"Shattered glass / I exist in the sludge between fiction and fact / Future and past" - Matt "Machine Girl" Stephenson
Marie did not respect the apothecarist all that much, but then again she did not respect really anybody all that much. Especially not in a bitter, inward fugue - if she herself was not worthy of her own appreciation, why should anyone else be? What, did they think they were better than her? Come on.
The apothecarist did not use her real name. There was no metric by which her operation was legal, and if it ever came to be that someone reported her location to a government authority, her house would be vacated within four hours and twenty-three minutes, with no trace of her equipment, her fingerprints, or any sign of habitation within six months. Her appearance, no better. When pressed for elaboration, she would interrogate your familiarity with John Woo's 1997 thriller Face Off (stylised with the slash if she felt particularly pedantic, and she often did). Though she acted as if whatever she were suggesting needed no elaboration, she refused follow-up questions regarding the specificity of her intentions. She especially avoided questions pertaining to the fact that the main character went to prison in the film.
"Evening, Marie. What can I do for you?"
"You got anything that can make me forget a bad night?"
"Wish I could, but I don't swing that way."
"That's not... forget it. Medroxy, then."
The apothecarist snapped her fingers. "You got it. I can get you, uh..." She beckoned Marie into her garage, and surveyed what materials she had left. "Well, you came pretty late in the week. You know, people come asking for a lot of different things that need acetic acid. Best I can make you is about three weeks' worth."
"How much, then?"
"For you? Let's round it down to twenty dollars, for being such a loyal customer."
"You can afford that?"
"I can afford whatever I want, so long as any above-table pharmaceutical companies can't. Been in any fights lately?"
"Hunting, mostly. The /juːʒ/."
"Any damage downstairs?"
"I thought all late contractees... you know."
"Aside from that."
"Nope. Why?"
"I'm treating menopausal pain here, remember. I don't want to think we're wasting our time."
"Right! Of course."
"That out of the way, go and gimme five."
The apothecarist held a strong opposition to letting anyone see the first five minutes of her process. Something about plagiarism or other. Why she acted as if that was sufficient to obfuscate her process and that it wouldn't prove more beneficial to simply hide the whole thing remained a mystery, as did the fact that, in truth, almost everything she made was prepared earlier, and the rest was just for show.
Marie knew this (or the first half thereof, at least), and had decided to spend no time absorbing the scenery on the trip over. She could save it for the wait this way. Of course, this was suburban Sydney, so what she entailed in thinking of it as 'scenery' amounted to the approaching thunder of class cold warfare, rich and poor united only in how horrendous the results of their breast implantation surgery ended up being, and that whatever neighbourhood conflict might kick up in the fullness of time wouldn't get any more out of them than a few ugly glares, and warnings to their children that you don't want to end up like those people, do you? The neighbourhood would surely be in such a state already if it weren't for the fact that the apothecarist showed no interest in synthesising speed.
To pass the time, she rubbed her ferryman's obol and resorted to imagining stories about the lives of the people who lived in each of these houses. By stunning coincidence, all of them were true.
By the time she was done, "You can come on back in now."
The apothecarist (accompanied by the sound of the garage door winding shut) welcomed Marie back to a setup which looked like something out of a cartoon, or a prop from a kids' show about science.
Marie knew those ideas must have stemmed from somewhere originally, but it was still deeply, undeniably funny.
"So. Marie. How's it been?" At no point in this time had the apothecarist taken her eyes off of her equipment, but Marie still knew that she had her attention.
"Crap is how."
"Right! Yeah, you'd said. Any reason?"
"Had a breakup during a date. Do you think it's wrong to hate someone for something when you'd already forgiven them earlier?"
"Tell you what I reckon. I reckon if we knew the answer to that, world peace would be within our grasp."
"Yeah, maybe."
"Why, do you want to go back on it?"
"I don't know! Sometimes you just meet someone who's like nothing you've ever seen before. For better and for worse."
"Girl, I've been there."
"And I just feel like in the face of someone like that, I was everything! That hasn't changed, it's just now I want to be nothing."
