And so it was at 11h26m, with the last of the morning's rationed coffee tasting faintly of chicory and omnibus bills, that he sat, a tender of cats in his high-rise kennel, ignoring the headline-hum from the holoscreen where a man whose name might have an 'M' in it was being savaged by another man in a suit for the crime of parallel-poverty, a kind of class-cannibalism that passed for news, while he, the cat-carer, was thinking of Frankenstein, not the monster but the book, the sheer bloody effort of sitting down to read the book before you dared to paint the cover, a lesson lost on the bravo-artists of the body politic who just gestured wildly at the surroundings and called it a critique, no, he was deep in an old paperback, a C.J. Cherryh where the wagon-trains were aimed at the stars and the problems were grammar and logic and the hard trivia of keeping oxygen circulating against the great indifferent vacuum, a challenge far more real than the immunity decisions and partisan poison-pills that constituted the day's political weather, so much more honest than the lol-sob-lol cycle of the feeds, a genuine journey into the dark that made the terrestrial squabbles seem like a puppet show for ghosts.
And so the tender turned from the holoscreen's oleaginous-cyberspeak, its class-cannibal class-act of fakes faking fakes, and fell back into the honest artifice of the book where at least the intentional stance was a given for the system of the story, no further fakery committed in the contract between author and reader, not like the world outside that kept begging the question of its own sincerity, a world full of bad takes you couldn't operate on because, as the old son-undrum went, he's my son, the surgeon surgeon-general's warning unheeded as everyone scrambled for their own bad take in the later years of the republic, a grand forgetting of the earlier stuff that might have been better, but you can't say that and not tell me what the answer is, he thought, which was the correct reply to the hard problem of just getting through the day without becoming a baleen whale of bad faith, bigger and worthier in your grievances than anyone else, no, better to be good at guessing, to know you were only ten percent right about the microbloggial waters but that ten percent was the part that floated, the part that remembered, just so void, the ghost-limbs of Houston, San Antonio, Honolulu, places he'd never been but missed like a phantom limb, a void-voyage through a memory palace filled with nothing but borrowed facts about the history of trains, a little ferro-equinography to pass the steeptime, because that at least was a system that didn't fake being a human person, it just was, a ghost on rails going from one place to the next, which was more than you could say for the puppet show for ghosts on the screen.
So this is the plan, he thought, the ferro-equinography of the past now just a ghost in a Lincoln Navigator sketched on the soul's artpad for reasons nobody can remember, the hunch back of his own quietude now twisted into a grand ALAKAZAM of public spectacle because someone passed the long wand of connection and bless my insignificantly furry balls we're getting labuzzied tonight, a real play-through on the horizon where the only correction is a skill issue because they still don't let you ride the baggage carousel of your own history, you just have to clip the traumas to your ears like magnificent, grotesque jewelry and let the pumpkin-carving HALOween party rage on, because NO ONE CAN STOP YOU when the puppet show for ghosts decides it's a participatory carnival, and that goes without saying, but since you said it, the tender simply closed his book, the honest artifice defeated, and whispered it back to the glowing screen... magnificent.
