“No. But you know you don’t have to, I check my response rates.”
“Of course you do, of course, because you’re a goddamn professional and an insightful writer. You get down on it, you dig deep, serve it up with something like soul, it’s v. old school and people respond to that. Three point seven percent if they access you on the oneiric feeds, did you know that?”
“Probably.”
“Your stuff is dream food, son, nightly nourishment for the masses. That’s a compliment, Den. And it’s why I want you to find Gregor Makarios.”
“Do not fucking kid.” Garbage, and this time I said it. “You’re handing me a garbage story, Ky. He’s gone. Scrubbed himself from, shit, everything. Actually vanished. Probably rotting in a hole somewhere and that’s not metaphor.”
“You really believe that?”
“I haven’t believed anything since I was sixteen.”
“Part of your charm, then.” Wilder smirked. Not a good look on a forty-five-year-old man. “You rebel. How do you do it? What’s the secret? C’mon, dish.”
There was nothing to dish and I told him so. Immersion in the noönet worked that way for nine out of ten people. Let your mind paddle around in a planet-wide stew of other people’s consciousness and you’d be bound to pick up some extra flavor, as it were. A mutual exposure to the base structures of faith across all cultures evened the species out. The high-end religious thinkers were quick to say this was thanks to the universality of what they called the “perennial philosophy”, but at the end of the day, the Razor applied best: We’re mimics.
“Monkey see,” I said.
“Huh. Den Secord, Original Thinker.”
“Fuck you, Ky. Den Secord, Not Wired That Way.” Wilder smacked his paws together, half-jumped from his chair. The sudden movement scattered files and infographics through the air.
“Not wired that way. Another reason I want you for this one.” He sat back down as the upset data settled around us like ash. “I’ve spent some time with early Makarios. His essays, talks he gave up at Esalen when it was still there. Redmond, Cupertino. His work with Tusk. The AI stuff. He liked the noönet well enough when it was in beta, but he wasn’t what you’d call an early adopter. Here, check this...”
A GIF began to knit itself into our visual field, then stopped before coming to full resolution. Wilder held up a hand to me. “Mind you, this is a meme. You gonna be all right with this? You wanna call your GP?” That smirk again.
“Jesus, Ky. Just play it.”
Close up on the face of a frog. The GIF pulled back from that to show the frog in a pool of dark, bubbling water, and then pulled back further. The pool was a pot. The pot was slowly boiling. A caption: TFW YOU IN THE NOÖNET. Wilder left it running.
“Makarios posted that to his socials back in ’33.”
“Before my time.”
“Sure, sure. See, what he was trying to say was, well, I guess no one knows this about frogs anymore, all considered, I certainly didn’t, but basically, you could put the things in a—...”
“I know what happens to a slow boiled frog, Ky. I get it.”
“Oh, fine.”
“That GIF is wildly offensive. How did you even find it.”
“Editor’s privilege. New Heretic archives are sordid and fathomless.”
“So, Makarios had doubts.”
“In a culture that was just getting comfortable with what it meant to believe in things and how that worked, yeah. Did it save us? I don’t know. Frogs are gone, climate’s still fucked, I can’t buy a pound of authentic coffee beans for less than three months’ salary, but, y’know, we’re fucking a lot less, so fewer babies?” He shrugged. “Being inside other people made it easier to make the hard choices?”
“You’re just quoting the brochure.”
“So what if I am. The brochure didn’t lie.”
“Makarios posted that thirty-nine years ago. Tell me what you think that has to do with the Numpty.”
“And Li’l Numpty!” Wilder must have voice tagged the video from before, because it popped up again and started playing. “I think he knew what was coming. Why did he stop working with Tusk. Right?”
“Okay.”
“Why did he drop all AI research. He scrubs himself from the noönet. Turns legendary in the process, status up to here, but he doesn’t stick around to enjoy it. Rotting away somewhere? Dead? Maybe. I don’t believe for a second that he wouldn’t leave a record, though. That he’d stop being Makarios. And with Li’l Numpty here...” The video began to loop the impact of car bumper with human jaw, the arc of spinning head ended by stop sign.