"Damn. Poetic."
"Is it? I don't feel poetic. I just feel kind of shit."
The apothecarist nodded, then thought aloud, "Well... if it's any consolation, a bad breakup is only going to be the second-worst thing to happen to you tonight."
Marie smirked. "What's that supposed to mean?"
The apothecarist turned one glass jar on her bench. The one she'd emptied into the flask. "This wasn't acetic acid. I'm sorry."
The label agreed with her confession, "CHLORINE".
"And everything you're pouring into it?" Marie faltered now. She didn't need to be told.
"Kill yourself in enough chemical accidents, and you build up an immunity to certain things. You, though... I hope you can hold your breath long enough to punch a hole through my garage door, but I'm
not an optimist."
Marie's breath hastened, which was about the last thing she needed in this specific circumstance. She drew her pistol on the apothecarist and struggled for a question. For any question. None came.
"Please, Marie. Please. Shoot."
Marie's vision began to cloud now. A human in her stead would have long since died.
"If you shoot me, I don't have to believe I'm doing this to some innocent lowlife."
She decided she would give her no undeserved satisfaction. She put the gun away as the last fragments of thought holding her consciousness together withered to dull white husks and blew away on desert winds.
She fell unconscious - operative word 'fell', hurtling downward into one of few missing gaps in the immense edifice of a concrete cube, impossible in size.
Hope picked up the telephone. She only wished that just once, there would come a call at a time like this without that call being The Call. Eager to oblige, a single metaphorical digit on a single metaphorical disembodied monkey's paw curled its knuckles.
"Don't say anything," she heard Danika whisper. "I know what this must seem like to you, but I don't want to give you the wrong impression."
Hope swallowed. "...G'day to you too. Whah, uh- what impression should I have, darl?"
"I don't- I don't know! Is there anything I could say that would make you accept that everything's fine, and I'm calling for no real reason?"
"Well, until you said that."
"Of course."
A pause.
"Why are you calling, anyway?"
"I need to talk to Marie. Is she there?"
"Well..." Hope scratched her jaw. "Not all there, I tell you that much."
"Can I speak with her? I'll be quick!"
"You can try." She tucked the phone into the corner of her neck. "Marie?"
"What is it?" came a disembodied reply.
"Phone call for you."
"Can it wait?"
"Can it wait?" Hope relayed into the receiver.
The voice of Danika only sneered a sarcastic, "How? How much time do you think I have?"
"I... don't want to answer that question. Hang on- Marie! Marie, come answer the bloody phone, you dead dog!"
She stumbled from her room, apparently out of sorts. "Who is it?"
"Danika."
"What?"
"Yep."
"But that's-"
"Mhm."
"So how...?"
"Right you are."
"I didn't know she knew how to use a phone."
"Been a while, though, hasn't it? Certainly not the first thing I'd have thought to question."
"Does she say where she is? Gimme the phone."
She didn't wait for an answer before taking it.
"Danika! Oh my gosh, where have you been? How are you? And also, would you happen to know the nature of an ancient mechanical dragon god?"
It was a question which had eaten at Marie for some time now. There was something she regretted, or perhaps felt guilt over, that she didn't know. She felt just the same to consider that she didn't know what she didn't know.
Macquarie knew, though, and was stringing her along because of it. Whitman could never mediate like Marie did even despite her abject neutrality, because she knew too much. Marie, on the other hand, could read Macquarie perfectly, but she had her by the neck, and was keeping her turned away. Keep your friends close, she had once said, and your enemies on a very tight leash.
She was absolutely certain that Macquarie knew something. Call it some kind of intuition - feeling around in the darkness of paranoia, certainly, but feeling around nonetheless.
She felt need. She felt hunger. The only thing to draw an animal from its home, perhaps even into the most terrible nest of danger. Perhaps even into the jaws of a hunger greater than its own. Nothing else could bring her back to the office of her own volition.
Her days here numbered only every one in seven, but Macquarie and/or Whitman held down the week in its entirety. Today was Whitman's, which was just as well. Marie didn't have to answer to her if something went wrong.
