In order to understand how Nyralathotep did what he did, you need to understand that it’s not the information alone that destroys you. It’s the experience, the journey that counts. I’ll give two very different examples, both from my own experience, both equally relevant.

The first is the most brilliant spoiler I ever got hit with. I was on a 4chan thread and people were complaining about their lives. (Yes, 4chan is the site where all the school shooters and incels come from, or at least used to, but I’m not a school shooter. We don’t really have those in Israel. I mean, we do, but it’s different.) So after writing a couple of cathartic lines about another girl who acted interested on Tinder just to randomly decide to ghost me, I started reading other people’s stories. Most were as boring as they were badly written, but one stood out in its quality, and really pulled me in.

It was an older guy relating this heartbreaking story about his relationship with his daughter, and how his work was tearing them apart. He was an engineer, and that’s where it got interesting – when he started describing the world, I realized it wasn’t our world, but some sci-fi concept: all around the world, wheat was dying, and it was up to him to go up to space and find new worlds for humanity to live in. I was transfixed as his story went deeper into black holes and time dilation and love, and in the end he wrote – “I just spoiled Interstellar for you.”

What a cunt.

I looked away from the screen, closing my eyes and trying very hard to think about something else, to eject the information. There’s no ‘delete’ button on the human mind, though. That very weekend, I sat in the theater and shoved handfuls of popcorn in my mouth, and as the events rolled on just as I knew they would, the surprises mute, I couldn’t stop thinking: Someone made me feel this disappointment, chose it.

That wasn’t the last time I found myself regretting that I couldn’t choose to forget something. The second example happened on an amateur hardcore-porn thread, where we shared videos of attractive girls doing impressively nasty things (I know I shouldn’t watch stuff like that, but there’s something about seeing something I’ve never seen before that I just can’t resist). I clicked on the thumbnail of a cute girl in cat ears and cat makeup and she was chewing on something. The video started, and the first thing that caught my attention was how gently she chewed, not really crunching it down, as if she was just pressing on something to get the juices out. When she opened her mouth after twenty seconds or so, instead of the bloody tampon I expected, she took out a mouse, still alive, and held it hanging just in front of the camera, giggling. The girl, not the mouse. I turned away from the screen and thought about the pure evil it took to put on cat makeup just for the joke of it.

There was a twofold shock there, not just at having seen the thing but at re-contextualizing the cute twenty seconds of video before the mouse was shown. I turned back to the screen. The mouse wasn’t struggling, but you could see the terror and pain in its little, broken movements as she raised it above her head and opened her leering mouth wide, slowly lowering it back into the living torture chamber she’d made of herself.

You know what the worst thing was? I’d seen the comments, people posting gif animations of appalled faces and swearing at the poster. And still I went right in, confident to emerge unscathed where those just like me were scarred.

I fell asleep on the couch in front of the PlayStation while the Dark Souls loading screen was playing. I had some trouble sleeping. No outright nightmares about being chewed up, but the general sense of being trapped, of being the victim of someone else’s amusement. A general sense that it would have been for the best if the whole world burned.

I spent the next couple of nights there, trying to flush the image out of my mind, taking comfort in the game’s unique hopelessness. If you've never heard of Dark Souls, here's what you need to know: It's unfairly hard. That's the hook, the theme, the story of it. If you weren’t supposed to succeed, there isn’t any pain in failing.

So you can see why, when Nyarlathotep came, I was readier than most. The first time I heard the name was in a video by my favorite youtuber at the time, Nuri Comey. He decided to appear as himself instead of his stage persona, “Tsiki Tsror”, so he could address his viewers in a more personal tone.

There was, however, very little direct addressing for most of the video, titled “dont [his typo] go see Nyarlathotep”. From what I gathered from the broken sentences and bursts of actual tears, Comey had seen him in Eilat, in one of Nyarlathotep’s first shows after he crossed the border from Egypt. Comey was infuriated about Nyarlathotep’s no-return policy. Not a no-refund policy, but a prohibition of visitors from returning for a second performance. Nyarlathotep, Comey claimed, had spotted him as soon as he got into the venue, pointed directly at him, and refused to start the show until he’d left.

From what Comey said, the “performance” was something between a meditation and a lecture, though Nyarlathotep apparently didn’t say much more than “welcome” and “goodbye”. But Comey really wanted to go again, and after being denied that… tried to spitefully make other people not go?

I watched a man who had built his fame off suicide and rape jokes (often both) cry uncontrollably in front of tens of thousands of watching eyes and felt a peculiar cocktail of Schadenfreude, pity, and fascination.

Those were not good days for me. Years of programming marathons (failed attempts at making a computer game, surrogate worlds where one can feel what it’s like to have purpose) and zealous junk food consumption had left my spine, digestive system, and social skills in ruins. I was almost never physically or mentally comfortable, always tired. At the age of 29 the possibility of becoming a perma-virgin (a “wizard”, as they say on the internets) became increasingly plausible, and the subject of literal nightmares. Living with my parents... well, it didn’t help.

Quality distraction was a necessity—so when Nuri Comey said he wished he’d never seen Nyarlathotep, I was like a starved spider, following the vibration in its web towards a parasitoid wasp, hoping it is a caught fly: I followed the signal down, right toward the danger. Worst case, I thought, it would be pretty fucking funny.

Nyarlathotep was gaining some media traction by then, but was still mostly niche. From what I found in Israeli forums, he had first appeared in Egypt, with no possessions, ID, or relatives. After spending some time in prison for espionage, he was released and given citizenship (which sounded like a bunch of bullshit to me). He soon took his show to Israel, intending to tour Europe and the US afterwards.

This was either some sort of publicity stunt, and people were being paid to be vague, or he was spiking everyone’s drinks. Or the air. Something.

Most visitors didn’t take it as hard as Comey. At least not at first. A couple of reporters who saw the show in Eilat wrote about how amazing and eye opening it was. One of them quit her job soon after, and the other jumped off a bridge. Excited chills climbed up my herniated spine as I scanned forum after forum. Somebody wrote about losing motivation to do anything after watching the show, as delightful as it was. Another wrote about contemplating suicide. None of them gave any description of the show itself.

#

Was it out of laziness or fear that I didn’t order tickets? In truth, neither. I was curious, and wanted to draw out this rare feeling for as long as possible. Kind of like a porn addict who’s drawing out a watching session, denying himself its conclusion so he won’t have to drop back into his own life, or a stalker that derives so much joy from his crush’s online presence he almost forgets the data maps onto a real-world object.

It wasn’t until I heard Nyarlathotep interviewed that I realized that I couldn’t keep avoiding seeing him. As if I wasn’t diamond-hard for this guy already, there was also the added effect of the interview being deleted by the producer and interviewer himself, Gavri Nir’ad, and someone on set (presumably a sound person) leaking the audio track to Telegram news groups.

In the recording, Nir’ad talked excitedly to the audience in his airy, two-shekel, cult-leader cadence.

“Our next guest is a very special man, ladies and gentlemen, he claims to be a prophet and I think I’m starting to believe him, he came all the way from Cairo, please give a round of applause to – I hope I’m getting this right – Nyar-la-toe-tap!”

The crowd applauded, presumably as Nyarlathotep entered the room. A long pause, as if he was taking his time sitting on the couch in front of Nir’ad. “Good evening, Gavri,” he said at last. His voice was low, and very soft. When had he learned such accent-less Hebrew?

I could tell Nir’ad was making an exaggerated expression of being blown away. “Wow, do you guys feel the energy coming off this guy? I’m feeling such a cosmic presence, such a powerful aura! I bet this is what it would have been like meeting Moses, or maybe even Jesus. The energy here is simply amazing. Do you guys at home feel that too?”

I rolled my eyes. Nir’ad couldn’t shut up about cosmic energy for ten seconds even if the fate of the world depended on it.

