"That said, are you not of a dynasty of sufficient resources to take down Bureau Hotel with relatively little outside assistance? I feel there must be an obvious answer to this question, so pardon the coarseness and directness, but why let this be our pet project and nothing more?" I want to make it clear that I didn't intend this as an objection or anything of that sort, nor was I asking for direct assistance, and I'm rather shocked that Vita didn't subsequently interpret it as such, but I also wanted something going a little further than just advice or counsel - perhaps an army raised by the French would be nice, just a little perk of being a revolutionary against a false ontology, or at least I would hope for it to be such, but neither Mag nor Vita seemed especially pleased by the idea of providing for what they surely saw as our pet project, or thus was my suspicion. Since everything was far from under control, it was inevitavble that I would let the pragmatism slip around other immortals every once and a while, but a light, fleeting blush tended to accompany, tagging along as an apprentice to my ordinarily efficient methods and remarking on all that could've been dexecuted more authentically or skillfully. Window then whispered in my ear with a similar - but not identical - excess of audibility and jaundice-inducing deficiency in secrecy, "Make sure you brushed up on your ontology, Res! Wouldn't wanna be caught without it here, would you?" I gave a nod of acknowledgment, leading her to desist and return to her drink for the moment.

"A woman at the window would hold all the answers, had she not forgotten herself," Vita began. In surprise with an air of unconvincedness, I turned to the nearest window and indeed saw the figure of a disheveled, disorderly person peeping in, but the glance was too fleeting for any identification, no crime scene photographs to cross-reference anyway, considering her quick disappearance and the near-forgettable nature of the occurrence - after all, she couldn't come close to hearing us, and it was likewise impossible to tell if she had been muttering under her breath or simply tensing the muscles of her mouth semi-voluntarily in ways which resembled speech uncannily. We laughed nervously and treated it as if nothing had happened, but Vita's recognition of the figure became a pivotal point for the conversation to come. "Seem, she would explain to you that, in the capital-C game of Cards, the most inopportune moment in one's session calls for the playing of inopportune hands as well, for the unexpected and clever wins the game much faster than tried-and-true strategy given Cards' complexity unmatchable by even the most unpredictable Amerigames, and furthermore she would gush and reminisce on days spent going hungry too focused on strategizing next moves against an opponent over and over until a compromise point was reached. A flashy and ostentatious woman she once was, but when external forces caught wind of her ambition - and by 'external forces' I do mean the same forces keeping the undying Bureau from reaching its grave in the ocean or an uninhabited stretch of earth which truly does stand still - to be revealed to you in time. She rips the memory from the mind and allows its erasure, believing, as your mother would put this mindset in her rhymes, 'it is best never to address distress.' I think it sounds stupid, and it doesn't particularly match the inside-baseball detail I'd prefer to give you, but I promise she will not be an obstacle, even if we owe this mess to her in part. If traversing time any way but forwards at this fixed pace were anything but impossible, she would've caused ten temporal paradoxes in one fell swoop, only bringing order to the disarray after realizing she has jeopardized her own existence. Your mother would've understood what she feels day in and day out; she could've prevented it, yet had no way of knowing. Your mother would understand the instabilities within the Aleatoric Empire which make it impossible for us to take it over so blamelessly as you, someone who has never killed, only drawn blood and inflicted concussions. The world would laugh if we even tried. Your mother would know every second of it."

"What? Which mother do you mean?"

"The one whom you barely knew, even by the standards of someone who was snatched up and carried away, like many other people your lover has loved, like your lover herself."

"And why is she relevant here?"

"You have some atonement to do, Res Jino!"

Being eternally seventeen is the biggest bore since they figured out how to slice bread, which I presume was a pretty boring time to be alive. No online communications, shit stereos (or really, they were monos because 'lend an ear' used to be literal, I guess), and a whole lot of nothing. That documentarian Veiksme Eisenberg sure did use it as cannon fodder for the industry of figuring-shit-out she's established, but she can make anything look interesting, can't she? It's the year 2016, and I'm bored as hell, practically thumbing my nose hoping that I have an anxiety attack just so I can feel something. Sometime soon I need to get out of this vacant studio apartment that I have to reset to its original position every single time I leave lest the landlord figure out I'm squatting and start drumming on and attempting to whip me with a flimsy weeks-old newspaper until I'm all the goddamn way out of his way and long gone down the street as he reaffirms the potentiated pressure of 'charges' and other such jolly human legalities I ain't got time for, because imprisoning some secret third Jino kid in here sure is getting to be a bore. Did I say that a little too fast to be taken in all at once, or was my enunciation appropriately clear?