Another, more pertinent differentiating factor between the two was that Macquarie was significantly less punctual in her lunch breaks. Too much time in the Attendant office drove one up the wall, but at least Whitman's time away could be tracked on the clock. Every day, she would break for lunch at precisely 12:20, leave the building around a minute and a half afterward, and would return to the office no sooner or later than 12:35. Marie had borrowed Hope's watch to track this as it happened. A minute and a half to get into the office, twelve to find what she was looking for, a few seconds' remainder to jump out the window. Couldn't be cleaner.
12:21:55
Step one was easy enough. Nothing about the way in was at all difficult to remember. The office was listed as belonging to one Dr. Nautilus Gayly, listed with the job description of child psychologist psychologist.
12:23:10
There were four-odd other girls in the more crammed half of the office, and they all respected her as they would have Deckard before her. Of course, she couldn't ask them not to mention her in passing when Whitman returned without arousing suspicion, but one thing at a time.
12:23:19
Step two was not quite as straightforward. The head office ebbed and flowed in tidiness during the days only one of the two rulers oversaw the establishment, each cleanup and maelstrom a very deliberate response to the other. To find anything amongst it all was difficult, even for Macquarie and Whitman.
Something smelled.
On the desk sat a clear glass container labelled 'Acetone (CH3)2CO', with a rubber stopper in the top and a few sheets of blank paper beneath, being stained with a translucent ring where it sat. Presumably dipped in it was a small paintbrush sitting upon some wafer-thin circuits, seemingly innocuous save for their accompaniment by what looked like the barrel of a gun the exact size and shape of the empty space in the boards.
12:23:22
Closer inspection revealed on all components some kind of logo, written in what to Marie looked like Chinese script. It spelled out the name of a Shakespearean lover and the multiplicative identity. Whatever it was, it freaked Marie out to see it being fixed up. What, she wondered, was the most noncommittal, innocuous sabotage she had the means to execute?
12:23:31
"You, there. What's your name?"
"Uh! Uh! Uh!" stammered the girl in her sights.
"Yeah, whatever. Look. I've got a flammable liquid here that needs to be disposed of. Do we have a procedure for this?"
"Yes, of course! You're meant to-"
"Cool. Take care of this." Marie sighed and handed her the acetone bottle.
"Ah, um, are you su-"
"Yep. Bye."
She slammed the office door shut, and that was that.
12:23:55
First two minutes well spent, jackass. Eleven left on the clock. Was she even sure what she was looking for would be in here?
Okay, of course it was. She was catastrophising under stress. If Macquarie had secrets (and let's not kid ourselves there, she thought), she wouldn't keep them in the other room where the Attendants she so apparently despised could find them, nor at home where Sinead could. What she was looking for was somewhere in this room.
She checked her own backpack. In living with Hope, her old notebook was practically as good as belonging to her again, and she'd taken a pages' worth of notes on defining characteristics of the fragments. Presumably, should she be keeping any from Marie, Macquarie was smart enough to encrypt whatever fragments she had. What these notes identified were commonalities in structure which should help to identify them, even if the words themselves were completely incomprehensible sans key.
12:24:17
She scoured the compartments of the desk. Most of them were only for show, and the rest yielded only the building lease, a few international shipping receipts - all of which were signed in Macquarie's name, but some of which, upon psychometric evaluation, were imitations forged in Whitman's upsettingly accurate hand - a German phrasebook incidentally a different edition of the same one Marie herself kept in her bag, two wads of chewing gum (each with a microbiome more diverse than the human intestine), and a brochure for an Egyptian exhibit at the Australian Museum. Nothing of great import.
12:25:43
Short of that, there had to be some kind of hidden compartment in the desk. All the filing cabinets and boxes and anything which one might reasonably keep close to themselves to hide something were in the other room. Evidently, so were the bounds of cleaner access. The longer she stayed in this room, the worse it smelled.
She removed her soul gem and set it on the floor beside her. Here she was reaching into corners she couldn't see, and she dared not risk scratching it upon anything.
