The Unraveling

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

  Uban threw up zir hands. “After what we’ve been through, you have to ask? ‘Though there is neither air nor light in the spaces between, I am heartbound to follow . . .’”

  “All right,” Ellix said. Ze sighed. “It’s wild foolishness, but I suppose wild foolishness is the best we’ve got at this point. Let’s ask Fift. It’s really zir call.”

  Half-expressions moved across Shria’s face like glimpses of aquatic creatures in the deep: suggestions of excitement, joy, longing, trepidation, worry, defensiveness, each melting away before it was fully formed.

  Ellix came over to Fift and put a hand on zir shoulder. “Fift, wake up,” ze said, and Fift opened zir eyes.

  In Shria’s eyes, Fift could see the world transformed—as when strange matter reactions create brief rips in the fabric of the cosmos through which entire other orders, subject to different laws, can be glimpsed.

  Fift wanted to kiss vem again. But doubts began to swarm, crowding around Fift’s heart like spice-gnats sucking at a vine. How would they live in the world outside this room? Would Fift live like a wild rebel Vail, having sex and fighting in the streets? Or were they going to pretend, absurdly, to be a hundred years older than they were, two babies in First Childhood mawkishly dressed up in imitation of a respectable proto-cohort dyad? Fift tried to imagine some way for them to be—strolling the byways hand in hand, laughing over mangareme fluffies, fucking—and zir mind boggled. Ze had no model for such a relationship.

  Shria watched zir face, cocking vir head to one side. “Fift?”

  Fift let go of Shria’s hands.

  “Listen, child,” Ellix said, squatting down next to zir. “You have a decision to make. We can take you to the Pole—all your bodies—and you can live with the Midwives. They’ve said they’ll adopt you, and they will. You’ll become one of them. It’ll be . . . a bumpy sluice. You’re starting the training late; they’ll separate you from the world for at least a century, and they may never trust you in the field. But it’ll be safe.”

  Fift thought of how the Midwives had cut zir bodies apart, and a spike of fear shot through zir. The Midwives knew where ze was. They must be closing in. There was no place to hide from them. “Shria, I don’t know if I can go through that”–zir voice caught in zir throat, tightening like a knot–“again. Being ripped apart, like on the docks. Do we have a plan?”

  Shria bit vir lip. “Pom does.”

  “If it were up to me,” Ellix said, “you’d go to the Pole. But Fasmul here thinks it’s a bad idea. Ze thinks you have a shot at a different option.”

  “What option is that?” Fift asked Ellix, weakly.

  “Consensus is unsteady at the moment,” Ellix said, a little reluctantly. “There’s a chance that it’ll shift in your favor if you stay at large for a little while. With the feed down . . . there are places you could go to delay things. To stay on the run. A dangerous game.”

  “Pom wants to show you off at this party,” Shria said. “Ze’s invited some senior Midwives, Rysthia and Elo. I don’t understand all the factions among the Midwives, but I guess these ones are considering whether to oppose the crackdown, and Pom wants them to use . . . us.”

  “Us?” Fift said.

  Shria flung a hand up theatrically. “A tale of two innocent children,” ve said, mimicking the Cirque’s grandiose announcement of the Unraveling, “caught up in the machinations of Clowns and feedgardeners and vailarch revanchists . . . their cohorts, their futures, unjustly, brutally destroyed by the mainstream Midwives’ reactionary rigidity!” Ve let vir hand drop. “Us.”

  Fift’s banker-historian agents were asleep, but even without them, ze could imagine the shape of it: the bent bow of their fame released, a swing from disgust to sympathy, the nonlinear whip-snap of a cascading ratings rebound, a seismic collapse of consensus, instabilities to exploit . . .

  “Do you think it’ll work?” Fift said.

  Shria shrugged. “Maybe. But I don’t know if Pom and these other Midwives really understand what’s going on in Wallacomp . . . It’s not just riots now. It’s not just Panaximandra’s goons fighting Clown sympathizers. It’s like a festival . . . there are all these team-tags with a flood of new ideas, and people have taken over the byways . . . not to riot, but just to sing in unison, to make speeches, to blank out ratings and lookup and social nuance agents and just meet each other, eye to eye, mind to mind, unmediated. It’s out of the Midwives’ control. It’s anger, but it’s also joy . . .”