Disowned for being a potential case study in cosmic crime (the reason as far as I know), I'm stuck doing sacrosanct dirty work, surveillance, and interference, the latter of which I'm pretty sure is an oxymoron when combined with 'sacrosanct,' but whatever, because it was never my problem, and being roped into this mess made me forget how to mix the concrete for the archaic dome on my Pantheon-turned-Basilica of St. Mary and the Martyrs, much less how to construct it, and I have to accomplish the process of making myself Christlike to avoid becoming like my own mother, who is nothing like Christ. I barely know a thing about Christ aside from the Catholic axioms they call dogma that Christ is all-good and couldn't have put any fault into the world that could subduct us all down into hell (which I will not capitalize when referring to the Abrahamic concept, as Hell sure is a real place and it doesn't work like that at all, which is in turn a fact no one seems to acknowledge if they have an upper limit on their potential lifespan and are too busy feeding themselves whatevers to focus on living forever in genuinly sustainable ways). I'm not Italian, which is for the better because it means I get to be Anatolian among other things, but I work for pennies, so some of those European Union labor laws sure would be of benefit to me - although I guess I'm in a situation where no law can apply to me, so to be quite fair, I'm going along with it. Of course, the aforementioned lifestyle of working for pennies has its rewards since I get to make my mindset Buddha-like as they've started to do in the People's Republic of China and engage in relatively little in the way of fun, but frugality isn't universal, so I'm often misunderstood when I say I don't want to go out enough times or I otherwise shoo away the teeth-chattering ecstatic irreality of fucking around all the time like the people I know, whose names aren't worth mentioning, do. I hear this Res Jino doesn't know shit about Buddhism or, by some other rumors, only knows a little, because she grew up in her family's little kinda-religion (and I don't mean that derogatorily) which stops just shy of typical cosmological monism and allows for a certain degree of personal freedom in faith, all without conflicting with the actual structure of this fucked-up universe as the other "there is something beyond" people do, so she now listens to Ari Augustenburg, regrettably one of my employers, explain her idiosyncratic variant of Islam to her for hours and hours, asking engaged questions and leading into erudite discussions on the nature of reality, for whatever reason. I wish my mom wasn't ontologically obligated not to give a shit about me so I could learn to talk to people from her so I could discuss Islam with people and find out how they interpret the concept of religion in ways unique to themselves, idiolects of semaphore, but it's going to be a long time before any progress can be made, any bridges can be built. Fine.

Ari Augustenburg isn't actually my employer - we work against each other rather than one for the other. She relishes her spare time now that she no longer has to capitulate to vampires by turning half that bloodline into unworthy sacrifices to absolutely no one, thereby wasting all cosmic potential and ensuring that the men's hubris leads to their downfall in a duel they thought they would win singlehandedly against the girl, the girl they never bothered to analyze prior to the onset of combat (as she would put it), and for that reason, we don't bother each other, or at least we bother each other in backhanded ways so the war may continue. By this "war" I do mean quite literally a war, one which has overcome this city and encouraged the shuttering of blinds, themselves useless as defenses when a window can be smashed in at random as I - hypothetically - send one of the belligerents cascading into the slowly-moving liquid silica, which, as one would expect of a fluid, shatters and pierces the skin, drawing up pinpoints of blood and potentially reaching the heart, requiring an emergency medical procedure to prevent those comas characteristic of immortal defeat from setting in for upwards of a decade, but perhaps we are already in a coma, culturally speaking: her monopoly on Tumblr culture for the last decade has been frankly unbearable, and my chance at fame is eternally underrealized with every Gaia Fable music video photoshoot from which they choose to exclude me, for neither do they know I exist nor will Ari ever let them know unless something so catastrophic radiates through the world from my own outstretched palms and outwardly-extended fingertips, discombobulating the particular subsets of creation which render me dis-, disowned, dismal, and above all else disaffected. Life is hell, and we, as the undifferentiated sludge of forgotten immortals who waste away their time with fingers becoming wrinkled in our pussies, hands clasped so tightly around our cocks the shaft is crushed and regenerates smaller than it started, must do our best with what little we get.

