As the desert rolled by, she listened to his stories of his past and how he’d pulled it all off; the seances, the card readings, the wartime deathbed scenes, the repairman grifts, the IT shaman game. She was still wary of him, but delighted at the prospect of a real mystery in the world, and interrupted him more than once to ask questions. She was afraid, but the fear was held at bay by her need to know more.
Cyrus, for his part, also felt strange. He had never shared any of this with anyone, and was relatively new to this immortality business, as far as he knew. The only others he’d met had had several centuries on him, even millennia here and there. Lamia, or whatever nightmare she masqueraded as in this century, had been as old as the bones of the world. The man he’d met during the wars, Nik, had casually recalled some ancient plague that Cyrus had never heard of. And Bea, who they were going to visit now, seemed to contain several thousand lives over several thousand years. Cyrus was an adolescent in comparison to them, Anthea just a newborn. Or something like it. But was she? He shook his head. Something to think about later.
Anthea was very careful not to ask about her mother again, and Cyrus took the hint. In the most general terms, he explained the process as he knew it.
A human being discovers they have a knack, and at some point they must make a choice; to ignore it, to wildly exploit it, or to carefully cultivate it. He explained the spark, and how often he’d seen them flare and fizzle out through his long life. She nodded in understanding. That was simple enough.
The rest was harder. He tried his best to explain the relationship between humans with a knack and the hunger that waited across the void. About the push and pull and the ways the feeding took place. There was another eventuality, however, that he was only just now able to articulate, probably for the first time in his life.
“I don’t fully understand how it works, but there are some humans who eventually… well, they seem to give themselves over to the spirit they feed,” he began, “They are no longer human, but they’re not really an othersider either.”
“Curiosity was hungry,” Anthea interjected. “I felt it. She wanted something from me, desperately. It would have been so easy to say yes, to give her what she wanted.”
Cyrus was impressed. It had taken several summonings before he’d felt that pull from Trickster. He’d assumed it was directed outward toward the human world, but ultimately realized he was what Trickster wanted. Resisting the pull and remaining himself all this time had taken work, but became something like second nature. But how would he feel after another few centuries? How would he feel after thousands and thousands of years on this earth? After he’d watched another hundred Great Wars and his scraps of empathy dissipated? When the humans seemed like nothing more than inconvenient and malicious vermin? Would his immortal soul beg for rest, for release, or for something else? And then what?
It wasn’t something he liked to think about. He still felt human, and was content to float along with humanity toward the future. He cared about them, he realized, and was startled to notice that he thought of other humans as a them and not as a we or an us. Something to think about later.
“I call them avatars, for lack of a better word,” he continued, “Beings that have wholly taken on the spirits they feed. They’re like a direct conduit to the void, and an extremely powerful energy source. All spirits seek to create them, to use them, to consume from them and through them. They’re extremely dangerous, and sometimes unbelievably difficult to spot. An avatar for Anger, for example, could be the racist demagogue on a soapbox inciting a riot, or they could be the software engineer creating a critical drive malfunction that only deploys when the user is most desperate, or they could be the driver who created a gridlock. I’ve felt them in my work sometimes, and have created a number of ways to remain invisible myself. It’s the reason I concocted that protection spell the night before last, and how I knew to do it.”
Anthea thought about all of this. The night before last? Had it really only been a day? Had they really only left last night? She looked out the window at the other cars on the highway, at the billboards and gas stations, the desert scenery, sometimes bleak, sometimes vivid. It felt strange to be so visible in the front seat of Cyrus’ car. The only other times she’d made these kinds of trips, she had burrowed into a bus seat, away from the window, praying for invisibility. She was still nervous, but not about being seen. She was at the mercy of her only friend, and she still wasn’t sure she trusted him.
Avatars, spirits, the void. Her mother, her friend, herself. How did it all fit together? And what were they going to do now? And why?
“Cyrus,” she asked finally, “What do the spirits want? What is the void and why are they so afraid of it?”
He was impressed again. He had never considered that the spirits were afraid of the void, but now that he thought about it, that was exactly right. They clung desperately to the human world, endlessly trawling for more openings into the living realm. They fed on life, or at least on the energy of the living, but he’d never stopped to consider why.
Perhaps we’re symbiotes, he mused, they cling to us, feed on us, but they protect us from the void just as much as they’re protecting themselves.
“The void is nothingness,” he told her, “an end to something that has never begun. Eternity that has no dimension of time. It is death that has never known life.”
She shivered.
“I tried to get Trickster to show it to me once, but even he refused to play along. He said it was ‘a hunger without beginning or end’ and left it at that. I think I would be afraid of it too. As for what they want from us, I think they rely on us to even exist. Patterns of thought take shape in the void, so in a sense, we create them. They need us like all children need their parents.”
He winced at that, afraid that he’d reopened the wound that drag Anthea into silence again, but she just sighed.
“I wonder how Hello is doing,” she said.
“Hello?” he asked.
She smiled softly.
“It’s how I’ve been thinking of our golem. I think she’d like to have a name,” she explained.
Our golem.
Cyrus smiled.