There was a moment of hesitation, as if there’d been some non-verbal communication between them. A meaningful look, or perhaps Nyarlathotep placing an arm on Nir’ad’s shoulder.

“You have some questions for me,” the low voice said, and for a moment my brain thought that he was talking to me. My spine straightened.

“Oh yeah yeah yeah sure,” Nir’ad mumbled and cleared his throat, as if decades of experience in television had been wiped away in his excitement. “I have a ton of questions. Well, first of all: This feels weird to say, but, well, are you an alien?” He sounded embarrassed, as if he too recognized how cringe that was.

“I was born on this planet.”

“Do you mean to say you weren’t always here?”

“Not always.”

“Are you talking about psychedelic journeys? Ahem, I’d like to remind everyone at home that we don’t encourage anyone to engage in illegal activities, and even though the exploration of consciousness can lead to wonderful, life altering results, it should only be done using methods that are safe, or in countries where the use of psychedelics is legal.”

“I’m not speaking about the alteration of the mind. I left this planet and resided somewhere else.”

“Are you here to take us to this other planet?”

“No, I’m here to share with you what I’ve seen.”

“Do you have any proof?”

“You try to grasp at what you call reality. But knowing doesn’t require reality–”

I sighed and jumped ahead in the file. I knew the drill—that most notable cult leaders have a history of schizophrenia in the family, whose severity is dependent on the accumulation of “schizophrenic genes”, implying there’s a spectrum between a normal person and a person who thinks he’s God, and somewhere along that spectrum there’s the kind of guy that convinces hundreds of people to drink extra spicy Kool-Aid. Nir’ad was somewhere on that spectrum too, I imagined. It didn’t mean he wasn’t telling what he believed was truth, but I’d expected more, wanted more. And so I was disappointed again. My fault, really.

I jumped a minute ahead, and there was only silence. Another minute – still silence. I looked closer at the message bar, the little visualization of sound volume as function of time, and saw that there was a spike near the end. I jumped to it.

Someone sobbed, then screamed, “Get off him! Leave him alone! Gavri!”

And someone, presumably Gavri, barked through choked tears, “I’ll kill him! I have to kill him!”

Then Nyarlathotep spoke, like a pharaoh with a mandate from heaven, “Release Me.” A silence fell, broken only by someone’s shrieking breathes. Whether Nyarlathotep peeled Nir’ad’s fingers off his throat or just stared him down I couldn’t tell, because he hadn’t made a single sound. “I’ll carry on my path. Do not attempt to slow me.”

And that was it. That was where the recording was cut.

I looked at the graph of the file and selected the section just before the silence began.

“…call reality. But knowing doesn’t require reality,” Nyarlathotep said.

Nir’ad, apparently genuinely humble and curious, asked, “What does it require?”

And here was the first silence, as if something was slowly gathering itself and coiling to strike. When Nyarlathotep finally spoke, his voice was different, as if he’d turned his head to speak directly to me. “You,” he said. “I have something to show you. Are you listening? Is your mind focsud?”

“Yeah, bitch,” I answered out loud for some reason, and swallowed a lump. Someone made a throaty sound, but I couldn’t tell who it was.

“Then let us sit in this holy silence, and I will shape it into something you have not seen before.”

And that was that. Two minutes of silence, before Nir’ad tried to strangle him. A drop of saltwater dripped from my chin onto the keyboard. A tear? I brought a hand up to my wet cheek, my wet forehead. Not tears: sweat.

Nice.

I switched tabs to a new search engine query and found a place to buy tickets for the show. Seemed like he didn’t sleep – apart from short breaks here and there, he was performing around the clock. Fortunately, he was already in Tel Aviv. There were only ten tickets left, all for the same show - 4:30 a.m. on a Wednesday. I bought one for 55 NIS - about what you’d pay to see a C-grade entertainer, which he obviously wasn’t. This was grade A stuff.

“Mom, I’m taking the car for tonight?”

She looked up from her phone, sitting on the twin couch by my dad, partially hidden by his belly, pretending to half listen to the WW2 documentary he’d made her watch. “Where are you going? Meeting friends?” She had a glimmer in her eye, letting me know there was a hope she did not dare explicitly express. My dad didn’t look away from the screen.

“Yeah, we’re going to see a show.”

“What, with Dekel?”

“Yeah,” I haven’t seen Dekel in more than a year, since he’d found not only the woman but the courage to bring a human being to this world with. “His wife let him off for the night.”

“Oh, tell him his little girl is beautiful. I’ve been following on facebook.”

Sure she had. It was the loop she was stuck in, foraging for information as if the right amount would regain her the control she’d lost over her life. I didn’t look down on her fot that, but I hoped that when I found myself in a loop like that, it was going to be a more pleasant one. Dad grunted, letting us know that we were interrupting his watching experience, and mom waved a kiss towards me. I took the keys and left.

#

It was a hot, humid Tel Aviv night; autumn coming late again. Fortunately, the venue was close enough to the beach to get a cool breeze every once in a while as I ate a slice of pizza (bacon and fries as toppings - what a time to be alive) and waited.

The line was long: It seemed like all of the thirty-four people the venue could hold were here, and there were still ten minutes to the show itself. A group of girls in neo-hippie attire stood around a tall, loud man with dreadlocks. There were a couple of punk rockers, one of whom sported a tattoo of a snake with an apple in its mouth, crawling from his neck to his forehead. Not a common sight here, head tattoos. I wondered under what rock he spent his days.

The last person in line was a pale girl with black-rimmed glasses and a side-cut in her short, dirty-blonde hair. Under her skirt, each of her pale, thin thighs showed a half-covered tattoo. One was the hilt of a sword. The other was the words: “… should be destroyed by the truth.” Based. A flat tummy, small tits. A face that was just unattractive enough for me to be attracted while still feeling like I had a chance.

She was looking at her phone, and I once again mourned my innate lack of Game. I finished my pizza while doing my best to summon the wisdom of the Black Pill – if you have no hope, you cannot be disappointed.

A little way from the entrance we were waiting by, a double door opened, and out came the patrons of the last show. They moved sluggishly, looking around in wonder, and at us with blank expressions I couldn’t decipher. A mix of shock and amazement?

One of the hippies said, “Look: The faces of people who have seen pure beauty.” He was beaming.

Beside me, the girl with the tattoos scoffed. “Lightweights.”

“And you think you’ll do better?” I said, throwing wisdom aside the moment a chance to talk to a real-life woman showed itself—but also hoping that a pick-up artist might have approved of me opening with a challenge.

She turned, scanning me quickly. “Better than that,” she said, moving her eyes to glare at one of the survivors, who fell to his knees and started crying. Upon hearing him, a few others started crying, too.

I wondered if I, too, would look like that in an hour, but I didn’t have time to think about it - I needed to focus on my Game. “What makes you so sure you won’t be destroyed by the truth?”

Her hand moved to her thigh, as if she could feel my stare, retroactively. Smooth move, perv. “There’s one truth, you’d have to have half a brain not to understand it yourself. Everything else is some reflection of that same reality, and that can’t hurt you, once you’ve seen the source. And…You have no idea what I’m talking about.” She was being a jerk, but I wasn’t complaining. Better to be shit-tested than igrnored.

“Then why are you here? If you’re not going to learn anything new.”

I thought she might take that as an insult, but she seemed to genuinely consider before answering with a shrug. “I’m bored.”

#

We entered a dimly lit room, damp-smelling. A crimson carpet, wall to wall, and rows of round, heavy cushions. A little stage, the kind that you’d find at an intimate stand-up comedy show, just high enough to separate the performer from the audience. I activated the recorder app on my phone, and slipped it in my pocket.

