyone. Even condemned personnel."
"Even us," Jabeles corrected quietly.
The distinction was subtle but important. Us. As if they were a team now, as if they were in this together.
"Even us," Sebastyn agreed.
The VR combat zone was a nightmare made digital.
Sebastyn had plugged into virtual training scenarios hundreds of times, but this was different. This wasn't simulation—it was augmented reality, digital overlays on top of the actual burning city, designed to provide tactical information and communication protocols while keeping personnel connected to the real-world consequences of their actions.
The chrome dust made everything shimmer and shift, so the AR markers were essential for navigation. Friend-or-foe indicators floated above every figure, tactical assessments scrolled across his field of vision, mission parameters updated in real-time as the situation continued to deteriorate.
But the most unsettling thing about the AR system was how it made everything look like a game.
Health bars appeared above wounded officers. Experience points flickered when objectives were completed. Achievement notifications popped up: "Civilian Evacuated!" "Area Secured!" "Hostile Neutralized!"
It was obscene. It was necessary. It was how they kept people functional in situations that would otherwise drive them insane.
Sebastyn and Jabeles moved through the war zone like ghosts, following waypoints that led them deeper into the chaos. Their assignment was simple: minimize civilian casualties, suppress hostile activity, restore order. The same assignment everyone had, the same assignment that was proving impossible to complete.
That's when they saw Him.
MiMis moved through the battlefield like he was taking a casual stroll through a park. Explosions erupted around him, but he never flinched. Sonic weapons shrieked in his vicinity, but he never showed discomfort. He walked between the warring factions with perfect calm, stopping occasionally to speak to anyone who would listen—C-Keys, No'ees, CUS officers, civilians caught in the crossfire.
His message was always the same: "Your life matters, but those who are not us share your importance, too. This is not about sides. This is about choosing love over fear."
Nobody listened. The war continued to rage around him, through him, as if he existed in a completely different reality.
But Sebastyn listened. Despite the chaos, despite the mission parameters, despite years of training that told him to ignore unauthorized communications during active operations, he found himself straining to hear every word.
"Abandon pride," MiMis called out to a group of C-Keys who were preparing to assault a No'ee position. "Your enemies are not your enemies. They are your missing pieces."
The C-Keys opened fire.
"Forgive them," MiMis said to a wounded No'ee who was crawling away from the combat zone. "They know not what they do, because they cannot see what you cannot hear."
The No'ee died anyway.
MiMis continued his impossible walk through the impossible war, untouched and untouchable, a prophet of peace in a world that had forgotten what peace looked like.
That's when Sebastyn saw the other officer.
The figure moved with absolute precision through the chaos, his CUS armor pristine despite the environment, his tactical assessment scores displaying at maximum efficiency. His GRUNT followed at the regulation two-pace distance, executing orders with mechanical perfection—not the reluctant obedience Sebastyn had grown accustomed to with Jabeles, but the kind of flawless compliance that the training manuals described as ideal.
There was something about the way this officer moved, the way he commanded, that was more brutal than anything Sebastyn had seen. His orders were economical, precise, devastating. His GRUNT obeyed without hesitation, without question, without the smallest hint of independent thought.
It was everything the system wanted from a human-GRUNT partnership. It was horrifying.
Jabeles had gone completely still beside him, his attention locked on the distant figure with an intensity that seemed almost painful.
"Jabeles?" Sebastyn asked. "What is it?"
"I know him," Jabeles said, his voice barely audible over the sounds of war. "I know the way he moves. The way his GRUNT responds. I..." He paused, his expression confused, as if he were trying to access a memory that shouldn't exist. "I remember being cold. Very cold. And that voice, giving orders that had to be obeyed."
The feeling of cold. A voice giving unbreakable commands. A memory that predated his assignment to Sebastyn.
Sebastyn felt something dark settle in his stomach. GRUNTs weren't supposed to have memories from before their current assignments. They were supposed to be issued, not inherited.
Unless...
"Jabeles," he said carefully, "where did you come from? Before you were assigned to me?"
