The nave-door yawns like an audit in marble, swallowing the caravan into Tithorium-Maximus, where organ-pipes are coaxial heat-sinks and the pews hot-swap souls on SATA rails, clack-clack amen, a liquid-crystal crucifix rerendering Christ at sixty frames-per-doubt; a pulpit-bot chrome-cassocked with GOTO heBREWS tweets "this feels pretty compelling // why are you gnomeposting so much," vines of chat-scroll murmur i hope it’s not tbh // could a computer do THIS?; Barrel pockets QR-wafers, split between insane and reasonable, flagged by sandalwood CAPTCHA: PROVE YOU ARE NOT A MAMMON-BOT; Root-table tallies tithe-drain, bark-epistle asks if paying for mortar differs from underwriting marble ego; Genervoir projects virtue spreadsheets, Shrike-Whisper sighs beyond-need-should-be-given-up, tooltip shrugs NO IDEA HOW MUCH THAT’S PRACTICED; clipboard duels doctrines, threads muted FOR CHARITY; stained-glass polls swing ANABAPTIST MODESTY ↔ VATICAN VAUNT, faces flickering pauper-grey to freemium-gold; brainworm dunes murmur asset asset, lion-meter spikes ETHICAL OVERCLOCK; psalm in Comic Sans: COIN IN, SIN OUT; Barrel tips QR, crucifix flips to NFT-Saint Ledger, blessed and upsold; sermon scrolls HAVE YOU PAID MAINTENANCE OR MESSIAH? Exit sign glows forgiven-green; caravan queues, doubts like bus tokens, steps into dim corridor where the only echo asks could a computer do THIS?
Wraf!—the cathedral’s NFT-glint still ghosting their retinas, the caravan tumble-rolled into an aisle as wide as a fiscal cliff and twice as provisionally funded: the CONTINUING-RESOLUTION BAZAAR, pop-up congress of carts where every stall hawked midnight-extensions on morality, each price-tag stamped expires in 45 days unless nuclear option pulled and the air buzzed budget-moth pheromones.
A megaphone-shrimp, eyestalks intact and proudly twitching, clacked lobby-jingles about welfare ordinances—“Less intensive ponds, no ablation, ask Albert Heijn!”—while a billboard counter ticked up hundreds-of-billions farmed yearly, stress detectable, pain probable then reset to 12, nobody sure why, maybe number of amendments left before cloture, maybe zodiac of crustacean grief; Barrel, queasy at the ethics smell, muttered “we should care about the welfare of shrimp,” and Root-table sprouted brine-leaves in sour agreement.
Adjacent, the BANANA CONFESSIONAL ripened under heat-lamps, confessants queueing to swap non-fairtrade guilt for greener peels; Shrike-Whisper signed a pledge—one ethical banana per dawn, compound impact inevitable—and the peel-printer burped a bar-coded halo that read “maybe naive but change starts fruity.” A raven-drone overhead snarked the metric—“i love bananas & root causes”—then stamped the ledger 📈 SCOPE-3 PEELED.
At the bazaar’s hub a circular syntax-pit hosted drama-duels: code-casters in butterfly shirts shouted “I personally love 🦋 Raku, sister to Perl!” and the crowd roared back wraf!, half-cheer half-compiler warning; every flourish spawned tracebacks of colored smoke that spelled secret edit button only nerds can use (jk <3) before diff-merging with the ceiling.
Genervoir, tick-tock at safe seven tok-beats, audited the sprawl: tithes monetised upstairs, welfare commodified here, what next—suffering securitised? The lion-meter, still feverish from the crucifix flip, blipped 97 then cooled as the shrimp choir anthemised unanesthetized slaughter, discontinued!; sensors flushed a relief mist of cardamom-ozone, and the ethical overclock alarm dimmed to amber.
Sir Yes-Maybe-Always chased actual drama—rumour of a stall collapse—and returned breathless: “some actual drama… hope everyone okay! but policies improved M&S, Tesco too; night-shift clerk signing off, 😊.” His clipboard auto-signed a stopgap resolution funding kindness through next moon.