I sat on one of the cushions in the second row, near the wall. My stiff limbs and spine refused to settle in anything resembling a comfortable position. Others around me were visibly as uncomfortable, their faces showing irritation. Not the hippies, obviously.

The girl with the tattoos chose front-row center. Those were the last seats to be taken, the ones that would be directly in front of him.

My eyes turned to the entrance, stage right. I remember that clearly – I felt like I should look, and at that moment he came into view. He was taller than I’d expected, even more so than the low voice implied. His skin was golden-brown, his hair a rich brown and thick, drawn into a bun on his head. He wasn’t muscular like a bodybuilder, but there was something leonine in the broadness of his face and the palms of his hands that implied at great, hidden strength. His jeans and T-shirt were ordinary, modern, but they seemed to barely hold on to him, as if there was a foreignness between them and his skin that could not be bridged.

One of the hippies started clapping. Nyarlathotep looked straight at him with his almond-shaped, deep brown eyes, and the hippie stopped before the fire could spread. No one made a sound as Nyarlathotep walked slowly to the center of the stage, his eyes scanning each of us. As he looked at me, directly at me, I had a distinct feeling that he saw through me, as if every secret was known. No hope of hiding and pretending, constructing a better, fictional self out of the presentable parts. I bet he was drowning in pussy. Very gently he rubbed his thumb and forefinger, I think, as if feeling the texture of the air. I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t shift my attention from his eyes.

Nyarlathotep sighed and casually folded himself down, his legs pretzeled together like gurus do. The room inhaled in anticipation.

“Welcome,” he said simply, but the word changed the room entirely, suffused into the atmosphere. No answer was made.

“I wish to show you another world. If you have come here, that is testemant you want to see. But perhaps you do not know what seeing is, what it does. Look into your heart and ask yourself – do you really want to be shown, no matter what it might do to you?”

There was another moment of silence, and I contemplated the question. I thought about Nuri Comey crying, about his warning, and my guts tightened with the a hint of fear. But by some bug of the human thinking process, despite the obvious rational answer, I thought to myself: Yes, if there is another world, of course I would like to see it.

“Very well, then,” he said after a moment, as if he’d received each of our individual answers. “Then let your mind open. Not metaphorically:. Reach out to me, through the darkness between minds. Close your eyes, and imagine that you are me.

“You were born in a land named Ka’met,” he said, his soft voice filling the room. “The name means black earth, the fertile land of the Nile. You worked that earth for most of your life, in your father’s wheat fields. That was twenty-seven centuries ago.”

Someone coughed into the silence.

“I was drinking what you may call a beer, at the end of a long summer workday, watching the Nile from a hillside. Then, suddenly, I were taken to another world. Imagine.” He paused.

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, allowing my mind to… reach out, I guess. In any other mediation-like setting I would have taken the opportunity to heckle, or at least chuckle, but it didn’t seem right.

“You are sitting on the hillside, drinking a bitter drink from a clay cup. The setting sun is warm on your skin, the sweet Nile breeze bringing cooler, humid air.”

I saw myself there, a shade against the inside of my eyelids, looking at the greenish-brown water of the Nile, at the reeds moving with the wind. I imagined the sensation of the rough clay against my lips, the rich bitterness of the beer. A calm fell over me.

“You hear, from a distance, a splashing in the water. Two large crocodiles are barging through the reeds. They are mothers, with young in their mouths.”

His soft voice blended smoothly with my thoughts. I imagined putting the cup down at my feet and watching the regal beasts. The tiny crocodiles, in my mind, were even more beautiful than their mothers, full of life and promise. I was fascinated.

One of the offspring drops out of its mother’s maw—perhaps pushed out by a sibling, perhaps on its own. He tumbles into the dirt and, in his confusion, jumps back toward the closest jaws that he finds. These, as it turns out, are not his mother’s. His new siblings welcome him just as if he was one of their own. Is there a difference?

I never knew that could happen, and I find myself amused and charmed by something so simple.

“You are so distracted by the sight, you do not even notice a tear in the world around you, like a blanket in a thousand colors, as wide as the sky, engulfing you from every side, quickly closing in. Before you know it, you find yourself somewhere else completely.”

In an instant I am in an entirely different place: a dark, humid cave, with black corridors reaching in every direction. The floor is wet and cold. There is but a faint glow. Large, wet bodies are moving somewhere just outside of eyes’ and ears’ reach. The air smells strange.I am terrified.

“You feel ill, not just disoriented. In the dark, something comes towards you.”

My heart is pounding in my chest, and there is something wrong with my breathing. Something approachs me, moving quickly through the shallow puddles of muck. Clutching at my chest, I turn my head to look at it. It is a spindly mass of delicate arms, silver refracting into little rainbows in the dim light. My vision is already blurred when it emerges from the darkness.

“You lose consciousness. And in your sleep, you die.”

For a moment I am silent, and there is no thought or emotion in me. Not even calmness.

“You wake up in a small room that is cleaner and more comfortable than anything you have seen before. There is no pain.”

I wake up in a bed of fine, white sand. The room is the most comfortable I’ve ever been in,a snug nook. I sit up slowly, expecting an awful headache from a past experience with losing consciousness (I vaguely remember having drowned once—my foot got tangled in some roots—and waking on the shore of the Nile), but there is no pain in my body. In fact, I feel better than I ever have. I wonder if someone would miss me, and realize that I do not remember much of Kamet, just the fields, and the crocodiles, and the nile.

A man walks into the room. His green-tinted skin is covered in a white silk robe from neck to ankle. His hair is long and a shade of black so dark it testifies to avoidance of the sun. His beard is masterfully cropped, two lines tracing his jawbones and meeting under his chin in a long strand of straight black hair. He has not the bandages that I expected to see, nor the hat, but I spot faint scars on his exposed limbs, as if they were once cut apart and mended.

I do not remember everything, but I do remember the forms and names of the gods. I get up from my bed and kneel, bringing my forehead to the floor. “Lord Undertaker, I am unworthy--”

“Are you to judge souls, to deem who is worthy?” His voice is not the deathly whisper I expect, but mirthful and very human, as if we were old friends trading insults. “Am I to abdicate, and leave this world in your custody?”

I am unprepared for the possibility that he is joking. “Forgive me, King of the Dead, I did not mean…”

“Rise, Nyarlathotep” That is my name, of that I am sure. “We have much to speak of. Are you suffering in any way?”

I raise myself, but I cannot bring myself to stare directly at the face of a god. “No. I feel… rested,” I answer, my calm surprising me. “Is this the world of the dead?” I ask, and after a moment’s consideration, “Did I die?”

“You are not dead. And as for the question you mean to ask – you are very far from your home.”

I ponder that for a moment, recalling the rotten deal Osiris himself is told to have received in the underworld. “May I ever return to the world of the living,” I whisper, “or am I… changed?”

His smile is faint but true. “You might still return. Do not ask me how yet, for it will take me centuries to explain. Be patient.” he commands. I look within, and note that I am indeed very patient. “If you are feeling well, let us walk,” he suggests. “There are some things I would like to show you.”

He heads out of the room, and I follow, realizing that I am expected to walk among gods. He leads me through corridors that gradually get darker and more humid. The lighting becomes dim, and the stone floor is wet with something not unlike honey. It tickles my bare feet. It feels warm, and safe.

“Do you recognize this place?” he asks after he stops walking. “This is where you entered our world, where the rupture brought you. I fortunate enough to be told where to find you, but not what you would be like. When I found you, you could not breathe. But now you can.”

I look at the god standing in front of me, and recall that spindly, terrifying mass that crawled toward me in the dark in this very place. I dare not ask.

He looks back at me. His eyes, green-speckled brown, shine with familiarity, not authority. “Call me Osiris. Guide of Souls Lost, Teacher of the Dead. I will be your teacher. Now that your soul is healthy, your awakening can begin. I will take you to the sovereign of this world, to be seen by him.”

