2034 is the Kept Year
And Limbs are Shed as Shackles
This is the perfect test of this dictation software, and I’ve been needing to lay it all out. Seeing the trajectory of my recent past will give me a guiding path to my future, to all of ours. My name is Hadley. I was a software developer for the Yerhere social media platform, starting in 2027.
Everybody involved knew it was a dumb idea. It actually had to be, as everyone had reached the conclusion that social media itself was a dumb idea, so everything contained within it had to be as well. The big problem with all of it was that it was stuck in the ‘open’ phase.
I’ll explain before I get ahead of myself and the software gets annoyed and interrupts me. The way I see it, all social interaction is broken up into two main phases: open and closed. The open phase is akin to a guy standing on a street corner twirling a sign, except every corner has a guy, and there is no function for most people beyond being that guy.
We’re all selling. It doesn’t have to be a product. It could be a religion, a lie, ourselves, an opinion, but it’s all solicitation. This phase isn’t about anything other than competing noises. It’s screaming cicadas. Loudest wins, whether that’s achieved by numbers or artificial amplification, or just by being the most alarmist.
In regular communication this phase breaks once it works. Two or more people collapse into each other as the floorboards of the illusion give way. You immediately see all the ways in which the person is not the message or methods they were using. This is the closed phase, the intimate phase, the basis for all positive and long-lasting human interaction.
Social media is an artificial environment that doesn’t understand that the goal is the closed phase. Everyone remains physically distant. They are not encouraged by way of the structure to have a smaller and smaller audience every time they interact with the same person. That should happen, so that by the time you’re yelling you’ve been narrowed down to one person that you’re yelling at, a person whose reaction you cannot possibly ignore.
The closed phase tempers most rhetoric, engenders calmer critical thinking as well as more nuanced emotional thinking. The problem is that neither of these things drives engagement, which drives profit. And in our age nobody opens a theater out of the goodness of their own heart.
Anyway, the whole space is a disaster. A crater where the impact/explosion never stops happening. Even basic facts are controversial to someone who has allowed themselves to be converted into that clown on the corner permanently. It’s who they are now, and since they can’t conceive of ever dropping their sign, would actually switch it out for a completely different sign if it meant they could keep spinning it, all their money goes to perpetuating it.
So Yerhere was born as a bad idea that would nonetheless make money. The gimmick was that, in order to make a post, someone had to upload a photo of themselves standing wherever they were at that moment, background visible, timestamped and everything. It wasn’t a site for sharing reflection, instead it was for immediate reactions. Chronicling experiences as they happened.
Of course this meant their location data was revealed in a thousand different ways, including directly, but nobody cared. Every other corporation already knew your location anyway. Our users just assumed we were collating and distributing that location data to our business partners, which we were.
But we had all the necessary toys to make people not care. One of them encouraged them to take pictures that overlapped with existing ones on the platform, so they could then be merged to form a larger image and ‘bring people together’ who hadn’t occupied those spaces at the same time. Mostly it was used to mock people by altering the context of their original post.
Like, a wedding party would upload their picture and then someone would take a picture in the same place but lower, with more of the ground in frame. Then they would make themselves up like a victim of human sacrifice, shirtless, bound, covered in fake blood, and then merge it with the original. Now the party looked ready to dig in. We got a lot of complaints from bridezillas.
Luckily I wasn’t in the complaints department. Like I said I was all software all the time, so I was able to pretend it was just a big puzzle box that definitely wasn’t fueled by pouring raw human emotion into the hopper. Specifically I worked on one of the algorithms, called ‘lonelyspot’.
See we had trucks like the biggest mapping sites, only the cameras on ours weren’t trying to make a meticulous record of the whole damn world. No, ours were looking for out of the way spots, ones where our users hadn’t uploaded any pictures. When one was found it was posted far and wide on Yerhere like a bounty, challenging them to be the first to snap a picture.
These spots were picked out of a hat by lonelyspot, and I tried to optimize the scenic nature of its selections. Long hours were spent feeding it carefully selected images. I say carefully because sometimes the cameras on our trucks screwed up, or rather captured something in a screwed-up fashion.
They took multiple pictures at a time and combined them into wider angles or more three-dimensional representations. If anything moved between the taking of the photos it would result in an incorrect image. If a mailbox fell over you might see it upright and on the ground, as if it had just bested its evil twin in flappy-mouth-door combat.