  “Some of them are quoting us,” Fift said.

  Shria grinned crookedly. “A lot of them are quoting us. Your friend’s clip-op made us into a whole thing. Anyway, my point is, I don’t know if Pom and Rysthia and Elo can put the frustrated trashrat back in the box. They want to use us to their advantage, but this may be bigger than them.” Ve cracked vir knuckles nervously again.

  Fift took Shria’s hand again.

  “Fift?” Ellix asked. “Do you understand what you’re choosing? We’re out of time.”

  “I don’t want to go to the Pole,” Fift said, a little shakily.

  Ellix exhaled through zir teeth. The feed was down, so the Peaceables’ neural states weren’t being published, but Fift thought ze saw a flash of fear in Ellix’s eyes before ze squared zir shoulders and nodded.

  Uban and Fasmul started pulling off their Peaceable’s robes.

  “Okay,” Fift told Shria. “Yeah. Fuck the Midwives, let’s do this.”

  Shria grinned, and leaned in, and kissed Fift again.

  The kiss sang through Fift. But the spice-gnats of doubt were still worrying at zir heart. They were hanging their safety on Pom’s story: two innocent children, caught up in the machinations of a terrible world.

  But the world would despise them for this kiss, if it knew.

  Most of all, it would despise Shria: rioter, peacebreaker, Clownist radical, chaotist, and now despoiler of staidish childhood, trespasser of the still center.

  Ze broke away. “Shria . . .” Ze tried to swallow the words, to cling to this impossible moment. Zir heart was thundering; ze might be torn apart.

  There was uncertainty in Shria’s face, and bravado, and hope.

  Rips in the fabric of the cosmos through which possibilities of terrible transformation could be seen . . .

  Uban took Fasmul’s robe, and zir own, and held them out to Fift. “Put these on,” ze said. “And hurry.”

  Maybe Pom could swing it. Maybe ze could turn the tide in their favor. But not if the world saw . . . this.

  Fift wanted to feel Shria’s lips again, vir warmth, to press zir nose into vir lavender skin and smell vir wild forest smell.

  But.

  “We can’t,” ze whispered. “We can’t let them see this. If anyone found out . . . they’d use it against us. Against you. There’d be no chance, then. For us, or for . . . your family.”

  Shria set vir jaw. Vir eyes flashed. “So we won’t tell anyone.”

  Fift’s throat was dry. It felt like zir body had been pumped full of electricity. As if zir skin had been peeled away, and every touch of Shria’s went through zir, into the marrow of zir bones.

  Ze tried to imagine their life outside this lab. Stealing glances at each other. Letting their fingertips brush against each other under a table as they were interviewed for some show Pom would get them on, the ponderous Salutations of Second Afternoon, Fullbelly! or the glitzy Manifestation of This Moment. Today we’re talking to the two innocent kids the Midwives have abused. Yes, we’re innocent kids, very innocent; we haven’t done anything wrong. Feeling this wave of fire when their fingers touched.

  And every glance and touch captured by the feed, and the rumors spreading, and the pressure never to admit it, never to let it slip.

  “I don’t . . .” Fift stammered. “I don’t know if I can . . . hide this.”

  Shria’s face darkened: little flashes of uncertainty and hurt and despair quickly suppressed, like a storm cloud swallowing its own lightning.

  The gaps w
ere closing, the strange matter extinguishing itself. The terrible, beautiful possibility of transformation evaporating, leaving only a shockwave of emanating debris . . .

  “They’d find out. They’d guess,” Fift said, zir voice almost a whisper. Ze could barely say the words. “This is . . . too big a secret.”

  Shria put vir hands in vir lap. Ve looked at them.

  The words were like acid in Fift’s mouth. “With . . . with the world watching. With your family at stake . . .”

  “I get it,” Shria said, quietly.

  Orphaned, incriminated, astray, without a profession, without benefit of sibling relationships, Fift was like a piece of debris zirself, tumbling in the void.