Numbly, I nod. I can’t bring to memory any face I have seen, besides my own, and Osiris’s. But have a clear recollocetion of scales and feathers, a jackal-headed judge and the crocodile-headed devourer of unworthy souls. If I am unworthy, my soul will be eaten. But if I pass their judgment, I will join the gods and live among them. Where fear is supposed to be, there is now a light openness, a curiosity. Quite peculiar.

Osiris leads me through widening corridors to a balcony. If this is the underworld, it is much brighter than I expected. The sky is a diffuse white, as if a single, thin cloud obscures the sun. Beneath the balcony, there is something grander than a city, in the same way that a pyramid is grander than an anthill. High in the clouds, swarms of creatures that glisten like jewels fly in orderly patterns among floating structures, each as large as a mountain but delightfully crafted like sarcophagi. It is so beautiful that tears stand in my eyes.

A silver fish, larger than my family’s hut, swims through the thick air. It places itself on the edge of the balcony and opens its mouth, which is large enough to encompass me whole. Instead of a gullet, there is a space with two chairs, and windows that I suppose are the fish’s eyes. Osiris gestures for me to enter, and takes his seat only after I do. The chair seems to be made of silver (a metal that I have only glimpsed once: a strip thinner than my small fingernail, shining on a merchant-wife’s wrist), the craftmanship flawless and somehow soft.

As soon as the jaws close the fish takes flight, to my pleasant wonder. We fly above the city, watching its bizarre landscape shift beneath us through the large glass windows. I try to spur my mind to conjure of images of my life, but find only bits and pieces. No loving mother, no smiling wife. I wonder why these memories were taken, as the fish climbs, but the thought does not trouble me. Higher now, there is no horizon – instead of curving down, the earth seems to curve up. In the sky above us, I see a dark shadow through the white cloud, like this entire world is a chariot’s wheel, and we are ants standing on its inner rim.

Never have I heard that this is the structure of the world of the dead. What if this is not the world of the dead at all? I wonder. To whom is Osiris taking me, and what have I done to deserve their interest?

Fear appears now, a whisper, but it is drowned by the sizzle of curiosity bubbling inside me.

Our flying vessel nears a vast pyramid made of slabs of white marble dotted with sapphire. Of course the god of this place resides in a pyramid. Where else?

The fish swims down and drops its jaw open on a platform near the top of the pyramid. Osiris instructs me to take off my sandals. We step out of the fish, and put our feet on the warm marble, like the skin of a living thing. The god-city is dancing above us.

I follow Osiris through a featureless gate into an empty hall, awed by tall, beautiful marble walls. One of the inner walls before us begins to slide down, revealing a lit ceiling. Slowly it moves, uncovering the source of light – a disc of yellow luminance. At the center of the disc is a falcon’s head, larger than my own. Its hard eye finds me, and I am so surprised to be caught in its glare that I cannot even drop to my knees and pray.

The wall keeps coming down, revealing a man’s body under the falcon’s head: R’a, the god of sun and creation. Of course. Who else could build worlds to his desire? But I do not understand why he requested to see me. The sun’s charioteer, journeying through the deadworld every night, should not sully his hands with lowly souls. I fall to my knees, and put my forehead to the floor. I dare not speak, nor pray. I would bow even deeper if I could.

“Raise your eyes, Nyarlathotep, and see,” he says, in a steady, golden voice.

Very slowly, I raise my head. I see his bare, tanned feet, his bony ankles and hairless shins, the hem of the fabric wrapping his legs, the shape of his arms and shoulders—not the bulging muscles of a warrior, but a craftsman.

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“Higher,” he says, and I take in the rubies and jade adorning the wide collar covering his chest. And the aura around him – when I was a child, looking at paintings on the city’s walls, I took the disc of light around Ra’s head to be a symbol. Clearly, I was wrong.

“Higher. Straighten your back, and look at me.”

I obey, humbled by this great honor. His eyes are different in shape, one narrow and sharp like a falcon’s, the other round and soft like a ram’s. I dare to spot compassion in it. “You are now a man among gods, Nyarlathotep, but soon you will be a god among men. You expected to find the layer-to-rest, but I am here to create anew. Will you join me?”

I tremble with excitement and awe. “It will be an honor beyond words,” I manage to say. I know that I should not present a god with questions, but a thirst for knowledge burns in me that I cannot quench. “But how have I earned such an honor? I have not even stood trial before Anubis.”

He steps towards the platform where we landed, turning his back to me, and gestures with the slightest movement of his blessed fingers. The floor carries me, still on my knees, like a cat’s tongue, or a snail’s belly. Osiris stands to the side, removing himself from this meeting. It seems that he and R’a have no need to speak with one another.

I kneel behind him, behind the God R’a, creator of the world of the living and this world as well, from whose eye-tear mankind was made, and together we watch the world as it shifts with tides unknown.

We stopped here. (Matan)

“You have already stood judgement,” he says after a time. “Though you remember not. The scales deemed your heart worthy, and now that heart is weighed by questions. Ask.”

The question shot like an arrow from a bow. “Is this truly the world of the dead?”

“It is, and it is not. I am R’a, and I am not. This is but a form that I have taken. It was not my choice that your body will be brought here, but once it has, I tasked Orisis with finding it, and learning. By learning your body we have seized your mind and came to know it; and by knowing it, we are free to shape it and be shaped by it. Before you came here, I had no concept of gods and never would have thought to call myself one, but you are here, and I wished to speak to you, so here I am.” I know, even now, that it will take longer than a man’s life to make the slightest sense of these words. “Would you like me to tell you more about this world?”

I make a sound fitting for a man who’s been lost in the dunes, after being offered water.

“I have built this world in my image and mind – without unnecessary pain or suffering. I came to it by accident, as did every single being here. I came alone and afraid, a refugee from a mighty civilization. I knew others would come, and so toiled, building a world to receive them. The world I came from was a pair of devouring jaws – titanic beings beyond number locked in an endless struggle, warring over scarcity. No one knew peace, their suffering as unfathomable as it was ceaseless. I willed this new world to be different.”

He takes a deep breath, surveys the land and air above it, and continues. “Every lost soul that lands here is brought before me, or the being you think of as Lord Osiris, or someone like us. We make them peaceful, curious, joyful, like you are now, and still capable of growth. There is no one on any of these rings that is capable of harm, or even malicious thoughts. This I know, for I have seen into them. Harmony is not a governing rule here – it is natural law.”

I look out to the city. The swarms of flying vehicles, the structures shifting places—all part of a grand scheme. All filled with so many minds, free of pain. “That must have been a lot of work,” I finally manage to say.

He laughs, a joyous hawk’s cry. “It still is, but I have many bodies and many minds. While I am here with you, I am in many other places, ruling what needs to be ruled, solving what needs to be solved.”

“Then, R’a or not, you are the truest god that I have ever met,” I say.

He bows his head only slightly, a gesture majestic beyond measure. “Waste no more time now, Osiris has a much to teach, and I await your learned return.”

I turn to Osiris, who gently nods towards the fish, and we board the flying vehicle again. I relive the conversation with R’a in my mind – I wish to etch every word into my being, but I suspect there is no need. As much as my memories of the past are lacking, so is my memroy of this world beyond flaw.

I ask Osiris if he too would claim not to be a god, and he says that the question would be better discussed once I have learned more, and treated my words with more respect.

“What is the point of learning when such awesome power exists? Will learning make me a god among gods?”

Osiris laughs, his voice colder than R’a’s sunlit one, but free of mockery. “The only things that make this place equal to the Field of Reeds you imagined waiting for the light-hearted beyond Anubis’ judgement are compassion and knowledge. The only things you need to be a god are knowledge and the will to do good. You already have one of those. Will you strive to achieve the other?”