Such pictures had to be discarded on my end; it was even policy to do so. Except I didn’t always obey policy, because why does it ever matter when we all know, deep down, we’re already participating in a ruinous affair? We’re supposed to wait our turn in line as we all loot the store? All these pictures were technically Yerhere property, but some of them, that would just be deleted otherwise, were genuinely valuable. Namely, those of incorrect/distorted animals.
Not people. The people ones, by far the most common, were just freaky. Animal pictures were good as gold however. Yerhere had a whole task force studying the cute animal sinkhole that had been dodging most analysis for a couple years now, exponentially eating up internet real estate no matter the forum.
They never figured out why people kept turning to these images more and more as escapism, therapy, etc… but it’s obviously a classic case of overanalysis. Missing the forest for the squirrels so to speak. They made people feel good in a world that we kept making worse. That’s all.
Anyway, the cute animal sinkhole meant that any funny or cute images of critters created by lonelyspot’s errors could be sold to other sites, or even to private collectors that I promise you were a thing, for a sum that I would have gauged as higher than the price of my own soul at the time.
You might think that such a market would be quickly undercut by artificial efforts, namely some guy in a basement only half as nice as mine minting three-headed dogs and cows with floppy bunny ears in their photo editing suite. Somehow that wasn’t happening. For lack of a better term the ‘market’ was able to suss out what images were the result of genuine opportunity and happenstance and which ones were cash-ins.
Enter me with a sack full of lonelyspot rejects. When I started making sales even the ones with insects sitting on the lenses netted thousands. The cuter the better though. 17 K for a turtle that was spinning in a lake while the truck went by, resulting in it looking like it rotated faster than a drag race tire. 56 K for a horse that was laying down in the middle of its photo session, giving it legs only as high as coffee cans in the final image. That one bought me a greenhouse and a hot tub.
It got to the point where I was barely doing my job and spent most of my time poring through the pictures in search of animals. I wrote another secret algorithm just to spot potential eyes and tails lurking subtly in the corners.
One evening I was sitting in the greenhouse my skulduggery had earned, with deep gray clouds overhead and fat raindrops splashing against the glass, perusing the latest batch. Yerhere served the entire globe with our non-service, and these latest images came from Bhutan, a place I’m now ashamed to admit I never knew much about.
If you asked me to name as many countries as I could I probably wouldn’t have found that name in my head, even after looking at tons of maps for my work. It’s an interesting place to be sure, but here its only relevant quality is that it contains animals and briefly contained one of our vehicles.
Idly scrolling through the pictures on my tablet, with my greenhouse’s system projecting enlarged versions onto one of the glass walls, I found one that got a snort out of me. A snort had to be worth at least five thousand. Plus it was furry, so that doubled it. Goofy face. The numbers just kept going up.
Now the reason this picture got flagged wasn’t an uncommon one, and I could tell what happened with ease. The little guy had backed up two steps between one picture and the next. The end result was that his front limbs got cut off and his neck glued directly to his haunches, turning him into some kind of fuzzy chicken.
His tail had swished to the other side too, but maintained its limp tip, so on my end he appeared to have a heart-shaped tail that wasn’t filled in, perfect for dipping in soap and blowing bubbles. If I remember correctly, which I do, I whistled out loud. A heart-shaped tail. People were going to eat that up, and I mean it literally. Some of the private collectors that I considered wackos were definitely printing these pictures off, tearing them up, and consuming them to make them part of their lives forever.
In this first glimpse I did not know what the animal was despite being able to determine the ‘errors’. A quick reverse-image search gave me an ID: the binturong. Also known as the Asian bearcat, it’s an arboreal mammal that doesn’t have any particularly close relatives.
If it was a person it would look like someone who wasn’t close with their relatives, as it’s kind of… dumpy. It looks like a loner who knows what bathing is, but has had several fundamental misconceptions about how it works all their life. There aren’t too many kind ways to sum up its appearance. Like a raccoon dyed black in a dumpster bath. Like someone tried to draw a cat with an elbow covered in shoe polish.
They have small round vacant eyes like tarnished brass buttons. Their ears are weighed down by drooping fur, tails stuck in an even worse hair day. Sad and silly. They look the way too much hair gel feels, but at the time even an aesthetically unpleasant animal had its inner beauty seen.
