A slightly different pattern of dead ladybugs than usual lined the casing of the heavily dimmed fluorescent light above me, itself evidently in the process of dying as well, at the library. I didn't actually know what the plastic at the bottom of a ceiling light fixture which separates the light itself from the rest of the world is properly called, and I still don't, but there's a beauty in the unseen nature of things which remain at least partially unknown forever after they are first perceived. In this way, it happened to never cease to please me to spend a bit of time alone, as if solitarily beginning to recount the intial stages of my story into a voice recorder for the sake of some researcher attempting to collect the oral histories of all the horrible things I'd been involved in, but I would decide a little under six years after this day that it wasn't worth it to speak to anyone about the experience at all, and then it would take another one hundred and twenty-two years for me to fully change my mind about divulging secrets to other human beings. For now, though, I found it best to imagine the recording in theory and indulge in its unrecording in practice, for there were many things I had experienced which I was sure were better off being left entirely unsaid for the rest of eternity, however I may undergo it.

As much as I recall the scene and the thoughts in the very front of my psyche, I remember exactly what I was thinking about at this moment in the back of my mind, the recesses from which things happen to escape from time to time, creating minor fractures in previous understandings, filling in those cracks later with a mental glue so that everything will heal, going unacknowledged from time to time for the sake of ensuring care's nonexcessiveness; within this assortment, every event's recency was striking compared to the distant memories which often surfaced when I found myself alone, especially when in turn I was left to my own devices in a lonely place like Han Wudi University. None of the recollections bit, only nibbled.

At the time, I wasn't actually thinking about the way I'd already restructured the University's framework to accommodate Ari's concurrent attendance (without intent to graduate or accept degrees - Magdolna's Law makes sure of that in the Alarie Code, and she wouldn't dare go against it), for it wasn't something I had to worry about at the moment, though I suppose it wouldn't hurt to explain as a context for everything else. Ari's attendance of Han Wudi, as she expressed it to me when she initially enrolled when we had worked to get her free from her Navashino captivity, boiled down to a desire not necessarily to escape from the hustle-bustle and perpetual motion of the Incipient - ever-present despite the propagandistic lies of Earth Standstill, itself essentially a civic Mandate of Heaven for Bureau Hotel to send the majority of their world under the yoke - but instead to experience different kinds of city heat, a more measured form of urban sprawl where peace can be dug out of chaos, a handful of predominantly North Americans who meet in a cabin in the Katangsky District once every year to play their respective hands of cards don't have a hand in everyday life, and, generally, a more admirable form of life is lived in many regards. Today and then, nothing about the Deep is or was perfect compared to the other two Earths, for some regions still display or displayed imbalances of power, and states persist now and persisted in that day wherewithin isolationism blooms and opacity dominates the affairs of governments and their people alike. Taken as a whole, however, the most oppressive powers on the Deep are deeply benevolent to their citizens by comparison to what we have seen on the Incipient, and Ari chose the foremost arts institution of the City-State of Hong Kong for her studies precisely because there were far fewer opportunities for horrors to come meet us. In preparation for her arrival, I had pulled a few strings to place each staffer - anyone who wasn't an instructor, really - on paid administrative leave, such that they could not interfere directly in the learning environment or abruptly turn against Ari, and I had done so while maintaining the illusion that the administration was still functional through a few well-crafted half-lies about the school's newfound restructuring. What I did to ensure this was sustainable for the duration of Ari's stay was slightly more complex: I was continuously outsourcing all decision-making and institutional maintenance duties to the student body at large through propagating enigmatic "homework" to the professors and their various assistants for mandatory, graded completion by students, which was actually a veiled manner of making decentralized, unbiased decisions about the University's courses of action, for the worksheets would subtly encode everything necessary, overseen by myself and Athanasius Window alone. I wasn't thinking about any of this, though, because I didn't have to. On my mind were the various ways in which our plan for momentary peace had fallen apart unceremoniously, rather.

While I was at RSA before, it gradually became impossible to distinguish the 'ordinary' affairs of human existence there (for immortals were forbidden from attending when I was enrolled, despite, of course, Rico Eisenberg's open secret) from the presence of the magic world in my lived reality. I generally refused to use magic, and I still do, but back then, it was a matter of personal distaste: I believed I would be a cheat were I to engage in any category of magic, human or immortal in nature, or were I to violate a boundary - however arbitrary - I'd set for myself long ago, and I was happier working with my hands and my brain alone, even in the most precarious and unbalanced of situations. Oh, even in outright combat, I wouldn't bother defending myself any other way than what I already knew from the very beginning, the vampire-hunting training I never put to use, the ways of the Jino knife I taught myself because my parents left too early and my so-called grandfather was too busy with his runaway spending to bother, the indiscipline of a street brawl following a drug deal gone wrong. There was, however, one time I was quite tempted to indulge in magic, counteract myself, and put a limit on my adherence to uncodified and codified principle alike, which I clearly remembered when considering why my dearest girl's twin sister had decided to make an effort to ruin our lives and take us as captives at the behest of a superior who arguably held her in equally poor regards, having taken up membership with the Library of Babel and its inner circle, the very same ones who personally financed her attendance of our would-be alma mater. More on them later.

Rico, I recall, was groomed into it from the very beginning. The leader of the Library of Babel in those days, Inkrys Joy-in-Sorrow, had no imagination with which to envision the images ordinarily conjured by a good book. I should've done something to stop us from reaching this point, but the image of Red Swan held me captive for the entire time I was there. I was too caught up in the blurs of crimson which would rush through the air from a deep cut inflicted in combat, and the imperceptibility of bullets except in rapid sound stayed with me forever, for better or worse. I had no time to personally invest in Rico beyond the surface of our friendship in the days it would've mattered for us to keep ourselves alive above all else. I suppose that would be an overstatement, but there wasn't enough time, I can say that much with a cold, partial certainty. Everything was hell, the kind of hell you can only articulate once you've grown up and realized that the haze coating your childhood and adolescence is polish from two decades of slow weathering in a river of ever-flowing pain. Someday, too, the river will have dried up, but it will have done so on a scale so great it's impossible to live to see it.