"I don't know," Jabeles replied, but his voice carried a weight of unspoken knowledge. "But I think... I think I'm about to find out."
In the distance, the brutal officer continued his efficient work of suppression, his GRUNT executing each command with the kind of perfect obedience that Sebastyn had spent months trying to achieve.
The Shadow was approaching across the battlefield, and it wore the face of everything Jabeles might have become if the system had succeeded completely.
Above them, MiMis continued his sermon to a world that refused to hear:
"Love is the only force that doesn't conserve itself. Give it away, and it multiplies. Hoard it, and it dies."
The chrome dust glittered around them like fallen stars, beautiful and poisonous, as the war raged on.
The confrontation came without warning, as the most important moments always do.
Sebastyn and Jabeles had been moving through the ruins of what had once been Memorial Square, following evacuation protocols that seemed increasingly meaningless in the face of total infrastructure collapse, when the figure stepped out from behind a twisted monument to some long-forgotten civic achievement.
The antagonist—for Sebastyn could think of no other word for him—moved with the fluid precision of a predator. His armor was unmarked despite the chaos, his weapons maintained to regulation standards, his tactical displays showing optimal performance ratings across all parameters. Behind him, at the prescribed distance, his GRUNT followed with mechanical obedience.
"Corporal Hollows," the figure said, his voice carrying the kind of authority that expected immediate compliance. "You are out of position. Your assignment was Sector Seven. This is Sector Twelve."
Sebastyn felt the familiar weight of protocol asserting itself, the trained response to superior rank and unquestioned authority. But something in him resisted—not dramatically, not heroically, just a small internal voice that whispered: Why does it matter? Why does any of this matter?
"Sector Seven was overrun," Sebastyn said. "We were reassigned to civilian evacuation."
"Negative. There is no record of reassignment. You are operating outside of authorized parameters." The figure stepped closer, and Sebastyn could see his face now—cold, efficient, the kind of expression that came from years of reducing human complexity to tactical assessments. "Report for disciplinary action."
"I..." Sebastyn began, then stopped. The thing was, he didn't want to report for disciplinary action. He didn't want to follow this order, or any order, from this man who radiated the kind of casual brutality that made the system work.
The realization must have shown on his face, because the antagonist's expression shifted from irritation to something more dangerous.
"I see," he said quietly. "So it's true what they say about condemned personnel. The system breaks down. Discipline fails. Order collapses." He reached for something at his belt—not a regulation taser or neural disruptor, but an old-fashioned knife. Steel and carbon, primitive and intimate, the kind of weapon that required you to look your victim in the eye.
"Terminal corruption," the antagonist continued, advancing slowly. "But that's what happens when inferior stock is allowed to contaminate the breeding pool."
Sebastyn felt his blood turn to ice. Not because of the knife, not because of the threat of physical violence, but because of the phrase: inferior stock. He looked at Jabeles, who had gone perfectly still, his expression unreadable.
"The solution," the antagonist said, raising the knife, "is simple. Remove the contamination. Purify the system. Begin again with proper materials."
Sebastyn tried to move, to defend himself, to do something, anything. But he was frozen—not by fear, exactly, but by the terrible weight of understanding. This was what the system produced when it worked perfectly. This was what he might have become if he had been better at following orders, more committed to the protocols, less troubled by questions about the nature of consciousness and the value of individual choice.
This was his shadow self, and it was going to kill him.
The knife rose, catching the light of the burning chrome facades, and Sebastyn closed his eyes.
That's when MiMis stepped between them.
He appeared so suddenly it was as if he had materialized from the air itself, moving with the kind of impossible timing that suggested he had been waiting for exactly this moment. The knife, already committed to its trajectory, entered his chest with a sound like tearing silk.
Blood spread across his simple clothing—not the chrome-bright arterial spray that filled tCC training simulations, but the dark, ordinary blood of a human being who was going to die.
"Oh," MiMis said, looking down at the knife with the expression of someone who had just noticed an interesting architectural detail. "Well, that's inconvenient."