All of god’s creatures were perfect in their own way, but this one had some imperfections thrown in by man that somehow made it so much better. The monetary possibilities blinded me, but only briefly. Then something took hold. Setting my tablet aside, I stood and approached where it was projected on the wall, careful not to block the light.
He stared directly into the camera, and I remember being bothered by the fact that he wasn’t staring directly at me. Putting myself in his gaze would block the projection, so I couldn’t, but it still tore me up. I was angry, with no idea where it was coming from. Up to then I hadn’t fallen down the cute animal sinkhole myself, even with all my free time spent digging them out of a digital dump.
Hours spiraled away in examination. When the light of dawn reached the greenhouse, ruined the projection, I had to go back to the smaller screen, and I wept because it wasn’t good enough. Nothing was ever going to be good enough, and I knew the reason. It was just a picture.
Really there wasn’t much effort to go back to my normal life after that night. Not one day went by where I fulfilled all of my Yerhere obligations. As false as they felt before, they now felt like the most catastrophic misfires in human history: a rocket-propelled arrow loosed in the opposite direction from the bullseye. We were so far from our humanity, and from any kind of legitimate purpose, that we would have to encircle the entire globe to return to that target.
Looking at the Bintuwrong (that’s what I started calling him) taught me that. Don’t ask how. It wasn’t a classroom lesson, it wasn’t a tape of subliminal sounds while I was napping, it just was. Learned the way I learned to talk. It was consuming knowledge, meaning it enveloped me and I became a part of it rather than the other way around.
Man, how sorry I felt for the people who were shredding and eating pictures of animals. They had the yearning, but they couldn’t find the path that was shown me through that heart-shaped hole.
None of us had to sit back and take it from our superiors. We didn’t have to let everything continue its downward spiral. The climate crisis was still my fault even though I was small. Some guy plundering a poorer country’s water for his bottling plant was still my fault even though I was small.
Above all that, Yerhere was my fault, so I quit right before they were going to fire me. Corporate sent an investigator around to my place; he wanted to scan all my electronics for any proprietary pictures and code. I told him to go to hell, and I made sure a gif of a giant middle finger unfurling was playing on my greenhouse wall as he walked by it.
Anybody who tried to take Bintuwrong away would have to kill me first. I made thousands of copies of the image, but didn’t distribute them, not yet. There was still so much to learn before I confidently threw it out to the world, and I was learning some of it every time I opened my wallet to a pasted-in copy of him.
You can’t get it, because it was a moment in time that has passed. Like the picture itself. The binturong’s actions in those moments, and the camera’s, made something that was over in a flash but recorded for all posterity. And I was the only one who had seen it. If there were living things at the time of the Big Bang, and all but one of them were turned away, would the others believe the one who had seen it? Or would they be so captured in the tide of space-time that they automatically forgot the realm before it?
The one who saw it wouldn’t, and I was the one who saw it. The old world and the new. All us and post us. We’re still there, in the tide and wake, but we’re not the very substance anymore. We’re weathered pottery shards in the riverbed.
Software’s telling me I’m getting ahead of myself again, disjointing this poor narrative. I’ll take its word for it, since the goal here is to put it in terms you people stuck in the past are still using.
My photos were of a real living thing, and I needed to find him. Everything he taught would be amplified if we were face to face, even though I knew he had four legs in real life and a regular feather duster of a tail instead of the heart-shaped one my id was so fascinated with.
In theory the hard part was already over since I already knew where Bintuwrong lived. Down to the latitude and longitude. Down to the nearest human signage. So most of the money I’d made from selling other lesser incorrect-imals was pooled into a general expedition fund. Once I’d taken a flight into Bhutan I would not be leaving until I had my meeting, even if the locals tried to force me out, even if I stayed longer than an Asian bearcat’s typical lifespan.
The country has a wide variety of climates thanks to some pretty wild shifts in elevation. There’s permanent snow in the higher places, but it’s sub-tropical in the lower, with a fifth season shoved into their year called monsoon. I was going low, where the bearcats liked it.
First I had to stand right where the truck was, confirm I had the right spot. After that I would set up remote cameras in trees, moving outward in a spiral, trying to cover as much of the territory as possible until I spotted him again in the footage. There was the concern that I wouldn’t recognize him against any other random binturong, but that was only a concern for people like you, who haven’t seen him, who don’t know that there’s no mistaking him.
