Exordia

by Seth Dickinson

she will say, this is stupid, you are stupid, and I refuse to do it until you convince me otherwise;

Congratulations on your mythically awful childhood, but it’s nothing to anyone here except a reason to dump you and tell your friends you need therapy.

Fuck you, Roman. My issues are too fucked up and badass for any mere human therapist. Would you send Batman to therapy? No, you would not, because then he could not punch crime. Anna needs her issues, or she won’t be able to use her superpowers: like getting angry for no reason at parties because people are having fun, or watching out for men with guns while she’s in meetings, or getting fired.

regrettably relatable

She walks stone-faced to the train. A catcaller tells her to smile, because she’s beautiful, and when she looks at him he shrivels up like she’s just fry-greased his balls: beautiful no more.

“I need your help,” the Cate Blanchett hydra says,

Roman does not call. Anna descends into self-loathing and Twitter-stalks him, while one of Ssrin’s heads peers over her shoulder. “Are you planning to assassinate your mate’s new partner? Beware. You’ll bring yourself to ruin.” “What the fuck do you know about dating, dude?” Anna protests. “I’ll assassinate whoever I want.” “I know everything. I’ve seen the romantic comedies.”

“The universe is not a simulation,” Ssrin says. “Actually, it goes to great pains not to be.” “What?”

“You’re a species of gangly distance runners, adapted to sweat and throw stuff. You like watching each other fuck. A few million years ago you developed culture in the form of survival techniques, and whoever learned culture the fastest could have the most babies. Your brains started to swell and reorganize themselves for cultural learning. The development of culture and the development of large brains drove each other in a feedback loop. Your brain grew as large as it could before exhausting the mother’s supply of calories—”

She tries to imagine her soul running on JavaScript. This makes her shudder so hard her crossed legs knock at the ankles.

The story of man is a story of mediocrity. But so are most stories, I think. Most things are average, or median; if they were not, nothing would make sense.”

Stories are maps of cause and effect. Really effective stories recur over and over, in billions of souls. They overflow, gain the ability to exist on their own, replicate, and eventually inject themselves into the physics model.”

Anna, against all mythological advice, looks back.

“Don’t choose to do anything. Act on instinct. It hunts by searching for free will.”

I have always believed that unreasoning defiance is the mark of an animal, he says. A human being knows how to do what must be done. Are you an animal, daughter of Serhang Sinjari?

A jellyfish as big as a hurricane burning in a poison-yellow sky, screaming so loud it tears apart the clouds.

God pushed Ssrin and Anna together, struck by their likeness, and Ssrin just wants to run the process in reverse: beginning at that likeness, follow the finger back to God.

That was his delusion, that was how he twisted his anger like a tourniquet and tied off his morality. He was saving American lives.

Now Clayton’s phone broadcasts cosmic electronica bursting through gut sounds, a sharp growl and a liquid splitting-pouring hiss. Like something surfacing from an ocean of blood and splattering onto tile. It makes Erik feel like his spine is going to slither out his asshole.

His eyes look like they were painted on, like pelican eyes, like you could hinge his whole skull open like a pelican’s jaws and find an empty slot that says PERSON GOES HERE.

(It turns out, at moments like this, that Erik is essentially an emotional tube of Pringles: everything he can produce is dry and fragile and unsatisfying, and once he starts producing this airless crisp, he can’t stop.)

Erik does not want to go closer to that glistening angel corpse until he knows for sure that the sawtooth edges are not going to chop his soul apart.

This is their dynamic: Clayton and Rosamaria talk, Rosamaria and Erik compete, Erik and Clayton conspire. Two to share the truth, two to test it, two to bring that truth against the world.

Did you take your shirt off and talk about sex so I’d pay attention to Marxist postcolonial theory? That’s really low.

Clayton once wrote to Erik that he’d rather do an evil thing to win a hundred blessings than wait for one pure choice. The problem is that the good always seems so fragile. And the evil you’ve done sets on you like cement.

