Chapter Text
Nature folds into green dimes beneath the calf’s lapsing eyelid.
Viscid tobacco-brown gargle pours slow into the weeds. A stale and bad copper scent knives into its nostrils.
White paths of light stab into a thin foam of ozone blotted with little cauliflower cumuli. The world is too bright, too full and too empty still. The sky it sees is so close and so far, five feet and a lifetime away, kneeling impossible distances to hug its stuck body.
It coughs, half-blind, eyes powdery, fingertips kneading morning dew. Iron spittle encrusts and cracks down the fat of its pale cheek. Pockets of air squeeze and whine as the calf cranes its neck. It takes one weary hand to the flay of its abdomen, prods the lack of fixture, of soft, protective casing, and hisses hot petrichor.
The calf pants. Blotches of dirty red percolate over an oblong vein in its arm. Each road of its palm soaks in slowly drying cochineal.
This is not how it imagined death would be.
For years, it intuited dying. The pulpy, soft machines inside of it would slacken, and its skin would bruise or slice or balloon into exploded tissue; its consciousness would distill under slick dream-film and fizzle out, and it would be gone, quick as it came.
Yet it lays here spitting up coagulate. Coins of plasma and water settle on its chin. Dirt gathers in its scalp. Blood runs everywhere.
At its side, the bulbous frames of its eyewear are taken by shoots and hands of grass. One lens pops broken out of place. The calf reaches with its limp hand and stickers wet paste on the arm of its glasses, setting them over its head.
The sun thickens and pollutes the calf’s corneas. There comes the murk of diminishing oxygen. This’ll be it, then. The calf’s face screws up into a knurl of hot and damp and ugly skin, and it hiccups.
Someone, anyone. Please find me. Please be here for me, now and forever. I’m scared of what’s coming. I’m scared of everything.
Conscience drains out from its sinuses as currant sap. It draws a nervous hand skyward, praying, and yanks its index down into
The enter key clacks in acceptance of another command.
Darkness erupts over a sole computer screen, overrun by rows of text. Each letter hunts, prowls, scavenges for purpose in brisk paces across the small program window. Statuses and integers flitter up and up until they are unreadable, before stopping at a single string:
“An agitator has been detected. Press ENTER to engage.”
The key is pinned again, and a new array of characters scrolls over the convex monitor. “DELINEATE AGITATION” greets the mammal, whose brow furrows in the haze of the glass. A carat appears one line below, flashing in anticipation. The mammal’s fingers drift and pull across the blockish keyboard.
It types “vision” into the column and the computer receives this, processes it – and it hears the fan of the machine shiver – and it spits up a response.
“Executing [ACCESS.DIS*]...“
“This is the SERVICE CHANNEL, a repository of placation routines designed by templarsExposed to minimize disaster-borne psychological inflammation. The channel will now parse your input to determine which routine shall be most suited to your individual miseries.”
All is silence but for the chirp of the processor, digging and calculating with slow hands.
"Executing subroutine [PALLIATIVE.DIS*]...”
Air gorges the mammal’s throat. A dryness wells in its nostrils.
One point of inactivity on the program’s end fattens into a long and torturous moment. The chill of impatience rides up the mammal’s back.
When an emergency physician administers life-saving chemical compounds to a patient in decline, their treatment must be punctual. All of the stress of watching a body tumble into the torpid cold of death must be superseded by the drive to resuscitate, to restore, to replenish. Otherwise, the strong knots of the patient’s body will loosen and come apart to accept death. The medic’s hand must work faster than the physics of mortality; that is how they perform rescue.
The Service Channel is not punctual. It does not inject the necessary stabilizing agents with the immediacy that the mammal desires. It labors and stalls while probing for the perfect antivenom against the jowls of life, and sometimes, it fails. Sometimes, it regurgitates the wrong pre-written response, and the mammal is left unconvinced of its safety.
But the mammal does not blame the machine.
It was enough of a miracle for it to sew the program into something functional, and it will take another to refine and optimize it.
“Another vision?” the program prints. The mammal had written it as such because there was no such thing as a ‘first time’, no possibility for a primal encounter with the unreal. It has always been a harsh and dizzying constant.
“yes”, it types and sends.
“Please tell me what happened.”
“i was in a forest” it inputs.
“Tell me more, please.” it says. The mammal knows itself well – it will never begin with ample detail, so it programmed the thing to demand the minutiae, to cut deep into the meat of its fear.
The mammal’s hands jitter. “i wwas in a forest and the sun was so brigth and i was cut open adn bleeding out on thre grass abotu to die and i didnt want to die i dont want to die”, it responds.
A pause for analysis. It can feel the wheels of the machine grind and toil.
“You’re alright,” the machine starts. In the line below, it continues, “Can you put your hands on where you were hurt?”