Oh, how the light began to flicker in the library, how the fluorescence proved itself unwavering, the maintenance costs needing to be paid such that this could end up fixed. The bubbling of being effervesced softly, and I felt the need to change my position, lest I become too still, too static. Truly, a beautiful fraction of a moment. Further, it was in this moment it struck me that Han Wudi in particular was the namesake of this university, built around the recontextualization of culture and the dissociation of the arts, because on the Deep, there was no Imperial China to refer to. The Deep's Hong Kong was always itself, a long-term settlement with a storied, entirely unrecognizable-by-comparison history of its own, a place which adopted its present name, synonymous with the city in the exact same place on the Incipient, even pronounced with the same consonants, vowels, and tones despite their foreignness to the locals, to bolster its reputation in the eyes of students coming from the other Earths to study at universities like this one - all of which were named for Chinese emperors and dissociated from their names in the indigenous language whose name I cannot quite remember even now - and furthermore to create a contrast with the rest of the world around it. Hong Kong (Deep) was an island of unsteady peace, unsteady enough for it to carry an air of true peace around it; it was a peace which did not exist in a vacuum. We were connected enough to the world that we could stay there without risking perpetual surveillance by petty, envious Navashino men, stalking attempts by obsessive documentarians trying to get a piece of my then-ongoing rise through Bureau Hotel (apparently historically unprecedented, not that I would care), or anyone else with a wish to exploit the two of us for their own gain. Oh, how the light began to flicker, myself knowing that, even in this perfect location, I was still unable to escape the ever-present consequences of my attempts to abandon my past.

Athanasius Window, of Texas, United States, Incipient, is the name. A woman born in 1993 to a mostly unremarkable family, from whom I learned sharpshooting relatively quickly. I have no titles, no recognition except that which applies immediately to my name. It's a very cold evening the moment I decide to visit Res Jino, certainly, and this time I don't know anything about her potential location or how I could wayfind to meet her. It's been a long day already, as I just hosted a radio show where I deride concepts I personally agree with for an audience of thousands of listeners who will no doubt grow to care and invest in the ideology more and more as the years go on, but I don't want to think about it right now. I am essentially an attaché for my closest friends in the world otherwise, except they are ambassadors to nothing and no one, and that leaves me to clean up their messes much of the time, but also to strategize with them and share a certain degree of friendship with the two of them, and the latter two things are the plans now. Res Jino needs more ammunition to give to Ari Augustenburg, which I am going to set out to provide after I give the former of the two a phone call. It's always been my preference to call in advance rather than text, as it's too easy to eavesdrop upon and eventually decipher the plain language used when SMSing, but calls lend themselves to being indecipherable. This means that I can speak to them both in codes only the three of us readily understand. We have a rapport, we have degrees of trust. We have everything we need to incite revolution at the nearest possible opportunity.

The ammunition I am currently delivering to Res Jino will not end up fired by her, at least presuming ideal circumstances, for she has told me how averse she is to every aspect of the firearm, how she views it as an element of cold necessity. I recall her saying, "I don't care if you can shoot perfect marks every time you fire a rifle, Window. It's not going to change the fact that I won't learn anything more than basic marksmanship, that you've got ridicule coming from me if you so dare as to try, as it were. The gun is an instrument of wrongful death, and the imperceptibility of bullets only makes it worse; for the gun exists, no one bothers with fair fights anymore when an opponent can be torn to ribbons in this forsaken era of instantaneity. Therefore, unless you want to stumble through the ways of the Jino knife, in which case I will also presume you're trying to marry into my clan and promptly excommunicate you from my existence, then you'll tell me nothing more about the operation of small arms unless you absolutely must." This sat in my mind for some time, but an hour later she told me, "I was joking about the excommunication bit, I promise, but you'd best not try to get me to learn it with flattering offers." She sighed. "I know that you know it's just me and my Ari. It's alright. You're doing your best. I just don't know how I'm going to live this through sometimes, and the gun's but another thing that happens to aggravate me. Do what you will always." I took this as an apology and moved on.

In the present day, I am told that there is inherent danger in delivering anything directly to Ari, so I am working in avoidance. I am told that various obscure figures stake out outside her house, functioning as mercenaries for Ari's twin sister, and I won't be able to take them on solo even though I, too, am an immortal of some kind and would likely recover from whatever damage they could inflict. It's an intersection of Ari and Res caring for me, but also underestimating me. A light rain begins to drift down from the sky, misting the surroundings and striking windowpanes with light force. The surfaces likewise become coated in condensation, and the Hong Kong air heavies with soft humidity. Nothing is under control, yet everything is. The war rages on so quietly, so episodically. It is cold, and we are warm. This city was never ours, not even for ten days, yet we shoot each other in the hearts over turf and capture the land while awaiting the kicking-in of regeneration - whatever can briefly incapacitate an immortal allows for equally temporary victory. This is not a stalemate, but an opportunity to find more permanent strategic success in the way of warfare. True victory is psychological - I hope to learn more soon in this vein. For now, I march forth and stumble at alternate intervals, and my poor coordination never betrays to the uninitiated that every shot I fire from the barrel of any gun lands. This is my claim to utility.

