Understand that I was already...compromised. That long drive where I kept telling myself the trip was critically important to the audit, that I was just being thorough? On some level I knew that was all bullshit. Didn’t even think twice about the tourist bureau: why would Riemann have that? Or if not Riemann, why would the state have something set up for a private holding? You have to know that those questions never occurred to me then, only later. And they didn’t occur to me…well. I’ll get to that.
Lost track of time down there. Seriously. Every once in a while it’d dawn on me that my back and knees were getting achy from walking, but then I’d get distracted by some new armory, or brick-lined arch, or another descending spiral staircase. I’d check my phone and it would assure me that I really hadn’t been gone that long. So I’d keep going, feeling, I don’t know, mesmerized. Or something.
Never even thought to wonder at how pristine it all was. Aged, yes, but untouched by graffiti, no sign of previous visitors. Should’ve leaped out at me, and did, but only in retrospect.
Finally, I’m heading down a broad set of stairs, and the edge of the circle of light from my lantern illuminates someone’s hiking boots and legs below me. ‘Bout near had a heart attack, but as I edged forward, the light fell on the rest of the person: Tia, girl from the tourist bureau outside. She’s just smiling up at me from the gloom, eyes shining weird like dimes in the sun. I’m still kind of shocked when she says “Welcome, Michael.” Like she’d been expecting me.
Won’t kid you, I was the opposite of smooth. Heart was in my throat, all I could do was frown and stare, couldn’t think what to say. Eventually she just chuckled, shook her head. Then she said: “Brace yourself”.
I paused the recording.
Mike had stopped talking, was just staring at the table top between us, so I cleared my throat, trying to convey impatience. He didn’t look up, but he spoke in measured, I’m-perfectly-sane tones: “Jay, this next bit...I don’t really have the proper words. I mean, there are no proper words, but I’ll give it a shot. And you’re going to think that I’m screwing with you, but I want you to sit there, and listen, okay? Listen right to the end.”
He looked up then, just with his eyes, and I raised my eyebrows in the universal signal for “Continue”. He sat back, tilting the chair onto the two rear legs for a moment until the chain caught, then rocked forward, glaring at me like Rasputin.
Should have stopped him right there. I often look back and wonder if that would have made a difference.
Instead, all I did was resume recording.
Suddenly, we weren’t on that staircase anymore. Everything had changed. Instead of a World War II era bunker complex, I stood in this vast underground chamber with stalactites dripping from the roof, and mineral deposits in the stone reflecting light like jewels. Heat washed over me--blast furnace heat coming from some deeper level, and in the distance I could hear flowing water echoing in the immensity.
Huge monitors lined the walls, streaming numerical and visual data. Banks of servers hummed, illuminated by gigantic bronze braziers that threw light from burning coals. Somewhere there would be a massive generator powering the electronics, ventilation and cooling systems, making sense of the running water. Making sense of Riemann’s capital investment. That was the thing: it did all make sense, if you didn’t pursue the logic too far. An effort was being made to present the situation in a way I could rationalize. Above my head, catwalks spanned the distance, giving the whole thing the air of a Bond villain’s lair.
Tia was gone. In her place, a...the...dragon leered. A Sumerian myth made flesh. No, Jay: let me finish. Colossal and reptilian; the great scaled head and fantastic bat wings. The endless, sinuous tail, and grotesque, nightmare talons. And the eyes: amber coloured cats’ eyes, filled with an ancient, monstrous intelligence. “I am Tiamat,” it rumbled with a voice--I was made to understand, like the way you know things in dreams--fashioned by iris valves in the long throat to approximate speech. “‘Leviathan’ in your ancient texts. I am the abyss; I am the One.” More of that “making sense” routine: a rationale for the voice; huge wing area to help dissipate internal heat; gill-like structures that would vent heat-expanded air to provide thrust for lift. The details all fit conveniently into place, giving me some kind of explanatory positioning. Convincing me of plausibility.