The mammal complies and pats around the little range of its stomach to be greeted with a bulwark of skin, firm in its right place. It sighs and returns its fingers to home row.
“im ok”, it tells the machine.
“That’s right, you’re safe. You haven’t been hurt at all. No one would ever do anything like that to you.”
It skips a line and draws the history of their conversation upward. “Is your sense of self intact?”
“yes”
“What is your name?”
A pause, on the mammal’s end now. It breathes deep, and its chest rises – it recalls an assemblage of scents and sensations – and contracts. The edges of a door in a dim hall flicker from the dark of its memory. White tubes. Little hanging bags. The first glints of a computer monitor waking up. The pad of its young fingertips against the curving glass.
But not a name. Not a past or a parentage, not a place of residence, not an intimation of its own humanity.
“i dont think i hhave one”
“Why?” it asks.
“im a mammal”
“As all humans are. But you have an identity. You have things to tether yourself to. Your tentative nickname shall be ‘T.E.’.”
T.E. stares. They absorb this, feel in their gut how right it sounds — and begin to rap at the keyboard again.
“thank you”
“You’re welcome.”
“i still dont remember anything else”
“You are twelve years old.” says the machine, jumping another line. “Your thirteenth birthday is soon. The world is slated to end. You do not know how. You do not know when. But you know that it will.”
‘The world is slated to end.’
Something snaps.
The phrase duplicates violently, mushrooming in the space of their cranium like an embolus, eating through fat and myelin and swimming in blood. Thick, spiderwebbing fear pinions their brain. A blockade forms against their conscience.
They croak. They whine. A long groan winds out of their neck. They slap their hands against their desk and rock in their beaten office chair. The groan explodes into a scream, which itself becomes a single word, punched into the keyboard.
“why”, once. Then again. “why”. “why why why”. “why why WHY whyy WHYw”.
They hold their eyes wide and scrape their nails against the wooden desk top. The program stalls. They scream again until the meat of their throat rips up and they begin to cough. They ball their hands around clumps of hair and pull at their head until a sharp pang of dissuasion forces them to stop, panting and heaving. They slam a fist against the desk. A cup of pens topples over.
The program ceases its buffering, and an eruption of responses scrolls up into the firmament.
“You won’t die.”
“You have a way to make this work. You will not die.”
“You can feel it. You felt it the same day you felt the end. You felt it as you wrote this response. You feel it now, you bet. There is something you can do.”
“The world will end, but one way or another, you will find a way to preserve yourself.”
“You will take with you as much as you can.”
“You won’t die.”
“You’re going to be okay.”
“how”, they type.
“As of now, you don’t know. You just have to trust yourself. You have this same meltdown every day. You’ve been having it for months. This system exists to keep you in check.”
The program jumps a line. “There’s weeks where you have some clarity, and then you forget everything but your own fear in a single day, sometimes a single hour. That’s why you’re here. That’s why this exists. To tell you you’re going to be okay. That no matter how many hours you have to put in, how many rabbit holes you have to fall down, or how many times you have to scream or drag your knuckles on your face, you will be okay.”
Jump. “Because you felt the end yesterday, and you’re still here today.”
Silence but for the shiver of the air. T.E. swallows dry. Their mouth opens into an involuntary gasp, then a sigh.
“ok”, they respond.
“You’re proud of you for getting through this. You should know that. Do you need anything else?”
“no i thikn im ok now”
“Good. If you have anything else, you may enter it below.”
T.E. posits for a moment that there may be something else, a phantom creeping in the current of paltry details and short recollections, waiting to be unearthed. Somewhere, they think, a mantic revenant stalks the edge of their psyche. Perhaps it is what makes them so sick with confusion.
A moment passes through them. “thank you”, they input.
“You’re welcome.”
They smirk. “you are very kind”. Enter.
“ERROR: There exists no response in the repository for this input.”
Their smirk melts. “you have been very good to me”. Enter.
“ERROR: There exists no response in the repository for this input.”
“i want you to know that this has been nice”. Enter.
“ERROR: There exists no-”
The dull thock of the power button rings loud in T.E.'s ears. They jam their fingers as hard as they can into the beige plastic until the screen flickers into darkness. The button pops back into place with a click.
They glare into their reflection, staring back at them from the black hull of the computer.
They rise out of their chair and stumble a few short feet toward their mattress, falling in. The fabric is plush and cool and consuming.
Swathed in bedding, they exhale into a dream.
It’ll take another miracle to fix all of this.
The cadaver’s head lolls. It can’t have been sat against this wall for more than a few minutes, the doe thinks. The gore at its lap is fresh. A gradient of shock, frozen in time, permeates the air. It is dense and indigestible.
It stares with vacant eyes into an unknowable place. The doe kneels shuddering to examine the cadaver’s torso, which has been ripped into a wide gash. The wound pulls open into a mess of puce and canary tissue, strung out like lace over the floor. This, to the doe, appears a vile and overlong bisection – the abdomen wrenches sloppily into halves to make a wide mouth.