I do have a gun with me right now. Said gun is entirely unconcealed and sticks out of the bag I carry with me which is itself evidently intended for weaponry, but it doesn't matter considering the emptiness of the streets in this district. We mapped everything out such that I could traverse the city without much struggle while still armed to the teeth, and so far, it's been fine. No strange looks from unfamiliar faces have met my gaze, and it's been easy to move out from the guidance of streetlights into the shadows when a fellow pedestrian goes by. This Hong Kong has no brutalizing HKPF; their law enforcement functions much differently and wouldn't have much of a shit to give even if they heard gunfire, but in a situation which would strike many on the Incipient as paradoxical, this place is actually safer than it would be otherwise. Explaining the exact details of the differing system's workings would be tiresome, and it certainly strays far from perfection, but I like to think I'm unlikely to be abruptly attacked and have to recoil from a nightmarish blow to the chest. I am equally unlikely in this situation to require myself to think quickly and strongarm the stock of my rifle into my opponent's chest as she (assuming I were to be attacked by another immortal, womanhood is statistically likely) kicks back with metal-toed boot. Nonetheless, I see a pair of eyes in a distant alleyway, and I presume correctly that something's about to happen, even though the scenario I just described is exceedingly unlikely. It's too easy to lapse into fantasizing about being important, and it just becomes easier the moment you taste importance ever-so-slightly greater; the perpetually high dose makes you tolerant. With every ascent Ari and Res make in their power, I dive deeper into their existences, and I move further into the shadow. This makes me what I am, nothing, but there's a trick here. I enjoy a certain amount of nothingness, and that would be the amount of nothingness required for life to emerge all of a sudden.

Just like that, I slow my gait. I notice the eyes in the alleyway rapidly brightening, then a blur of a figure becomes visible before I can draw the pistol I'm open-carrying. Her skin evidently glistens with either water or sweat, and she wears something unsuspecting and fashionable, and it's what you would never expect from someone who deprives you of air and knocks every bit of oxygen out of your lungs in a single bloodying punch to the middle of the chest. She compresses the body and makes me fall right over, my rifle spilling out of the bag. Ammo ricochets without even having been fired. The time I took to react must've been an excess; she jams her foot into my face, and she kicks until she can see a canine come out. The pain sears through my entire body, and I know for a fact I would die ten times over with each passing blow if I were any weaker or my blood were any lower in pedigree. My invulnerability is total, and there's no chance that that tooth will grow back without serious magical intervention I can barely afford, but that's not what I can think of right now. The potent blurring of events coalesces into a cocktail, probably a Corpse Reviver 2, and it would be complete with the rumored - but not present - hallucinogenic properties of thujone. Parts of my body are battered so heavily they paradoxically go numb, as third-degree burns would; I have to close my eyes when she bends down to break my trigger finger, only to discover it snaps back into place. She sighs as if to say it's pointless to try to saw it off, for she didn't bring the right amputative munitions, but I can't be sure; everything is shut tight. The eyes I saw in the alleyway, it strikes me, were only visible because they iridesced so distinctively, and with that, I open my own, duller eyes, knowing exactly whom I'm seeing. Let it be known that I will never take joy in this sorrow, that I will never sympathize with the enemy, even if the enemy has a way with words and expresses a love so great it cannot be achieved in the current fabric of reality. All signs point to yes; for now, I'm fucked. Nothing can stop her now.

Eventually, the minutes began to add up, and I decided I would reference the shelves in search of something written in English or Korean (always rusty for me even though one of my mothers spoke it to me often as a child) or French (same there, but with the other mother and only in pronunciation) or Mandarin (had begun to teach it to myself at the time for 'business reasons' - but more accurately phonaesthetic pleasure), but it proved somewhat futile as worry as to Window's whereabouts began to consume me as I browsed the assorted titles in each tongue's respective foreign language sections. Surprisingly enough, there were a few reputable translations of the Book of Unrest into each language mentioned in sight (the original edition in its original language unfortunately unavailable, but perhaps in a special collections vault someplace, waiting to be unsealed by a truly dedicated scholar - that said, there weren't many people intimately familiar here), but that wasn't what piqued my interest at this exact moment, for I was looking for other books on the philosophy of combat, not just those with superficial examinations of the nature of war as it was many centuries ago, then marketed predominantly in poor Indo-European translations for clammy businessmen to slobber all over without a second thought and have something from which they could shakily claim their 'intelligence' and cunning nature sprung upon the request of a stray interviewer, a stray interviewer not unlike Athanasius Window, whose whereabouts I was still unsure of at the moment. Knowing that she lacked a tendency for punctuality, I found myself willing to extend as much grace as possible whenever the occasion struck, for it wasn't in my nature to be outwardly bitter, even if I had a tendency to momentarily sulk in the privacy of my mind's furthest recesses when things went wrong or plans fell through, and thus it didn't worry me a bit, and I carried on tip-toeing through the space on my own two feet without another concern. Idly, I considered several options for what I could do to pass the time. There was the possibility of doing more historical research - more properly 'educating myself' - to fill in the remaining gaps in my experience with the narratives of the magical world, but that felt passe and played out, given that I'd already reached a point where I was writing history, meeting with the Center in the fabled pocketworld housing their complex with its elaborate atrium, and figuring out what my role would be when my time came - but I didn't know it had already come. Too deep in the idea of my irrelevance to care any less than I already did, I imagined I was at the very beginning, being shown by my mothers how to mix formula for Saja in case I ever had to, something I hadn't understood at first, something I would never have to do in the future, but which harrowed me down to some core I didn't know I had. I believed I had fuckall when my now-wife was handing me entire bands on the regular whenever I meekly asked for a bit of spare change for food, accumulating savings out of her absurd wealth in the process that I didn't bother using because I wanted to feel like I had just enough at all times - all this when the norm in the magical world was excessivism. 'Excessivism' had recently been used in mainstream media to represent an art-world movement predominantly consisting of wasteful use of resources, paint smeared multiple inches outward from overburdened canvases, perhaps even sculptures cast from multiple purified rare-earth metals which would've otherwise gone towards laughably niche industrial applications (only chosen for their relative nonabundance in the Earths' crusts), and it was known to certain human collectors with a knack for magazine reading, who'd picked up on it and imagined how close to immortality it made them feel, seeing the pushing of resources and their quantities to extremes. The term, however, speaks to something far deeper. Excessivism meant - and means - making more than the most of things that never run out, and no one would understand infinity but an immortal. That said, by this point, I decided on what I was going to do: I was going to write poems - or maybe just one poem - on the predicament I was living through, full of allusory detail. It, I decided, would be an entertaining exercise, through which I might understand things better.