12:26:09
No sign of any secret compartment.
12:26:11
A quick review of the desk's past revealed nothing, either.
Hang on, her gem wasn't where she put it. It had moved about 30 centimetres aside. She replaced it where she had put it, and watched it roll from that point, again about 30 centimetres.
Resting her head against the floor, Marie quickly identified a small bulge in the carpet.
12:26:56
The carpet was rough with age, and finding a seam to tear was no trivial feat. But sure enough, once she had, buried in the floor of the office was a small tin box.
Marie opened the box. Inside was a pile of worthless paraphernalia. On top were two clumsily rolled joints and an orange lighter.
Really? Macquarie already had a family history of dopamine imbalance. Why would she think this was a good idea?
A cursory investigation revealed that they were not rolled by her. Rather, they were the work of Francis Marlowe some months ago, handed over on a humid February day. Further searching through this box revealed that every single object here was here for safekeeping - things whose owners couldn't take home, for one reason or another. Mostly drugs or memorabilia of gay relationships.
Marie took a moment to reconstruct what she could of the lives of these people. Not all of them still had one.
12:27:33
Alright.
Here she was faffing about with some sentimental crap, so much that already half of Whitman's lunch break was over. She was beginning to seriously freak out now. Impulsively, her thumb stroked the ice-cold surface of the Knight's coins in her pocket.
Time, she decided, to put all this junk back in its box.
12:27:47
Shit.
12:27:48
Shit shit shit.
12:27:49
Okay, this was stupid. Marie needed to pull herself together.
She clearly wasn't coming at this from the right angle. If she were Macquarie, where would she be hiding her secrets? She'd checked the desk, the floor-
Oh.
Well, she was none too glad to admit it, but there was one last place she'd never considered. And it was a place she'd never considered only because she was short.
When examining a room, it is almost always only by way of suggestion that they ever think to look up. If a panel in the ceiling were slightly askew, it could take a very long time before anyone noticed.
12:28:19
She'd constructed a ladder up into the ceiling. Really, it was just a swivel chair on top of the desk, and sure, it looked as if a slight slip of one of the wheels could kill her, but it would work.
12:28:35
She'd rebuilt a ladder up into the ceiling. Really, it was just a swivel chair on top of the desk, and sure, it could apparently barely hold her weight, but it would work this time.
12:28:41
Concealed within the ceiling was a crawlspace, about one metre tall and four wide, and run upon wooden beams to distribute the weight of its inhabitant evenly across panelling clearly not made to support the weight of a grown woman.
There were all sorts of staples of a conspiratorial nature hidden away here. Copies of obscure tomes on the occult, disorganised paperwork, even - when Marie lifted her gem for its light - a corkboard covered in images of famous historical women and coloured string. On each was written a word.
Beneath Anastasia - 'M.G.'. For Helen of Troy - 'Human' (underlined with a hasty 'if real'). Aminatu was labelled with '?', and a disappointing 'Human' marked the visage of a queen apparently named Lady Great-Skull-Zero, for example.
12:30:02
Making any sense of the crap Macquarie kept in here was a time sink, and so close to uncovering something Marie felt immense, outside the boundaries of her imagination, such a hurdle was her choice of deadly or tantalising. Marie chewed her lip and rolled the coins between her fingers again.
She chose deadly.
Some of these loose papers were world-shaking, she realised on collecting them into a single pile. Others were so obviously hoaxes. Most bore completely trivial information that Hope almost definitely knew, so Marie didn't consider those particularly significant.
12:31:56
Among them were a few over a half dozen fragments. Completely uncoded, no less.
12:32:05
One of these fragments was new to her.
12:32:12
Make that two.
12:32:19
By the time she counted three, it was obvious that Macquarie was intentionally keeping her in the dark.
12:32:27
The fourth made it all the more worrisome.
12:33:14
By the time she had double-checked everything else, Marie was cutting it lethally close. In another fifteen seconds, Whitman would be in the building.
She leapt out of the crawl space and stacked it something nasty on the chair-desk tower. Healing cost another few precious seconds. Insult to injury, the office still reeked.