I arrive home at the bitchpartment, where Nyx is stuck in the closet, which she said she preferred to the ceiling, a statement which I chose to respect for her sake. She's my latest gamble on perturbing the order of the cosmos, which always seems to go after the disaffected as myself and make us undergo punishments deeper than the ancient grave of a mortal pharoah buried in a lavish tomb with half the servants of the court when we try to make a difference (unless I'm deeply out of the loop as to the causes), because her surname just so happens to be Jino, and she's been surprisingly cooperative since the onset of this kidnapping. Indeed, I did push her to the ground, tie her hands together, tape her mouth shut to drag her into this place, but the first thing she told me when I restored her ability to vocalize beyond indistinct mmphs was, "If you have a plan, I have a plan too." Never has anyone held themself so tightly to a promise they made to me than Nyx has to her subsequent promise to go along with whatever I had in store on the condition that I maintained the pretense of kidnapping, because she wanted someone to give a shit about her when the world seemed to have forgotten to give her any of the power she'd been promised from the moment she could understand who she was - like me, except I got the power anyway; I'm the bastard daughter of Ultimate Good herself, even though no one was supposed to know that quite yet. Nyx's surname, on the other hand, is Jino, which leads me to clarify that, even considering our apparent consanguinuity as descendants of that devil Giles, none of this is or could ever be romantic: it's a big ol' private scheme, all in the found family. She plays a role, I write the parts for her monodrama; I get out in the streets and remark that I have the hidden Jino child conceived of neither of Res and Saja Jino's mothers, and above all else, I direct this whole lunatic show. That's the important part - Nyx wanted direction, and, as I'm about to make her some tea and drag her out of the closet to the couch I picked up off the side of the road recently after complaining loudly in front of her that felt the place was unfurnished, I realize that I wanted a little direction too, doing all these odd jobs. I've learned all sorts of tidbits about the Augustenburgs, the Jinos, a couple of Arenbergs, et alia by slipping into rooms unnoticed before being cast out immediately before I can get the important half of the story - I think it's entirely understandable to want something a little more lasting than the exhilaration from those sorts of things. Ari hates my guts all the way through for this reason: whenever I hear one of these semifactoids about her dropped in conversation and am of course removed from the environment in which I discovered said semifactoid (probably from the loosened mouth of under-the-influence Athanasius Window, who doesn't drink a lot but really ought to drink more so she I can eavesdrop as she tells the full story I want to hear in less words), I have to fill in the gaps with some bullshit whenever I report back to the non-damn-giving Center, and they sniff the bullshit out fast, call me useless, pay me, and then hire me again. It's a bigger nuissance than I could ever be on my own, and I'm entirely here for it. It's not even that I've been entered into an unescapable contract, nor is it that I want my mother's recognition, for she recognizes me and my incompetence alike every time I approach the Center (and often also its indirect associates) with information: I don't even know exactly what I want, because I'm seventeen forever and seventeen is the most directionless age, at which most American students discover the nuissance of college applications and get ready to live out shit you'd find in a Gibson or Stephenson novel through their increasingly online and surveilled education systems which are continually dismantled and unfairly rearranged at the behest of lawmakers across the United States, a process I'm sure will continue until Bureau is eradicated, Bureau's eradication being that fabled revolutionary event that all these vaguely Marxist wannabes, a la Res Jino, point to as the single greatest turning point since 1322 (if you don't know, you should know), but I get the feeling they lie. They can't be anything but liars. Nyx and I like to tell each other the truth whenever possible, unless I've written lying into the current act of this opera. Nyx especially enjoys lapsang souchong, to which I introduced her. It feels like I have a family for once, and I take back everything I said about her being a bore, but not out loud. This is a turning point if anything ever fucking was. Thanks to Nyx for being my kidnapping victim and, to some extent, my sister, that anomalous bitch who loves getting on my nerves and treats me like I actually exist. In the same vein of trust and mutual understanding, I hope this opposing perspective is of real significance and not just some pisstake on the way the world works.

