by Adam Nemett
By the third week, they’d added a new sacrificial component.
A set of heroes would offer to the flames some symbol of the old world—prepackaged supermarket meat, for instance—while demonstrating the new world SITS equivalent—field dressing a deer, maybe. A ritualized death and rebirth. The Kali Yuga followed by the Satya Yuga.
When the rains came, they still kept the fire going, even if one superhero had to take a piece of it into a steel bucket and keep the flames going, feeding it with scraps of newspaper. The fire was important. It was a forum for all to be exorcised. And to see justice done.
They wanted to ward against complex bureaucracy, but the USV had grown too big. They needed a way to establish and enforce law and order. So mediation was the first step. Then the duels returned. For minor disagreements where both parties were amenable, the paintball pistols were put back into service. A quick-and-dirty justice, once the province of daytime court TV.
Bonfire backdrop. Ten steps, turn, fire. Case closed.
For bigger issues, it was the League of Nine that served as judge and jury, there in the basement lair. And if a guilty verdict was reached, the sentence was always the same.
— Ø —
She sits beside him on the roof, this purple god.
Haley knows Ultraviolet’s not a god. Nor even a man. Just a boy like all other boys.
He’s smart and driven and sexy and powerful, but a boy still.
When she’d had her first Big Bang, she saw Mathias in that hyperspace. She’d discerned there something about his persona or character or soul. Whatever psychedelic tea leaves she could read and decode. That Nyla was meant to wield a tool or weapon, or that Britt was meant to morph into a hundred different beings. For Mathias, though, all she’d seen was purple, a kind of viscous lavender smoke, some kind of glittery goo curling around itself like a child’s science experiment. She thought this was normal, at the time, or as normal as an abnormal drug experience can be. She thought she’d seen purple because David said to make him purple, the power of suggestion. But when she saw everyone else in such anthropomorphic forms she’d still seen Mathias as this formless smoke.
She tried getting closer to it, this second time. Millions of tiny beings were swimming in this whirlpool, or maybe drowning, she couldn’t be sure. She remembers wondering, at the time and still, if this meant maybe Mathias was a god.
Or maybe he was nothing. Just smoke.
Haley likes to stay seated as he stands and holds court over his flock. He’s got a great sense of humor and keeps it light amid all the serious darkness. He says something about the rain, the wind, the hot, hot heat of the fire. She has faith in everything he says, and yet she doesn’t believe a word. All at the same time. It makes her feel insane.
When she got to college, she imagined she’d fall into what people refer to as a normal, long-term relationship. High school had been lots of short flings and hookups, even dabbling a bit with girls. She never wanted to commit. She knew she was smarter than most of the others in Pikesville, destined for big things, and the horror story of teen pregnancy had been drilled into her like one of those torture film screenings from A Clockwork Orange.
In college, when most people were finally off the leash and going nuts, that’s when she’d settle down. She’d meet someone in her History of Jews in Hollywood class, and they’d flirt during precept, share some inside joke about the kid who pronounced “Warner” like “Wawner.” Then they’d see each other out one night and it would be stupid drunk perfection and that would be that.
He’d be good in bed—her equal—and they’d hole up in his dorm room for the first few weeks, and then vacation in her dorm for a while, before she eventually abandoned her sad, involuntary roommate and moved into his room permanently. They’d start wearing sweat suits all the time because they were past that steamy first phase and were now in love.
They’d stay together all through college, one of those rare couples. Maybe they’d break up briefly and dramatically, in a way that made their mutual friends question the very nature of existence. And then they’d get back together, just as dramatically. And that’d be it.
They’d graduate. Marriage. Kids. She’d be a fine arts professor somewhere cool and edgy, and he’d be something noble and high-minded, too.
Instead, Halloween happened. And now it was the end of the world.
This was certainly a different way to go.