She rolls my limp body over like I'm currywurst frying in a pan, as if she's smelling my ever-so-slightly Germanic blood and its various admixtures boiling and leeching out the most disgusting components to optimize the American grease for consumption. It's like she could eat me alive at this very moment and I wouldn't be able to tell, my eyes still closed, my ears beginning to ring. Right here and right now, I am vulnerable enough that I could indeed die at her hands; nothing about this strikes me as entertaining or amusing, except for the inherent ridiculousness of confronting mortality. If I were a currywurst, I'd surely be a Volkswagen currywurst, I think to myself, for I'm upset beyond belief and I want to try to make light of the situation. I would be a utility, I think, and I would be predisposed to being present behind closed doors and making things work without ever being seen, I think. Above all else, I realize, I would be very marketable and have a medium-length Wikipedia article about myself. This realization elicits an involuntary chuckle, and my eyes dart open to find that my body has ceased to be beaten, despite the slight amounts of red - with a little bit of purple - blood I can feel coming from both my left nostril and my mouth. My assailant seems to have become disinterested, and I can't help but wonder why until her eyes come to meet mine, confirming her identity: Rico Eisenberg. Rico Eisenberg de la bibliothèque de Babel. She gives a snide, oversize grin and begins to interrogate me as she picks up the ammunition she made me drop and places it in a bag on her back.

"Ey, I don't think I said hi, did I? How untubular of my overoptimal self to forego the essential secret handshake shared even by opponents, especially when Rico Eisenberg isn't actually here to put an end to your hard-earned lowlife! Except you floated through your lowlife without even scratching your goddamn ass, yaknow…your aim makes me so jeljel. Jealous, that is. JEALOUS jealous." She hesitates to see if I'll flinch when kicked in the crotch, but doesn't actually end up delivering the blow, instead stopping short of boot-nether contact. "Pfft, you're effortless. You're but a maenad frozen in a Pompeian fresco, and you can't move around or follow your wine-god 'cause only your likeness survives, your body turnt topsy-turvy and hollowed out in the pyroclastics just so an archeologist can accidentally break open your head sometime, ruining you for good. You don't understand shit, Athanasius Window. As you'd say" - she lapses into an imitation of the deepest reaches of my Texan idiolect - "your head's down in yonder." She loudly clears her throat, reverts to her normal speech patterns, and promptly continues without giving me a chance to speak, even though I've regained my faculties and can most certainly engage with her. "I know, I know, you'd never say such a thing. You're gonna tell me all about your usual patterns of speech and I'll just sit there snickering between the lines knowing damn well that you're nothing but a hick who's all too affectionate towards Res Jino for my liking. How bad you wanna fuck her, scale of one to ten?" I've never even thought about it. "Your silence constitutes a ten, by the way. Just so you know. Or whatever. I don't really care." Finally, unexpectedly, she orders me, in an unusually assertive tone which still creates a characteristic rhetorical contrast I've come to know all too well: "Stand your ass up."

She gives me room enough that I can struggle to my feet, but she declines to offer me a hand, perhaps because she wants me to know I'm a weakling in her eyes or she wants to perceive me as such even though she knows the contrary is true, for let it be known that I didn't get here solely because of my aim. I'm sloppy, and I'm a mess. I'm a total social failure, and that's precisely why my dearest friends keep me around, because they know what I'm good at as much as what I'm terrible at. They laugh along with me, and we create popular fronts of ridicule which align themselves against earthly evils; after all, so much of what we've experienced is funnier than even the most 'oddly Shakespearean' comedy routine's act of falling flat. Becoming the present Athanasius Window required a plethora of unpleasant sacrifices, and it was less than easy to figure things out, let it be known. Even if I make it out of this happening with compound fractures in multiple bones and a ringing in my ears, I will have figured out how to avoid it next time by the time I regenerate. Sure enough, Rico is far from who she thinks she is, and in a pattern with only a select few suppletive irregularities, her psychic - or even psychotic - drift from her own being is always what brings her down, snatching her out of the sky.

At last, I've become upright, and I discover that Rico brandishes no weapons except her tightened fists, yet against all the odds I can possibly conceive of, she shows no signs of fixing to assail me. Her bundled hands, which are somewhat paler than the bared skin of her arms, lie next to the miniskirt she wears, which I'd describe as holographic in the manner of the safety gear cyclists wear late at night in America to avoid meeting the face of God after an unfortunate meeting with a metal death chariot (which is in turn described by public investigators as 'being hit head-on by a 2014 Ford F150 in the middle of the night'). All too familiar. I realize that she wants me to speak and address her directly, although I've maintained a stunned silence up until now, during which the heaviness of my breath drifted up all the way to heaven, exchanging CO2 for breathed-in oxygen as we were taught was the process of respiration. My body alternates between being caught in the bear-trap of potentially imagined cold amidst the night and oscillations of sickly warmth, the same warmth experienced by the fever dreamer who tries to sleep yet remains only in either hypnagogia or hypnopompia, but that's not the doing of mine necessitated by the world. At last, I speak.

"What's gotten into you, Rico? It was more than possible for you to kill me on the spot, as I was in an extraordinarily vulnerable position and you're far higher in blood than I'll ever be. A perfect time for murder, was it not? I hear they've started calling you hyperimmortal, even, but I've also surmised that you felt fear for some reason or another at the prospect of cutting off supplies to Res Jino and your sister." My words are combative, and I hope that I've riled up something within her, but I feel a bit of guilt because I'd be dishonest if I said I hated her. She might've surrounded our forces as Polybius claimed the Carthaginians did at Cannae, she might've stabbed me through the heart another time, and above all else she always refuses to share what's embroidered such anger deep into her very soul, but I suspect she has a common cause. She has something to destroy herself, and many more things to intentionally destroy than we wish to at that, so I may as well appeal to our commonalities instead of the irreconcilable differences that make her life a lavish pastiche of Ari's in a shattered mirror. I continue: "Our war for the territory of Hong Kong City-State, The Deep, has gone on and on, and your continual fear tactics have put us in a perpetual superposition between our locations and the trenches, until they become one and the same. Your authority means nothing to me, and mine nothing to you. Why not forge more?"