“I’m sure she’s fine. It’s almost lunch time, so she’d probably sitting down in your kitchen to dive into a hearty meal of pop tarts and potatoes,” he said with a sidelong glance.
Anthea laughed. Actually laughed.
It was the best sound Cyrus had ever heard. The death-grip tied around his heart began to relax.
“I’ve been thinking of her as ‘Sweetling’. Do think she’d like that as a middle name?” he asked.
Anthea laughed again.
“Hello Sweetling Schock-Menzies? That’s an awful name,” she declared, and they both laughed. The tension between them had settled into something less awkward, and with a small shudder, he felt a thin sheen of her belief settle around him.
Not long after, Anthea and Cyrus sat in the parking lot facing the Arizona Department of Transportation Motor Vehicle Division office. They’d turned off the interstate and driven down a wide residential street until the properties had begun to thin out. It had only been a couple of miles, but to Anthea it seemed that the MVD building was in the middle of nowhere. Her head was still swimming with knacks and flames and avatars and spirits and she was irrationally glad to be in an open expanse of space, even as she considered the ravenous maw of eternity in the void. She was tired.
Scrubby trees lined the edges of the broad parking lot. An American and Arizonan flag hung limply in the sun in front of a building, next to a comically shaped saguaro cactus. Anthea wondered if it was real, and how many little creatures flitted in and out of the wide holes each night in search of food. It was probably home to all kinds of things, like mice and lizards and maybe even an owl and do they have any endangered animals in Arizona and…
“Anthea?” Cyrus asked, “Is that ok?”
“Sorry,” she winced, “Is what ok?”
&n
bsp; He sighed but wasn’t displeased. He was beginning to recognize when her powers were stirring, even if she wasn’t yet.
“I need to get Bea’s attention without drawing attention to them,” he explained again, “so I’m going to have to do something disruptive. Is that ok?”
“Oh,” she said, “Is that all? Sure, do whatever.”
“Think of this like an exam of sorts. I want you to try, really try to feel the belief in this place. Try to sense where it settles, and why. Bea is very old, but surprisingly playful for a being so ancient. They’ll like you, I promise.”
Anthea nodded and they stepped out into the incredible Arizona heat. She marveled at the way the sweat dried almost as soon as it was produced, just like in the foothills of Las Vegas. They entered the building and passed through an ancient metal detector, guarded by a bored-looking man in a faded uniform. The damp, air-conditioned space felt like a mausoleum.
Cyrus chose a line at random and motioned for Anthea to take a seat against the wall. She looked around at the people in the lines and wondered about their lives. What drew these people to this place? Why were they here? What did all these people have in common? What did they believe that made this place so important to Cyrus and to Bea? She closed her eyes and imagined that she could feel the threads of belief wafting around her, like spider silk looking for purchase.
A gentle breeze blew the threads toward a far wall and Anthea opened her eyes. Someone in a brown suit had stepped out of a back room and the threads were resting lightly on the shoulders of the official. The employee walked to the waiting area and handed an envelope to a woman seated near Anthea who smiled and looked relieved. She loudly thanked them and Anthea’s eyes widened as the threads, which had been tentatively hovering around the brown jacket, firmly hooked into it and then followed the person as they disappeared again into their mysterious back room.
What just happened? Anthea wondered. Who was that?
As she waited and watched, this cycle repeated itself another half dozen times. More people would enter, their hopes would wander in search of a savior. Then the mysterious employee would appear, smile at a patron, and hand them an envelope. They would exchange a few words with the happy recipient, and then the belief followed them back into the recesses of the building.
The process, she realized, They all trust the process.
She was about to go and tell Cyrus when she suddenly heard his voice, raised above the quiet hush of the other several dozen people around them.
“What on earth do you mean, forged? How dare you!” he was almost yelling.
“Sir, please, I just need to speak to my manager,” the clerk was saying in a placating tone, “I’ll just be right back.”
Cyrus was huffing angrily when the bewildered clerk returned with the person in the brown suit, who was now looking very stern.
“If you and your wife could just come into my office for a moment, we’ll sort this all out,” they were saying.
Anthea rolled her eyes, stood, and followed the two immortals into the hidden recesses of the American DMV.
Chapter 18
Faces
Anthea and Cyrus sat in front of an immense desk, piled high with neatly stacked papers and folders. A tidy wire-framed stack of trays labeled ‘inbox’ and ‘outbox’ sat in one corner. Anthea recognized it as the duplicate to her own at Corporate International back in Burbank. She allowed herself a single moment to feel guilty that she hadn’t called in sick today, but put it behind her with great effort. That life was over, maybe forever.
She had started over before. She could do it again.
She would miss it, she realized with no small amount of grief. Just another thing her mother had stolen from her.
Anthea took a deep breath and blinked hard. Focus.
She looked at the person seated behind the desk and tried for the 100th time to see their face. She failed again. The person in the brown suit was laughing and reminiscing rapidly with Cyrus as though they were old friends while she sat and listened and tried not to squirm.
Everything the person said was delivered by a different voice, wearing a different face, sometimes shifting to a new persona mid-sentence.