Mathias had been the perfect self-defense teacher in that month afterward. He was unassuming at the time, teaching the fundamentals and occasionally listening quietly when some poor girl broke down. He never got fresh, not with her and not with anyone else, to her knowledge. He didn’t need some shitty springboard to meet girls. Still, Mathias let them kick the shit out of him in that padded dummy suit. He was plain. Not particularly funny or exciting. He was just exactly what they all needed him to be. And that made him beautiful to her.
She found out, of course, about his off-campus living, his money. She doesn’t want to think about that, whether it swayed anything. It did and it didn’t, but of course it did.
And then came the opportunity to dress him up any way she wanted. The paper doll with infinite costumes. Of course, it had been David dictating the first set of costumes, but still, she could take his suggestions and fashion them into her fantasy. Not that a guy wearing purple body paint and a straitjacket was her fantasy. Or maybe it was, who even knew anymore.
Mathias was a tremendous dancer. That much was incontrovertible. Masculine and soft and goofy simultaneously. As the drums pound, he moves like he’s fucking her, like he’s fucking them all. And it’s pretty okay to watch and feel like his queen, like she’s the one everyone is jealous of right now. Not so long ago she was the one everyone was pitying.
But it’s not his magnetism. After she broke through the veil, and then broke through with him, he told her his secrets. She saw his burdens—something beyond privilege, like where privilege is pushed so far that it cycles all the way around back to abuse and pain.
His brother. His father. His pills.
She’d decided she had to save him. And save him she would.
David is up here, too, on the roof of The Egg. She knows he wants to save her. Haley has no desire to save him, the way she feels for Mathias. David will be fine. His is regular old privilege. He’s young and stupid, but he’s a rock, the kind of boy she might’ve worn sweats with in another lifetime, if he were a little bit taller.
Maybe Mathias wants to complete the Photoshop polygon tool and save David, or maybe he actually wants to save all of them, play his part in this big show and hope it becomes a self-fulfilling circus, where he can be ringleader and the acrobats all do their jobs. They’ve reached well more than critical mass by this point. There are capable lieutenants and teams working autonomously, improvising and evolving the USV the way good movements do. They look to him, but, hopefully, they’re all really looking to themselves. The fundamental truth is that all of this could be gone at any moment. The chief virtue is independence, self-sufficiency. Mathias is powerful—he is power incarnate—but he is not the entire grid.
Or if he is, then like the grid, he cannot be relied on.
Haley knows that. She wonders if the rest of them do.
A new anger rushes over her. A familiar energy by this point. She’s started to think of it like a drug wave, or the transformation the Hulk goes through. The Hulk used to scare her when she was little—one of the few superheroes she remembers viscerally because she remembers not understanding why he was called a good guy when he looked like a complete nightmare.
Right now, her anger is due to Stockman, who needs to be punished.
They bring him up to the roof. Below, the drums and dancing cease, but the fire’s flames are still high. The USV initiates gaze up to hear the sentence and witness his penance.
Stockman had served as Cap’n Cunt’s trusted assistant. But he’d only posed as gay in order to ogle and grope women as they moved
through the costuming workshop in various states of undress. Held there on the roof, as they harness him up to the zip line, he screams a bizarre defense. Venemous attacks on Ultraviolet and Cap’n Cunt and Dr. Ugs and Business-Man devolving into crazier shit about the Illuminati and Metallica and Beyoncé and cloning farms and the prehistoric Vril Lizards and god knows what else. Haley had heard about psychotic breaks brought on by DMT, but until now she’d thankfully never seen one occur at The Egg.
Cap’n Cunt ties Stockman’s hands behind his back using a handcuff knot and throws a purple evolution cape over his shoulders. As the congregation grows quieter below, she takes the strings of the cape and ties it around his neck. A double half hitch with a quick-release loop on the tag end.
Ultraviolet lights a candle and brings it to the hem of Stockman’s cape. The flames grow from blue to orange. Then they push Stockman off the roof and he soars through the air, over the fire, trailing a wild cape ablaze. It’s kind of gorgeous, actually.