Ellipses elapse. The dysthymic fog of Hong Kong springtime colorgraded for the pre-HDR monitors of old people's dreams. Humidity is a suffocative shower disappearing into the black but not a rainshower, all taps unflowing but gas into former bleach chemomammary jugs. But arson can wait: a truck is driving bridgeside. x=CO(NH2)2+CIOH, solve for x. That is not quite the method. Insomnic morning, four thirty ante meridian. A hammockrope intrunk holds a pasta pot of liquefied yellow. With shaky hands the pot is removed (breathe in), and the shipping container suicide doors are opened from outside and a marathon is ran away from the imminent spill site as the overboiled pasta reduced to liquid is flipped over hail-mary and a precrater puddle is given time to moisturize trafficskin and lightly brushed with a foot and a disembowelment which is the decrepit unstably circular now tubular now snakelike stylized momentary going and gone hoofprint suggests a gigantic infrastructural cookie cutter template never used (breathe out and fall into the water). Nitrogen trichloride: made with bleach and ammonia or chloride bleach and piss. Why terrorize in early dawn? Because gastaps are for the taking in the pursuit of dousing cars and police as part of Great Leap Forward prophylactics. Or, spoken with candor, (and this is an assumption but yourself can take myself to be truthful or at least be hiding only a quarter of the sun behind the hill) because Ricococococo thinks explosives with like, real tension are totes lame, and besides Rico gosh darn Eisenberg is an upstanding gentlewoman and won't ditch class just cuz, Ricocococococo's not a lackadaisical manchild who skips like, every class that can be skipped like rope (bunnyhop bunnyhop) and still get an A like some latter day Qin legalist. Not landscape but landmark art and not landscape carving but landmark carving and not landmark carving but landmark erasure. The first great work of landmark erasure in the absence of the need for cities reconstructed. Keep the bleach jugs (gasdispensers) on top of the washing machine and don't flush the toilet because the pig's native environment stinks of and is obfuscated by shit and ask the policeman to wash his hands before touching any of your public property after giving him a nice bribe and then make it rain while he's unconcerned because one smell overpowers the other and money strikes all remarks from record. Money allows for silence more sacred than immolation, fainting from an improvised crucifixion of wrist and ankle to wall with duct tape occurs after the easy elapsing of three minutes or less. Call now and we'll preburn the virgin for you - barbaric is three hour death, innovation is the three minute death. Sixty times faster, sixty frames per second - combination doublesight, victim and perpetrator. Pedestrian walkways remain accessible but epidemic is artificial immobility, a combustion carriage Erfurt Latrine. Waylaid body without organs aerially endoscopied with no point of throat entry. Set the metronome in the Khanate tent of handslapping piano teacher to two hundred and fifty beats per minute, slap the zeroth and seventh octave and duck your head and cover your ears in the fanciful hope to one day unhear the error of your (survival) measures - to convert revolutions per minute to beats per minute halve the value. Twenty four hour anxietycasting helicopter blades revolve at five hundred revolutions per minute, the washing machine drum mechanical heart of a sinless man at two hundred forty. The Ottoman general comes again for a collect call and yeastdrip by yeastdrip three sons of Besnik the Kosovar fall to the ground kicked out of the door to join the Ottoman army and makes their share of the daily bread into kvass. In the absence of a perpetrator and a plate number for a truck spilling recipes from the Housewife Anarchist's Cookbook, construct a perfect perpetrator and make him the perfect penitent and foster him out to helicopter parents of vicarious intergenerational ambition. May the STEM grown from the cherry core in your belly one day grow tall enough for the biblical capitulation of the ascendant conveying tracts and the central skull. Swing that dang bat, sport. I didn't forking send you to college to smoke the Devil's Lettuce. Kiddo. KO. The first trepanation is always the most relieving.

Flashback to no one directed by no one - the day prior (Hijiri: Rabi al-thani, one thousand four-hundred thirty-seventh year / Kafirochrony: February the tenth, Anno Domini two thousand and sixteenth year).

SAMAIN MAUER: "…Nobody could outbid whoever ya want to win because they'd be trying to hear you announcing their bid and wouldn't have a lucky sec to cut in.".

ARIANA AUMONT: "It would be quite possible for myself to corner the art market in this manner."

LO MEIN: "How are you gonna slurp that up?"

ARIA: "Sell reproductions at rigged auctions to chosen gullibles and have the institutions claim they are the originals. I will then hang the originals in my own house and pretend that they are the reproduction and when it is time for the gullible to go to the DMV and state they are now named 'gullible' with an X gender marker for two hangmen with their legs crossed myself will announce all of the precious 'originals' are reproductions. Then the caged bird will sing of the transparent bars for the first time in an 'I wanted' song."

It is the same bridge we stranded that motorcycle on.

MAIN CHARACTER: "Then ya kill 'em."

INCIDENTAL AR(I)CHETYPE: "Yes. Then I 'kill 'em'."

Feur: halfmauer (turn and face the wall, DE/EN: "Mauer" -> "Wall", Thurn und Taxis, turn to face the door, exit the exterior wall, catch the Taxi and have a tremulant and awkward conversation with the driver, transmitting dark unbelieved in polite information) at whiteflag halfmast and quartered quarterarnaud, genus Koine. Pace around.

THE ACT OF MAIMING [sic], MAINLY: "By helicopter? Throatgrab and splash."

AR(I)DOUS POVERTY: "Yes, let the organisms that expect whalefall dine and dash."

PRM ([BUREAU OF) POPULATION, REFUGEES AND MAIN)): "Pilot's drunk, burn and crash."

Balkanize the noosphere. She thinks: "Smuggler's drunk and the Aegean's hungry."

CIA (CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE ARI): "Both the canvas and the life too reduced to trash."

Balkanize the air:

FMSHRC (FEDERAL MAIN SAFETY AND HEALTH REVIEW (DIRECTOR: ARI AUMONT)): "A rhyming scheme worth another falsely morbid nursery rhyme."