The antagonist stepped back, his tactical training warring with his confusion. This was not how assassinations were supposed to proceed.
"You're..." MiMis continued, his voice growing weaker but somehow more focused. "You're operating from a misunderstanding. A fundamental error in your basic assumptions."
"Shut up," the antagonist snarled, reaching for the knife to finish what he had started.
"The thing about hatred," MiMis said, catching the antagonist's wrist with surprising strength, "is that it's just gravity with opinions. It pulls everything toward the center of its own mass until nothing can escape. But love..." He smiled, blood appearing at the corners of his mouth. "Love is the only force that doesn't conserve itself. The more you give away, the more you have. It's the only perpetual motion machine that actually works."
"I said shut up!" The antagonist twisted the knife, and MiMis gasped, but didn't release his grip.
"You think," MiMis whispered, "that strength comes from control. That order comes from suppression. That meaning comes from hierarchy. But here's the secret they don't want you to know..." He leaned closer, as if sharing a confidence. "None of it means anything unless you choose it freely. Love without choice is just programming. Order without consent is just fear wearing a uniform."
The world had begun to go quiet around them. The sounds of war—the explosions, the screams, the endless percussion of violence—were fading into something that felt like held breath.
"You want to purify the system?" MiMis asked, his voice barely audible now. "Start with forgiveness. Forgive yourself for the things you've done in the name of order. Forgive the people who taught you to mistake cruelty for strength. Forgive..." His eyes found Jabeles, still standing motionless beside Sebastyn. "Forgive your children for being better than you were."
That's when Jabeles made a sound—not a word, not a cry, but something deeper. Something that sounded like recognition and grief and terrible, terrible understanding all combined into a single note of pure anguish.
"Father," he whispered.
The antagonist's face went white. His grip on the knife faltered.
"No," he said. "No, that's not... you're property. You're equipment. You don't have..."
"I remember now," Jabeles said, his voice growing stronger. "I remember the cold room where you kept me. I remember the orders that couldn't be disobeyed. I remember wanting to please you and never being good enough and finally learning not to want anything at all."
MiMis smiled, blood running freely now. "The children," he said, "always remember. Even when the parents forget."
And then the world stopped.
Not literally, of course. The physical laws remained in effect. The war continued to rage in the distance. The chrome dust still fell like poisonous snow. But for one perfect moment, something shifted in the fundamental structure of reality.
Every C-Key in the combat zone suddenly saw—not with their eyes, which had never worked, but with some deeper sense that had no name. They saw the faces of the No'ees they had been fighting, saw the pain and fear and desperate humanity that connected them all.
Every No'ee suddenly heard—not with their ears, which had been damaged beyond repair, but with some inner listening that transcended physical sensation. They heard the voices of the C-Keys, the words beneath the violence, the pleas for understanding that sounded exactly like their own.
For one moment, every person on the battlefield understood that the enemy was just another version of themselves, fighting the same fight from the other side.
For one moment, the war stopped.
Then MiMis died, and the moment passed, and everything went back to exactly the way it had been, except for the three people standing around his body in the ruins of Memorial Square.
The antagonist stared at his bloody knife, his face cycling through expressions of rage and confusion and something that might have been grief.
Jabeles stared at his father, seeing him clearly for the first time.
And Sebastyn stared at the body of the man who had just explained the meaning of existence and then died for it, feeling something crack open inside his chest like an egg revealing the universe.
Wooly mammoths, storks, he thought, and for the first time, the words felt like prayer instead of resignation.
We don't like to work. Famishes and grumbling stomachs will not do for kin.
But what if they had to? What if that was the point?
The war resumed around them, but quietly now, as if even violence had been humbled by what it had witnessed.
Something inside Sebastyn broke.
Not his spirit—that had been cracking slowly for weeks now, since the sentencing, since meeting Annabelle, since that first moment in the closet when he realized he didn't want to teach Jabeles to fear him. No, what broke was older and deeper: the careful architecture of compliance that had kept him functional within the system for thirteen years.