“Forged papers! What next, you old swindler?” laughed a wrinkled white face. A woman. Anthea blinked. Cyrus was saying something but she didn’t hear it.
“Of course we remember Reno!” shrieked a long, thin face with a pleasant mustache. A man. Anthea closed her eyes, counted to ten, opened them.
“Oh of course that was us, who else could have leaked that info?” a small face with a sideways smile. Anthea wasn’t sure what was happening. She was so tired, but her adrenaline began to kick in. She found herself falling back on the habits and defense mechanisms she’d built during her childhood and adolescence at The Camp. She forced her face into a slack, neutral expression, emptied her eyes of emotion, and focused on her breathing. As a child, it had kept her from screaming in frustration when she was chastised by the Helpmeets for her doubts, fears, or confusion. In her mind’s eye she observed herself observing Cyrus and Bea, and it calmed her somewhat.
That is, until the two turned to her and Cyrus formally introduced her to Bureaucracy.
“Bea, I’d like you to meet my friend Anthea. She and I have just, well, sort of escaped from LA. It’s not really my story to tell, to be honest. I’ll let Anthea explain as much as she’s comfortable with. We came to see you because,” Cyrus was hesitant, “she needs to know some things, and I’d prefer that she hear them from… well, just, not from me.”
“Struggling with belief again, my friend?” Bureaucracy chuckled, now as a striking blonde with a vague accent, and then turned to Anthea.
“Hello, young one,” continued the accented voice, but the face shifted again until Bureaucracy was now a middle-aged Black woman with smiling eyes. Having Bureaucracy’s attention focused directly on Anthea quickly unraveled her control.
“Hello,” Anthea said. Tears pricked the corner of her eyes as she struggled not to allow her confusion to blossom into full-blown panic.
The features of Bureaucracy’s face became mostly still but tightened with concern and question.
“I can’t… I can’t see you,” she tried to explain. Bureaucracy’s eyes widened and Anthea was immediately worried that she’d just said something extremely rude.
A long moment passed, and Bureaucracy grinned.
“I’m so sorry, child, I didn’t realize. Is that better?” Bea’s face stopped shifting and their voice was rich and deep. What had been a plurality of selves seemed to settle into a single self. Anthea nodded carefully, still fretting that she’d offended them. As though they already sensed Anthea’s peculiar need, Bureaucracy immediately launched into an explanation.
“We are an entity composed of countless others, and what you are seeing is a momentary glimpse of our many selves. We call it ‘scanning’. It keeps us connected and… healthy, for lack of a better word. Not many people can actually see the scan. Most people don’t really look, actually, and even when they do, their minds apply a sort of filter to what they’re seeing. You must be very clever, young one,” Bureaucracy smiled a full, toothy smile. Anthea was drawn to the warmth of it and finally began to relax.
Bea had given a name to the phenomena that was causing Anthea’s disquiet without even forcing her to ask, and she could immediately feel the disruptions in her curious nature calming and regrouping.
“Can you do mine as well?” she finally asked.
“Why do you ask this question?” Bea quirked an eyebrow and closed her eyes briefly. “Ah, I see. You have also done my work. I do feel your energy out there, far away. Stale, but still edible. Permits! Permits, permits, permits!” Bea rasped a long laugh.
Anthea’s mind was a whirlwind as she combed through what Cyrus had said on the way here, what she had just learned for herself in the waiting room, and that she had once had a role in it all as well.
“People… believe in you, or at
least what you represent, right?” she began, and was pleased when Bea nodded encouragingly.
“And regardless of your role in all this now, this faith in the process sustains you, is that right too?” Bea nodded again, glancing at Cyrus quickly. The two immortals could both sense what was about to come bubbling up from Anthea.
“So, are you an avatar? Who is your spirit? Why can I see your scanning? Have you fed on me? No, not without my consent, right? And because I believed, I gave consent, right?” she could hardly stop herself long enough to prioritize what it was that she wanted to know most. She took a deep breath and Bea just waited. “‘My name is Legion, for we are many.’ Who were you first?“
Bea smiled again, so wide that their eyes narrowed, feral and charged.
“So curious, so young. Cyrus,” they said, “Be a sweetheart and go fix us some coffee?” and then Bea and Anthea were alone.
“I will begin in the beginning, as much as I am able to do such a thing.” Bea’s features shifted again into a young woman. Her sculpted eyebrows dominated the smooth, flat planes of her face. Her eyes were large and dark, separated by a regal nose. Her skin was a rich chestnut, and shining curls hung gently around her shoulders and down her back. She reminded Anthea of a statue, or a drawing.
“This is my first self, my oldest self. This person is Sumerian, from a fearsome and wealthy house. Her father was a cunning warrior, her mother a shrewd accountant. Together they increased their wealth, year after year. And their daughter watched all this, and she learned their secrets. Her father used a symbol to mark his possessions, and those from whom he regularly purchased goods also adopted this symbol. It marked their products as set apart from all the rest, and others saw the symbol and feared and respected it. Thieves learned quickly not to dare incur her father’s wrath by molesting his shipments. Merchants saw their profits increased, and they in turn gained in prestige.
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