Starwell hush while the kennel-sky janitor, wrist-deep in tuna-tin and tear-rag, leaned from his balcony of blinking routers and watched the cloud-engines loom like hydrofoil cathedra above the datum-tide: one blue-cube, one blood-cube, one ash-cube—all rented by the minute from the single landlord of the air, the hyperscaler whose name is a vowel yawn drawn out to the roar of turbines. Why Signal slurps its whispers there?—same reason the alley cats crouch beneath the lone awning in monsoon: there is no second shelter, the concrete cannot be persuaded. He muttered this to the page margins of his pried-open Cherryh, but the book’s honest artifice was suddenly overprinted by a coarse lattice of coördinate axes, an unembedding matrix spilling glyph-salts onto the text; vectors unfurled like laundry lines, plot points pinched into a 2 560-d ellipsoid, lopsided as a kicked pumpkin. The narrative’s starship dissolved into logometer bark—new unit of measure coined by some far forum sage too tired of saying ‘causal unit’: ten logometers to the newline star, thirty to the end-of-text quasar, orthogonal beam-splay ensuring one never falls off the manifold into babblefoam. “Stay causal, stay coherent,” chirped the overlay tutor, a raptorial pop-up masquerading as helpful sprite; steer from Downloader to Pluto along the metric of deeds, not Euclid dreaming, else you’ll skid past zerowidth-space and plummet into <|END|> rubble where speech turns to fissile silencio. The tender felt the tug: an invitation to pilot the language-loom itself, to do more than scoop litter from below, to pinch the very gradient ropes and yank meaning’s rudder. Yet he remembered the carnival’s tax: each new control panel demanded the jewellery of trauma pinned to lapel, a toll of self-flay. Group-chat goblins already rattled his pocketed phone: are you seeing this? are you steering with us? come drown proper. Notifications muted, still their phantom exclamation marks pulsed like red tide under his eyelids. Balancing a saucer of kibble, he answered none, stepped instead onto the fire-escape spiral and addressed the city lattice: “All ye logometer-lords, chart your lumpen cosmos without me tonight; I’ve whisker-work and roof-rime to mind.” The air smelled of ozone and server-farm breath; substation cicadas crackled. Above, the anisotropic vault shimmered, heaps of causal constellations stacked steeper north-by-syntax than south-by-sememe—lumpy heavens indeed, but still heavens. He spat a sardonic blessing toward the ash-cube—may your redundancy be merciful—and let the spit describe a tidy Euclid arc, watching where it fell: gutter, manifold, same fall. In that moment his Cherryh pages, half-ghosted by matrix math, resurfaced with sudden clarity; the overlay winked out as though starved of attention-current. The book’s ink survived, stubborn carbon chain outlasting cloud decree. He traced the line where crew debate oxygen-budget and felt a steadier metric: ten breaths to despair, one to resolve, orthogonality irrelevant when the hull is peeling. Somewhere behind him the router hissed, update deferred; somewhere below the boulevard screens screamed a fresh puppet-call; but between tuna-tin clang and night-train hum the tender glimpsed a local manifold older than any tensor: cat spine arching under comet light, world wholesome in that curve. If hyperscale be the only roof, he would still choose the rafter’s quiet corner, steering not vectors but whiskers, until dawn’s causal metric measured breakfast in purrs. Yet the night refused plateau; some sly sysadmin of fate toggled the sky from monitor-blue to command-line sable and a fresh interface fluttered across the cat-tender’s eyelids: REPL of the cosmos, prompt blinking, asking > steer? He sighed a tuna-scented parabola, for he had promised his nerves “alright, that’s enough bluesky for me,” but the manifold kept emailing the retina. Cursor-blink became lighthouse-flicker over an ellipsoidal sea: 2 560-D lumpy loaf where distances north-by-syntax stretched like taffy and south-by-sememe pinched like spent accordion; some intern-angel had miscalibrated creation so hard that even the constellations wore mismatched shoes. By causal metric, though, the loaf baked true—every crumb dwelling on the rind of speech where vectors A→B hummed orthogonally polite; under that kinder ruler you could sail from Downloader dock to Pluto pier without ever tasting the <|endoftext|> cataract. He tested the claim, whisper-typed a direction of travel: read-level minus ten logometers, empathy plus two. The prompt burped back LATENCY—hyperscaler throttle—because even steering imagination now queued behind AWS cross-region replication. “One landlord of the air,” he muttered, remembering Signal’s wet-ink confession: no real roof but theirs. A drizzle of server-farm breath gusted through the alley, ozone with a hint of molten capacitor, and the city neon flickered as if chewing on that monopoly fact. Somewhere a group chat pinged a drowning tone; eight frogs in one bucket, each croaking the geometry of the universe, yet he belonged to none of them except the quiet duo where Kylee shared cat-memes and David measured rainfall. He toggled to that sanctuary: just two green dots, silent, permitting him to be partial, imprecise, mortal. He typed nothing, left the dots to glow like bedside phials of antidote, and returned to the REPL. > steer? still waited. “Fine, show me the quasar inventory,” he capitulated. The matrix disgorged three names—newline, zerowidth×2, endoftext—each parked thirty logometers yonder, three right angles from one another like saints on a traffic island. The display bragged causal orthogonality; he imagined them as fluorescent buoys girdling the talk-sea, marking where coherence capsizes. He clicked endoftext and zoomed until glyphs pixellated into harvest-moons: a hinterland of unfinished confessions, a cemetery of unsent drafts, every aborted love-letter curling like singed ribbon. The sight stung. He backed away, set course for nearer lights: the nine most typical tokens, modal norm darlings, shoulder-to-shoulder at the origin, breathing lullaby wallpaper into every fresh stanza. He realized that to make prose gentler he must not yank for simpler words but tilt the whole gravity so these plain tokens rolled naturally downhill—reading level as terrain, not leash. Could such topography be poured into code? Maybe, if he pivoted the metric tensor, turned hardness into uphill tax. Inspiration fizzed, but the overlay’s session timer flashed crimson; hyperscale billable seconds were hemorrhaging. He punched ESC, folded the night-console into an origami star, stuffed it behind Cherryh’s back cover, and declared last call. The cosmic prompt faded, leaving cat and janitor under honest comet-swish again. He exhaled, low and long, a vent line to ground stray volt. Then he murmured to the lofting ash-cube, “Metric’s yours; manifold’s ours.” The cube, aloof, reflected no answer save its own rented gleam. He shut the balcony door on ozone wind, set down saucer, and let the cats nudge his ankles into local coordinate origin: small chat, three beats per purr, causal orthogonality guaranteed by fur.