When he gets to the other side, heroes are on hand to tamp out the flames. It is more scary than painful. Still, SuperVisor bundles him up and drives him to the hospital.
After this, a moment of silence. This is their typical end to the Super Fucking Fire Zero, and then the heroes travel inside or stay in their spots, meditating, or reconvene for all manner of impromptu talent show in The Shack, elevating the music or literature or theater that makes humanity worth saving.
As the crowd disperses, Haley climbs down from the roof and makes her way to the other side of the circle to retrieve Stockman’s burned cape. She brings it to the cul-de-sac and tamps out the last of its embers, ash disappearing into asphalt.
Part of it is still good and can be salvaged.
She looks up at Mathias, stoic on the roof, nodding down at her and everyone else. This punishment might seem evil to some, but she knows this is Mathias protecting her, protecting all of them. The fervor is intensifying, and they need to hold the space, the structure, the Ten Assured Futures, for when the shit really hits the fan.
Leadership. Power. Safety. Evolution.
She looks up at him.
Ultraviolet sneezes, grossly, then smiles and shrugs and wipes his purple face with the sleeve of his straitjacket.
He is not a god.
But maybe he could be a hero.
ii.
David snapped back the neck of his plastic likeness, the face atop the Pez dispenser molded to look like Business-Man with his signature goggles and sideways Mohawk. Two of their heroes—Ninja King Pirate and Compass Rose—made it with the architecture department’s 3-D printer. David accepted a Party Zero poking out from his own severed throat. He felt famous.
This was a dangerous feeling, a clear shadow moment—at odds with everything they were doing—but it was secretly thrilling to be recognized like this, his persona made plastic. And it wasn’t just within the USV. He’d received an email, the “We are pleased to inform you” variety: David had won the PEN Startup Competition. Actually won the thing. When it rains, it pours.
David kept the accolade secret—to brag about his win would have been to admit fundamental disbelief in the entire mission of the USV in favor of the exact kind of capitalist careerism they were supposed to shun. But still. After some phone tag, he finally reached Zhou.
“I will say, it was the most comprehensive entry, extremely well written,” said Professor Zhou. “And it certainly has its heart in the right place, so the team wanted to recognize that.”
When David asked about the financial prizes, the possibility of funding, Zhou laughed:
“No, you didn’t win because of the investment opportunity. Your plan doesn’t have 10X potential, so I’m afraid it’s not the kind of thing that’ll garner even seed-round VC consideration,” he explained. “But we were sufficiently impressed with the thought behind it and would be pleased to offer you a paid summer internship with Randolph-Forrestal Ventures. You’d gain some valuable and necessary experience.”
“With all due respect, sir,” said David, “have you looked outside lately? I’m not sure we’ll all still be here this summer.”
Again, Zhou laughed.
“You’re still young,” he said. “You haven’t lived through enough of these so-called apocalypses. Once you’re ancient like me and you’ve been through five or six of them—political, nuclear, weather-related, epidemics—but… no. There’s plenty of future to be had. There always is.”
David was taken aback. At first he wanted to hang up on Zhou, call him a name that young people call old people. He’d had such negligible mentorship from the elder generation since arriving at Princeton, despite his parents’ best efforts. But maybe Zhou was right. Maybe every generation feels the threat of the End and simultaneously cultivates the people who ensure it doesn’t happen.
Maybe David was one of them. And there was indeed plenty of future to be had.
“Are you available this summer?” Zhou asked.
“I think so,” David said. “Any time after June 6.”
The USV’s entire modus operandi was all about cultivating these multitudes. Two dozen initiates now camped in the backyard of The Egg. The overflow moved back to campus, some of them into the safe-ish confines of the dorms, and others formed a tent city in the valley around Spinoza Field House, awaiting instructions.