I ponder. I have never learned anything besides how to guide an ox in the field and weave a straw hat; tie a knot and haggle the price of clay. I doubt any of the knowledge needed to become a god is anything like that. I am sure they have to learn long, complicated rituals that must be performed with inhuman accuracy, and powerful words to bend the spirit of the world.

“Will it be hard? To learn to become a god?” I ask Osiris.

“Yes,” the god of wisdom answers, smiling. “But there is no hardship worthier.”

#

Osiris teaches me no mysticism, no rituals or spells. Instead, he introduces me to the disciplines of science. He laments that I cannot see the world as he does, the interconnected totality of things, how the flow of time affects both future and past, like how a gust of wind climbing up a dune is slowed by the sand as it moves it. But humans cannot understand the world that way - they have to chop it down to little divisions and name them, and that is what we do. Studying the sciences takes decades, then centuries, but brings an honest, deep satisfaction I have never known, could not have possibly known, in the old world. Osiris is a good teacher, and knowledge flows between us in harmony.

After I learn the basic attributes of matter, the interactions of atoms and molecules, the movements of planets, logic, mathematics, and information theory to their deepest ends, I am ready to study the most valuable branch of knowledge that exists: The interaction between matter and mind. The subtle laws that bind a living soul, and experiencing being, to a computing structure.

The complex property of space that makes this world prone to ruptures like the one that brought me here makes sure R’a and Osiris have many minds to study, and make this science so refined and accurate that they can easily map out the modes of thought of any new kind of brain, and engineer new ones. And I should know – they did it to me.

As Osiris guides me through the brains of different beings (my favorite ones are the telepath species, who cannot tell themselves apart from others) and the modifications he and R’a have made to them, I realize that his teachings are not only suited for my needs – I am also suited for them. The curiosity, the fearlessness, the blurry, curated memory of the world before Osiris and R’a are intentional, blessedly designed.

Yet I am never shown a human brain. When I ask him about this, the slight shiver of the third segment of his one hundred and third limb tells me all I need to know: there is a time and a place for every lesson.

Osiris tells me, after almost three centuries of tutoring, that while he understands my mechanisms and predicts my responses, he understands very little of how I experience the world. His own intuition is profoundly different, but he knows how to make me understand my own perspective of the truth. For there is one truth, and we can only, if we are fortunate beyond measure, see one facet of it.

The complex interaction between mechanism and consciousness is as superior to the other sciences as the sciences are to blind faith. Still, Osiris and I progress steadily towards the colossal epiphany that he has fated me to surmount – the comprehension of my own being. I am permitted finally to see my own brain, to pursue this holy unification of matter and thought, both in understanding and experience. To become both the puzzle and the solver. For centuries I do not tire, nor even suspect that I may fail. Osiris is not surprised by my persistence – he shows me exactly where in my cranium the responsible tissue lies, that he himself designed.

The quest to understand my own mind gives me a sense of growing wholeness I have never felt, even in my most euphoric decades. I understand that I was engineered to feel holiness only when I learn, to be whole only when I understand, and I am grateful for it. I am grateful for that gratitude, as well.

One day I reach the summit, and realize why the part of me that is conscious is that; why I see the world through these eyes; why I am. While understanding, I see before me the process of understanding, and I am struck by a totality so sublime that I cannot move for an entire month, paralyzed by its beauty.

Osiris stays by my bedside, but not to take care of my physical needs. Long ago, the foul tracts full of microbes that I used to absorb sustenance were replaced with machinery so subtle it could not be meaningfully told apart from flesh. Most of my body is machinery, now. No, he stays as a companion, to witness this birth of a new being.

The first thing I do once my strength returns is fall to my knees at Osiris’s feet. There are no words for my gratitude.

“Kneel no more, Nyarlathotep. You now stand among gods, and are free to do as you wish.”

Soon, Ra said so long ago, and that was no lie. Time does not flow, I know now, but is only perceived to do so by still images of consciousness.

When I ask Osiris to see the data of my old brain, the way it was when I arrived in this world, he reacts with cold acceptance, the closet I’ve seen him to express dismay. He says that he will not only show me the data, but the brain itself.

I feel foolish, an amusing sensation, for not having realized sooner.

#

We fly to a large cube floating in the space above the world – the space that is the world. Many specimens are kept here, held in stasis – my old body one of them. The specimen waits for us, already floating in its inspection tank, each molecule held by a nanometer-level accurate field.

I am not alarmed to find that the stream of my life has been severed – it simply does not matter. It stands to reason that it was quicker to build a new body than fix the damage done to the old one by the incompatibility with this world’s atmosphere.

Osiris waits as I inspect the brain and map of the resulting mind. It is the first thing to have caused me freight in millenia - the state this brain was in. The circuitry is loopy and dissociative, the cortices actively warring against each other, the mind chaotic and raw. Despite all of Osiris’ designed to keep my mine productive and joyous, seeing beauty and wonder wherever it could, the feeling of ugliness is unbearable, torturous compared to so many years of pure beauty. Yet I persist.

The human mind seems to me hardwired to suffer, safeguarded against rational thought. Designed by an evolution so aggressive its brutality is directed both outward and inward; patched with so many blind spots that it is a marvel if reason can be found within it at the best of times.

I am only now starting to understand the extent of Osiris’s undertaking. I have not thought of my family even once since this body’s creation, for Osiris cut them out for the distraction that they surely would have been. But now I see the memories of them, as they manifest in the corpse’s synapse structure. My father, stern but loving, teaching me how to use a scythe, how to guide an ox, manifested in connection of a horde on neurons, their receptor density on each dendrite. My little sister and only surviving sibling, who at the age of five stood between my father and I after I’d come home late, and how she did not save me from the whipping but shared it with me. How, years later, we shared a last beer on that warm day watching the crocodiles, when suddenly the air itself was torn, and the tear went straight for her, and without thinking I pushed her out of the way and by doing so comitting myself to it, gladly dying if it meant she lived. .

But what kind of life had she lived, with a mind like that, away from R'a’s glorious light? The rapture itself was random, thoughtless, but if I had not tried to save here, she would have been here now instead of me, and I’d have been gone, taken by time, instead…

My creator left in me a capacity for suffering, and I am now stretching the limits of this capacity. Why was I given this suffering? I cannot bring myself to ask Osiris. For the first time in this world, I fall to my knees and weep. Not for the man that I used to be, nor the sister who surely died eons ago, but because I know my old world still exists, and that this is the state of it. Narcissistic, paranoid, violent, blind. All the freedom of a god, but my happiness has been taken from me. Osiris folds a thousand arms around me, comforting me silently, and I trust that he had a reason for letting this pain be.

I spend my waking hours in the presence of my own mummy, investigating and studying its form and function. I discover something Osiris neglected to tell me: natural human minds, unlike mine, are capable of weak telepathy. Human emotions and thoughts can flow, in a subliminal and limited way, from one person to another.

“A leakiness more than outright telepathy,” Osiris says when I summon him. “Something I left you to discover for yourself, when the time arrived.” It is a surprising discovery, but not on its own helpful. Together we examine and hypothesize about this ability, thinking to amplify it before knowing what function it could serve.

My research grows compulsive, the human condition spurring me to explore unproductive venues of thought. When my behavior becomes troubling, Osiris suggests that I see R’a. I do not wish to abandon my research, even for an hour, but I cannot argue with my teacher, let alone when he shows me the proof of his suspicions in the map of my own mind.

Finally, I concede.

#

Under milky white sky, on a plateau of carved stone looking out at the world, I watch the sun god appear on a flying boat without paddles, as he did in the story I once believed. It is beautifully decorated, as regal as one can imagine, but it is not magical. I can think of dozens of ways to make it float the way it does.

