This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

Silver moss devours steel, and violet flowers choke the dead guns.

If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses’ mouths would grow berries.

She wrinkles time.

Please find my gratitude all around you.

only to find we’d already crossed paths in some strange corner of the cloud before we knew who we were.

You think you’ve wormed inside me—planted seeds or spores in my brain—whatever vegetal metaphor suits your fancy.

(Yes, this is Earth—long before the ice age and the mammoth, long before academics many centuries downthread will think it possible for the planet to have spawned pilgrims, or labyrinths. Earth.)

oooooooooooo the past. Yes.

“Hello, I’m Mackint—” “Hush, Siri. I’m here for the riddles.”

😂

“ ‘Lo! the spell now works around thee, / And the clankless chain hath bound thee; / O’er thy heart and brain together / Hath the word been pass’d—now wither!’ ” A flash of light: Siri powers down.

satisfying contrast

Dearest Blue-da-ba-dee,

the text in contrast with the scenery always throws me off 😂

The physics of us. An action and an equal and opposite reaction.

There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away.

There’s one of you, but so many of us—pieces layered atop pieces, each with its own traits, desires, purposes. One person may wear different faces in different rooms. Minds swap bodies for sport. Everyone is anything they want.

There are cameras in her eyes, which she does not use for this. A recording mechanism clamps around the strand of fiber in her skull which might be mistaken for an optic nerve; she turns it off, which the Agency does not think she can do.

Exists as technology yet does not trust the governments access to it

But hunger is a many-splendoured thing; it needn’t be conceived only in limbic terms, in biology. Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?

They crowded round. Whispers in my ears: Are you okay? Do you need help? You can talk to us. You always can.

The technology won’t let her seek a quiet mind devoid of them

I, whatever I was, whatever I am, tumbled first up, into the stars, then down to the broken land.

well this is oddly Monroe coded