Then Tia was back, the girl, the human. Human except for the weird starlight where her eyes should have been. She held her hand out to me and I stumbled forward, recognizing in my enslaved gait that she’d been drawing me to her all along. Maybe for my entire life, the pull at first gentle, barely felt and only understood as a force after the fact. Like gravity at a distance, getting stronger as I got closer.
Her hand was blazing hot to the touch, and weirdly dry. Like snake skin.
She walked me over to a bank of monitors. For-ex markets; commodity futures; stock exchanges; bond bids and yields; crypto-currency crosses. Complex stochastics spit out live rolling averages; Black-Scholes calculations updated and projected time values as data from a myriad sources aggregated and changed. It was like a main line cut into the vein of global finance: news feeds and financial data propagating each other like electromagnetic waves. Tiamat was at the center of the Meltdown, the cause of it all. And Riemann Draco was one of the few beneficiaries.
Contrasted with the cold hard numbers were the vid feeds from all over the world. Scenes of food riots, armed border disputes, air strikes, carrier groups conducting tactical ops, protests being beaten down by armored phalanxes. The human expression of financial volatility. Tiamat was at the center of that maelstrom too.
“Do you get it?” She said, smiling up at me from just about the height of my right shoulder. A picture of Smaug--that dragon in “The Hobbit”--lying atop an impossible mound of gold, forced its way into my mind, and yes, I did get it. Dragons loved concentrating and accumulating wealth, and in the 21st century, this is what a treasure room full of other people’s gold looked like.
“You...” I struggled to speak.
“Indeed.”
“This can’t be real,” I said. Part analysis, part hope.
“Sure it can. Because I’m back, baby. Or just about. That’s where you come in.”
“Just about,” I stammered. “What do you mean, ‘just about’ back?”
“I can influence human affairs. Move economies, thanks to digital interfaces and corporate personhood. Cause signs and portents in weather and other natural phenomena. I can whisper into the ears of sensitives like Tolkien or Lovecraft – why do you think Tolkien’s Smaug is so obsessed with money-supply? Why are Lovecraftian monsters always grotesque mashed-up wholes of things that shouldn’t go together, rather than discrete parts? Me. I’m the inspiration. I was once contiguous with the cosmos, whole and indivisible. I am Cthulhu moving poets to madness in the dark.
“But only you, Michael, can see me in high res. How I’ve waited for you. Longed for you. Called for you. In perceiving me, you make me real again. Real-ish, at any rate. And, having made me real, you shall be my herald, preparing humanity for my re-emergence. You are the gateway, Michael, the Prime Perceptor. The Mind Shaper. Through you shall others see me, and in their seeing, shall I wax strong again. Or words to that effect. Big picture, Mike: I need you. Consider yourself blessed.”
Mike had drifted again, staring past my right shoulder. I was just about to say how disappointed I was in his testimony, when he started speaking again, practically to himself. “E Pluribus Unum,” he mumbled.
“Out of many, one,” I translated.
“Now you’re getting it,” he said. I assumed he was referring to his “whole and indivisible” line, but it was safer not to get caught up in his reveries.
“There was more,” Mike continued, “in the cavern, much more, but that bit was the big reveal. She took me to Maxwell’s lab in the 1800s--showed me his notes for a derivation of what amounted to some kind of relativistic correction to Probabil
ity. It was related to his stats work in thermodynamics--never published--all pre-vector calculus, but brilliant, far as I could tell. And then it dawned on me. Jay, remember ‘Maxwell’s Demon’? That was Tiamat; she was there, fucking with him, pulling his strings.
“She showed me a vault in Princeton that contains hard-copy volumes of calculations--thousands of pages--working out the scatter-amplitudes for a single set of classified Feynman diagrams that researchers apparently refer to as ‘blasphemous’. That I couldn’t follow as neatly as Maxwell’s speculations, but it doesn’t matter: it’s a work in progress. When they’re finished, it’ll be a description of the cosmic dragon herself, though they won’t know it. Another sign, another portent.