12:33:22
That was because of a dark patch running along the carpet and out into the other room. She realised only now that the stopper on the bottle mustn't have been airtight enough - plenty of acetone had soaked a ring onto the blank paper on the desk. She sniffed the brush. Unmistakably the smell was the same. That shaved a few seconds off her escape deadline: as soon as Whitman sees the stains, she'd come running.
Marie threw a hammer against the window, shattering it entirely. An alarm began blaring, and she wasn't making it out of that without tearing herself to ribbons. She considered that, say, another thirty seconds shorter until her apprehension.
She looked at the acetone stain.
She looked at Francis's lighter.
No, surely not...?
Not unless...
12:33:40
Despite at least one variety of really bad, probably lethal thing happening to her in the next thirty seconds, Marie paced back and forth, anxiously massaging the coins. The real question was which fate held the most enviable chances of survival.
She tripped, on the loose corner of the carpet. One of the coins flew out of her pocket. She fumbled to catch it as if that were the matter on which her life hung, and what's more, she succeeded.
And then it occurred to her - she had just flipped a coin. The original purveyor of instant binaries, disguised throughout all of human history as something so otherwise single-minded as currency. Its true power was in her hands now. Hand, even.
She slapped it, close-palmed, onto the opposite risk. Heads, she-
Marie was outside.
She was outside, there were four new sheets of paper in her backpack and... the office was on fire? Alright.
Did she do that?
Jesus Christ.
She had a very pressing phone call to make.
Marie ran to the nearest phone booth and dialled the number she'd least wanted to ever since she'd learned it.
She could hear Danika laughing through the receiver, and for a moment her heart felt several lifetimes out of sorts.
"Don't worry about it, I'm alright, and how should I know?"
"In that order?"
"In that order. Is this what happens when you go three days without talking to me?"
"It's been three days? Christ, Dani. So much has happened. I got lost out in the desert, and, and Borges was there, like the author guy, and I think I killed someone? Also I ripped the top of my skull off with my bare hands but that was unrelated."
"In the space of three days?" It sounded almost like Danika was amused to hear it.
"Actually that was all last night, come to think of it. Sorry, why were you calling? Seriously, where are you?"
"I'm... around. I've been occupied. I'll trust you two not to say anything."
"Can't you be more specific?"
The hum of the line filled an uncomfortable, rough gear shift of tone.
"I feel like I can't tell you anything you don't want to know. I've tried. You probably don't even remember what I'm talking about."
"Shit... Dani, have I said something to upset you?"
Another pause, this time broken by laughter. Glowing, heartfelt laughter. "I think it takes a bit more than you being obtuse to upset me. Give me some credit."
"O- oh! Haha! Right you are!"
"Don't come looking for me."
"Err...?"
"It's not worth worrying about. But if you go on with your life, I'll know where to find you."
"And you can't tell me where you are?"
"Again, I can't tell you anything you don't want to know."
"Hm."
"My time away is almost over, anyway! I'm around ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine nine percent of the way there."
"That's not how percentages work."
"No? Well, we'll see each other again soon. Have I said that already?"
"Yeah, loud and clear. Is... is this what you were calling about?"
The speaker crackled with the sound of her clearing her throat. "That's going to be more difficult to explain. You know ideas?"
"What about them?"
"This isn't a trick question. Do you know ideas?"
Whispered, aside: "Fearno, do I know ideas?"
"No comment here."
Back into her receiver: "I don't know what else there is to know."
"And would you say your ideas and reality are two very different things?"
"Hold on. Ideas, generally, or my ideas?"
"Whatever suits you better."
"This doesn't sound like you. Are you reading this off something?"
Silence.
"Dani?"
"Well..."
"You've discovered Platonic literature, haven't you?"
"Alright. Guilty as charged."
"So you know about forms and all that?"
"That's what I was going to ask you next."
And what something in the form of Marie-ness appeared to divulge to something in the form of Danika-ness was the quickest version (yet an abstraction further from the original - Phaedrus would be ashamed) she could conceive of the relevant passages of the Republic. She could have made mention of the allegory of the cave and called it a day. The rest was just for show.