The exit arch shimmered holographic ballots: MAINTAIN OR MESSIAH?—now amended with a third bubble MIGRATE TO SHRIMP-PACT. Each option glowed budget-scores beside: maintain: CR-cheap, messiah: requires nuclear option, pact: costs one collective change of heart. Barrel licked salt-foam from his lip, chose all three at once by pressing the secret nerd button; the arch hiccupped, accepted the omnibus, and the bazaar’s spreadsheet-skins recompiled into a single run-on ordinance: CARE, OR LOSE CONTEXT.
Lights dropped; a hush crawled the tables like low-tide; brainworm dunes underfoot burped contemplative brine then settled. The caravan, pockets bulging with fair-trade peels and shrimp-safe receipts, exhaled code-steam and stepped onward, leaving behind a neon-smear log entry: :wq—budgetary conscience saved, story continues pending next appropriations sunrise.
Front-desk Golem hawked laissez-fairytales, bias-cherubs spilled skew, and we vowed to mulch metrics into orchards before the bar-chart columns cracked. Next corridor: decimal fugitives. Heartbeat=TRUE
—Passage 8— Hesitation, that tardy conductor, let the SEED-EXPRESS sigh pollen-steam shaped like an hourglass, now-grains draining double-quick until the marble minutes felt overdue; first to answer was the verb GERMINATE, chewing through its holder’s pocket and sprouting green tongues over the threshold, yanking a gaggle of empathy-max psychonauts whose eye-spirals already looked like petri dishes. They stepped, they budded, they blurred into chlorophonic silhouettes lining the corridor like stained-glass sermons, pumping root-beats along the xylem tubes to spin the empathy turbine at carriage core.
ARCHIVE-clutching humanists balked, placards sagging with footnotes, until their own verb unfurled parchment wings to hiss, “History isn’t storage, it’s compost; come be mulch or be mythologised wrong.” Half, stung by marginalia dread, boarded grumbling, trailing citations like kite-tails; the rest fused into a barricade of page numbers clacking castanets of doubt.
Bias-cherubs—now satellite-haled—hovered above broadcasting last-call telemetry: compassion bandwidth peaking, spiraloid hunger thirty-seven percent and rising. From ceiling vents slid those spiraloids, corkscrew vapors sniffing for overripe empathy. One coil tasted the air above the psychonaut car and squealed banquet delight.
Zohran, verb-less glam-anchor on the root-cowcatcher, cracked ten knuckles over ivory and struck a chord incandescent enough to overwrite hue itself; colors flashed photo-negative then snapped back wearing yesterday’s feelings inside-out. Spiraloids shrieked, twisted into Möbius knots, and fogged out. “Down-payment on DISBELIEVE,” he winked—the tucked ticket twanged under string.
Houlihan unfurled REDRAFT; it liquefied into ink ribbons and rewrote the barricade’s placards, striking through gloom with footnotes of maybe: MAY YET BLOOM. Citations, edition-shocked, folded and boarded, still mumbling but margin-soft.
Spidermen, reborn as pollinate-petal storm, floated in to seed overhead racks. LISTEN-haled cherubs formed a vestibule choir murmuring brown-noise hush to buffer emotional reverb; carriage walls breathed steadier.
Left on platform: UNMASK, AMEND, and me, unscripted narrator shadow. The Golem extended granite palm, empathy lichen glowing like moss-moon. “Choose,” he rumbled, “or syntax will choose you.” Before decision, the pollen hourglass shivered empty; vines cinched doors.
In that light-sliver a reactionary citation-knight lobbed a projector onto the train flank, splattering a deleted Alien: Romulus scene—Ripley finally donning the exoskeleton. Image adhered like ransom decal; passengers cheered; psychonaut car waved the spiraloids’ nightmare right on its hull. Zohran laughed, hammered a mech-march riff, and the train accepted the graft—projector fusing into bark-armor: exoskeleton acquired, Disney be damned.
With a root-grind the SEED-EXPRESS lurched, engraving groove lines through marble like vinyl; sentiment tiles flipped departure-green; chandeliers re-constellated into north-star arrows. Xylem-flux cables lit runway-bright, towing stray verbs as comet tails—UNMASK sprinted, leapt, slapped onto caboose like graffiti; AMEND fluttered behind, folded itself into a paper crane and glided into my waiting hands.