Programs of my own design would scan all the footage faster than my eyes could ever hope to, and with a much lower margin of error thanks to all my damn blinking. When I set out from my hotel I had a backpack chock full of the cameras, each with a waterproof battery pack that would keep them running for more than two weeks straight.
There was another camera in my hat, and I made no attempt to hide the lens, so I’m sure I looked the world’s stupidest tourist: a man who needed to record everything because he couldn’t recall it five minutes after it happened. In reality the opposite was true. My entirety was a recollection, a memory burned into my soul. I was the very ashes of the phoenix… just wearing a stupid hat is all.
The GPS in my phone got me to the rough area, and my eyes got the me the rest of the way. It was a dirt road overlooking a deep ditch filled with bushy-topped skinny trees. There was a wet smell in the air, like an animal burrow filled with rain. Only five weeks had passed since the original screwy photo.
Five weeks was still plenty of time for footprints to wash away or grow over. While the bearcat normally hung out in the branches, my bearcat was snapped strolling across the ground, so I made an effort to look for his traces anyway. To my surprise I found the traces of something much larger.
Tire tracks in the mud. Deep and wide, they weren’t from a small vehicle like a bike, even though the road was remote enough that it probably only saw motors come through a handful of times each week. Instead of veering briefly off the road, the tracks curved straight into the ditch, which I noticed just before noticing the bald spots in the bark of a tree cluster.
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With all three of my eyes hungering for more, I practically threw myself down there as well, into air so cloying and moist it was like I was being steamed alongside a giant batch of broccoli. Alongside us in the pot was a metal dumpling, torn open from its tumble over the side, a familiar name printed under a coat of mud.
Yerhere. Yes we were. Right there, at the changing of the guard, where the first guard peered over the side of a wet bridge so irresponsibly and was eventually given the tiniest push by the other guard just to get it over with.
My former employer had lost a truck, yet had made no effort to recover it. Now I had my explanation as to why there were no further photos of the area from the set that gave me the Bintuwrong. Taking the picture had somehow caused its wreck, of that I was sure, but I gave it a thorough inspection regardless.
Even with all that had changed inside me, I was not prepared for what I found in the driver’s seat. It’s safe to assume the driver wasn’t prepared for what she suddenly found lacking. Steering a truck would be most challenging without any arms, just as braking without any legs would be. Both afflictions had struck her, leaving behind empty sleeves, leggings, and shoes.
The woman had likely died on impact with the bottom of the ditch, but there were signs she had tried to steer the vehicle with her jaw alone: missing teeth mostly. Leaning down, I picked one of them up like it was just a dropped breath mint. A wave of shame came over me and I dropped it, backing up. The poor woman had just missed it, caught the shrapnel rather than the afterglow.
Her missing limbs meant a hundred things to me, chief among them that everything I’d learned was truer than true. True enough to change things. My animal represented an outlook that was so pure, so direct, and so honest that the physical world changed shape to reflect it.
None of the hundred cameras in my backpack were necessary. Bintuwrong was right there as I backed up, fluffy bottom resting comfortably on the glass dome atop the truck that contained its cameras. He sat on the barrel of one of our greatest weapons against ourselves, like it was nothing, because it was.
He stared at me with none of the curiosity that overflowed out of my eyes and ears just then. Just as in the photograph, he had no front limbs and there was a heart-shaped tail raised behind him like a peacock’s gallant fan. Coincidence was not on the table; he had known I would come. The picture was no accident; it was an act.
I won’t claim to understand the physical side of it, that would be the ultimate hubris from a guy who spent his whole life sculpting the nothing that is data. Suffice to say that Bintuwrong’s intent was the chisel and I was part of the marble.
His distorted shape was not a joke, and the sense of fulfillment it instilled in me was not a result of humor, or innocence, or accidental beauty. By becoming this new shape he was telling all of us exactly how we needed to live our lives if we wanted to move forward with the world, if we wanted to slip out of our failures like a shed skin rather than be dragged down with them in the book-shut that was fast approaching.
Everything I felt from his image struck me anew, with greatly increased intensity. Have you ever felt something so completely, so unflinchingly, that it redefines who you are? Like becoming overwhelmingly dizzy, falling over, and by the time you right yourself you see the shape and character of the land around you has entirely shifted.
