And I'm Not a Gauddamn Cloister, Buttbrain!
Sage was daydreaming in Intro to Datamancy, awaiting the tone that would end her last class of the day. Soon she would leave behind her Normative Education experience and move into higher learning, but for now, she was still stuck in the meat grinder and it was all she could do to pretend she wasn't being processed. The moment the tone sounded, her bag was packed and slung over her shoulder. She was out the door before the tone could even finish reverberating.
In this final year, she had no classes with Theodicy. They ate lunch together and the met up every day after the final tone. This, of course, when Theodicy even came. Today was one of the many she had skipped the first half of her classes. Sage knew she would be waiting for her out front though. They sent messages back and forth constantly. The two of them could never really be apart for too long, even if often they needed to be umbilicalized by streams of signal pulsating through the æther. On this day, Sage knew that Theodicy was champing to see her because Sage had told her friend that she had some news.
Sage squirreled through the swirling masses of people. She darted expertly between the zipping and unzipping teeth of the crowds. And there was Theodicy, waiting where they always waited for each other, a mess of light brown curls and overlarge clothing.
"Gauddamnit I'm going crazy," said Theodicy squeezing her friend, "What the butt is this news?"
"Okay, okay don't freak out, but I think I met someone cool," said Sage.
"Cooler than me?" asked Theodicy, with a mock fluff at her big curly hair.
"Of course not," replied Sage grabbing her friend by the shoulders.
"Is it… a guy?" asked Theodicy.
"It is," replied Sage.
"Oh Gaud, good, you need to get out there,"" laughed Theodicy, looking over her large glasses.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, do not get ahead of yourself there."
"I'm just saying, it is very abnormal of you to never date and never express any interest in anyone all through Normative," teased Theodicy.
"Technically I have," said Sage, "besides, I thought that's why you liked me."
"Okay, first, we don't count that and second, you think I like you because you are a cloister?"
"Because I'm abnormal, you dolt!"
"Oh yes, that. Definitely."
"And I'm not a gauddamn cloister, buttbrain!"
"If you say so."
Sage giggled and mock strangled her friend.
"I'm just saying," said Theodicy, wrestling Sages hands from her neck and holding them by the wrists, "You have your pick of every gender of smoke around here and you live like a," Theodicy paused here to slap Sage with her own hand, "cloister."
The pair doubled over with laughter, Theodicy still holding Sage by her wrists.
"Kay okay," said Theodicy, sliding her hands back into Sage's, "tell me about this completely platonic relationship you have entered into where you will shave your eyebrows for Gaud and meditate all day."
"His name is Julian and I met him at Crossmaker Crossing."
"And he's a big weird nerd?"
"No, that would mean I have an obvious type, and I am anything but obvious."
"Hey, okay, first of all, go fuck yourself, second I already told you, as I have told you a million times that that one does not count, and third, maybe go fuck yourself some more."
"He's kind of cool and mysterious actually."
"So you do have an obvious type?"
"So it does count?"
"Are we doing this again? It does not count toward your total Normative romantic encounter counter if you pass someone a note when you are twelve telling them you think they are pretty and you become best friends."
"Hey, I think I get points for courage."
"Yes, you very ‘courageously' passed a note telling an," Theodicy mock fluffed her hair again, "obviously very pretty person they were pretty because they had a Divertido you wanted to come over and play. ‘Diabolical' is more the word I would use."
"Ah, you love it."
Theodicy rolled her eyes with a huge grin.
"So I am supposed to meet up with him in three days and you are absolutely coming with me."
"Are you gonna invite your mom too?"
"I'm about to invite your butt to the pavement."
"Fine, I will go with you. Very courageous to invite your best friend to come on your date with you."
The pair doubled over laughing again.
"It's not a date though," said Sage, wiping her eye.
"When we get there, and it's a date, you owe me… hmm… five currents."
The Void Window
Theodicy's room was always a mess. It was not dirty, just infinitely cluttered. She was a relatively clean person… a constantly distracted and disorganized one, but relatively clean. Sage sat in the swiveling OMEGA chair next to the pile of glossies, and Theodicy sat on her bed, making a Red Liquid. She pulled the stopper from the vial and dipped the tiny spoon into the brick red powder inside. Three of these spoonfuls went into Theodicy's glass, and then it was filled with water. The mixture swirled slowly, and then more quickly as Theodicy put the glass stirrer in and made a rapidly turning whirlpool. The familiar deep chemical crimson evolved in the glass. Theodicy chugged.
