“When do we go back to Judith Command?” Something about the owner…She’d laughed at something her cigarette customer had said. Something.

West marked Paul’s gaze, uploaded new matrices into the Judith ME. “I think we’re done for the day.”

“Right.” He sloshed coffee around the cup. “What’s your favorite book?”

West’s hand moved instinctively to his codeburn. “The one you haven’t written yet.”

of Samayel, of Katre, of countless others: Berlin, Frost, the Judiths, the Wests, the ocean of gods who were Michaels and Windhams, Hunter and Joseph. I could tell you of so many.

I could tell you of their plans. Of purposes.

I could tell you of the place they built in the stillness between times, that catalogue of the remnants, how it stretched away into universes filled with typing monkeys.

when i close my eyes, who do i see there?

Walking down the passages that looked like metal, a charge to the air of static and nothing. Heart beating in my throat. and i can’t even compose a single fucking coherent sentence anymore. I’d been taken from a beach and immersed in this: self-referential, indulgent bullshit. No discernible plot, no outstanding characters, no sympathetic developments. I asked myself if I could begin to explain that which I could never begin to comprehend.

They’d been busy since I’d first written them into existence.

And I realize now that what I’d seen in those sleepless hours and daylight moments paused over a cup of coffee, a cigarette, lightning in the gulf was a pale fragment of what I was supposed to have seen. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to have seen it at all; maybe it would have best been left hidden behind the clouds, hovering behind veils of shadow and doubt, in that place where hopes and dreams