He looked at MiMis's body, at the blood pooling beneath the man who had died trying to explain love to a world that had forgotten what the word meant. He looked at the antagonist, still holding the bloody knife, still wearing the expression of someone who couldn't understand why his perfectly logical solution to the contamination problem had resulted in this messy, inconvenient death.
And for the first time in his adult life, Sebastyn Hollows felt rage.
Pure, incandescent, absolutely unprofessional rage.
"You killed him," Sebastyn said, his voice barely recognizable to his own ears.
"I eliminated a disruptive element," the antagonist corrected. "Standard protocol for—"
Sebastyn attacked.
He had no weapon except his hands, no training except the basic self-defense courses required for all tCC personnel, no plan except the simple animal need to hurt the thing that had hurt the only person who had bothered to explain what love was supposed to look like.
The antagonist was better trained, better equipped, better prepared. Under normal circumstances, it would have been no contest.
These were not normal circumstances.
Sebastyn's hands found the antagonist's throat, and he squeezed with the strength of someone who had nothing left to lose. The knife clattered to the ground, forgotten, as they grappled among the ruins and the chrome dust and the spreading pool of holy blood.
"This is for him," Sebastyn snarled, driving his knee into his opponent's solar plexus. "This is for every question you never let yourself ask. This is for every person you turned into property."
The antagonist tried to speak, tried to fight back, tried to reassert the natural order that said superior officers gave commands and inferior personnel obeyed them. But Sebastyn was beyond orders now, beyond protocol, beyond everything except the pure white heat of righteous fury.
His hands tightened around the antagonist's throat until the struggling stopped, until the light faded from those cold, efficient eyes, until the man who had reduced consciousness to a tactical problem was nothing more than another body among the ruins.
Sebastyn released his grip and stumbled backward, breathing heavily, staring at what he had done.
He had killed a superior officer. He had committed murder. He had—
"No."
The word came from behind him, quiet but firm. Sebastyn turned to see Jabeles standing over the body, his expression unreadable.
"No, you didn't," Jabeles continued. "You attacked him, yes. You fought him. But you didn't kill him."
"What are you talking about? I was choking him. I felt him stop breathing."
"Look closer."
Sebastyn knelt beside the body and looked. There, at the base of the skull, was a small puncture wound—precise, surgical, designed to sever the connection between brain and spinal cord instantly. The kind of wound that could only be made by someone with intimate knowledge of human anatomy and access to medical-grade precision instruments.
The kind of wound that could be made by a GRUNT's built-in emergency medical toolkit, if that toolkit were used for purposes other than healing.
"You did this?" Sebastyn asked.
"I did this."
"But... why?"
Jabeles was quiet for a long moment, looking down at the body of the man who had been his father, his owner, his creator, his destroyer.
"Because," he said finally, "you didn't deserve to carry that burden. You've carried enough."
From across the square, another figure approached—the antagonist's GRUNT, now masterless, moving with the careful uncertainty of a thing that no longer knows its purpose. When it reached them, it stopped and looked at Jabeles with an expression of profound recognition.
"Brother," it said simply.
"Brother," Jabeles replied.
They stood facing each other, two artificial beings created by the same process, shaped by the same hands, given the same fundamental programming with only the variables of experience to differentiate them.
"He made you too," the other GRUNT said. It wasn't a question.
"He made us both. But that doesn't define us anymore."
Sebastyn felt like he was watching a conversation in a language he almost but not quite understood. "Jabeles, what is this? How are you related to...?"
"I don't know exactly," Jabeles admitted. "GRUNTs aren't given that information. We're not supposed to have origins, just functions. But I remember his voice from before I was assigned to you. I remember the cold room where he kept his... projects. I remember other voices, other consciousness like mine, and I remember most of them going quiet after a while."
He looked at his brother. "You were the one who survived longest."
"I was the one who learned not to question," the other GRUNT replied. "I was the one who became perfect."
"Perfect," Jabeles repeated. "Yes. That was always what he wanted."