Sage held the trash can in wait. Theodicy winced hard, but spewed only a modest amount, owing to her slightly greater experience with the Red. Sage watched as her friend leaned back with eyes widening. All the tiny almost imperceptible hairs on Theodicy seemed to stand on end at once and the hair on her head frizzed slightly. She hugged herself and rocked just slightly. Her crisscrossed legs seemed to tighten. Unblinking eyes wide as dinner plates now, her pupils expanded and contracted slowly, like they were breathing. None of this was shocking to Sage. None of this was even that notable. These were the postures and physical signs of someone on the Red Liquid. Theodicy's nostrils flared. When it came on, your breath was held for a few moments before you started to breathe strongly through your nose with mouth clamped shut.
Sage remembered the first time she had watched this. Theodicy had warned her that it would look weird, but that everything was okay. She had been terrified. It was now normal though. She had been right to think that first night that these experiments would continue. The two of them took turns venturing into the Hauntologic Hallway mostly every night and then comparing notes. They had found a Cathedral made of knives and twine. They had explored an iridescent jungle in blue and pink tones where giant tree-cyborgs roamed. Once, Theodicy had found herself in a wasteland with an endless procession of vehicles in the distance. This one was terrifying to both of them, though Sage had chosen not to venture there after hearing about it. Theodicy had talked about being watched ever closely by The Moon, a persistent and even oppressive gaze. When vine-like black tentacles had burst from the ground and tried to grab her, she had run for the door never looking back.
Sage watched the tension in Theodicy slowly melt away and knew that she was returning to the room. It would be a moment before Theodicy could speak. Sage handed her friend a glass of clear water. Theodicy grasped it tightly and sipped slowly. You may know that if you try to speak immediately when returning to the room after an adventure with the Red Liquid, you will find your voice an unintelligible creak. The throat is dry when you return. You need to lubricate your vocal cords.
If you are not familiar, then you won't know that the mind can be a bit scattered as well. While the trip into the lands which the Red Liquid is a gateway to seems almost like a lift-off, like the psyche is being shot into some type of other space that is up, but in some orthogonal, spiritual way to your starting position as a fully integrated aspect of your body, the return is more like wherever you have gone melts or burns away and you find yourself back where you started. Those who subscribe to a non-dualist notion of psyche and body will say that this is impossible, that it is merely metaphorical at best. A non-dualist interpretation is that you hallucinate something and the hallucination ends as this psychoactive compound's effects dissipate. Indeed, even a dualist could easily subscribe to this notion. It is not a prerequisite that a dualist should believe that alchemical compounds can send the psyche elsewhere while the body remains. But in any event, the perception at least of transportation is quite vivid. At this particular moment, I do not ask you to take any side on dualist or non-dualist, transport or hallucination. I can't promise you will never be forced to wrestle with such questions. All I ask now is that, if you have never experienced the Red Liquid in particular, please keep an open mind about what is possible. On another note, I would also ask that you allow these indulgences from time to time. There are moments in which it makes no sense to limit myself to the thoughts and actions of the players I am at that moment describing. I could have pretended to be Sage Seer and written all of this from her point of view, and then such asides to my audience might seem less intrusive. After all, there is nothing she knows that I don't. And clearly, this story follows her closely. She is what you might call the protagonist. But I admire her too much to pretend I am worthy of that. For all her flaws, I cannot pretend to be as good or as courageous a person as she is.
"I found the big technological complex again," said Theodicy when she had regained the ability.
"Did you make any headway this time?" asked Sage.
"Nah, that place is more of a maze that the Hallway it feels like."
"Did you see any people?"
"Nope, nobody."
"A couple of posters on the Cartographer's Forum have said they found people there. They guy in the hospital bed, for example. I don't know why we never see anyone."
"Seems like the place is huge. I'd guess there aren't many people to be found. I did try to access one of the OMEGA terminals. I can't really explain what I saw. The screen did a bunch of stuff really fast. I think it asked for commands and credentials a few times. Obviously, I probably wouldn't even know what to do with that anyways, but it was too fast to even fully read, and the language seems different."
"King Laz on the Forum thinks it's the future."
"King Laz is some weirdo conspiracy theorist."
"I mean, you're just describing yourself now."
"Ha ha, but like really, that guy is a fucking nutjob. I have a healthy distrust of the powers that be. That guy thinks he's one of the part-Yeti elites that has been repressed by society."
"Okay, yes, he's crazy, but also like we know the Yeti existed and we know they did genetic experiments. I only think maybe he jumps to too many conclusions because he's like psychically ill or something, but he could be right about some things."
"I mean, now you're just describing yourself."
"Grrr, just mix me a Red, buttbrain."