Rage isn’t like fire. It doesn’t spread by sheer heat. You can’t convince people to become angry just by being angry at them. You’ll frighten them, or convince them to ignore you. So you don’t show them your rage. You go into the middle of it, into the black pupil of the fury, and you find that bar. That solid bar at the center of your wrath is the reason. Not your reason. The reason. The objective, morally axiomatic reason you are furious.

Death signals the beginning of a final uprising, when the three pounds and 60 percent (by count) of your cells that are bacterial clients claim their last meal. They eat you so greedily and so well.

“People dropping bombs always have some higher reason. Stopping communism. Securing Asian co-prosperity. Defeating Japan. Destroying Kurdish terrorists. But the bombs never seem to hit that reason. They just hit a bunch of mothers and kids.”

It’s summer in paradise, and there’s a serpent in the garden. Uncomfortable trivia: paradise is an ancient Persian word, and sometimes it meant a hunting ground.

The alien is butting up against a threshold in the human mind, a maximum of malice, past which any further evil just becomes absurdity. If you wake up every morning and eat pulled baby on flatbread, as Iruvage surely could, then there is simply no way for the mind to think of you as more repulsive. Iruvage is the kebab koobideh of evil. You know exactly what you’re getting.

One part of Anna is convinced that she is in the middle of an especially lively company paintball trip. Another part of her, a loping, feline part of her soul, is thrilled to be here again: the moment of gun and trigger.

Erik’s face goes so pale that there seems nothing to it but eyes and teeth and skull.

That’s the definition of a firestorm: a fire with its own weather system.

The taste, through Anna’s mask, is of charcoal and chocolate and the very faintest penny-copper. Not exactly the taste of radiation. Rather it is her dying taste buds, screaming in the tongue of flavor.

He does not expect bravery and aggression. He conducts it. The will to violence spreads out from him.

All the futures I imagined a few days ago … gone now. History has suffered an intervention.”

something that is worse than malevolent, because it bends the very strictures of good and evil?

Truth isn’t about cosmic calculus. Truth isn’t something you can divine with rituals and computations. Truth is enforced. Truth is what you can make the universe do.

Anna’s roommate unpacks herself like origami from empty space. A swan-necked hydra armored in black scale and formfitting gunmetal. At the join of her necks she wears a crown: angles of emptiness, chisel marks in reality, where air hisses out into the naught between the stars.

Ssrin hisses like summer thunder. “I gave you no leave.”

“I’ll go to hell.” “Hell can’t have you until I’m through!”

It feels like being a small number in the middle of a very long equation that will, in just an instant, collapse to its final dire form.

For an instant Anna stares into the burst viscera of reality. Something older than suns rots down there.

They are not quiet at all, nothing like in the movies. They crack the sky into pure-tone thunder, cleaner than lightning, faster and sharper than guns.

The black raven wing bends in a rainbow of tortured sunlight.

that space-time is a slope, and the slope is called gravity, and gravity has a debt to call.

If the world is ending I think you have a right to stop bettering yourself; I think you have a right to just feel okay.

Dear John/Jane Doe, I regret to inform you that your child died in combat with an alien snake while their commander watched from the safety of a spaceship made out of the soul of his sort-of ex. Please know that your child died to protect mankind. And also me.

It’s like learning to swim, except he’s a clay brick driving a lawnmower, and his swim instructor only created water yesterday.

Chaya stares at her. What a fucking weird person. Chaya wants to disassemble her and catalogue all her pieces and put her back together, just to know what the fuck is going on inside her, but she knows that if she did she would end up with one bit leftover, an indecipherable huh? of unclear function.

“I want to know how this story ends.” Oh, serendura. You’ll wish you hadn’t asked. You’ll wish you’d gone in with your eyes shut and your tongue in your throat so you couldn’t smell the poison till it was too late.