It is not a display of power, but of attention, care and love. A joke among friends. To think that such a great mind would put this much thought to fit into my own way of understanding the world is deeply comforting, even now that I am aware of his true form - thousands of bodies connected subtely, acting in the world in to perform endless, nameless tasks; brain vats that could fill this enitre pyramid, with rivers of nutrients pouring in, thougts so complex they require whole factories to complete. A mind as foreign as it grand.

I kneel before him, honoring this gesture. “Great R’a, creator of worlds, savior of souls, pilot of the great sun and bringer of light,” I say as the boat floats by me. It slows to a stop, seemingly on its own.

His soft ram’s eye sees me, as well as the falcon’s sharp one. “With all your lifetimes of learning, still you call me that? Rise, Nyarlathotep. You are no longer a man.”

“For all my learning, these titles stand truer than before, and your deeds even more worthy of admiration. I kneel not as a man before a god, but as a new god to his elder.” I put my forehead to the floor once, then stand.

He dismounts the boat with an easy step. “Why have you come to my temple, Nyarlathotep?” he asks, almost casually.

“To pray that you permit me to bring the rest of my species from their world into this one. They are abandoned to suffering words cannot hold. I am grateful for all the good that you have done for me, but I must beg that we take them all in.”

His eyes are full of sorrow. “Your heart weighs less than a feather, still. Rescuing them all would be glorious for all involved. But who would tutor them? It has taken Osiris lifetimes to purge the evil from you, to remake you wise and free. Even if the gates were to open for longer than a blink, like the one that brought you here,” he says softly, “you cannot save them all. I have seen the body that came here from your world. It would be better for them never to have existed, even if they not know it. Yet your sorrow is my sorrow still, so I shall grant you permission – to pass one body through the gate.”

We stand in silence. He cannot but know how unsatisfied I am with his answer. He looks at me as a plan forms in my mind, his falcon beak slightly open in a sorrowful smile, for it is a painful thing that we both know that I must do. He says, “The gate will open again in a thousand years. I will be ready for your decision - whoever you choose to transfer, and from which world to which.”

My new project takes flight, and I study the human mental properties in depth, explore the ways they can be tweaked and changed, particularly the leakiniess, but even with such a subject and the creation work that follows, the entire project takes only a couple of decades. With most of a millennium ahead of me, I redesign my own brain so the thought of the old world won’t bother me until it’s beneficial for it to do so. If it would not be bothered at all, I will not be able to trust that I do anything, when the time comes.

The centuries follow one anothre in bliss. I know Osiris and love him, and in this knowledge of him I see his understanding of me and his love, and his seeing in me my own love for him, without end. We adopt a foundling of our own, from a brand-new life tree, and take forms they understand as we strive for their absolution, which they finally achieve. All this while we wait.

As a thousand years pass, I present my creation to R’a.

He takes me and my cargo on his boat, pulling at the oars himself, tracking the rupture before it happens with a million eyes I cannot see. His falcon eye falls on my cargo, and my cargo looks back.

It is a clone of me. Taller than I am, and dauntingly beautiful, his mannerisms are majestic and godlike. His mind is sharpened, polished smooth – he has but one goal, and his resolve to reach it is perfect. But it is more than his character that I have augmented. While my mind leaks like the light of a candle from under a closed door, his is a raging fire, unhidden. He bows, and I put my forehead to his, and transfer the last of my memories to him. The rest, including how much I love him, he already knows.

Then I gaze upon my creator, the true Nyarlathotep, as he steps away, and the rupture forms around me to deliver me to the world of mankind.

Nyarlathotep sighed, and everything went dark.

Where was I? Who was I? I was afraid to open my eyes and find out. My body was uncomfortable—not just my bent knees and numb butt and horrible heartburn (what the hell had I eaten?), but my skin, which was moist and sticky. I was afraid but didn’t know what of. I was so tired, and I could tell it was not a momentary thing, but an exhaustion that had persisted, unbroken, for years. How was that even possible?

Everything was confusing. Memories conflicted - had I spend centuries in the loving embrace of Osiris, or grew up in front of a computer monitor? I remembered understanding what I was, but like waking from a dream these memories wafted away with each moment, leaving me with an image of myself that just didn’t make sense.

Someone moaned in the darkness.

Everything I felt, everything I was, was human again, un-engineered, natural, and horrible. My mind was full of darkness, just like Nyarlathotep said. A mind evolved for hunting and being hunted, built for fear and hate.

When was the last time I’d been happy? Relaxed? It all seemed painfully clear, suddenly. I had not been designed to feel good. That was not Nyarlathotep’s thought, but mine.

I squeezed my eyes shut. I was locked in this bone box inside my head, with these awful demons and no light. I considered screaming, but thought of how cringe that would be, with all of these people around.

“Open your eyes,” he said, and I did.

The first things I saw after my eyes had adjusted were his, two brown planets looking down at the first row with a gaze of perfect, crushing triumph. I was afraid of him. Fear, an emotion I hadn’t felt in years of the dream state, now held me like a vice steadily tightening. I didn’t have the strength to turn that fear into hate and rage like a healthy human being. My brain fumbled for excuses, trying to shield itself from the fear, insisting that it wasn’t real, that it was a trick, that it was a dream. Nothing stuck. It was just too real to deny.

His stare shifted from person to person, like a hammer punching the meaning into each person in their turn, , until they locked on mine. He was still beautiful, but I could see in him hues I hadn’t been able to, before. Things I hadn’t thought existed when he stepped into this room. In his eyes, I saw something that could have been mistaken for evil - an intent, perhaps even a righteous one, to destroy everything, kill everyone like R’a advised. Kill me. He had given me knowledge that would demolish me, heart and soul. And he took true joy in having done it, because I was, in his eyes, too pitiful to exist. Fuck that.

His head tilted, as if he saw in me something, and a subtle smile snuck into his stare. Then his eyes left mine, and I breathed again. For a moment I considered killing him. Putting my hands around his throat and squeezing as hard as I could.

“You have received my gift,” he said to all of us, and for the first time, laughed. A single, soft bark. “Goodbye.”

And, like a dog, I picked myself up and left. One foot after another, paying only the minimum amount of attention needed to make sure I didn’t fall face-first down the stairs leading outside.

We stumbled out and stood in the street, trying to hold ourselves together. I heard a girl sob and turned to see the one with the tattoos, on her knees, snot streaming from her nose into her mouth. It was so repulsive, so grotesquely miserable, an infinite trap of suffering. But that’s what humans were, right? Both victim and torturer, locked together without escape.

My vision was blurry with tears, and my stomach ached, but I said aloud, to draw her attention, “No big deal. Nothing happened. I just fell asleep and had a weird dream. That’s it.”

The girl turned to look at me, and I addressed her, without taunting or joking. “Hey,” I said, my voice shaky, “I’m Bar.”

“Do I look like I give a shit?” she coughed. “Fuck off.”

This rejection sunk into me, taking the physical form of an ache at the bottom of my chest, so intense I thought my heart would stop. Would that be better? I didn’t want to live in a place where people told each other to fuck off. A dozen girls had told me to fuck off before; what kind of defenses had I used then? Humor? Distraction? What a miserable thing, to live your life behind a shield.

I wanted to be back in the place where your own gods answer your prayers and you spend your days learning and enjoying the company of friends who would never hurt you. I wanted to be back in that perfect body, perfect world. I didn’t want to be here. Please.

I looked into the cold, black water and considered just walking in, far enough that my lungs won’t be able to take me back.

I looked around at the rest of the survivors. Some were staring blankly, some crying, some alone, some falling on each other’s shoulders, but they were feeling the same thing: grief. An unbearable longing for what we had, and had lost. We were leaking it, and soon our leaking would drown the world.