FEMA (FEDERAL EMERGENCY MAIN AGENCY): "You're telling me Ring Around the Rosey wasn't about the Black Death? Damn. Coulda lived my whole life thinking that."

The virus @ariarnaud: "Sorry to cough so loud it unseals your eardrums of wax."

In the year 2150 this is what the Arnaud family's display names are. The primacy of alphabetized information in three to seven letter databases, all in claustrophobic second and third of kin foreborn proximity.

Arnaud, Alchys: I HAVE MONONUCLEOSIS @alchysarnaud; Arnaud, Arianna: The virus @ariarnaud; Arnaud, Isabela ("Bela"): zoognostic girl @belarnaud; Arnaud (née Elana-Mauer), Feur: sick fuck @GOD; Arnaud (née Jino), Res: The fucking disease @realresjino; Arnaud, Violet: EPIC ZOO TIC @Fwaahhhh.

These are the people who vote for you. Monitoring of them has revealed unusual activity, and unusual activity amongst politicians indicates a shift to hateful rhetoric, "end times propaganda!", Eratosthenes wept. The expected state of spectacle interfacing for Ms. Alchys Arnaud appears thusly.

Display name: Alchys Arnaud

Handle: @alchysarnaud

Biography: Official page for Alchys Arnaud updates.

Homepage: https://alchys.alarie.gov.eu/investments

Location: NYC

Sample posting: "Just completed an acquisition of Evil Beans Manhattan. Initial public offering soon."

Ms. Alchys Arnaud's profile picture is a clean well-lit headshot of herself, glam-rock pompadour red against kitchen drawer white, prim and bloused. Pompadour here appears as a qualifier and not an indicator of hairstyle (hers is squat toilet straight).

Meanwhile, this is nothing unusual for Ms. Violet Arnaud, whose manner of presentation can be declared 'erratic' at best. It will be presented unsystematized, understood, sighted in its native environment. Capitalization is preserved.

V For Violence @Fwaahhhh

I'm White But Depends On Who's Asking. Maybe I'm French. I Don't Know

13 following • 2M followers

📍 Evil Girl Palace / http://alarie.gov.eu/vi/rulesformyfuckintwitter.mp4

Joined April 2044

Sample posting follows.

V For Violence @Fwaahhh

I Was Incubated And Incarnated As The Coolest White Girl Since Kreayshawn. Hope The Cycle Of Samsara Permits No Fuckin One To Reincarnate As Me Because They Would Not Be This Pristine

6:00PM • Twitter for Voice Typing Microwave Twitter Applet

Ms. Arnaud Violet's profile picture is a blurry, light-trailing close up of discontinued 'blackout in a can', Four Loko, which she professes to never have drunken in her life.

In the year 2016, this is myself. I am the bloc, I am the industry. I am surveilled and the FOIA request arrives as a thousand pages unstapled, apocrypha found in discarded bluntroaches battling for inclusion in a Discordian Bible.

Display name: Mayor of sodom

Handle: @notvashino

Biography: Strange mid level difficulty white girl. Email @realresjino Fax @schmainschmauer. To make an appointment call your grandma she is very lonely

Location: Printer that drinks blood

Homepage: https://usa.com/deathtoamerica

At the time this all begins and the live ragdoll staging occurs, this is the continuation of myself. I am the narrative, there are disclaimers proudly make me unclaimant of anonymity and declaiming my standing.

Ari @notvashino

Bureau Hotel Grand Treasurer

Funny gun girl from the television. Host of "Origins of Subversive Thinking" etc. Forward all death threats to @realresjino. This is a clothes store @ecarlate

150 following • 66.6M followers

📍 Drowning in Mussolini pussy 📎 http://www.ari.gov/addressing-the-rumor-that-my-name-is-spelled-with-two-ns-and-not-one