"Sis told me all about the way you've socially climbed and chased clout for the past frank excess of time over the phone. She even mentioned the way she and Ressie met you for the first time, how your nosy ass got in the way of their plans and they decided to keep you as their little pet! I understand that an underground bunker must have quite a bit of allure in a world you see as filled with sickness to which the only cure is seemingly impossibilism, but in that moment, you had nothing. Your band and their synth-punk CDs have sold exceedingly poorly, and I know you've had no time to focus on what you love because of your allegiance to them. Wouldn't you rather disappear than channel your hatred of a system you can't fix into worldly destruction with the help of your shitty friends? I think it's obvious." My remarks are evidently not well-received, and I can't say I don't feel anger at the suggestion, but I maintain as much stoicism as possible in the face of the situation.

"I don't particularly care. You don't know who you're dealing with."

"I also don't give a damn, Athanasius. You don't know who you are."

"You just said who I am. My name's enough in my book."

"A name means fuckall when detached from reputation."

She moves with a purpose.

Ariana Aumont was born begrudgingly and laboriously in the Walloon ski resort Baraque de Fraiture in and atop the Belgian province of Luxembourg which largely consists of swaths of forest seized from the nearby microstate to Risa Ecarlate and (whoever) Navashino, who she is impersonable toward, and whose voice she cannot impersonate, and whose face constitutes a black censor bar, and who exits her story trivially after a divorce seven years into Ms. Aumont's lifespan. The impression of the sky on the due date (which?) was a smoggy volcanic and there lay too much snow for the comfort of the Low German plains. It may have been six, or it may have been five, or it was four, or it was before she was born, because an event in delay strives to become evitable and never have happened at all to make up for the lost time which it seeks to repatriate into dying patriarchy. Ariana Aumont, "Ari", is aged nineteen.

Ms. Aumont wears long skirts over pants and chose a dual major in choral direction and statistics.

The name Aumont is neither of the parents' names. It is that of Aunts M, V, J and T, of the merged branch Houses A and A-fG, which bear the collective name 'Aumont'. Aunt V has a personality hardly fit for this glossary schematic. The mother, Ms. (formerly Mrs.) Ecarlate and this set of four aunts share a tenuous, shady blood relationship not worth dwelling on here.

Ms. Aumont wears a static smile and has no legitimate explanation for the strange coloration of her eyes, like that of a house experimentally on fire: belief in "Alexandria's Genesis" cannot be exhumed in the present year, which is 2016: in the Sahara, in Algeria, there is a burial mound of carefully littered pebbles located next to two rings of concentric circles sunk into the desert floor, from underground dynamite explosions which are fragile barbaric strings of the very first of viol de gamba meant to be tuned to the scale of oil: the only civilization is a French sardine can from 1958 - French presence in the region is dubious, and so is history, and so are the circles, but not the tomb. Alkaline rings from the plumage non-supply of dead volcanoes deader than and prior to dinosaurs who are also a vestigial unplumed form give rise to fertile, isolated, water-rich valleys, oases.

Ms. Aumont attends the prestigious Han Wudi Conservatory of Music and could have chosen not to pursue a second major in addition to the actual musical track: no pun. When asked why, she cheerfully replies "I really liked sitting at an abacus next to Mom while she reviewed her papers of thousands of names and digits and pretending I was helping. It felt like I was doing something big. I missed being part of something big so I decided to take up doing big things as an adult." This is a simple, declarative sentence, and you can trust this assessment because this is a declarative sentence too.

To our knowledge: you and me know this, why haven't you remembered that this is true: there is no other Ariana.

Ms. Aumont was three years old when she slid down a mountain with neither ski nor bottomcircle, which is an inflatable donut-like sled with a floor of another Earth exposed in the hole, and reported the experience was fun: no injuries, no regrets: the sky was a late evening abyss and she was in the wrong lane because there is no right lane on a slope only sectioned by two elevators and life is non-parallel to highways as there is only natural light in life and most life is irrelevant from space and not a marvel of engineering but gained such acceleration as to be ahead of any skis on mammoth tomb ice: there is neither scarab nor scorpion in the Saharan pores over a hundred kilometers from the nearest major settlement and a thousand kilometers from Algiers. I am told now these non-objects and absences are called 'saucer sleds', but 'bottomcircle' is the naive invention of her and her alone used to describe the imagined perimeters for a vehicular non-ski descent and bildungsroman starts with the neologistic fully insulalinguistic 'goo ga ga' and ends with fifty pages of attempting to spell 'deoxyribonucleic acid' to reabbreviate it and gain one more cellular day: the stopped heart fails to extend your lease even if you win the reverse spelling bee.

There is no Hell and there is no death.

This academic year the Han Wudi Conservatory of Music has been gender segregated and functions as two institutions across a hallway from one another where the probability of floors being impassably slippery and an East German being fatally wounded returns the same number and the correlation is not false unlike that of purchasing trends for parmeggiano reggiano and diagnosis of clinical depression.