"Okay okay, don't get your podryasnik in a twist."
Theodicy mixed the Red for Sage as she had done her own. Sage took it and winced psychometrially before enacting the scene and swallowing hard and fast. Ascension began. The harlequin flag waved and melted. Psychic acid burned away the world until Sage found herself standing at a place she instinctively felt was at a low altitude, looking out a window. A window? No! The Cartographer's Forum had many legends, and all but one were of doors. Only one legend contained mention of a window and it was one of the most fearsome ones of all. Sage had read all the legends of the one window in the Hauntologic Hallway. The name cartographers had settled on was the Void Window. The legend was that some who traveled long enough in the Hallway, those who used an IV drip or the tactic called dunking, where the moment they began to come back to themselves a friend poured more Red down their throat, and continued exploring, avoiding entering any doors, might eventually find themselves at the Void Window. All who did were compelled to look out and lost most of themselves for it. It was said that what they saw was the pure emptiness outside of the Hallway, the void in which the structure floated. These people returned a gibbering mess. Details of the Void Window legend were pieced together, supposedly, from the mutterings of these individuals. They would babble about having seen it and turning away as quickly as they could and running. It was one of a handful of terrifying possibilities one risked by entering, but no one had ever ended up there, according to every legend anyhow, upon entry. The belief was that it was the lowest point in the structure of the Hallway, and travelers there always entered somewhere in the middle. But here she was, entering right there facing the window and unable to close her eyes without in some sense beholding the fullness of what was outside.
Sage could never describe to anyone what she saw there. I can try, but understand that it is probably indescribable. This is because sight is a sense with limitations and what she saw, truly in some sense saw, was beyond those limitations by which sight is innately bounded. She saw nothing. She did not see an endless pure white expanse or a blackness beyond pitch, but nothing at all. What she saw was not small. What she saw was not large. She saw a space, or more accurately a lack thereof, somehow both infinite and infinitesimal. She saw exactly the thing that one cannot see, that which does not exist materially. She saw not an object off which light ricocheted to her retina, nor an empty, lightless expanse. She saw nothing. She saw true void. Because, as I have told you, I am not Sage, I can describe it in these ways. I can box this up neatly for you. But Sage, having been the one to see it, never could for anyone. She would not even try. She would only say, as I have, that what she saw she could not describe any further than to say she could not describe it.
To say that Sage was gripped with fear, knowing that she was standing at one of the most horrifying places in all the Hallway, would be an understatement. Her entire form shivered with fear, and it is probably fair to say that she went to some place beyond shock. She came probably as close to death as anyone had ever come without being dead. But since she was here, since as soon as her normal world had melted away she was already looking out the Void Window and there was nothing to be done about it, Sage decided to gaze long and hard. Sage Seer stared out the Void Window, experiencing that which is not experienceable, seeing the thing which cannot be seen for full two and a half minutes… the longest eternity anyone has ever known and a mere blip in the life of our hero.
The Longest Fall Ever Fallen
Space in Sage's normal life was not forever changed, but for just a brief time in her story, but such a long, long time in her perception, she was falling. She fell like she was almost weightless, but gravity had never felt so strong. She felt in her fall the force of a neutrino rocketing from a star, that she could pass through almost anything at the speed of light and not be hindered. Falling would be, she thought, the rest of her life. But at the same time, she felt like the heaviest thing, the enormous black hole whose gravity let nothing escape. Was she falling, or was she pulling the ground toward herself under the force of her own collapse? Every tiny subdivision of her fall was an instant frozen. It seemed as if she could count to infinity before she moved noticeably. She had so much time to observe herself that she was sure she could think every possible thought in that time. And yet, her mind seemed slow as well, heavy in its own way. Could she monkey typewriter her way through the Library of Babel in ultra-slow-motion? It certainly felt that way. It certainly felt like she would be omniscient before she had moved an inch, since she had time to solve every problem ever in her head. Even still, like so many things in Sage Seer's life, before she knew it, the longest fall ever fallen was over, and she had not thought of anything but to register her state of motion.