Joined January 2009

Post ex facto everyone has the lobotomized smile. Preserve with the camcorder what you understand is a moment that will override the sound of your loved ones' voices and be seized by the cathode godray refresh pulse, humanpulse lowered by the consistency of machinepulse. Watch the signifiers. Watch the fine-issuance traffic camera, watch the deserialized license plate, confirm the forensically confirmed and investigatively ongoing reality of the literature (beyond the scratched off serial letters and numbers of the second derivative once more franchised): a pool of the improvised explosive nitrogen trichloride which to shop for all you have to do is make one stop in the bathroom with the appropriate amenities of neglected toilet and the all night mecha-dhruva-pada of the washing machine and discover the ingredients (piss and ammonia) has decimated the bridge connecting Hong Kong and Macau. Godray refresh, Hindu refrain, pre-tape insertion it glows Shiva blue. If you were in the lone car under which the crater expanded and are feeling celebratory now that something in your life full of isolatory vehicles functioning as selfbarriers is worth solidarity and you no longer fear anything, contact SAMHSA: SAMHain Services Administration, Halloween party planner, ascream secondseeing the sheetghosts of the past, sugarcrash, candy cigarette. The crabs will eat your corpse, paint the drive-in gate of Red Lobster gold, maybe a bridge too far; if you're reading this, you must have survived. To free a lobster from behind glass, contact SAMHSA (disambiguation follows): San Antonio Marine Humane Services and Attestations; to ensure the crab that eats you at urban whalefall's perpetual stay of execution enclosure's is habitable in the long term, request an attestation. If a starving tiger is taking its last stand and submerging itself into the lake to die afloat, leap down and escape SAMHSAra. Become the Buddha whose shrine rests at Golden Gate Bridge and flowers to whom are outside the authority of FSB. The reason that you wait years for the electric chair is that they expect you to hang yourself with congealed citrus moonshine yeastfermented under the bunk bed of the crummy cell. Those who live by worldly pleasures die by worldly pleasures. > At the moment of the explosion I am sat under the bridge, anticipating the megaphony of the concrete hypoTitanomachy, disappointed she didn't just butter up the beams and used them to fry the golden goose's egg. This is the road of the hopefully lost yet always unhad Midas Touch, gambler's return, ideally upwardly beyond the zero, realistically just beyond where the addition of a plus and minus still produces minus. It is known exactly, this noontime's program at the traveling circus of aftermaths and every symbol of ecstatic union that can be derived from sitting in audience to comforting depravity. It is known the dealer cordially sits and forgets your face. It is known that if this strikes again, and it will because the bridges remain open and isolation must travel, you are one blurry matrice of the Godray dealt a fate of resting at the propulsionfree satellite graveyard. It is known that Rico will have known I would come and would yawn in annoyance and chew on a chocolate bar from the nearest vending machine and her knuckles will be unclean because she no longer carries quarters in an attempt to get on the Marquis' good side, after all she is her girlfriend's grandmother and impressions like delusions must travel directly to the center of regard. A gambler's center of regard is the casino and the dealer never regards. The Buddha's center of regard is nothing and the Buddha only has regard for suffering. Suffering never regards once it arrives, therefore the Buddha regards nothing. The method for expression of myself's regard for Rico's actions is also nothing, as I cannot slap her nor yell at her nor mean it when I yell at her as our impulses do not regard each other, they are each other and you are nothing.

"Atonement is the least of my worries, Vita Asmundo, because trust me, my family is intimately familiar with taking accountability," I began. "I won't even mention 'your high-and-mighty conceptualization of accountability,' partly because I respect you and want to continue this discussion in a civil way so that we can get to the meat of whatever we're both getting at, but also partly because I believe in the power of litotes to get you to realize that my priorities are in conflict with yours here. This is not some christologically governed journey towards a better state for myself, because I would've already quit carrying this knife of meteoric fuckoff metal everywhere with me so that I could renounce the Jino religion and turn to the tripartite memory of God, who would probably want me to maintain Bureau, make sure the paternalistic conservatives fulfill their daddy-dom or really daddy-findom fantasies out in the public eye while I would be their spokeswoman, calling it the 'prosperity gospel' or the more CEO-like 'fuck you, we win because God said so mindset.' I also would've surrendered myself at the bunker with you and Ari, Athanasius Window, because I wouldn't have cared enough if God was guaranteed to do all the good work for me. I believe in some divinity, don't get me wrong, but my divinity is not all-powerful. It's powerful enough to merit the utmost reverence, but not strong enough to take down what human beings worship more greatly in the Nietzschean era, because many seem to stand to benefit psychologically from the world's metempsychosis into a purgatory of stagnant wages, reckoning it a blessing from not God, especially not my God, but from humanity itself, which means that, if I were to atone for actions you've all but failed to specify beyond my mother, I would become a martyr - or worse, an abbess, for the very same cause against which my spite originated. I am not my grandfather, and I think you should understand that, for the world sure seems confused whenever it realizes that I don't defile the bodies of the unaware dead at random. My impulses are in check, and let it be known that even in a small moment of thought, I could see now that this is necessary to say, and somewhat earlier on in my life that remaining in the bunker during that tsunamic surge of paparazzi cascading into the foothills of the Alps on government helicopters to get a look at an exhausted Ari Augustenburg and a joyful yet somewhat lethargic Res Jino, both of whom are at this immediate point no longer virgins, was a good choice because giving myself up would mean a history where I never spoke to you and remained in some maximum-security facility until all civilization rotted, having failed to come up with the convenient litany of media excuses I did that led Ari into the world of Bureau." There was certainly some anger in my words, but it was impossible to give a damn since creating a claustrophobic space of language around Vita was necessary to keep her grounded enough to deliver a response that wouldn't land her directly into a series of ICD-10 diagnostic criteria in the psychiatric section - like those even applied to her wandering mind. "Now, are there any alternative ways to express what you tried to articulate just a moment ago, maybe something a little more neutral?"