“You think he’d have something to say about it.”
“Something interesting.” Impact. “Something that New Heretic should put out there.” Arc. “Something you could get out of him.” Stop.
“If I find him.”
“Take all the time you need, Den. Have fun being a real journalist for a change. Get a little old school. We’re hardly the fifth estate anymore, but a little cosplay is good for the soul, I’m told.” Wilder flicked the tip of a finger through the air near the video to pause it, finally. The deceased Japanese head hung there in the pre-dawn light, screaming still. We gazed at it in silence for ten, maybe twenty seconds. Oil-slick washes of color began to appear at the edges of my vision, the traditional harbingers of a migraine. Wilder coughed.
“Extreme butoh,” he said. “Don’t you think?” I lifted myself from the chair and keyed an exit from the chatroom. The space evaporated around me as I left his office.
“It’s death, Ky. Not dance.”
Wilder shrugged, and smirked again.
***
I’ve thought about how to present the so-called detective work I performed in the weeks that followed. The problem, here, in this abandoned shitbox apartment, is that the ancient noönet terminal I’m using has no access to, say, the New Heretic ganzfeld chamber I’d normally use to write my stories. That’s not true, technically; there’s always the hardline, Gregor, but we both know why I can’t use that, not yet. I’m forced to dig deep, recall the skills to actually type out my thoughts and recollections, for what they’re worth. To write the story.
I’m forced to so much. That’s all a life is, at the end: a submission to forces, to the outside. Compromise and capitulation. Feints at freedom. The thrill at getting away with something, running the cliff edge. The poetry of the skydive. It’s death, not dance I’d said to Wilder, but I was wrong. Or half-wrong. It’s both. How the story is written depends on who, or what, leads. And as often as not, it’s blood that does. Or at least that was an ancient aphorism they’d presented to us at journalism school. I’ve probably got that wrong.
I was wrong, too, about the boiled frog meme that Gregor had posted way back in the day. That image kept floating to the surface of my awareness as I began the assignment. Do I write about the weeks of leads that went nowhere, interviews with sky-eyed former employees muted by equal parts admiration for the man and NDAs locked down by his legal teams. Do I opt to make you feel, somehow, the exhaustion of useless nights trawling through the benthic muck of the noönet, trying to siphon up nutritious scraps? Do I write about the actual work? No. I wish there was a point to writing about that, but there isn’t. I will tell you about the frog, though. There’s a point to the frog.
The boiling frog is bullshit.
There, done.
But not really. There’s a little more. For one thing, it’s a bad metaphor. Vice presidents used to trot it out to warn about global warming, so, you know, good job, guys, because that clearly worked so well. For another, it’s a metaphor that falls apart when you actually dig up the documentation on the early let’s-boil-a-frog-see-if-it-notices experiments, and I do mean early. Think 19th century, somewhere in the middle. And those were frogs with their brains removed before hitting the pot for some goddamn reason. Fast forward to late in the last century and you’ve got real biologists scoffing, because hey, who knew, frogs won�
�t sit still for anyone. Put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it jumps out. Put a frog in cold water, it jumps out. Warm water? Out. Tepid water, with a tidy experimental plan to warm the water by a degree every minute? Yeah, that frog is on the counter and making a break for it before ten seconds have passed, so good luck with that.
TFW YOU IN THE NOÖNET
So why did you post that meme, Gregor. If I could dredge up old data on the frog no one could actually boil, certainly you could have. And given your intelligence you would have, you old polymath. So what were you trying to say?
These were the kind of questions that drove the work. What were the things you said, and did you mean them that way? Which of these things did you scrub from electronic existence using the vast powers at your disposal, and which did you let remain? Why? And where did you go, when you were done? With the noönet, with humanity. The planet. Us. Where’d you hop off to, Gregor.