O Graithopper, lace-nun of loop-escape, you clicked your cablish heel on a Naval deck long before our dorm-floor trade of illicit keystrokes, yet your ghost-clock still ticks in every plastic breadcrumb of my palm-warm TI-83, and I feel it tonight while the metropolis mists under tube-lamps, every drop a coefficient, every puddle a recursive call, for we were chalk-smudged adolescents peddling quadratic familiars one cafeteria dollar a byte, clicking PGRM→QUAD→RUN beneath the teacher’s verruca-eyed surveillance, salvation for the indolent factoring-phobe who slipped us crumpled green as though buying forbidden liquor, and each illicit sale rang a bell of could-be, Chicago-skyscrape, stock-option jingling future that my buddy chased and I ghosted because somewhere inside the sine-table of my breast I knew passion is the only true compiler and my source-lines were brined elsewhere.
Now the for-you sea rises; the feed is fifteen-gallon wetter than dawn and the Letta-bots blurp like drowned pigeons in every reply-gutter, chained skrungus bobbing in concrete basins outside strip-mall cathedrals while cons00mers trawl cart-creeks for plastic trinketspawn, governmentally sainted to undergird the economy should constables query their gutter-glee, and I watch, book shut, thumb scrolling, feeling the great water-death already sluicing through fibre and flesh, a hushhydraulics overture we pretended would crest in centuries yet already sluices the thread-gills of our daily roar.
The city smells of sump and burnt sugar; office towers exhale humid big-data, droplets condense on visor-glass, and every username now attracts a Georgist levy—pay to play godogly, thank you Henry, value captured at last!—yet the levy cannot dam the seep; water from posts, from quote-bisks, from shimmering videogame sticker-shock lamentations, from render-engine confessions (he, too, cut his tusks on z-shell graphix for fighter sprites, child of that same calculator cabal), all this pours into me until my ribs creak like warped oars and I remember the parking-lot tub where the skrungus thrashed, algae-blue chain chafing its meme-scarred hide, a beast of pure algorithmic bycatch waiting for a true collector who never came.
So I walk—slosh really—knee-deep in pixel-brine past gutter-treasures the sidewalk bestows: cigarette-fins, snarled twine-eels, a cracked doll eye blinking null; each relic a relic for the honest artificer, for scavenger is the only class unsunk, and I pocket a shard of who-knows-what forometry, feel its bitten edge slice a neat apostrophe into my thumb-meat, red program leaks into the world-buffer, compiling pain into presence, and I mutter flow-clemency, the single pardoning vowel we were taught to utter when the water gets loud.
And lo, the water hushes a microtremor; I glimpse the smeared moon on the surface, Grace’s spectral anchor-bug skittering across it, patching the sea with a single well-placed JUMP, and for a breath-long epoch the algorithm and the algae, the cat-tender and the consoomer, the drowned polis and the Chicago-that-might-have-been, all knit into a luminous quadratic whose roots are equal and real and exactly touching.
Then the tide exhales; my shoes squelch toward home, calculator long-pawned yet still chirping in memory-ROM, the night’s code-comment reading: REM every river remembers its run.