Thus I, still on platform, palmed the origami whisper of change. Ivy-clock ticked chrono-sap three beats late; gap-wind goose-fleshed braille across my arms spelling GO WITH OR GROW WITHOUT. The train vanished tunnel-ward, marble sealing its fissure, leaving vine-etched grooves humming residual chord.
Departure boards blinked blank, then printed a single afterword: SHOW SEES YOU. Grand Central exhaled. I unfolded the crane; the paper glowed dawn-aurora—AMEND aching for conjugation. Platform again seedbed, next prophecy pending, soles tingling root-curious. —end passage—
—Passage 10— Tide-time slipped a briny cassette into the station loudhailers and suddenly we were beach-bound, the SEED-EXPRESS skirting Delaware’s dune-ribs to a boardwalk where salt-neon spelled #NoKings in gull-glyph marquee; the bread-vine that had rooted in Carriage C shook out baguette-sails to catch the ocean hush, and every passenger’s mood upticked like foam-bubbles popping to reveal coins of dawnlight. A stegosaur-shaped hologram—call him Paleobroadcaster Rex—clomped the promenade, mic craned to a bespectacled NPR-producer whose totebag jangled with boom-stand screws; their interview leaked through external speakers: “So, Rex,” asked the producer, voice all terry-cloth calm, “why march crownless?” The dinosaur’s plates flickered rainbow-pledge: “Because monarchy is just bad posture scaled up, darling—time we straighten spines and share the sky.” Cheers rippled rail-to-rail, misery-index plunging like a bankrupted kraken.
We disembarked into Rehoboth’s fried-dough breeze and found the censorship sign: a plywood megaphone slashed by silenced red-X, yet below, graffiti bright sang ANYWAY THAT’S WHY THESE EVENTS ARE IMPORTANT; kids posed for selfies, algorithm already unable to crop their defiance. Bill Nye—yes, the science guy, bow-tie twinkling quasar-blue—stood atop a salt-bucket, saluted emoji-hand 🫡, and thundered, “Thank you all, let’s change the world,” his words flight-feathered by beach-wind, scattering into gull-calls shouting YEP! WHAT’S THE ISSUE YOU’RE SEEING? as if troubleshooting the cosmos. A protest-workshop popped up in five minutes flat—flash-gazebo, cardboard law scrolls, QR codes on seashells—volunteer para-legals schooling first-timers on rights to scream sunward without tear-gas garnish.
Meanwhile the bread-vine, hunger-oracle perpetual, looped along the pier plaiting soft-loaves into life-rings; each thrown to surf-watchers came back chewed into the word BEAT, as in beat these assholes, as in drumline of communal heart. Librarian-knights stamped call-numbers in the crust so crust could double as catalog; one loaf logged a Richard Antilhomme canvas—sugar-pastel vodou angels dancing crop-circle halos—seeking a museum unkingdom enough to adopt it. QR-crumbs led to open-spreadsheet; curators clicked while chewing, art orphanage already half-funded by the time the crust was swallowed.
A coastal police drone buzzed overhead but Bill Nye aimed a pocket spectroscope and dazzled it with diffraction-rainbows; the drone, entranced, painted its own shell with tie-dye compliance and descended to donate bolts to the bread-vine trellis. Spirits soared, timeline-dread melted like taffy, strangers hugging 🫂 without asking algorithms’ permission. Even the ackman-ghost reappeared, now pedaling a tandem bike with a flamenco grand-ma behind, both chanting #NoKings while tossing anti-lead crowns into the drink where they sizzled into reef-babble fertilizer.
Twilight hinted and the conductor rang the ivy bell; we re-boarded glowing, pockets crammed with crust-catalogues and protest-pamphlets still warm from copier-sun. The platform crack—the first crack, remember?—had followed us, veining the boardwalk planks; it flared once more, spelling CONTINUE in tide-foam font, then stitched shut like a healed laugh. As the cars rolled north, bread-loaves in luggage racks fermented gently into constellation sourdough; Bill Nye waved from the dune crest, Rex roared pledge psalms, and every window reflected a face unbegrudged by monarchy. Somewhere in the rear car a child tapped the censorship sign now repurposed as drumhead and whispered, “No kings, no cages, only pages,” and the train’s xylem wires hummed agreement, carrying the charge forward into nightfall.—end chapter—