Vita seemed, of all things, pleased with my response, a far cry from the intended reaction on all fronts - I'd hoped for shock value, but even I felt I came across as excessively earnest and too distanced from the slight cynicism underlying my every motion, and Athanasius Window looked at me like Vita just handed my ass to me in the Jino arena after having been given the disadvantaneous position and a dull knife - well, faux - made of wood. I was well aware how many games of Cards Vita had won without any recollection, how many things she'd said having later proclaimed that never in her life had she contrived through articulatory phonetics to verbally gesture as such, Vita, immortal of unknowable power, the youngest of the Fifth Generation of Alaries, a (somewhat) devoted sister, a deeply intelligent woman attached to a collection of dissociative tics, the flesh allowed to meld until they were quite close to monistic unity, yet still readily distinguishable upon inspection of the details. It was through this method that I quickly realized that my speech was either close enough to how Vita wanted me to respond or far off enough that she was pleasantly surprised, and from there I deduced that her reaction was closer to the latter - she slowly clapped, and Mag joined in at a less lethargic pace, creating what I could only presume was some kind of incalculable polyrhythm for the next thirty or so seconds. When Window attempted to applaud me likewise, I reached over and lowered her hands such that she could not contribute to a humiliation she did not know had even occurred. Something else must have been on her mind, I thought to myself, assuming my position after my snappy motion and slight grimace. She was supposed to be the failure here, not me…and I say that with the utmost friendly affection towards her even today.

"A little more neutral, you say?" Vita started up, rapidly drawing my eyes - my lumina - back to her, confused somewhat but ready to integrate whatever she had to say into the half-logical flow of our conversation, if glaciality could count as flow in the eyes of those who live mortal lives and gaze upon them anyway. "I'll convey it to you as follows, Res Jino, and this is required listening for Athanasius, too." She seemed more amenable to Window, whom I almost never called Athanasius (much less any shortenings thereof - I still full-name everyone but my wife when speaking out loud no matter how many times they prostrate before me, shower me in gifts, or otherwise attempt to demonstrate their reverence, although they can be easily, silently downgraded to Ms. or Mrs. or (God forbid/I hope not) Mr. if necessary), which was understandable because I was much less of a thorn in Vita's side and she wasn't, but it underscored a mistrust in my ability to be cooperative. "I mistrust your way of looking at the world. Your cynicism is a necessary falsehood with which you conceal a childish optimism for the future state of things befitting a staunch anti-revisionist, and you pull it over the head, your current reality a prisoner at Abu Ghraib. I don't care how realistic you try to be, how many fried green tomatoes you eat for breakfast, how much hick shit you have to trudge through to get to the bottom of what's keeping this Bureau monster alive, but I sure do hate how often you've chosen to indulge. You'd rather be fucking my niece right now, wouldn't you? But you have priorities, you have quote-unquote 'distance' to quote 'work through' unquote, and you superimpose a simulation of humanity onto yourself, into the management of which you're putting far too much effort when you could theoretically do the bare minimum to maintain your ontological status. Well, fuck my niece all you want, Res Jino, this is far from entirely about that, but you need to prove yourself worthy…to yourself. The desire within you is all too human, which is why I say 'atone' and mean you should atone for your birth, which, if we didn't care for you so in the Center, would otherwise be an affront to all divinity, a daughter of Giles Corey settling for a mere human and immortalizing her, raising two children with her, leaving them both abandoned into the arms of that man whom I cannot name without screaming. There, that's the aid I can provide you, an imploration to do better. Maybe you'll think a little harder and we can talk more about this another time…or even right now, if you really wish." I looked at her in shocked silence, disagreeing with almost every polemic she turned towards me, as if revealing a hand of nothing but royalty and Aces of the suits. But we weren't looking for a royal flush, were we? No, we were playing Bullshit, and if I made the rules, she would've had to draw a card. I chose, however, not to stand up to her colorless green ideas, for that would truly ruin my prospects, truly fuck everything up about a conversation that had already gone down the drain.