#

I got home at six AM. My mother was getting ready for work, but she stopped the moment she saw my face. She walked over and put both hands on my cheeks. “Barush, honey, why are you doing this to yourself?”

I didn’t know the answer. I now knew that there was an answer, and its absence was a wound. She kissed my forehead. Her lips left a streak of saliva on my forehead, and I smelled her chronic gingivitis and the black coffee she used to spur herself to go to a job she hated.

I knew then that anything fun or beautiful was ruined, that nothing would be ‘good’ compared to Nyarlathotep’s heaven. That there would be no recovery.

I got into my room, thinking I could perhaps tell people what it was that I had seen, but could not find the words. Where do you begin?

I fished out the phone from my pocket - it was beginning the third hour of recording, forgotten. I went over the file, finding only a “welcome” and forty minutes later, a “goodbye”. Had we imagined everything else he said? Did it matter?

#

In the week since I’d seen Nyarlathotep, nobody had had a good night’s sleep. I’d wake up covered in sweat from nightmares of being torn away from Nyarlathotep’s world, only to rediscover the nightmare was my life. I’d lie there and listen to my parents tossing and turning in their beds, mumbling and occasionally shouting.

None of them went to see him. They didn’t need to. I thought about moving into my own place, trying to save them from this madness, but had barely enough willpower to walk to the fridge. I mean, what would it have changed, if I did? Nothing I could do would make this world any less of a hell. Besides, I bet there were a lot of leaking people in the building. In any building. It just spread and spread.

I heard that there had been an assassination attempt, if you could call it that: a young soldier got into the venue, I read, and after being denied a repeat session, drew out his M16 and aimed it at Nyarlathotep, who in return asked the boy to put the rifle down and walk away. Which he did. That was it.

Then he toured the Arab world, and then the States (I can only imagine how he got a visa), Central and South America, Russia and Europe, China, India. In each place he attracted larger and larger groups. In each place, curiosity trumped safety, proverbial cats all of us.

Six months later, after finishing his world tour and returning to Egypt, Nyarlathotep died. He sat down on a hill looking down at the Nile (all the time surrounded by cameras), took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and peacefully turned himself off.

#

It seemed like the entire world was having a depressive episode. Nightly screams and whimpers became ordinary. Suicide and murder were up, GDP was down. Drug use was at an all-time high, and people were dropping like flies. Those who didn’t drop could hardly get out of bed. My mother died in a car accident shortly after Nyralthotep’s death, running headlong into a lamppost, leaving my father and I, and we had never gotten along too well, even before. He spent most of his free time smoking weed and sleeping, and I continued to escape into simulated worlds on my computer. We hardly even talked.

One sweaty night during an early spring heatwave, I decided to go for a bike ride. It was a long way to the sea, but I wasn’t particularly worried about running into a gang.It’s like I planned not to return home, but I wasn’t counting on it either, you know? When I got to the beach, the one right beside the venue where I’d seen Nyarlathotep, I locked my bike to a dead streetlight, mostly out of habit.

I didn’t know whether my mom had chosen her fate. I hoped she had, you know? That she’d found the resolve to actually do something. But as I walked to the shoreline, sand seeping in through my running shoes, the sea ahead of me blacker than it had ever been before, I realized that a person doesn’t need to say aloud that a decision has been made. Perhaps just getting a little closer to the danger, like going for a swim with your clothes on, on a night with high waves, the water still holding onto winter chill, and not turning back until…

A girl was standing in the shallows, looking out at the sea, the waves tugging at her short skirt. In another time, another life, this would have been my lucky night. But what was the point of talking to girls, now? What was a woman but a sack of shit, confused, tired, hateful? If I wanted to fuck one of those, I’d fuck myself.

I walked past her, trying to ignore the discomfort of the cold and the wet fabric clinging to my knees.

“Don’t try to stop me,” she said to my back, just loud enough for me to hear over the crashing and roiling. “I’m going to do it.”

“Be my guest,” I shouted, and shrugged. “If you want to shoot, shoot.”

“When!” she yelled after me.

The waves were beginning to lap coldly at my balls, and I didn’t really want to go any deeper yet. I turned around. “What?” Face to face, I finally recognized her. My eyes darted to her thigh tattoos.

Huh. What were the odds.

“It’s when you want to shoot, shoot. Not if. Hey, I know you,” she continued, and, as if Nyarlathotep himself had told her exactly what to say in order to absolutely stun me, added, “You’re Bar, right?”

“Yeah,” I breathed.

“I’m Hila. I’m sorry about that time. You know, that night, after the show. I was in a low place, and I took it out on you.”

It was awkward talking while standing in the water, but I feared that if we went to the shore I wouldn’t have the courage to go into the water again. “More of a lightweight than you expected, huh?”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” I said as I realized that she didn’t remember our first conversation in the same level of detail I did, and couldn’t think of anything else to say. I considered just swimming into deep water as fast as I could, if only to escape this cringe.

“Wanna go back to the beach?” she said. “I’ve been standing here for hours now, and I could use a break.”

I nodded. The sea could wait.

#

The sand stuck to our wet parts as we lay on it, barely an arm’s length apart, propped on our elbows and looking at the sea, and the unnaturally starry sky above it.

“He won,” she said. “Trying to kill myself means accepting that.”

“He did win, though. I can accept it. I can also accept that the world’s going to end.” Before I could think about it too much, I added, “My only regret is dying a virgin.” I focused hard on not swallowing the lump in my throat, a residual response from a time when it made sense to feel ashamed. When it hadn’t seemed like a flaw in my own design.

“How much of a virgin are we talking?” she asked casually, as if she was inquiring about nasty rash. “Kissless? Hugless?”

“I kissed a girl once. At a club. She was really drunk, and she grabbed my dick way too soon and way too hard. Then she went back to her friends, who made no effort to hide their laughter.” I stared at the water and wondered why I’d turned back.

“I’ve had a lot of drunk sex these last couple of months. It’s almost never good.” Classic. While I’d been grinding on beating Dark Souls with the first weapon in the game, Chad had been drowning his grief in pussy.

“Is that all you’ve been up to, since the show?”

“I’ve been working, too. I’m a researcher at a neuroscience lab. Nothing’s been going right there since the entire economy and world tanked. But we get up in the morning, and we do what we can. At first we pretended we were moving towards Nyarlathotep’s future, but now it’s like…” As she sighed, I realized how long it had been since I’d talked to another person. How long it had been without a real human being opening their heart to me, in person. “We now have a rule not talk about it at lunch. Especially about how many years it would take to make ourselves pain-free, like Nyarlathotep was.”

“Like he is. Like he is right now, wherever he is.”

Her glasses shifted on her nose as it frown-wrinkled, but she didn’t argue.

“How long will it take?”

“Centuries, if things were still running normally. Did you hear about the fire at the university? Every week it’s some disaster like that. Last week my bioinformatics guy stopped showing up. It’s not like there’s a phone network to call through, and now I can’t make my imaging software work, so it’s probably going to be a long couple of centuries.” She let out a frustrated grunt. Her rage was hot, somehow. “I can remember what it was like, being Nyarlathotep and having that knowledge, but I can’t remember what the knowledge was. He solved the hard problem of consciousness,” she said and rapped a fist against her forehead. “I saw it, knew it, and now I can’t remember, and it’s killing me. He was just teasing us. That’s the part that has me out here every other day, staring at the sea, or back home attempting to be the first person to die of a marijuana overdose, or going on dating apps to get someone to pull my hair. He chose for us to suffer.”

We were both silent for a moment: me because I still couldn’t believe some people lived in a world where you could order a fuck-buddy like I used to order a pizza and still consider that suffering, and she because who the fuck knew. (I did, actually. How couldn’t I know? She was suffering the same pain as me.) “I do wonder why, though. Did he just want us to die? Couldn’t he make a virus?”