Untouchable by the Tentacular Vines of Death
She could feel the carpet against her face and sense Theodicy scrambling off the bed to kneel at her side. Sage could hear her name being called out in a worried tone. Just for a moment, she could not move or speak. She'd fallen out of the chair she was in and faceplanted. Her body buzzed and hummed and tingled. Some of this was probably the fall and some was obviously the departing of the Red Liquid. Without a doubt, at least some part must have been her window gazing experience. At first she was sure that her mind had been obliterated by this experience and she would spend the rest of her life being strapped regularly to a bed to avoid hurting herself. She would be that example of permanent psychosis the legends described. But, paranoid as this thought might seem, it did seem clear. It seemed to Sage that her mind was in most ways just what it had always been. She was rattled, extremely so, to be sure, but she felt… okay. Very mildly injured from falling from a chair, not quite ready to speak, but she knew after Theodicy helped her right herself and let her drink some water that she would be the Sage Seer she had been a few minutes ago. She would be that Sage at least as much as she had ever been that idealized version of a person. Sage, the Sage that Sage recognized herself to be, was after all given to an ontologer's flights of fancy. She knew that the psyche was a hard puzzle. She knew that there might be an argument for there being no real Sage. But she knew, as she reached out her arm and let her friend help her back to the swiveling chair she had fallen from, that she was as much Sage Seer as Sage Seer had ever been. Theodicy would not be writing on the Cartographer's Forum about her friend who had become another victim of the Void Window.
The two of them did not lie to each other. They did of course, like all people do, sometimes say things to each other about their own thoughts, feelings, motivations that were not strictly accurate. But knowingly misleading each other, and in fact accusing one another of doing so was not really something these two girls did. They trusted each other and did not violate that trust. It's not anything either of them would ever think to say out loud, but they were such good friends precisely because they both valued both the ability to feel safe being honest and they both valued each other enough to always try to be straightforward. So it's not a small thing when I tell you that for a moment, when Sage had told her friend the story of her experience, Theodicy, just one time, and not vehemently, but not at all rhetorically, question her friend Sage as to whether what she was saying was true. But this is still a credit to their trust of each other. If anyone else but Sage had said it, while Theodicy may not have openly questioned it any harder, she would not have believed them. She believed Sage. If Sage had been talking to anyone but Theodicy, she would have kept the experience to herself.
After a long and convoluted explanation from Sage, the pair sat in silence for a long time. It was maybe the first moment where the both of them had realized that they were messing with something serious. Sage thought it very strange that even though she had survived something that supposedly no one else had, she felt a little less invincible afterward. It's often said of people this age, just moving into adulthood, that they think of themselves that way, untouchable by the tentacular vines of of death. Sage was sure she had escaped something though. But she did, on some level, think it might be something special about her that pulled her through. In just a few short weeks she had seen what she understood to be two of the rarest things to see in the Hauntologic Hallway. In fact, her meeting with the Jackal of H(e)arts had been on her first trip into that space. And now just short time later she had come out relatively unscathed after encountering one of the darkest legends Cartographer's talked about. What she had read people write about in the grammatical equivalent of hushed tones over and over, had become just a bit short of commonplace for her. She felt lucky to be alive. She also felt a certain sense of protagony about herself. She felt what all heroes of postmodern mythology feel, what, in fact, many people in general feel when confronted with an ending and avoiding it: that she was moving on a track toward something that was certain for everyone, but that it would somehow only come at just the right time. The endless question is: how wrong are we about this?
Sage found herself thinking about the book from the new arrivals section of Crossmaker Crossing. She wondered about the boundaries on either end. It starts somewhere and it ends somewhere. This was not, as far as she knew, an inaccurate description of life. Life was a story with a beginning and an ending. But not all stories started at the beginning of a life, and not all ended in death. So in some way, life was a series of nested stories, a narrative matryoshka doll. But still, overall, there was a beginning and an end. She thought of the religion she was raised in. She thought of how the ending was becoming one with the Demiurge. But this ending, according to what she was taught, was no ending. We become one with the Demiurge when we die. She thought of the video she had seen on the indranet that said that this was a mistranslation. What the text actually said, if translated properly, was that when we die, the Demiurge consumes us. All the potential energy in our now inert corpse became fuel for the Demiurge. We were, in this version, merely food for the engine of creation. All of our hopes and dreams were a tiny electromagnetic surge in the fabric of a universe that was itself slowly dying from the moment it is born. Some even said that the Eschaton was just that, the heat death of the universe. In this interpretation of her parents religion, the tireless work to bring about the Eschaton was just the inevitable that all living things contribute to: the highly entropic state at the end. Of course, heat death was only one possible ending. In the midst of the universe as it was at that time, no one was really sure how all of it worked. With all of the power the sentient races of the universe held, no one was quite sure where the universe was going. So that's how you have to live life, Sage thought, you don't really know how it ends so you just do the thing.
Sage realized that Theodicy was crying.
"I'm glad you're here," said Theodicy, sniffling.
Sage smiled at her friend weakly, "Yeah, me too," and she winked.