I began: "Well then. I'll ensure that this keeps me pensive and contemplative for the next few days, how about it? In fact, I won't even show outrage. I'll imagine you made a fair point, or rather construe it that way, but we can seek aid elsewhere, from someone who won't lecture me about my sex life, my work life, et cetera, the compound of both those things admixed in ways I'd rather not describe to any of you, potentially eliciting more fuckery, because this conversation didn't even get to an agreement where we could remark on Red Swan's heritage as an organization or even properly reintroduce ourselves. Perhaps that isn't a bad thing - we're taking our first steps. We're-"

Magdolna began: "Dysfunctionality of organizational principles not so much as dictated in Robert's Rules of Order render unpermissible your ruinsome technique, notwithstanding the equal unenforceability of this verdict by ourselves the semidisenfranchised, whose machinations to repossess the Continuous Insurgency" - an old epithet of Red Swan which had fallen into disuse after my "grandfather's" hostile takeover - "disassemble and undergo condensation prior to the perturbing ocular-witnessable metamorphosis into gelatinous matter unsuitable for fornication and the continuous - but not differentiable, as with Weierstrass' abomination - reconception of mentality-praxes, which precludes our participation in sociopolitical consilia pertaining to the activities of the Center-"

Window began: "The slime cyborg analogy, you might be onto something." I wondered whence she'd gotten 'cyborg.'

Magdolna: "Prithee do tell?"

Window: "I would fuck a slime cyborg until her gelatinous components became creamy and opaque." Silence. "Provided I had an opportunity to do so, which makes me a perfect fit for your organization. Don't listen to what my comrade, my 同志, мой товарищ - in the ungendered Soviet sense, of course - my pal here; she's not in the game like I am." She felt the bump of my elbow right away, as if I'd taken a permanent marker throughout her mouth-running and written YOU'RE DRUNK in a relatively solid facsimile of one of the heavier weights of Helvetica Neue all over my arm in various heights and widths, prompting her to look at it. It was written on my face, too: that Window, you were drunk, and you needed to stop talking before you offended Pneuma Maria Jidas Magdolna Matraguna Boas Therpele Asmundo's Salemite sensibilities of casual conversation, especially while being unable to ascertain the extent of her freakishness, once again due to pervasive drunkenness. "No, I'm not done yet." That was when it became clear to me that she didn't get the memo. Ah well. "You know what? Fuck. I need a woman in my life, don't I…" Maybe she did.

Vita: "Let's try this. Will you two young women and my niece put your brilliant minds to work to reclaim Red Swan from the Evil and pour molten gold down Bureau Hotel's prolapsed asshole to kill it for good and thereby get it off the more just, more respectable ass of the peaceful, prosperous contry you call France, which my daugher rules, or will you continue your diversions into friendships, romance, alcohol, betrayal, localized warfare, smaller representations of broader conflicts, playing each other at chess, exploring markets that have been modified by Rico Eisenberg so as to warp in on themselves and force you to run without knowing which direction moving in a straight line will take you, and finally, refusing, Res Jino, to stand up for your fellow citizens as a half-Frenchwoman by birth? It's one or the other, but you need to get to work." She promptly dissociated and accepted another award, this time for Best Director at the Oscars, and gave an invective speech to her imagined audience viciously tearing apart the American military industrial complex from the perspective of an ex-insider who worked at Raytheon for two decades before entering film, though she hampered and bogged down the otherwise heartfelt and tragic speech with shoehorned references to trite superhero cinema, with which her daydream-persona appeared to be genuinely enamored. The film, entirely fictitious and confirmed as such by multiple search engine queries Window and I would soon both make in silence on the way back to our respective one-bedroom apartments near Han Wudi's campus in which we actually resided, ostensibly revolved around the Occupy Wall Street protests, human sexuality, and the increasingly perilous American housing market.

Anyhow, we left after some uncomfortable silence, covertly informed that we'd fucked up the deal through an absence of further communications, but honestly, the lack of respect was a necessity for us to succeed. The one part of the immortal world that wasn't already all over us had to be convinced, but we didn't give too much of a shit. The only way to beat Earth Standstill, after all, was to remain motionless when necessary and sprint otherwise. This era just so happens to have been the one in which we did the most waiting, even if we were at war, aguably civil war on top of that. Family against family, in particular twin versus twin, plus or minus a cult centered around my wife's old habit of masturbating in front of a certain mirror in the privacy of the Navashino house to which she was confined - more to be revealed. We encountered Rico again later that night and beat her ass - verbally. I stepped aside to send Ari a series of secure messages explaining the situation, to which she simply replied "I don't give a shit" and then "I'll just fuck you and fuck you harder than last time next time we do the deed," which was quite blushworthy. Window finally shut up, and we parted ways for the night. At last, I returned to my apartment, and everything was still.