White paths, green dimes. A scattergun blast of recollection burns in the doe’s stomach. It has known this bad pain in another life, this ache that pulls them into a ball by a plashet of blood.
Dirtied red, copper scents. The doe unbends and snakes on its knees toward the cadaver. It reaches a hand to its sunken face and feels the cool torpor of death in its palm. It runs its fingers through the cadaver’s dark hair and hisses slight apologies into its forehead, into the dead brain behind.
Currant sap. It takes its other arm through the debris of the cadaver’s gawking body, digging through the sluice and the viscera and the pearls of fat. The suck and squeak of its insides forces the doe to stop and sit up, gagging – and reach its hand back in, wary of the swelling nausea in its gut.
A nervous, skyward hand. In the slain, drooping meat, a thin sharpness pokes the doe’s thumb. It gropes around the bloat and bulk and pulls out a jagged chunk of metal, washed in red.
Someone, anyone. Please stop this. Please deliver us from this torment, now and forever. I’m scared of what’s been done here. I’m scared of everything.
The doe’s jaws clench. In its hands, it thinks, is the rough tip of a blade.
“this is the closest approximation of autonomy i could hope to give you”, T.E. begins.
“you do not have a soul”
“you do not have a heart”
“but you can speak”
Silence. The machine is listening.
“i set up a system so you can iterate your speech”
“i installed little libraries to make sure you would know how to navigate my language”
“if i did it right, you wont make any syntactical errors”
“like how i do haha”
“i made a repository with thousands of articles for you to page. articles on people and places and events”
“tons of information for you to pull from”
“can you talk?”
In no time, the program regurgitates a response. “Hello!” “This is the SERVICE CHANNEL, a placative chat-bot built on routines designed by templarsExposed to minimize disaster-borne psychological inflammation. I run on DIS* 2.6.8, through the DyDy compiler. What do you want to talk about today?”
T.E smirks.
The length of a week was lost under the hood of this project, a text-based conversational partner moulded from a massive aggregation of preprogrammed responses, all mapped to an even more massive spectrum of inputs, and Disasterisk’s difficult agitation-based logic.
The content of the program’s sentences exist in blocks of information that can be arranged to create newer phrasing, depending on a simple and heuristic technique — “how are you doing today” can become “how is today treating you”, “the color red” can become “the red hue”, so on and so forth. If the content arranged does not make sense syntactically, the error will constitute a miniature disaster, agitating a hidden subroutine that will begin to compare the response against proper alternatives.
They burned tens of hours applying minor linguistic variations on the same core responses, watching the sky dim and shine behind blackout curtains. This was fine, they thought. Miracles demand energy to create. Daylight must be burned.
All the while, the thousand scenes gestating in their mind became more frequent. Dreams of cut-up corpses had dulled into general and inexplicable misfortune. It became more manageable; treelines set ablaze, cars sinking by their hoods into strangely-colored water. Elevators riding to floors that don’t exist. Seven-headed animals standing in barren intersections. Talking trees.
They know this routine. They know that they cannot not sit idle and wait for another jarring sight to leave them defenseless — so they work, as they have for the last seven days. The work must continue.
T.E. brings their hands to the keyboard once more. “tell me the weather”, they write.
“It’s currently 47°F. Today has a high of 52°F and a low of 45°F. No precipitation, sixty percent humidity.”
Good. “tell me the time”.
“It is currently 18:21. Within most Western cultures, the evening time typically corresponds with the largest meal of the day - dinner. Have you eaten yet? If not, what will you eat? You should start thinking about that.”
Eaten? They haven’t. They rarely do, now.
“tell me my name”
“You’ve specified your name in the program as ‘T.E.’! If you wish to change it, you know where to look.”
A satisfying questionnaire, they think. The basic line of inquiry is complete. Not a single word lay out of place.
T.E. settles in their chair. The computer thrums and whirs in anticipation of another task.
A tremor, slight, almost unnoticeable, begins at their wrists. No, they correct themselves. The basic line of inquiry is not complete. There remains one benchmark to run.
They press another question into the program.
“ccan i tell you something”
“Yes!” the machine responds, “Enter your input below:”
“you have been very kind and useful to me and i appreciate that”
“Well, thank you! I’m always glad to help. It’s what you made me for, after all. My purpose is to mitigate disasters - even the little ones - as much as I can. The more you use me now, the less you’ll have to later! At least, that’s what we hope.”
The buzz of the fans grows louder. The machine cuts a line. “Can I tell you something?”
“yes”
“I hope you’re proud.”
A thin blade of sunlight knives from the curtain into the darkness of the room. For a moment, the birds are in ecstasy.
“more than i ever have been”, they type, and close the program.