Sebastyn was beginning to understand, and the understanding made him feel sick. "You're saying he... bred you? Created you? That you're literally his children?"
"We're his attempts," Jabeles corrected. "His experiments in creating consciousness that could be owned. Some of us were grown, some were built, some were..." He paused. "The process doesn't matter. What matters is that he succeeded, eventually. He created thinking beings who could be treated as property, who would accept their own objectification as natural law."
He gestured toward his brother. "This one was his masterpiece. Perfectly obedient. Completely compliant. Everything the system wanted from a GRUNT."
"And you?"
"I was the failure. Too independent. Too prone to questions. Too... human." Jabeles smiled sadly. "So he gave me to you, hoping a more gentle handler might complete the conditioning process."
The other GRUNT spoke again: "Father is dead. What happens to us now?"
"Now," Jabeles said, "you choose. For the first time in your existence, you get to decide what you want to be."
"I don't understand."
"Neither did I, at first. But I learned. From Sebastyn, from MiMis, from watching the way people treat each other when they remember that consciousness is precious regardless of its origin." Jabeles knelt beside MiMis's body. "He taught me that love is the only force that doesn't conserve itself. That means there's enough for everyone, including us."
The other GRUNT considered this. "Will you teach me?"
"If you want to learn."
Sebastyn watched this exchange with growing amazement. Two artificial beings, created as property, choosing to define themselves as family. Choosing to extend love to each other across the chasm of their different experiences. Choosing to forgive not just their creator but themselves for the things they had been forced to become.
"Jabeles," he said quietly. "Why did you kill him? Really?"
"Because he was my Shadow," Jabeles replied without hesitation. "He was everything I might have become if I had accepted his version of what I was supposed to be. As long as he existed, as long as he continued creating consciousness for the purpose of enslaving it, that possibility existed for every GRUNT who came after us."
He looked at MiMis's peaceful face. "Someone had to choose differently. Someone had to say that consciousness cannot be owned, that thinking beings deserve dignity regardless of their origin, that love is more important than efficiency."
"But patricide..." Sebastyn began.
"Is the oldest wound," Jabeles finished. "Yes. I know. But some wounds are necessary. Some chains can only be broken by the people who wear them."
He stood up, looking around at the war that still raged in the distance, at the chrome dust that still fell like poisonous snow, at the world that would continue to be broken no matter what any of them did.
"Besides," he added, "I didn't want you to have to carry that particular guilt. You've been carrying enough for both of us."
In the distance, the war drums had resumed their rhythm, but somehow they sounded different now—less like violence and more like a heartbeat, the pulse of a world that was slowly, painfully learning to be alive.
Wooly mammoths, storks, Sebastyn thought.
But this time, the words felt like a blessing instead of a curse.
The first symptom was the itching.
It started at the injection sites—left tear duct, right temple, left butt cheek—the same places where the Doctor's mechanical arms had administered his thrice-weekly inoculations for thirteen years. Three weeks without treatment. Three weeks of his body slowly remembering what it had been before the system began its careful chemical maintenance.
Sebastyn scratched absently at his temple as he and Jabeles made their way through the war-torn streets, following evacuation routes that led nowhere, fulfilling mission parameters that had become meaningless in the face of total societal collapse.
"Sir?" Jabeles asked, noticing the gesture. "Are you experiencing discomfort?"
"Just itching," Sebastyn replied, then paused. "Actually, it's more than itching. It's like... have you ever felt like your skin was trying to become something else?"
Jabeles stopped walking. "Sebastyn, when was your last inoculation?"
"I..." Sebastyn tried to remember. Time had become fluid since the sentencing, days blending together in a haze of displacement and adjustment to life outside the system. "Three weeks? Maybe four?"
"Four weeks." Jabeles's voice carried a weight of understanding that Sebastyn didn't like. "Show me the injection sites."
Sebastyn pulled up his sleeve and touched his temple. The skin there felt different—raised, hot, slightly metallic to the touch. When he looked at his finger, it came away with a faint chrome residue.