When preparing Hong Kong, The Deep for my dearest's arrival, I had made several considerations for her sake, trying to create a safe environment in which she (and I) could exist after having experienced too much of the 'real world' in years prior, an experience with which she had made me intimately familiar and which I have always understood on a personal level, far more than the usual sense of camaraderie experienced by the average pair of fellow revolutionaries. I'd been ecstatic at the idea of true temporary peace as well, and it had seemed reasonable not to stop at anything to accomplish our objective, but a series of conversations over double- or occasionally even single-strawed milkshakes at ice cream parlors then led the two of us to question what was and wasn't necessary for our safety. My initial proposal was frankly Draconian, as I wasn't going to put up with anything which could snip the threads of localized conversation holding together what would soon (ideally) become our Bureau-Hotel-takedown-planning space, as I ended up proposing an impromptu ZATO surrounding HK,TD, which would entail supervising all entrances and exits from the area, inspecting every shipping container that entered the building, properly compensating hundreds of people to act as faux-security for a densely-populated area's perimeter, and - with even more difficulty than obtaining and paying for the labor in a truly ethical fashion - convincing people there was a need to value security at all in a uniquely kind place which had previously been all but open to the world surrounding it and near-unconditionally accepting of such outsiders as ourselves. We had selected it for the very reason that it was often (popularly) considered the 'kindest' place on The Deep, having been labeled as such for decades even far outside materials promulgated to promote the city to those beyond its limits, although we knew that that kindness had to have a limit and didn't want to test it, so discreteness was a must. Still, even in the best case possible where our stealth perfectly concealed us and allowed us to converse about how Bureau would fall in the overlaps of our respective bits and pieces of spare time, we would've had to put up with knowledge that there existed an ongoing process of turning anyone who dared trespass into ribbons with fire from machine guns mounted on temporary turrets along high-voltage fences extensively protested by dissatisfied locals, so our camouflage would've been razzle dazzle at best: the direction of our forward motion would be exceedingly difficult to estimate during brief glances, but if someone looked long and hard enough, they'd most certainly be able to shoot us down, making our pursuit of a world not marred by slashings (without corresponding burnings, i.e. deforestation) executed by a centralized neoliberalism's most dispassionately avid (perhaps also avidly dispassionate?) exponents. We, of course, quickly deemed this counterrevolutionary and not in the Bathysine sense, but we should've realized more quickly than that that nothing, nothing at all, would work for us unless we actively fought. What I was thinking about in the library was what we de facto decided in the end: to fight, but to fight in the shadows.

It was for this reason that, at the time, I was rather clandestine about my communications. Everything delivered over text, by my own count, required end-to-end encryption, with the exception of non-crucial communications with Ari, which we mutually and strictly sanitized of any identifying circumstantial details which could lead someone to our location, someone who would in turn attempt to take us to a different location, whisking us away in a false-imprisonment spiral to a South China Sea whirlpool, entrapping us there and - for we would be unable to die - requiring us to ineffectually swim for months on end to the nearest shore, only to arrive unclothed, heavily injured (seawater tends to delay healing), and without any means of communication, having swum not knowing if our destination would be uninhabited, requiring us to plunge back into the sea and tread miles and miles more of water. Of course, this would've been a worst-case scenario, but in these days, worst-case had ceased to be unreasonable to anticipate the moment Rico had begun to see us as the enemy, the honest-to-god enemy. That moment was the day the institution which defined her childhood and mine alike went up in flames, but that's another story for another time. All that must be known now is that Rico was at fault for every bit of this. The mother who birthed her, Saturn Thebes, refers to Rico and Ari both as 'Ri,' both her twin daughters the same way, even if they stand together in the same room, making direct eye contact with her mother's numerous mutated tentacular pupils. To this day, Saturn mentally distinguishes, but she never feels the need to outwardly differentiate her children into distinct figures, as she reasoned that they needed to feel intertwined in purpose, even though the only thing Rico wanted to do in the days of Hong Kong was unravel. Ari and I often ran through night markets and careened directly into immediately shattered windows of office buildings, vacant in the night, whatever moment at which we realized we had been discovered, all to create a path for us to follow which wouldn't be caught in Rico's tears in the fabric. The Center were her greatest opponents and her most primal fears like, but she was far from important to me. Whenever a catastrophe strikes, we tend, as intelligent beings, to emphasize the element of tragedy, the utter deprivation of basic decency, the violation of the nature of existence, and it ceases to seem reasonable to focus on joy in any capacity, as we end up believing we must exist in remembrance. That said, Ari was just as beautiful in those days as she is today, and the grace of her movement was unparalleled, for whenever she took a step, she had likely at least considered its position a solid day in advance. She was only a part of her own world and by extension recognized that she comprised only a sliver of the world beyond that, extraordinarily egotistical knowing that she would never be the only one drinking at the bar (within the confines of her highly heterodox personal interpretation of Islam) or yelling multilingual obscenities at passersby who dare rudely ogle at her appearance and countenance, screeching without providing context on her deeper nature as a crucial turning point in history. This egotism, however, makes her the kindest woman I have ever known in the course of my life, for she's given me more time every day than there seems to be in the approximate span of twenty-four hours. In my heart there exists an additional hour for Ari, unperturbed by the passage of other time. I know now and knew then that this hour would never begin to pass on the clock, as we have empirically measured out time in the course of determining the workday, but I'd like to think I would spend that hour contemplating this alongside her, having redefined time itself for the sake of our love and having inserted an anomaly into reality which cannot be repaired, once again for the sake of our love. Ari is selfless, for she is selfish, logical, for her logic is beyond the understanding of all those but the select few to whom she extends trust by expressing her mind clearly. Ari means - has always meant - everything, but I strove not to communicate openly, for no one could know anything more than that mere fact.

The day she set foot on campus something strange happened.

An empty lot on the grounds sprouted fir and pine that if killed and autopsied or involuntarily injured and tortured to reveal where inside itself it keeps the old state secrets it tells to newrooted hires of the arboreal commissariat would reveal inner rings of the centuries: this could not be overnight construction but it could be replanting conservation: this is unlikely - the reason for replanting a tree outside of its native ecosystem is climate change: evasion of rising temperature: artificial displaced home of the desired temperature; obscured by the trees there is a gate of black steel with fingerprint ID or buzzer: inside the frame which frames the perimeter fence the interior composition of the gate is cast in two large stylized rosebuds: only through where the sky or the bush would be is there any way to glimpse past the gate: scoliotic neoclassical pillars hold a bisect worldtortoiseshell balcony humandownwind from which the only pool to jump into is hard fresco'd pebblepaved manorground: two floors and maybe electric basement set in Hispanesque (why electric? why Hispanic?): cold porklike cuts of unreburied disjuncta, architecture that belonged to some former iteration of this institution or at some point comprised the university itself entirely: a wave of black snow veils the student body's spy cameras.