June 6 was on the horizon. David figured they needed one more interim spectacle before this D-Day. By now there were teams responsible for executing the nuts and bolts of David’s ultimate vision. He only had to plan the big picture.
But he couldn’t plan. His mind was stuck on Haley Roth.
David stared at her across their circular table, trying to oonch out a wink, a smile, or some invisible pheromone to let him know she was thinking of him, too. But her poker face stayed strong.
Although she was also battling a virus, so maybe she was just trying to not vomit.
“Try again,” Haley said to Britt, then burped. “I swear I’m listening this time.”
“Okay. So how much do you all know about psychoacoustic weaponry?” Britt asked.
“Some,” Haley said, burping. “Sorry. What I mean is: What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Transmission of sound directly to the subconscious without affecting other brain function.” She spread a bunch of psychology articles on the table, pointing at pages like a quarterback drawing up plays in the mud. She and Fu explained: to the ear, psychoacoustics sound like white noise. But subliminal sounds are overdubbed and encoded into the lower frequencies. The sound doesn’t hit the outer eardrum mechanically, but it’s processed by the inner ear the same way.
Your brain hears it.
Echo had his trio of laptops open, layers of audio files stacked on a musical timeline.
“The KGB has used this stuff since the seventies,” Mathias said. “FBI used it in Waco. And in Afghanistan, look”—he flipped pages—“‘used psychoacoustic frequencies to engage the neural networks of the enemy’s brain’ blah blah… here! Quote! ‘ONE soldier talked 450 enemy troops into surrendering.’”
“I thought we were after nonviolence,” David said.
“No, ours isn’t a weapon,” Britt said. “It’s for post-disaster communication. It’s my thesis!”
Owen’s headset crackled. He mumbled a few words into it and then sprinted upstairs.
Mathias sat. “When I was a kid they used psychoacoustic correction in the hospital,” he said. “They take pictures of your brain with electroencephalographs, which are totally rad, actually. Once they map the different areas, they can physically affect the mental landscape with psychoacoustic messages. Like terraforming the brain. Commercials used this as subliminal advertising for aeons.”
“A Colorado professor found a psychoacoustic that makes people shit themselves,” said Fu.
“Ours will pipe in Fu’s Human DJ tunes,” Britt said. “And any encrypted instructions.”
Under the articles was a schematic drawing of what looked
a little like a gramophone, that big bell-horn at one end, leading to a small black box. Mathias’s plan was for a new spectacle—one where they’d transmit music directly to the USV and be able to start and stop it at will, creating a sort of coordinated freeze dance. David wasn’t sold yet on the new idea, which Mathias had dubbed “the Silent Dance.” David owed a new communiqué to the USV outposts and he needed to get his head fully around the concept before writing and disseminating clear instructions. He pretended to pore over the articles and schematics, but the words went through him without catching hold.
Haley looked sad. Why was she sad? he wondered.
“This must’ve cost a fortune,” David finally said, sifting aimlessly through the ledgers. Accounting was becoming his province by default. And he kind of sucked at numbers.
“You can actually do it for less than ten grand,” said Fu.
David’s head shot up at Fu. This number he understood. Because it was massive.
“Okay, everyone,” David said. “We are literally hemorrhaging money right now. Mathias, dude, what do we need more technology for? We’re already toying with drugs and, you know, the fabric of time and stuff. Now, you… you’re always coming up with this half-baked—”
“This has always been the next logical step,” Mathias shot back. “This is what zeroes us in and connects the collective consciousness needed to enter the Null Point. This is Echo’s thesis.”
“His thesis is a musical flash mob?”
“This is his hour. This needs to happen so the next thing can happen. Stay positive!”
This was Mathias’s power—always nine steps ahead and beckoning everyone else to catch up. Had he told David about the psychoacoustic noise machine last year when they met in that river, or during winter break, or any time before now, David probably would have laughed and walked away forever. But on the heels of their latest ante-upper, anything was possible. Everything was necessary.