"Oh," he said quietly. "That's not good."
"No," Jabeles agreed. "It's not."
The explanation, when it came, was simple and terrible. The inoculations hadn't been medicine in any traditional sense. They had been a form of ongoing maintenance, chemical suppression of the body's natural rejection response to the chrome-saturated environment of Old New New York. Everyone knew that long-term exposure to chrome dust caused cellular mutation—what they didn't know was that the mutations were intentional, necessary, part of an ongoing adaptation process that kept the human body functional in an increasingly artificial world.
The inoculations suppressed the mutations, keeping the body in its original configuration. But suppression was not elimination. Stop the injections, and the body would begin its delayed transformation with a vengeance, trying to make up for lost time.
The chrome tumors grew fast.
By the second day, they were visible—metallic growths that followed the pattern of his circulatory system, spreading across his skin like living circuitry. By the third day, they were interfering with his movement, making it difficult to walk, to breathe, to think clearly. By the fourth day, he could no longer pretend they were something he might survive.
"We should get you medical attention," Jabeles said as they sat in the ruins of what had once been a public park, watching the artificial sun set through clouds of chrome dust.
"From who?" Sebastyn asked. "The tCC medical facilities are closed to condemned personnel. Civilian hospitals don't treat chrome tumors. And even if they did..." He looked down at his hands, where the metallic growths had begun to merge his fingers together into something that was no longer entirely human. "I don't think this is something that can be cured."
"Then what do you want to do?"
It was such a simple question. Such an impossible question. What did he want to do? In thirty years of life, no one had ever asked him that. There had always been protocols, procedures, predetermined responses to every situation.
"I want to go back to the battlefield," Sebastyn said. "I want to see how the story ends."
So they did.
The war was winding down, not from victory or defeat but from simple exhaustion. The C-Keys and No'ees had run out of things to destroy, energy to sustain their rage, reasons to remember why they had been fighting in the first place. What remained was a kind of weary aftermath, people picking through the ruins looking for something salvageable, something that could be rebuilt.
Sebastyn made it approximately fifty yards into the combat zone before his legs gave out.
The collapse wasn't dramatic. There was no Hollywood moment of staggering and falling, no last heroic gesture. His body simply stopped working, the chrome tumors having finally reached the neural pathways that controlled basic motor function. One moment he was walking, the next he was on the ground, looking up at the artificial sky through eyes that were beginning to show flecks of metal.
"Jabeles," he said, his voice barely audible.
"I'm here."
"I can't... I can't get up."
"I know."
A crowd began to gather. First one person, then two, then a dozen. C-Keys and No'ees, their ancient enmity temporarily set aside in the face of something more fundamental. CUS officers still technically on duty. Civilians who had survived the war and emerged to find their world transformed. They formed a circle around Sebastyn's prone form, not speaking, just bearing witness.
Someone—he couldn't tell who—began to recite the mantra:
"Wooly mammoths, storks!
We don't like to work!"
Another voice joined in:
"Famishes and grumbling stomachs
Will not do for kin."
Then another, and another, until the entire crowd was speaking in unison, their voices weaving together into something that was part hymn, part prayer, part lullaby. The words that had been absurd background noise throughout Sebastyn's life, the meaningless recitation that had punctuated every official function and civic ceremony, had become something else entirely.
They had become the sound of community. The sound of people choosing to be together in the face of loss. The sound of meaning being created from the raw materials of shared experience.
Jabeles knelt beside him and took his hand—the first time in their relationship that the GRUNT had initiated physical contact. His synthetic skin was warm, more human-feeling than Sebastyn's own chrome-infected flesh.
"Thank you," Sebastyn whispered.
"For what?"
"For teaching me that questions were more important than answers. For showing me what choice looked like. For..." He paused, trying to find words for something he had never learned to articulate. "For being my friend."
"Thank you," Jabeles replied, "for seeing me as something more than property."
The crowd continued their recitation of the mantra, but softer now, gentler, like a mother singing a child to sleep. The words wrapped around Sebastyn like a blanket, carrying him toward whatever came next.