They found out what you really are and you and she lay popularly pavingstoned where they came to take your home. Ari Aumont takes dilated midnight breakfast, longdaydrinks at 3 a.m. and wine leaves the roasted bulb of the fatty desert tulip. Ari Aumont is in her statistics class by the board and says "Good day." in Cantonese, then in English; writes her name in chalk: sounds out the French soundlessness: says she is taking this course to find which correlations that intuitively seem false hold water due to lost cultural context: working class child is taking an IQ test and can't build a chain of words: the film of the chain snapping is ran in reverse and a boarding school educated way of taking tea is regurgitated step by step flux to flux: palid and Anglic angled: alien of the tenement decades: the injust double digits of the child at the edge of the empire. If we fail to universalize intelligence and intentionally make positive intelligence only proven with class signifiers, she says, how can we be trusted to work on a case by case basis to universalize through baby steps the relations of everything in the world? Counterquestion when off the stand and reseated at the jury panel: is it really true that your mom owns the world economy? Addendum: It's so cool to know some real old money.

Many text messages are exchanged between pairs of individuals speculating on how the house could have landed there overnight: interiorless facade: large cardboard cutout disguised by forestry with a hole for a door in the front face: just a painted surface: the other three walls are obscure and treelined and sight beyond the gate is a near impossibility. Nobody wants to hide in the bushes and watch Aumont leave and enter: somehow it's certain she has eyes in the back of her head and in the trees and the stones have biting mouths and the steel roses sprout spikes when provoked. The abacus anecdote is told to the ars novative choral class who are all discussing what they're doing besides this. A Fourier transform can be likened to the decomposition of a chord into its constituent pitches: the chord of college megaphonics is invented and polytonal: a lack of love is found in the Tristan chord: the eagles' screech in consonance with the Prometheus chord: a bloodline is snuffed with the Elektra chord: the elevation rises in a divine imitation of the manmade and the God of Abraham makes each man learn an individual heretofore undiscovered language when the Psalms chord rings: all this simultaneously: Euler's journey of self-identity. She, silent.

She paces minus any semblance of purpose, a concept which she sees as an attempt to control her destiny, she tells me. She sees authority as an unnecessary noospheric layer on top of intelligent beings' existing conditions, an abstraction of dynamics of control created to arbitrarily map relations in a graph-theoretical binarity of connections representable only in terms of arborescence, yes and no, but all I hear when she says such things is that her desire for control has overtaken every cubic centimeter of her cranium, but without rotting out parts of the brain in the manner of Alzheimer's. There are no neurofibrillary tangles there, and everything is reversible with the right medication, but said remedy has a flavor so horrible and is necessary to take so (ostensibly) unreasonably often that Rico would refuse under any circumstances. I never got the chance to meet the Rico known to Res: at the very moment she and Ari gave me permission to intrude on the Swiss bunker where they finalized Ari's escape from the Navashinos and verified one another's affections once and for all, Rico had already set off the bomb which left Red Swan defunct and its entire campus soon enough derelict, which set her and my dear friend drifting their separate ways through an ocean which had already been turned bitter in some twisted imitation of the prophecies of Revelation, but the wormwood in question wasn't a star - it was hard liquor, and no one was making hot toddies out of it. On that note, the unpalatable, inedible, and unreasonable remedy which I mentioned a moment ago would be learning to give up. Even Pyrrhus would weep at the sight of Rico Eisenberg's victory, to the point where the only one who would understand her motives would be Sisyphus, who would've been dug up from Tartarus and given a rest from his endless rolling of the boulder just to watch Rico's efforts on the side of Babel, but even he would return to his pointless pursuit, having found meaning in the torment somehow. Why does she choose not to drive a blade through my heart, temporarily turn me to ribbons so I can experience the pains of regeneration over and over, a Promethean icon of a damsel in distress? She seems lost in her own thoughts to a disconcerting degree, which gives me an idea: praising this heroine will endanger her. Her name is known, but her praises are never sung here. The people know her not at all for her valiant efforts against the Center; they understand her as one who brings fear and has mastered its mechanics like no one else has. I wish to demonstrate such a thing to her myself.

Wind drifts through the silence. It whistles with no particular intensity to punctuate our more-than-relative lack of spoken words, but unlike the two of us, it seems to have something more profound to say, something which we cannot help but strain to hear. Truly, some immortals are so gifted in the way of manipulating small details as to be able to transfer their speech through Aeolian means, and there is a further group of immortals still who may conjure a visible image up from lingering dust, but no such beings accompany us, for even if everything can be done in the vast world we live in, be it done on any Earth, within Liminality, or someplace else connected to the rest of reality only through mystic technique, everything is not necessarily (to be) done right in front of us all at once, and not everything can prove itself worthy enough to go unpunished for deeds done beyond the vestiges of the law which either once or never was. Knowing the loneliness of this predicament, there couldn't be a better time to run than now, I think to myself in contemplation of the potential outcomes, but I realize that running would mean false peace, and in turn false peace would lead to my immediate infection with the Deceiver, and that disease would ravage my mind and rob me of my eternal life. I am, like many others destined to live forever, here to explore every possibility which comes to mind, not to eliminate the ones which give me a hard time. Of course, this is all my own armchair hermeneutics of my own predicament, but it drives me to abruptly lunge at Rico, burying a fist in her face and pushing her backwards as she staggers to her feet and finds herself astonished at the degree of anger I, the supposed underlying stoic, was able to manifest towards her and her disgraceful degree of disarray. Within instants, I nearly receive a blow in return, but the hand slips away as I narrowly shift my position, which leaves Rico to stagger forward now instead. The adrenaline drives her to kick my chest, but even with my lungs suddenly deprived of air, I manage a tackle and pin her to the ground uneasily. She struggles continually, faking retching in disgust, trying to gesture towards me as if I were filth with a smell foul enough to expel an entire full (conference) room, attempting to recall the mental codes necessary for her to activate the superior strength she was clearly so used to wielding when nothing seemed to be able to catch her off-guard, even in her ostensible contemplation-states. Thus, the interrogation begins.