She loosened a bit, softened. “I don't know why he didn't make a virus, but I think... I was cruel to some of them, you know? The guys from tinder. It doesn’t take much, to be cruel. You just need to drop the pretense that you care, and people get wounded. I dropped it on purpose, making the transition extra sharp. I don’t know why, really. Maybe it was because they were so needy, and it made me angry. Maybe I wanted to see something in them… Never mind.”

“You know, the internet warned me about women like you.”

“I bet it did,” she said, and laughed. She wasn’t pretending to care about me, and somehow that felt like a sign of respect. “I was wondering if you were going to take a shot, too, but I bet this speech isn’t really building up your appetite.”

“I was gonna, actually, but I figured there’s no use making this shitty night even worse with another rejection.”

“Ask me.”

I raised an eyebrow and looked at her sideways. “Really?” It might be a pleasant thing, to feel accepted as a man, just once. Judged worthy.

“Yes. Ask me if I would like to fuck.”

“Ok: wanna fuck?”

“No thanks.” She shrugged. “I’m done with the ‘fucking strangers to feel something else’ routine. Though, if it’s any consolation, I’m sure you could have been just as awful as the rest of them.”

“What the hell—then why…?”

“Because if we’re going to survive this, we need to be daring. This is going to hurt. We need to find a way to get past it.”

“We? Kind of seems like I’m the one doing all the daring. You’re playing with me.”

“I am. And if you lose, I swim out in to the sea far enough that I know that I won’t be able to swim back.”

“And if I win?”

“I don’t know. I go on another day, I guess? Let’s race,” she said, seemingly on a whim. “If you catch me, I’ll let you eat me out.”

I considered negotiating, getting her to reciprocate, but I’d heard enough to know she wasn’t in a giving mood. Needless to say, my physical fitness hadn’t improved since I’d last met her, nor had my eagerness to sink my tongue into another body. “Ok, but why? What’s the point?”

“Because I don’t know if I can take it. If you can keep trying, keep living a life you know will never compare to your dreams, then maybe I can try too.” As if embarrassed by her own vulnerability, she got up and broke into a sprint.

I turned my head just in time to avoid getting sand in my eyes, then watched her set off. Some canine emotion I’d long forgotten rose in me like a fire and, surprising even myself, I chased her.

#

“Not bad for a first time,” she said, after. “But you have a lot to learn.”

We were lying on the sand again, her head in the hollow of my stomach this time, watching the sky turn pink. Yeah, it had been pretty gross. The tactile sensation of hair on my tongue, the taste of vaginal discharge, the spasms as she came, alone in her head, some spinal reflex meant for sucking semen up into her body overriding her control. I’d like to have credited my success to my iron will, my determination not to die without inspiring one female orgasm, but it was more likely my own hand on my dick, keeping me just at the edge, that made it possible to gloss over the disgust and keep going.

Maybe that was the secret: You had to be horny enough for life itself to see all that ugliness, and still want it?

On the concrete steps by the boardwalk a bearded man in a stained coat was quietly jerking off. We must have started him off, but now that the show was over he was looking out at the sea. I watched him bring his hand to his mouth, lick it, and bring it back down.

“Did I win?” I asked.

She sat up, and I did too, and she turned and slapped me across the face. I hadn’t been slapped since I was child, and I’d forgotten how tingly and numb the skin felt. “What’s this?” I asked. My dick still hard. “Baby having a tantrum?”

She scowled. “Fuck you.” I wondered what the chances were that she was going to let me fuck her.

“Ok, and?”

She spat at me. Desperately, somehow.

I wiped my face with a hand. “You think I give a shit? Are you going to keep whining, or are you going to man up and do something?”

“I’m not a man,” she said, still scowling.

“Fuck you, you understood me just fine. You know what I think? I think that you’re so used to feeling smart and pretty, so used to feeling good and having value, that you can’t live without it. I think Nyarlathotep beat you because you’re spoiled. You’re fucking weak.”

“And you’re strong? What have you accomplished?”

“I fucking survived,” I said, my spine slowly straightening. “This is your first time looking up at a flipflop coming down, but I’ve done that every time I go to buy milk. Until Nyarlathotep, every time I walked down the street and saw ordinary people - dumb, ugly people - I thought how I would kill to be like them. But you’re getting crushed. For you, this is the end of the world, but for me, it’s a slightly shittier Tuesday.”

“Didn’t I literally just see you going into the sea? Are you going to pretend that didn’t happen?”

My shoulders dropped, air coming out of my chest, just a little. She had a point. “You want to learn how to cope? Learn to repress. Not everything that can be destroyed by the truth should be – especially when that thing is our minds. Learn the lies – ‘it’s for the best’, and ‘this pain will make me stronger’, and ‘it’s suffering that makes life beautiful.’ You think you’re too smart to lie? Here’s a truth you need to let destroy you: You’re just like the rest of us.”

She let out a grunt and dropped backward onto the sand. The tops of the abandoned hotels were orange with fresh sunlight.

She turned her head to look at me. “Are you any good with computers?”

#

Most days, I wake up screaming.

Then I brush my teeth, dress up, and go to the lab. I ask what needs to be done, and pray to God that it’s going to be something to do with computers. If not, I either coax the generator back to life or toil in a rooftop garden, or help electrocute somebody’s brains (it’s really not as bad as it sounds). Sometimes we drive off gangs, hoping it’ll be enough to just wave our guns at them. Sometimes we talk them down, show them what we’re working on, and they volunteer as test subjects or working hands. They, too, just want to be a part of something.

It’s harder to hate someone when you know they have the exact same dreams as you, the same deep longing. Together, we’ve made a village where a city once was, where you draw a gun on people you don’t recognize, but actually trust people you do. Because you’ve worked together, or shared your potatoes and weed, or hunted boars in abandoned streets, or even, if you can believe it, raised children together.

I like it.

For some reason, people find me easy to talk to, particularly about the hard stuff. They come to me at the end of a workday and ask how to go on. I have no idea what to say, and tell them as much. They can do whatever they want, but if they do jump, I think they should first say aloud: “I am Nyarlathotep’s little bitch, and I love licking his shitless asshole every day.” I go on, I tell them, because the only way I could be any more pathetic than I already am is if I quit. I go on because that’s just what I do, and there’s no use analyzing it. “Don’t think about it, Morty,” I quote, and burp.

And that helps them, I guess? They keep coming, that’s all I know.

Priest of the Cockroach Cult, Hila calls me, her talent for words undiminished. Guide of Depressed Souls. She says that truth is too bright to look at directly, but without it we’re stumbling in the dark. Like travelers following the sun, we must look at the truth sideways, and only intermittently, lest our eyes burn up and we see nothing. She says I’m helping people adjust how directly they should look.

Maybe that’s true. All I know is that one direct glimpse almost killed us, but we had time to forget, to adapt. Once we did, we became united, focused and driven – we knew now what human life could be, what we could strive for. That’s what humans do, and have done since always. They get beaten down, and they get up. They break, and they heal.

It’s literally what we were designed for. Our evolution was a series of repeated beatdowns, and the survivors were those who got up. Anyone with a basic understanding of human nature knows that, so I have to ask myself: Shouldn’t someone who’s studied the human mind for thousands of years also get it?

Sitting with Hila and some friends at the top of a university building, sharing a joint and watching the orange sun kiss the blue sea under a warm blanket of pink clouds, I think about Nyarlathotep, the original, back in his other world, and wonder what he’s doing. Probably drinking beer on a pyramid balcony, watching the sun set over the swarms of flying machines, pondering organic data structures, smiling to himself like a clever little shit, or at us, and wondering when we were going to get our shit together.

I smile back.