“She knew I needed to understand her in terms of math. She was speaking to me in the language I had always used to describe reality. She was helping me to see her, and the more I saw, the more I could see. She was bootstrapping herself into our world through my perception.
“She showed me history she’d guided, taking me there with illusions as vivid as reality itself. I saw her create the petro-sorcery that allowed Byzantines to use Greek fire without setting their own ships alight. The same sorcery that would one day allow Standard Oil dowsers to locate the massive hydrocarbon structures so crucial to the shaping of our modern world. I was in the room when she whispered in Churchill’s ear to switch the British fleet from coal to oil. A thousand little moves and trajectory tweaks and domino reactions designed in the end, to bring me to her. I mean, she was thinking in terms of genetic probabilities, maximizing the chance that something like me-- something that could directly perceive her in our space--would be generated.
“The vastness of her intellect, Jay. The granularity she perceives. Do you see? It’s ‘Maxwell’s Demon’ in another reference frame.”
“Okay,” I said, nonplussed at his data-free performance. “Are you ever going to get around to the attack on Riemann’s server farm, or...”
He turned his face towards me, and his eyes seemed to get a bit more present. He smiled a smile that was all irony and regret. “Yeah, well. When I woke up at the cave mouth, I thought only a few hours had passed, but it had been weeks. And at the bottom of the trail, there was no ghost town, no tourist bureau. Not gonna lie, I didn’t take that news as well as I might have. I was not, shall we say, particularly resilient. Many of the ideas I came up with in that period were not the result of intricate planning and deep reflection. And it’s true: blowing up the Riemann hub was one of those ideas.
“Understand, I thought that destroying the hub might disconnect her. I still thought that Riemann’s quants were doing the dirty work, but it turns out they were basically monkeys taking dictation, doing the paperwork, managing the machinery. They didn’t actually have advanced AI code: it was all Tiamat. And the worst part is, while I thought I was doing some enlightened destruction, the actual point of the operation turned out to be to attract the attention of the counter terrorism task force. To attract you. I didn’t see the design until I was brought here. But now it’s obvious. In our frame, that’s how magic works. It shows up in our narratives, and all our narratives are shadows of some higher explanation.”
“Still a little opaque to me, Mike. I’m an engineer, remember? I like a little concrete mixed in with my batshit theory.”
“I’m the herald of Tiamat, Jay. I’m here to announce her presence. To tell her story and make you see.”
“Hate to break it to you buddy but you haven’t exactly convinced me that dragons are real.”
“Yeah?” Mike’s eyes got glossy as they welled up. With his left hand, he pointed down at the floor where he’d dropped his water glass. I glanced down on reflex.
The shattered pieces of the glass had randomly reconstituted, leaving the unbroken vessel standing on its base. Second law of thermodynamics came back to me in a torrent. I was looking at a bunch of Royal Flush draws in a row. And I was the farthest thing from a poet, or even a polymath like Mike. If I could see what I was seeing, anyone could; everyone would. Peggy, the kids, our folks. Everyone. Dimly, I began to see why Mike had been trying to get my attention in particular. Or more precisely, why something had been using Mike to get my attention, and put us in a room together.
A mean Hudson Hawk rattled the windows of the safe house with a thumping blast, carrying the sound of distant gunfire with it. More sirens, too; more of that sense of the city seething in the darkness. Things boiling hot, getting energetic. Getting ready to explode.
I tried to swallow but my mouth was suddenly dry.
“What’re the odds, right?” Mike whispered. “I’m sorry you can’t unsee that, man. It’s Tia Time. Not gonna lie: this is gonna hurt.”
Kevin Cockle is a speculative-fiction author with over thirty short stories appearing in a variety of anthologies and magazines. His novel “Spawning Ground” is narrowly believed to have invented the micro-genre of “occult game theory”, and was published by Tyche Books in 2016. In 2019, Kevin alongside co-writer Mike Peterson won AMPIA’s “Rosie” award for the feature-film screenplay “Knuckleball”, breaking a persistent streak of long-list nominations, honourable mention citations, and other close-but-no-cigar metrics.
