Psalms for the End of the World

by Cole Haddon

The Thracian does not scream or shed tears or bury his face into the crook of his arm. Nazarius watches him, this man who refused to help his wife, until the eyes of the Thracian meet his. Even now, even with his face bloodied and a savage inside him, there is nothing behind those two different-coloured eyes. It is like looking into the empty eyes of a doll.

using the excuse that she wants to teach them about the constellations. Mimori can’t explain why, except something feels different. No, not different. Wrong. Like she’s been slowly shifting out of sync with the world around her and the stars are now her only way to orient herself in it. They have become her only constant. At first, she suspected her frustrations with Sōjirō’s perpetual aloofness were behind the nagging dread, but she understands now it’s something else, beyond her, nameless and formless and terrifying. The stars disappear.

There is an immediate sense of of separating, of multitudes of cells and beings and possibilities ripping apart like threads along a seam, of coming unmade in tens of thousands of places all at once. She reaches for her mobile, to call the girls, to tell them she loves th

Tab thinks Syco – whom he also interchangeably refers to as the Moonman, the Black Prince, and Buddha Bad – figured out what reality really is and, with a ‘Let me break it down for you,’ frames his case with lots of references to French philosophers Keisha hasn’t read and weren’t even included in her cultural download when she retired here, ’cause, no doubt, Plurality Life Insurance Corporation thought some sister who was supposed to have grown up in Detroit in the ’80s wouldn’t give a shit about Sartre and Camus and Baudrillard.

He continued, saying, ‘It’s hard to explain, but it’s about how the world we live in. This restaurant, these margaritas, you, me, our waitress and that creepy guy at the bar I’m pretty sure is touching himself – none of it’s real. He’s definitely touching himself, by the way. It’s all a giant computer program and we’re all just strings of computer code ourselves, know what I’m saying? And, if that’s true, what does that mean about the intrinsic value of our lives here? I mean, is there any if we’re not even really alive? Why are you looking at me like that?’

Tab looked relieved. He explained how he got the idea for ‘the simulacra’ after attending most of his college physics courses while high. Does she know that physics can’t account for how much of the universe works? Quantum physics tries, he said, but it’s a malleable field that changes faster than reality and our understanding of it can keep up with. Don’t even get him started on theoretical physics, especially the many-worlds interpretation and multiverses and retrocausality which suggest that time travel isn’t possible, but that energy, one could even say effects can precede their own causes in time, since, at the end of the day, time’s arrow is an illusion exclusively limited to the biological experience.

she realizes Tab has lost everything he loved in his life and that was the key to how he figured it out, ’cause his screenplay is about a concept of reality in which parallel dimensions exist and in one of them, maybe many of them, his whole family still does, too.

Everybody she knows, including Sigmund, now display their anxiety like a pulsating aura for all to see. It is as if there’s been a collective human surrender to an inscrutable inevitability, an unknowable impending doom, and living with it, especially navigating the new social permutations that shift and evolve daily because of it, is exhausting. Mimori’s daughters seem especially sensitive to it. It’s always been a virtue of youth, to live with the confidence that nothing is impermanent, that life and everything you love will go on for ever, but now her children, like all of their friends, like children everywhere across Earth, sense that might not be true and are withering, are cracking in a miscellany of ways, are going mad as a result.