That was the work. I can’t be bothered with writing out the details. If I were building this story in the ganzfeld chamber, I’d lace this part with a blend of sour adrenaline, simulated acetylcholine and serotonin. I’d overlay the late nights with a gumshoe montage of noir intensity. Maybe throw in a couple of needlessly spiteful interactions with the spouses for that verité vibe. Really make you feel that tired ache and boredom, but spike it with a subtle rush of excitement whenever I wrote about a possible clue that would eventually lead exactly nowhere, often within the hour.
I say I can’t be bothered with writing out the details, but I will tell you what I really mean. What I really fear. I think I’ve forgotten how. I fear that I no longer have the skill to do so, and wonder if, in fact, I ever did. So much of my success at New Heretic, at Fossil Lake Monthly, at The Resonator...it was all down to the noönet, in the end. That, and the story tech we all used, tech that spliced my work so seamlessly into the interior, emotional lives of readers. Did I back up my articles and thinkpieces with real, verifiable information? Sure. Sure, I did. Fields of carefully cultivated footnotes stretching off into the buzzing distance at the outer edge of all my stories. I wonder now if that was what really mattered, though. If anyone actually cared to walk out into those fields, to test me. Wilder and other old men like him call what we do journalism, but I wonder how far that goes, what the word used to mean, whether it’s still that thing anymore. Did anyone ever go beyond the feelings I’d frost a story with to get at the real food beneath, the nourishing stuff? A taste test? I’ve never been tested.
Sure as hell picked a fine time to start.
That feeling when you in the noönet.
All right, then. The basics, sans feelings. Insert gumshoe montage here, if you like, if that’s what you’re used to.
Wilder wanted me to find Gregor Makarios, based on a hunch that Makarios might know something about the Li’l Numpty. A hunch based on a line or two of extemporaneous prophetic poetry in an ancient interview and the bullshit boiling frog meme, also ancient. I poked around in the shallows for a while, thinking I’d get lucky, maybe turn up some more recent lead that would take me to the man himself. Makarios had been extremely thorough, sadly. Little shreds of data about him here and there, old addresses, tech conference posters with his name in the guest listing, but nothing substantial, and nothing after ’59, the year he’d disappeared.
I kept coming back to that meme, and those lines of poetry. Not that I felt they meant something grand, in and of themselves, but their dates. Ancient. What else was back there, buried in archival storage? So, I went back.
Insert wash of fresh adrenaline here.
The article I found was from 2017, back when barely-there mountain towns in Cascadia still put out a limited print edition for the elderly. I had thought to track back along the timeline and locate Gregor’s parents. The elder Makarios was not unlike the son: a cipher, with an electronic footprint so scant as to be non-existent. The mother (one Dana Mallory) was a different story, active in fringe environmental groups and a low-key producer of generalized doomsday agit-prop in and around the Bay Area. There had been a divorce not long after Gregor’s birth, and a choppy retreat to the middle of nowhere, which is to say northern Oregon, for unclear reasons. And it was while sifting through area rags that I found her name, Mallory, but in connection with her son, Gregor. Because of course she’d gone back to her maiden name, and it seemed the by-then teenaged Gregor had used it, too, at least for a while.
I’d never even heard of cryptozoology before then. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t heard of it at all.
***
There’s a stain on the wall here, in the corner of what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, the living area. Do I damage my credibility further by confessing that the words living area fill me with dread? I live here, it’s an area, enough said, and anyway what credibility. The stain is there, in the southwest corner, tucked up against the ceiling, a dark grey patch of fuzz. Your black mould, Gregor. Hostile in its vagueness. There’s a serious aspect to it, a presence. It doesn’t look like anything, I don’t experience pareidolia when I watch it, and I do watch it, constantly. No. I won’t go so far as to say it has autonomy, but it seems as if it should. It seems like something of theirs.
A former tenant took a hopeful rag to it at some point in the past. You can see the swirls in it where the cloth, soaked in industrial-grade cleaner, passed over it. Only just, though. There was resistance. The stain prevails. I will sometimes imagine that the stain was here before the walls went up. It’s that serious.