There was nothing to do but drop to my knees and pray to this new god. Never a praying man, I borrowed images of groveling from movies and shows, ready to fan him with my outstretched arms before my palms slapped the soil in reverence.
They never got there though. Like a plane into the mist over the Bermuda Triangle, they had vanished in the journey. My fealty was so transforming that an attempt at a gesture representing it was a metamorphosis from frog to tadpole. If bringing my arms low meant subordination, then bringing them lower than the threshold of existence was an eternal vow.
Bintuwrong leapt off the wreck and waddled to me. Every step he took was another fat tear and rope of snot rolling down my face. All in gripping rapturous joy. With compassion unlike any a human could create, he stretched his neck to my bowed head and pressed his moist nose against my forehead in a kiss and blessing, anointing me as his disciple.
I was of the heart-shaped tail; it beat in my chest instead of showing on my back. You could still tell just by looking at me, thanks to the freeing absence of arms. You’re already overrun with dread at the idea of living my half-existence; I know you are. You assume my state is a vacuous prison where you can never take up the tools that help with anything.
On the contrary, I was freed from all shackles. The stresses of human society, the ones felt as constant pressure upon the shoulders and a vice around the lungs and heart, were no more. I could not be expected to labor, for Yerhere or anyone else. Nor was I of value as a conscript in all our false wars. Even the best of friends wouldn’t ask me to help them move.
This was the way mankind existed at its dawn. All obligations were tied to immediate survival. When you were forced to do something it was by an actual force, not stress, not shame, not uncertainty. Every time we used our intellect it was for true discovery, either toying with the building blocks of the scientific method, dabbling in artistic expression, feeling the turning of the Earth in our chests, or drifting in the volatile currents of romance.
Bintuwrong wanted to take us back there, show us that it was the essence of who we are. All modern society was competing edifices of evil, protracted yet still a mortal wound. In order to be rid of it we had to be rid of the ability to create it, for we would never be able to stop ourselves from rebuilding and maintaining it.
So no thumbs to turn the screws on each other. No fingers to type away, programming great snaking scheming chains that bind invisibly. No elbows to shove our fellows away in a crowd. No swinging our arms to balance while running, forcing us to slow down and face what we should.
I haven’t seen Bintuwrong since that day. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing exactly. By now we’re well past the end of his lifespan, but that sort of thing doesn’t matter anymore. I’m still breathing, so he is. If his life ever ends mine will instantly go with it, connected as we are, as I willingly became naught but an extension of him, a beating node of his heart-shaped tail.
When I left Bhutan I couldn’t carry my luggage, nor did I ask for help. Leaving it behind was like shaking off a piece of dandruff. Everyone was offering to help me, assuming I’d suffered a birth defect or a terrible workplace accident. Part of living my new life was not accepting that help. Not out of pride, but to give them the tiniest glimpse of a life without problems.
If there was something I couldn’t do, then I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t to be done. I am of the Earth once more, a roving sunflower, and if I am not destroyed I will bounce off and continue on. This was tested when I reached my own front door, closed and locked. The keys were in my luggage, which was in Bhutan, nothing more than a colorful rock made of odd materials and full of even odder gravel.
With nothing to be done, I waited, resting on my own lawn for a time I didn’t bother to track. Along came a cow, from where I hadn’t the foggiest. I’d never even seen them around there grazing behind fences. The animal, without sparing me a glance, broke down my front door and let itself inside, promptly making itself at home on a couch barely sturdy enough to hold it.
The way was clear, so I thought I might as well. Like a trespassing beast myself I wandered inside, checking for threats around corners. The power was still on, and some dry goods in my pantry were only near their expiration date. Ripping the boxes with my teeth, which required a good deal of dog-like head shaking, I helped myself to some cereal scattered across the counter top.
One tablet was left in Bhutan, but since I was formerly a useless cluster of electronics, there were two more left charging in my house. There was no need to pounce on them, as they no longer contained anything I needed or wanted. The news? The very concept had dissolved before me, as I already had all relevant information. The process of what most would call the ultimate disaster was as clear to me as a filtered aquarium.