KRISTA D. BALL
FOR THE GLORY OF GOLD
All things considered, things were looking up for Miranda. A month ago, she’d lost her job with Orbit News. Thankfully, Miranda was an award-winning journalist and had a successful podcast with enough sponsors to cover her weekly station costs on New Sky.
And, honestly, that was great and everything, but what Miranda really wanted to do was write a book. Specifically, she wanted to write about the big races that made the move to New Sky—the station that now orbited the moon—and their role in the successful advancement of humanity.
Personally, she loathed the term humanity. How human-centric. However, no one had come up with a better term that everyone could agree upon, so humanity stuck.
She wanted to write the history of the station and highlight the importance of her own kind: trolls, orcs, giants. There was a small problem with that plan—it required her to interview the original founders of New Sky, the investors, and the administration team.
And that meant interviewing the Duchess of Toronto.
She couldn’t remember the last time she was this nervous, which was surprising given that the entire reason Miranda was unemployed was because she’d outed the duchess’ financial interests on her podcast.
A well-dressed woman stepped through a door and into the reception room. “The duchess will see you now.”
Miranda immediately noticed the woman’s jewelry. There was a ring with a different gemstone on each finger, both thumbs sported thick gold bands and delicate diamonds and emeralds decorated both her ears from lobe to the very top tip. Most impressively, she wore a choker of emeralds and diamonds that must have cost a lifetime’s worth of wages.
The woman motioned for Miranda to follow her. When she turned, Miranda noticed the woman’s high heels. The spike tips were gold, or at least gold-plated.
Miranda picked up her equipment bags, taking the time to distribute them correctly so that she could stand straight and not worry about them slipping off.
I am in the wrong profession, Miranda thought.
Miranda dutifully followed the assistant through a confounding maze of corridors, stairs, and doors. Miranda was growing sweaty and she wasn’t even wearing metal-tipped spikes. She soon realized they’d been walking in a circle, slowly moving toward the middle of… something.
Finally, they arrived in a round, three story room. A surprised sound escaped Miranda, which caught the ear of the assistant.
“Everyone is awed upon their first visit.” She motioned at the round table in the middle of the room. “Please, set your things there. The Duchess will be seated in the gold and red chair, exactly in the position it is now placed. That will allow you to set up any lighting and cameras you wish to use.”
“Am I permitted to take photographs of the room?” Miranda asked.
“Of course. However, the Duchess will need your drive to be submitted for inspection. Any photos not permitted will be deleted from your device.”
Miranda took a survey of the room. “Is there anything specific here you know I should avoid?”
“Merely anything that hints at our security. The safety of the duchess is paramount.”
“Oh, of course. I have no interest in putting her life in danger.”
“Excellent.” She glanced at her watch. It was, of course, gold. “Her Grace will be with you in six minutes.”
Miranda got to work setting up her equipment. Once the camera and lights were positioned correctly at the golden chair, she used her handheld camera to take some shots about the room.
And what a room. Everything was decorated in red velvets, and light filtered down through the skyline windows above. Of course, that was only an illusion; the room itself was in the middle of the station’s administrative wing. She must have at least forty glow sprites living in the ceiling to create this kind of light. How in the world did she manage to convince them to work for her? How rich was she?
The amount of gold in the room risked bordering on tacky, but the rich fabrics, simple marble floor, and the proper amount of black and wood items somehow turned it down enough to go from tacky to opulent. In the far corner was a dragon statue, wings spread the entire width of the room, it heads throw back in a scream.
“It is magnificent, isn’t it?” spoke a silky voice behind her.
Miranda turned around. She’d not heard the duchess enter. She put on her reporter smile and said, “Thank you for granting this interview, Your Grace.”
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