When my eyes tire of the phosphor burn from the malfunctioning screen on this terminal, and if I’m strong enough, I’ll watch the stain. I think about your archons, Gregor. I think about the cryptids and rub my left leg reflexively, dig my fingertips into the soft spaces beneath the knee. Push the patella around like a plate. The knee is an impossible joint, notoriously false.
I’ll start to write about them, soon. I know it. Submission to those outside forces demands that I do. This is how they’ve structured things, for me. This room, the corner stain, the Gauss pistol, the cable.
Gregor, you have made a mess of me, I think as I rub my knee. Me knee, me knee. Tech hell! Up horse, in! If I could see with their eyes, would I be able to read that stain, make a decent translation? Would I understand them better, the archons?
Gregor, you have made a mess of me. In every way that’s possible, you’ve done it. I don’t fit anymore, Gregor, and it’s not just the leg, or the things I now know. I imagine, in my sickness, that when this is all said and done, written out by the sweat of my brow, and I connect that hardline, I imagine that when this is finished, and they come to wipe it all clean, that I will remain, a stain, floating here and waiting for the next structure to rise up around me.
Or the other thing, and I’d leave a stain that way, too.
I imagine this, but, as you often told me, I can’t know with certainty what will happen, what their intentions are. Imagination is all I’ve got.
***
LOCAL TEEN SEEKS CRYPTID
A big, hairy mystery is unfolding in a remote community in northern Oregon.
Residents of Watts, a bedroom community on the western edge of Forest Grove, have been reporting strange screams and howls coming from Tillamook State Park – and some think they could be coming from a sasquatch.
Local youth and avid amateur cryptozoologist Greg Mallory said he recently recorded the unusual sounds on his cell phone at night on the backside of Mount Hebron.
“We were on the porch up on the back road and we heard it once, and I didn’t get the recording, and the second time I got the recording,” he said. “That was on the back porch. Very eerie.”
Mallory isn’t the only one who has heard the unsettling howls.
“This summer I’ve heard it three times, I’ve heard it scream three times. But it’s been coming here for years,” said long-time resident Doug Standish.
Whatever has been making the noise is heard primarily at night, and while some have dismissed it a
s a dog, others say that’s impossible.
“With that volume, absolutely no dog can make that kind of a noise with that volume,” said Millie Craven, who has heard the sounds coming from right outside her home.
Mallory is convinced the calls are from a sasquatch and claims to have encountered the legendary beast last year while tree planting in the Tillamook.
Mallory said he was with fellow planters in camp at dusk, preparing dinner, when out of nowhere, a tree was hurled at the group.
“Pulled the tree right out of the ground, the branches were still on it. I don’t know anything that could literally pull a tree with roots and all,” he said. “I mean, it was a small tree, but you see that little alder growing out there? You try and pull it out, you’re not going to be able to do it.”
Others claim to have physically encountered the creature right in Watts.
“One person that’s seen it, her father lives in Watts, and she came up to visit her dad,” said Mallory. “She went up to the graveyard to pay respects to one of her family, and she saw it standing there at the edge. She turned around and she got out of there right away.”
A more recent sighting occurred when a group of teens were playing soccer near the local Tillamook “big house”, according to Mallory.
He said a large, upright creature moved quickly along the building in just a few strides.
“Big, tall and it moved really fast. Too big to be a human, they said. [The teens] took off right away, they don’t even stay there anymore after dark,” he said. “I went there the morning after and managed to get some decent plaster casts of the tracks it left.”
The sightings have sparked the interest of renowned sasquatch investigator Dermot Huffnagel, who has been looking for evidence proving the creature’s existence for decades.
As for Mallory, he’s always on the watch for the elusive creature. “I like to think that seeing one would be a pretty special moment in my life, so I keep my eyes peeled, and collect as many reports as I can. It bothers me that no one has caught one by now. A real mystery. But it’s out there, somewhere, the world champion of hide and seek. It’s got to mean something.”
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