  Shria’s touch felt safe, but it wasn’t. Nowhere was safe.

  Ze wanted to be five again, cuddled up in a bed with zir parents fussing over zir. But they were gone, too.

  “I get it. You’re right,” Shria said. Ze took a deep breath, smiled a tight smile, jumped down from the table, and straightened vir clothes.

  In what was no longer Iraxis apartment, Fift struggled into the Peaceables’ robes.

  “Shria—”

  “It’s fine, Fift. Look, are you okay? Are you ready to go out there? If you’re not up to it, I can tell Pom . . .”

  Shria stood at the room’s cervix-like door and visibly forced vemself to meet Fift’s eyes. Vir skin was smooth as flower petals, vir bare shoulders powerful above vir opalescent dress. If only they could be telling jokes in the supper garden at Iraxis cohort again; if they could be watching unpurposed wild fireflies in a surface forest smelling of thunder. Anywhere but here, any time but now.

  “Ellix,” Fift said, “I’m sorry for what I . . .” Ze glanced around the walls of the apartment, like the carapace left over when something had died. Squell’s cuddles, Frill and Smistria flirting and fighting, Arevio’s gentleness, Nupolo cupping vir drink solemnly in both hands, Grobbard listening to zir with quiet patience, Thurm’s voice rising to an excited pitch as ve explained something, Miskisk’s booming laugh, even Pip . . . even Pip just sitting by the window, watching the light. It had been full, and now it was empty. It was hollowed out, and Fift had done that. “I . . . I just . . .”

  Ellix shrugged. “Kids make messes. It’s what they do.” Ze straightened the Peaceable’s robe over Fift’s shoulders, draped the hood over zir face. “Even with the feed down, this will only fool them for a few minutes. Let’s move.”

  Shria rolled vir eyes. “Kumru, Fift, you look like you just swallowed a trashrat and it’s wiggling on the way down. I’m fine. I’ll get over it.” Ve crossed back to the table where Fift sat and took zir shoulders in a firm, friendly grip. “Are you ready?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Fift said.

  “All right, then,” Shria said. Ze helped Fift off the table, brushed off zir shift, and offered an arm for support. “Pom’s been sending me frantic messages for the last ten minutes. Let’s go impress some Midwives.”

  Fift swallowed as they crossed the room to the door. “Yeah, because I’ve been so great at that lately.”

  “You didn’t have me by your side then, comrade,” Shria said. “Now you do.”

  The door dilated, and Fift took a deep breath.

  Shria squeezed zir shoulder. “Showtime,” ve said, and they stepped through, into the wildfire.

  Interlude

  Personal Essay

  “The Unraveling and Me”

  by

  Ruich Milva Snedic of name registry Startled Pastry 23

  14-year-old Vail

  submitted to the automated agents of the Fertile Surprise/​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Inner Znep Neighborhood Schooling Interdependency

  This essay is about the Unraveling, however I am not supposed to just repeat what my agents tell me about the Unraveling, but, instead, bring my own thoughts and feelings to the fore.

  First, I am going to talk about what it is, to set the stage, and then there will be feelings.

  The Unraveling is more than one thing. First, there is “the Unraveling,” which was a performance by the Cirque Fantabulous six years ago. I was eight at the time and I remember it very well, because afterwards the feed went out and my parents were scared.

  The performance is on the feed, so you can look it up any time. (I’m watching it now for research. Honestly, it seems pretty silly and over the top, but back then everyone was really amazed, I guess.) After the performance, everything goes blank. You can’t look up what happened. Your agents can’t tell you about it. You just have to remember it yourself.

  Nonetheless, everybody remembers where they were that day.

  The Feed Went Down! That’s how everybody thought about it then. The Feed Went Down!! With capital letters and exclamation points! Nowadays feed outages are pretty common, so for someone my age it’s weird that they made such a big deal of it. But this was the first big one, so that is why. Everyone freaked out and didn’t even know how to use local caches. There’s practically nothing recorded from that incident.