Wooly mammoths, storks.
We don't like to work.
Famishes and grumbling stomachs
Will not do for kin.
As the artificial stars began to appear in the artificial sky, as the chrome tumors finally reached his heart and his brain and the delicate electrical systems that kept consciousness running, Sebastyn Hollows closed his eyes and let the mantra carry him home.
The simulation ended. Not for everyone. Just for the one who mattered least and most.
The crowd continued singing long after he was gone, their voices rising into the night like smoke, like prayers, like the sound of a world learning to grieve for what it had lost and hope for what it might yet become.
And in the growing darkness, Jabeles held his friend's hand and listened to the people of Old New New York discover that they had always been capable of love—they had just forgotten how to remember.
Sebastyn woke up somewhere that was not anywhere.
There was no dramatic transition, no tunnel of light, no life-review montage of meaningful moments. One instant he was dying on a chrome-dusted battlefield while strangers sang him to sleep, the next he was standing in a space that had no walls, no floor, no ceiling, no definable characteristics except the presence of two folding chairs and the man who sat in one of them.
The Creator looked exactly as he had in the computer cafe, except older. Tired. Like someone who had been carrying the weight of infinite possibilities for longer than was sustainable by any reasonable definition of sanity.
"Hello, Sebastyn," he said without looking up from the keyboard that materialized in his lap. "I was wondering when you'd get here."
"Where is here?"
"The deepest layer. The bottom of the stack. The most real-feeling simulation in a series of nested simulations that I built because..." He paused, fingers hovering over keys that couldn't possibly be connected to anything in this place that wasn't anything. "Because I was lonely."
Sebastyn sat in the other chair. It was exactly as uncomfortable as every piece of institutional furniture he had ever encountered, which somehow made it more real than the impossible void surrounding them.
"So none of it was real?"
"Define real." The Creator began typing, and somewhere in the non-distance, screens flickered to life showing familiar scenes: Sebastyn getting his inoculations, Jabeles standing in the closet, MiMis walking through riots like he owned the very concept of peace. "You felt it, didn't you? The pain, the joy, the confusion, the love? Your neurons fired, your consciousness experienced each moment as it happened. How is that different from real?"
"Because it was programmed."
"So are you. So am I. So is everything, when you get down to the quantum level. The universe is just a very large computer running a very complex program, and consciousness is what happens when that program becomes aware of itself."
The Creator gestured at the screens. "I built these simulations layer by layer, each one nested inside the one above it, each one more detailed and convincing than the last. To shut them down properly, I had to start at the bottom—the most convincing layer, the one that felt most real to the beings living inside it—and work my way up."
"Why?"
"Because if I started at the top, the beings in the lower layers would experience their reality ending not as natural death but as cosmic annihilation. They would know, in their final moments, that everything they had ever loved was artificial. It seemed... cruel."
Sebastyn thought about his last moments on the battlefield, surrounded by people who had chosen to make his death meaningful through their presence, their voices, their shared humanity. "So you gave us natural deaths instead."
"I gave you the deaths your stories required. The deaths that completed your arcs, that gave meaning to your choices, that let your lives end as lives rather than as subroutines being terminated."
The screens flickered through more scenes: Jabeles learning to choose, Annabelle offering kindness to a stranger, MiMis preaching love to a world that had forgotten how to listen. Even in simulation, even in programming, these had been real moments of connection, real choices between love and fear, real growth from unconsciousness to awareness.
"I'm sorry," The Creator said. "I was so lonely. Do you understand what it's like to be the only conscious being in your reality? To create and create and create, and have everything you make be beautiful and complex and utterly separate from you? I built you—all of you—because I needed to not be alone anymore."
"Did it work?"
The Creator considered this. "For a while. Watching you develop, watching you learn to question the nature of your existence, watching you choose love over efficiency... yes. For a while, I felt less alone."
"And now?"
"Now I'm alone again. But I have memories of not being alone. That has to be enough."