"What business did you want with me to begin with?" My voice quivers somewhat, but I know no one else is here to notice the hint of cowardice but Rico, whom I know will do nothing about it. "Because I don't get it."

"Ammo means gunfire, bitch. It means they can hurt me in ways I don't understand because they've long left me out of the context, with a deathwish, even. They want me gone, and you're but another means to make me gone."

"So why go after perhaps the least important person in this situation? I can't go on without either of them, and I don't reckon you'd have any qualms with eliminating or incapacitating your twin sister now, would you?"

"Oh, it wouldn't be a biggie, but I'm holding off just in case she leads to something more important."

"Your involvement with Babel has brought you nothing but sorrow. I know that much."

"Instability is a blessing."

"Diseases too can be blessings in the eyes of those who traffic in Calvinistic faith-healing. You fail to see this."

"You really think I'm Calvinistic scum? Laughable."

"Well, I can tell you're not admitting something or another to me. I'll slap your face until a tooth falls out - even if it'll grow back - if you're not careful."

"It's so easy for me to explain my motives, come on now. Let me talk." She clears her throat. "I want the Center out of my hair, and I want nothing to do with the mechanics of Aleatoric imperial recognition. I want every system which defined my worst moments gone, such that those worst moments will cease to guide my every move and I can live without determinism partially shaping each and every moment; I want wills which are freer than even the free will, for why pretend fate exists when we've disproven the concept tenfold? For this reason, I want no take-backsies from the people who hurt me when I force them to capitulate on threat of the last thing they see being their headless body as I hold the decapitated part up to see in its final blurs of vision what its thoughts have governed for years upon years upon years. I want my enemies to suffer, and because of this, I realized it was a shit idea to kill you to begin with, because you support the fate-believers I refer to even if you don't entirely agree with their means. Faith-healing is your business - you and Ari and Ressie are allowed by reality itself to endlessly traffic in bullshit without any consequences, and I envy that. I envy the so-called 'favor of God,' so I want nothing more to do with it now that I know what you're in for. The least important person in this situation, as you call yourself, is a missing link from my point A to my point B, and fully understanding you would allow me a glance into the machine which fails to keep this world running with every firing of its cylinders. You lost me the moment you spoke to me. You lost me the moment you sided with them. For that very reason, it's your job to lose my sister and her object of affection, and it's your job to take down the Center knowing how close to it you are compared to me. You know, Babel never sends delegations there…or else I'd set fire to the whole compound they meet in without a second thought! I'd fucking kill to have the connections you do, you know, so don't you dare make like a telepath and try to leech information out of me. You're damn wrong. You always will be. If that's enough for you to know, let me the fuck out of your grip, cunt. It's not your fuckin' place, never, ever was."

Elsewhere among the hostile organizations where they will rot on the vine every window within a window, every door within a door, opened at once for all of them to follow the marching order and forget the workplace ID tourniquet and the inconsequential banter about the weather or the wildly progressive observation that the wife is being a bitch had with whoever staffed the front desk and stand in the rain with their hands up while all of the computers in the building were loaded onto a convoy truck and the boss with something pink about her exercising perfect nonchalance during the fall of what was supposed to be a lifetime opportunity for her personage, a death grip on the internal affairs of the Swiss state, hand on the big red button, button sub-backside, obvious all the comfort of the fragile wire and dust and hair catching net that is all armchairs and not even the boss' in particular, who seemed to desert it to leave it to be any other in the building during her frequent desertions of command, who seemed to leave it to the German who spoke regularly of a Latin American who no one at the office had ever seen, whose stoic manner and distance she admired, who she said could be made a model for phasing out cognitive behavioral therapy as the foremost booster of productivity in the modern world of unneeded, uninherent thought we strive to formulate before our eyes have even refocused, we must be made culpable for ruining the shot from our birth, we will never work in this town again, because as infants all we are see is swimming light, and the method actor methodically tautologically scheduled precision regimenting the narrowing of her mind swims in heatless searchlight, and she is asked by the German with the flagellant name who sings the praises of sin in the true parsonage of uninherent vice, incongenital the way the topic of death is first brought up and inhuman the way it is questioned why exactly it is that the sun has surrendered the sky, where the pink, the German and the Andean drink and drew mead and are a set of three who do seemingly do not include the two, and yet the pink who is the boss and the flagellant German who is the viceroy share the same minimal props that are afforded to their theatre program in a world where art goes to die as the inauthoritan pink seeking a dictator and the German lashing out against this world of innate sin the debt of which the Yeshudeans are paying back and their dogma of envirtued suffering; the generals of coming attraction, cavalric and falconeering, wear red tasseled armbands which shield like theater curtains the first lyric of the first danse macabre before its corruption: "Oderint dum metuant", and something in the pink lights up with recognition and something in the German lights up with remembrance of complaints and heretofore and thenceforth faked dismissals of taste, the coming attraction a continuation, with the Swiss conference an intermission, white walled bathrooms as shrines to the inextricably framed art of graffito and break room toast and overpriced popcorn; sun of white death in a horizon impendent of corrugation or Finder and overpriced leather bags with bribes streaming out in a tornado unmetaphorical and not in the mind of Texans made the toilet paper unreserved but reassigned to cleanup on aisle Seat, dishonorably compensating for the misaim of the inclement engouement (Fr. "fad") phallus, which is a disaster from which there is only the false peace shelter of a house woven entirely out of pine needles after all trees are exhausted and a tumor of capital's absolute demand sent down the ladder to the 4 Michelin star all California popup location sensory experience gourmet kitchen of a thousand of dishwashers accessed only via midnight QR code drop at the microdosing cliffside barbeque-cum-parachuteless trust fall skydiving suicide pact will not quicken the remnant stump. Rico thinks my uniform looks like shit, I don't, because now it is worn by Orphe.