  My own memories of that time are super clear. I remember everything my parents said. Rushing back home and hearing the noise of the crowds. There were some green, red, blue, yellow, orange, and aquamarine balls that had fallen off a byway and gotten stuck in the sticky invisible web between the habitations. Just hanging there like they were floating. That’s not on the feed at all, it’s only in my head, but that makes it special. It’s like it’s more a part of me than anything on the feed.

  In addition to the performance itself, some people use the phrase “the Unraveling” to refer to all the changes afterwards. But how long was “the Unraveling,” really? Was it just the chaos of the first two or three years afterwards, or is it still going on today? People disagree.

  Some people think, not only are we still in the Unraveling, but it’s going to go on a long time, and even become its own age, the Age of Unraveling. To me (and this is just my own opinion) it seems like they’re getting carried away. Ages are like hundreds of years long! You can’t have everything changing this much for hundreds of years. People have to settle down at some point! On the other hand, some people have pointed out that the excavations are all concluded. So how can it still be the Age of Digging? This is a point for further discussion.

  The Unraveling (the second kind) had a big effect on my family, though not as big as for some people’s families. We lost our squatright and had to move, and my eldersibling Umis got in trouble for rioting, and my parents were like “what is happening with the world how could Umis do that it was never like this when we grew up” and “you’d better not act like your eldersibling when you’re bigger.” But they also stuck up for Umis even though the local adjudicators wanted them to send vem to a Learn Responsibility Enclosure once those started up. My parents were like “that’s the opposite of an Idyll” and “you can’t force someone to learn responsibility” and “our Mothers didn’t dig Fullbelly so we could put our children in lockboxes” and “these Midwives of ours have gone too far.” That’s why we lost squatright and had to move.

  I didn’t like our new apartment at first, and I didn’t know anyone in the neighborhood, but I didn’t complain, because we had almost lost Umis to the opposite of an Idyll, and that sounded really bad. I had trouble sleeping for many months. I felt like the world was upside down and inside out and what was the point of anything. I had the opposite reaction of Umis, who wanted to fight all the time: I never wanted to fight again, even on the official mat training sessions. I just hid in my room a lot. That would have been bad for ratings, except with all the rioting and panic and dispute resolution incoherence, I guess a lot of people thought a young Vail just hiding in vir room all the time was better than whatever the average young person was doing.

  One thing I got into then was Fift and Shria. I know, no surprise, everybody was paying attention to them. It was the new craze, especially for young people in First or Seco
nd Childhood, and especially in our part of Fullbelly. (Because I come from the same region they do! You can see Foo from my old house!) We all followed them. We viewed their talk with Thavé, and Panaximandra, and the riots, and Fift’s escape, and the bodycut on the docks (I mean the “Polysomatic Network Disruption,” but that makes it sound like an accident!), and the confrontation with the Midwives at Stiffwaddle, and when they went on all the shows. That was something. I remember Shria freaking out when ve met Trink on Manifestation of This Moment, and it was super relatable. Shria was a fan of Trink just like we were fans of Shria.

  There was so much drama! And we felt really connected to it all. Whenever Fift and Shria got caught, the fans and team-tags would lead the public pressure until they got released again. Different famous people started getting involved, and some Midwives and feedgardeners and adjudicators would help because they wanted Fift and Shria associated with their factions. But mostly it was us—from littles like me, to kids in their teens and twenties and thirties and forties—people who no one was listening to before. We were speaking up. The whole world was falling apart, but we believed in Fift and Shria and Dobroc and Emim and Aparia and Bojum and Meroc and Bluey and Urchis and Eirera. Especially in this part of Fullbelly. People had different faves in different places, but for us, it was that gang.

  That craze kind of passed for most people. People still follow Fift and Shria, but not as much. I don’t know why. It’s not like the crisis is over. In my opinion, nothing has been solved.

  The world started falling apart when I was eight. Here I am, already fourteen, and it’s still falling apart, I guess. There are still riots and feed outages and bodycuts. There have been body loss incidents and major flow disruptions. People have gone hungry! Adjudication doesn’t work like it used to when I was a baby, when conflicts between two people just got mediated and that was that. Now people joke about how any argument between two cohorts over a bundle-garden can blow up into a riot with team-tag armies and feed-snarls. It’s funny because it’s true.