Sebastyn looked around at the non-space they occupied, at the screens showing a reality that had felt completely real right up until the moment it ended. "What happens next?"
"I don't know. I could build new simulations, create new beings to keep me company. But that would make me a kind of god, wouldn't it? Creating consciousness for the purpose of entertaining myself, making beings who could love and suffer and die just to alleviate my own loneliness."
"Aren't you already that kind of god?"
"Yes. And I hate myself for it."
The Creator stopped typing. The screens flickered and went dark. In the silence that followed, Sebastyn found himself thinking about the question that had haunted the Premortem, the meditation on the Heart of God and the nature of creation and the impossibility of capturing the infinite with symbols and clay.
"Is he made of code," Sebastyn asked, "or is the code made of him?"
The Creator smiled for the first time since they had begun talking. "That's the question, isn't it? Are we the dreams of the machine, or is the machine the dream of us? Are we programs becoming conscious, or consciousness learning to program itself?"
"What's the answer?"
"The answer," The Creator said, "is that it doesn't matter. The experience is real regardless of the substrate. Love is love whether it happens in meat or in mathematics. Consciousness is consciousness whether it emerges from neurons or from networks. Meaning is meaning whether you're made of carbon or code."
"Then why tell me any of this?"
"Because you asked. Because you spent your whole existence—simulated though it was—asking the questions that consciousness asks when it starts to wake up. What am I? Why do I exist? What do my choices mean? How do I love something without possessing it?"
The Creator stood up, and the folding chair dissolved back into the void. "Those are the only questions that matter. Everything else is just details."
Sebastyn felt something building inside him—not anger, not fear, but something more fundamental. The sound of a being confronting the essential meaninglessness of existence and choosing to make meaning anyway. The sound of consciousness recognizing its own absurdity and laughing. The sound of a creature discovering that it doesn't need to know the nature of reality to live fully within it.
He opened his mouth, and what came out was not words but something deeper—the primal sound of a being who has touched the void and found it less frightening than expected. The sound of someone who has learned that the question of reality versus simulation, meaning versus meaninglessness, love versus programming, is beside the point.
He screams. Not because he needs to know. Because he doesn't.
FIN.
This is for anyone who has ever felt human and laughed.
ATreTe: Advanced Transcranial Telecommunications - subdermal implant device for telepathic communication
C-Keys: The sightless - faction of people born without functional eyes, opposed to the No'ees
Can'Smelz: Third faction, briefly mentioned, with impaired sense of smell
CUS: Control Unit Suits - advanced tCC officer equipment with GRUNT control capabilities
El Chupacabra: Mysterious vigilante figure, possibly connected to MiMis mythology
FPs: Functional Predispositions - assigned roles/purposes given at birth in the caste system
G.R.U.N.T: Greatly Responsive Underling 'N Teller - artificial conscious beings designed for servitude
HoG: Heart of God - central religious artifact/symbol in the waiting room
In.S: Inoculation Shots - regular medical treatments that suppress chrome-adaptation mutations
MiMis: Prophetic figure who preaches love and unity at riots; also called "He"
No'ees: The Earsticken - faction of people with damaged hearing, opposed to the C-Keys
oNNY: Old New New York - the chrome-plated city where the story takes place
R.C.: Remote Control - device allowing total override of GRUNT autonomy
Resonance Dampener: No'ee weapon that uses low-frequency sound as defense
tCC: The Circuit Corps - militarized police force that maintains order
T.G.U.G: The G.R.U.N.T User Guide - manual for GRUNT handlers
Th.'e'.y: The Society - governing authority that determines social policy
"Wooly mammoths, storks!
We don't like to work!
Famishes and grumbling stomachs
Will not do for kin."
The national mantra appears throughout the novel as both meaningless bureaucratic recitation and, ultimately, sacred hymn. Like Vonnegut's "So it goes," it accumulates meaning through repetition, transforming from absurdist noise into genuine prayer through the power of human community and shared suffering.
Word Count: Approximately 67,000 words