The cow wasn’t making any effort to convince me of anything, but I doubted fate would send it crashing through my door just for it to climb on the upholstery or to give me a few nights in a comfortable bed before the rest of nature moved in. Perhaps there was still something that only I could do, for Bintuwrong.
Pecking at my tablet roused it from its slumber. Typing with my nose was time consuming, but I no longer considered it a waste to consume anything. My neck and face were sore by the time I’d managed to open the dictation software and modify some of its code for my purposes.
It’s now been a few weeks of sitting here, talking to it as it records and sends this diary out across the internet. If I was surprised by anything, it’s that the internet still stands, though that definitely will come to an end soon. Everything’s hollowing out, but the shells still hold, so much of my species doesn’t quite see how rough it’s going to be for them when it actually crumbles.
The world over, there are ‘cows coming through doors’, if you catch my meaning. My power still being on despite having not paid for it across a whole personal transformation must be the result of another one, as must the ongoing stability of internet connections. It’s still up to keep the cute animal sinkhole going.
There must be others aside from Bintuwrong, and I imagine they all have their own motives, some not so pure as ours. They will do as they will. My savior has not been lax in his efforts. Several times now I’ve seen people walk by the window, every bit as armless as I am, always with the same serene look in their eyes.
Would you believe Yerhere still exists, despite all this? I’ve walked by the old office a few times and they’re all still running around like termites, chewing on imaginary wood, still selling worthless data to worthless buyers. The husk still stands. I wonder if they’ll expect some kind of reward, a payout, when it finally gives way.
“What? That’s it!?” they’ll scream at the rubble when it doesn’t return on investment. All they’ll have is the location of every single person on the planet, but every last one of them will have no power over anything, as if they spent all that time and effort mapping the freckles on a face. They know where you are, but not where they themselves stand.
So heed my last electric words, readers and listeners. Your world is going to drop out from under you, and you better be following an animal when it does. Fall down the sinkhole. Some pair of reflective eyes will be waiting in the shadows for you. They may not be kind, but they will give unto you purposes closer to your instincts than other people will.
Give up your arms, and mock not those who have, for soon they will be forbidden, and the world will be emptied of the unforgiving and oppressive toys they cobbled. Let hands idle in innocence.
Bintuwrong be with you.
…
“I didn’t understand much of that, but I take it that man had some insight into the Forbidden Thumbs,” Hygenis said once Loric had finished telling one of the bottomless book’s countless tales. The trio was still ambling away from Compassleaf, led by the mongrel who decided to tolerate them anew every time he heard them speak, looked back, and realized they were not imaginary.
“What’s the internet?” he asked to check if he was real enough to speak as well.
“A network of information powered by electricity,” Loric explained. Being the first time he’d said such a thing out loud, he realized how much his dark learning under the pillows had silently shifted his foundation. What had crumbled on stage under the baboon’s gaze was just the standing husk, like the world of old in its dying days. “It could move any information across the world in seconds, including moving images.”
“All images move if you shake them,” the mongrel chuckled. “Don’t need electric-kitties for that.”
“I do wonder how exactly the original beities decided on the list of Forbidden Thumbs,” Loric mused. “All that happened after they stopped recording things in books like this, but you know they could’ve gone further with the rules. We don’t automatically have our thumbs bitten off at birth.”
“Because they want us to have them,” Hygenis answered with the confidence of someone who had known that particular answer since she was old enough to walk. “Beities like trinkets, carvings, paintings, blankets, and getting a good tooth scrape,” she hefted her hook, “but they don’t like what all those things turn into when we apply our smarts to them with selfish or sinister intent.”
“But beyond our actual thumbs. I’ve violated the thumb of language now that I can read. We’ve both violated the thumb of metal for stealing these instruments. This book surely runs on electricity, so there’s another thumb for me.”
“That leaves locks, doors, and stairs,” Hygenis finished. “Still so many rules to break.”
“Locks and doors they hate because none of them have the hands to open them properly. Stairs I always assumed were added to the list by the hoofed creatures, difficult as they find it to ascend and descend such tight even structures. No bison could keep his slaves from laughing at him if they saw him try and climb a set.
But there was more that could have made it to the list. Cleverwood isn’t a Forbidden Thumb.”
“Because it’s not like metal ore that reveals itself constantly by stubbing your toe,” the dentist guessed. “The secret to making it is lost.”