"Of course. What do you think?"
"What- what do I think?"
"You haven't spent too long around the Attendants to the Deep Light to think for yourself, have you, Crawford?"
"Well! I think it's an interesting idea. I guess it's kind of like quantum field theory? As in, you take something to be the sum of the properties that make it up."
(Behind her, Hope rolled her eyes.)
"And have you ever heard the word, 'metaeclypticism'?"
"Nope. Sounds made up as hell, though."
Hey.
"I think so too."
Hey!
"What does it mean?"
There stands no reason for this tale to reiterate the definition of such a fundamental concept, worded marginally less intelligibly, and therefore, this section of the conversation is omitted. For the time being, the narrative is freed from its leash.
Yvette pointed her rifle squarely at the killer's chest. He frowned. Her face betrayed no emotion in turn.
"Put the gun down, baby. If you want to talk about this, just-"
"I know it was you! You were the culprit all along! Ever since that night in Barbados, 1985!"
He was wincing now. "C'mon. Yvette, darling... I was with you the whole night, now and then."
"It was a masked ball. The person with me the entire time was a double of the same height and build. While he was spending the night with me, you ran off and-"
"And what? Broke into a locked room and patched it right back up?"
Yvette jostled the rifle in Harry's direction - and of course by now we must ask ourselves who else could it have been, really? - and he fell silent. "While your double impersonated you, you impersonated the victim's own lover, gained her trust, entered unimpeded and locked the door behind you. The door was still locked by the time the police arrived because you never left the room!"
"And the porter? You really think I could have-"
She fired a shot into a nearby wine glass. "Be quiet, for crying out loud! I'm-"
It took the fraction-second she'd turned away for him to produce a small pistol from his pocket, and from the hip, fire directly into her left
"Wow. That's what metaeclypticism is?"
"Simply put."
"And you bring this up...?"
"Because I'm going to need you to wake up."
"Wake up? Dani, you don't mean... surely...!"
"Have you ever felt like your life was slipping away from you, almost like a dream? Have you ever felt like reality sat just outside of your grasp?"
"Yes... exactly! Like shadows on the cave wall!"
"Then you should consult psychiatric assistance. This has nothing to do with that. There is no grand, Philip K. Dick style twist here; I only brought it up because I could tell you had other problems. I implore you, literally, to wake up."
"I am awake, though. Oh. Oh! I'm awake here and now, but..."
But...
But...
But...
...it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning...
...or only the earth.
Marie woke in her own time. Her endocrine and limbic and sensory systems screamed at her conscious mind that something was wrong, that she was in danger, and yet, remarkably, her conscious mind disregarded their warnings. The brain could only process so much information at any one given time, and despite circumstance, beyond all fear, all shock, her stirring was slow and bitter.
She had become too much of a miserable prick to be the slightest bit afraid.
Someone - an Attendant of whom she had only the most passing recollection, the acetone girl - was heard to declare that she was awake now.
"I could have told you that," she grumbled.
"What... what was that?" The Attendant was visibly nervous, as if at any moment, Marie might break her bonds, kick the chair she was tied to aside-
Oh, yes, and it appeared she was tied to a chair. Well, she felt as if she might follow those first two steps, and improvise a third. She could start biting people. That would be exciting.
The act of breaking out was only so enticing in the absence of Whitman, which was broken all too soon.
Her head was buried in a clipboard, the type with a flap for a front cover. She ushered her junior out of the room - now that Marie was wide awake, evidently some division of a warehouse - slammed
her clipboard shut, and looked up.
"Crawford."
"To what do I owe the pl-"
The brief manifestation of her silver gauntlet, mid-flight. Magic against thermodynamics, against laws of conservation. m m', v = v', ∴ p ≠ p'.
Marie spat blood. Currently, she had the rare displeasure of it being her own. Several seconds after the fact, the sensation of knuckle upon cheekbone still rang out in the relevant sensory neurons.