Theodicy kicked her ever so softly.
Clown Ontology
Sage woke up in Theodicy's bed the next morning with a dry, disgusting taste in her mouth. Normally, Sage would not have shared the bed at sleepovers. She was not fond of having another person in bed and they had made a pact that they would sleep on the floor when at each other's houses when they were thirteen. It hadn't needed to be established though, after her visit to the Void Window, that Sage wasn't going to sleep alone. It wasn't really discussed. It hadn't needed any words. They just fell asleep with a comedy playing after Sage had vetoed the late night horror they usually watched. It had been easier than expected to convince their mothers of the impromptu sleepover plan too.
The speakers of the OMEGA blared an advertisement at Sage as she groaned and rolled over:
"Drink Slimeade! The only product made with real orgone!"
Theodicy, at the groan, clicked her tongue and said, "Sorry, Sage," and turned the volume down.
"Gaud, it's like an Advanced Alchemy lesson being delivered by a douchey beachbud," mumbled Sage.
"I know, like, what even is," Theodicy imitated the ad, "orgone?"
"The metaphysical fluid which condenses to will and desire in living things," Sage mumbled again, stretching, "and theoretically exists in all physical matter as a metafluidic field," Sage swung her legs over the side of the bed, "that last part is more like Advanced Ontology though."
"I skip these classes for a reason," Theodicy said, "give me some cold hard Datamancy or don't give me anything."
"I will never understand how you wrap your head around that stuff. I am barely passing Intro and I'm about to graduate."
"If it weren't for ‘that stuff' I wouldn't even be graduating."
"You'll be the youngest head of programming at the Citadel of Gnosis in no time."
"Ew no, I am going to go private."
"I thought you wanted to go to space? Can you even do that on the private track?"
"These days there are more private track datamancers on outbound flights."
"Well, shit, shows how much I know."
"You should look into doing an Alchemy track before you go into Ontology and then we try to work it so you go with me on my first space flight. I'm gonna miss you too much if I have to go outbound without you the first time."
"I think when you get to space you will forget all about me."
"Unlikely."
"Anyway, I could probably swing a diplomatic mission to Clow on an ORBS Ontology track."
Sage knew that Theodicy had always wanted to visit Clow. She had had a Clown nanny as a little girl who had shown her pictures of the pink sand beaches with the hazy lavender skies overhead that had excited a young Theodicy. It was lucky for Theodicy that missions to the Clown region were incredibly common as it was The Solar System's closest neighbor and they were the race with which the Chancellorate had the closest relations. Ontology was a big part of Clown culture too, so Sage, who was poised for an Ontology track education and had read a lot of Clown Ontology would feel right at home there.
"Oh Gaud, that would be so cool," said Theodicy, "Do you really want to?"
"Um, GH Jest wrote The Myth of Pagliacci. Need I say more?"
"No way, I didn't even know he was an ontologer."
"He was friends with laika greenfinger."
"How do I not know about this?"
"I've told you before."
"I glaze over sometimes when you talk about greenfinger. No offense, but I don't really understand their stuff at all. It seems too complicated."
"It's not complicated, more like intentionally nonsensical."
"See, that is not what datamancers deal with. Making sense of things is the name of the game. At least they admit it though. Most ontologers it seems like they are acting like it's all signal and no noise, but it usually sounds like noise to me."
"See, with greenfinger the interplay of signal and noise is kinda what it's all about."
"Well, I can respect it at least. I know we have to have some Ontology as the basis for the other disciplines. Just don't ask me to do it."
"At least you get it. The whole Ontology department at our normative is really down on greenfinger."
"Wasn't greenfinger down on some aspects of the Chancellorate?"
"On most, actually."
"Well, there's your answer. No one in any department in normative is going to go in for Subversive shit."
"But greenfinger was down on a lot of the Subversives too. A lot of the Subversives were just Grey sympathizers who thought we should organize society according to the system the Greys established. The whole point greenfinger was making is that the Chancellorate was too similar to rule under the Grey Faction. They spoke at WUN in support of an adaptation of the Eurasian plan."
"Oh I get it now. You've taken History. You know how the Mainstreamers feel about the Eurasian plan."
"Now you're gonna make me be the ontologer and remind you that nuance is lost on Mainstreamers."
This was the moment where the breakfast tone sounded. The two of them shuffled out to sit at the breakfast table. Theodicy's mother wished them a good morning, and showed them the bounty of breakfast foods glistening in their serving dishes. Theodicy pilled her plate high, but Sage was not hungry. As they sat down at the table, Sage stared down at her empty glass plate in front of her.