"You're here because we have a job to do, and you're not known for cooperation."
"Hence the whole, uh..."
"Yeah. Hence that. It's some of Macquarie's shit. Don't consider me behind her intentions, just because I'm working with them."
"Weird-poetry-fragment-type Lara's shit?"
"And Ancient Greek, to boot."
Cool. Cool cool cool.
Marie expressed exactly this: "Cool. Cool cool cool. Must be one of the oldest ones, hey?"
Whitman only scowled.
"Hey?"
"Hmph."
"You're no fun. Come on. Surely even cops do things for fun?" Marie smirked. "What about domestic violence? Entrapment? Aren't you guys supposed to love that sh-"
"Enough!"
Tears stung Whitman's eyes.
"Are you seriously this stupid?"
"And stupider," Marie confirmed.
"I'm not here for Macquarie. I'm here because of you."
"I don't follow."
"The jewellery shop?"
"Oh! Oh, yes. That was clever. Technically what I did wasn't illegal, though. You, on the other hand, breaking that display case and stuff..."
"I did what I had to."
"I know! It was heroic, too. You know, the 'right thing' and the 'legal thing' have each other by the balls like forty percent of the time."
By Whitman's will, a searing pain played Marie's body like a harp. "You endangered all those innocent people!"
"I would have killed the witch if you didn't."
"And the police at my house?"
"Genuinely expected you to own up. The consequences-"
"Subtlety's not your strong suit, Crawford. It didn't take a genius to work out who was behind everything."
"No? Well, you did, so I guess clearly not."
Whitman struck Marie again. Harder this time. She could feel her own teeth cut into the insides of her mouth in two places.
"I take it the time for professional courtesies is over now, then?"
FROM ALL SIDES
One of the most fundamental axioms in fathoming the influence of magic upon reality in full is the fact that magic itself is shaped by the emotions of its source. Thus it follows that the shaping of reality is an entirely subjective process, as the individual experiences and choices of distinct, unique beings serve to define the rules and structure of the very reality in which their experiences and choices occur. So what came first, then: reality, or the will to shape it?
It should be obvious by this point that the two notions are inextricable. Just as an electric field and a magnetic field (affect/effect/are) each other, so too does magic influence physical reality influence human emotion influence the soul influence magic. For the purposes of putting a name to it, let's ascribe this phenomenon 'epiphenomenal-psychosomagic dualism'.
A key component of Einsteinian relativity is the notion that there is no universal reference frame, no point in time and space whose perspective of other points in time and space are more "objective", if you will, than any other. This is, strictly speaking, true, but it does not necessarily disqualify the existence of a universal reference frame outside of time and space. Consider, if you will, the Narrator, unrestrained by boundaries of time, space, probability, and thought. And yet, as I speak every instant, every singularity, every possibility, and every concept into being, they are all completely visible from my panopticon of nothings. The universe is both my speech and the amphitheatre from which I speak it.
But a solipsistic orrery strung up with all of time and space and every notion both physical and metaphysical is a dense one indeed, and there are countless points where different notional syzygies radiate from my line of sight. Suddenly, seemingly unrelated pieces of information can intertwine themselves in facets difficult for mortals to notice, let alone understand. They become, for want of a better word, metaeclyptic.
What is fated to become of Marie Crawford will, in her lotus meditation, see similarly. And yet, even under my demonic omniscience, I wonder... much as she has, since a child, wondered what the constellations look like on other planets. Much as her own inverted self wondered what those lights she watched above the starless skies of Esagila, Kansas really were. The zeroes and ones twinned above? The spheres whose music Schoenberg sought? A crystal sphere as presumed in the time of Aristotle?
Marie, like all things, is metaeclyptic with an infinity of other things, places, times. One of these things happens to be a blue Lotus Europa S that, in a matter of months, one of our heroes will attempt to use as a weapon, but be discouraged by how butt-ugly it is. She will instead opt for something far smoother. Someone will die.
What constellations will Marie's future self see, when that shitty blue car steps into syzygy with us? As she grasps for memory, what next springs to her mind?
Let's take a look.