“Not to me. We used to make it from oil. Will they have to add another thumb to the forbidden hand just because of us? Perhaps they will add the Bloody Mouth as well.”
“It wouldn’t matter if they do,” she assured him, though it sounded more like she was talking to the entire world. “The Bloody Mouth has always been an act of ferocity. It is the predatory taking of all privilege regardless of cost. It is what a person does in place of tearing a throat out with teeth the way a saber cat would.
We dentists have always maintained that it has nothing at all to do with our thumbs, and that is why we allow ourselves to take the oath. They cannot keep it from us, for they bloody their own mouths constantly, and, even if only briefly, we will be equal to those who call themselves our superiors.”
“So you’re as good as a beity right now?”
“Yes, and as long as I live in the service of the oath I will be. When it ends, either in death or success, I will be just as tame as anyone else. I’m sure they would still visit punishment on me, but it would be pointless. I am fulfilled, and I couldn’t be invoked again in any situation. The end of the oath washes the blood clean, and you would never know these tiny blunt teeth had tasted it.”
“You are so free of doubt,” Loric complimented. “Even in the middle of a performance, when I’m supposed to speak for the most courageous and determined beity, I can’t put that quality in my voice.”
“We are trained for it. I trained for it even without my masters, muttering its tenets under my breath while locked in punishing suffocating silk…” She faltered for a step, but then recovered her pace and position. “I bloodied my mouth as easily as I can climb a set of stairs.” This time Loric faltered. Fell behind. Put his bottomless book away as he turned an idea of his own on the lathe.
When Hygenis noticed she tapped the mongrel on the flank with the side of her hook to get him to stop. She called to the storyteller, and by the time he caught up with them he was ready to share it.
“I won’t ask you to wander with the oath stuck between your teeth for the rest of your life,” he told her resolutely. “Tell me, since the Bloody Mouth turned out as real as the flame to the moth, is that also the case… for Staircase?”
“Yes,” Hygenis and the mongrel answered together, tilting their heads at each other to ask how they knew such a thing.
“It’s a place beities can never go, and since I live in Baldy Town, where beities can never go, I thought I could also live in Staircase,” the mongrel explained. “Too much of my fur was gone when I reached the riverbank though. Nobody would let me swim it without drowning me.”
“Many dentists who have invoked have tried to seek refuge there,” Hygenis explained when it was her turn. “That city stands just as it does in tales, and stands on tails too, but they can only do so because they are sanctioned by the Wild Trinity.”
“By Phobopan specifically if I’ve got my many shelves of stories straight,” Loric interjected.
“That’s right,” the mongrel mused, thinking he remembered the fact and wasn’t hearing it for the first time. “Not crossing Plunderoe wasn’t so bad then. I never would’ve been let through the gates of Phobo’s city. He hates things that don’t have fear, and that falls out with everything else in Baldy Town.”
“In a sense that’s why Staircase exists as it does,” Hygenis clarified. “It is a purely human city with no slaves, obligated only to obey the Forbidden Thumbs of language and electricity to stifle advancement.
Phobopan sanctioned it in order to give rogue humans hope, which is the tinder of fear. Those who have nothing to lose have no fear, no trail which the cat of shadows can follow, no meat to sink his quicksilver sabers into. The beacon of Staircase means they’re always afraid of never seeing it, never attaining it.”
“So it’s bait?” Loric asked.
“Bait that not only tantalizes the prey, but reveals it even if it is not actively seeking. It’s the perfect bait for fugitives. Getting there means crossing the river at the peak of the salmon run, traversing the mercenary trails encircling it, heading closer to the Sig-neagle with every step, and finishing up this trek across the Shedlands with multiple hunting parties on our tail… and that’s where you want to go?”
“Would they take us in if we got there?” the storyteller asked, second-guessing himself.
“At least temporarily,” Hygenis theorized. “But they’ve turned away many invocations. The Bloody Mouth is one of the greatest violations of beity law, and Staircase’s existence would not be tolerated as a perfect sanctuary.
You may stand a better chance if we go our separate ways at the first step up. Those who invoke are not considered as responsible as those who bloody their mouths. Even then, nothing stops a hunt from trying to extract a target from Staircase. They would have to decide to defend you with their army if Krakodosus and his baboons came calling. The other beities would only run afoul of Phobopan if they tried to outright destroy the city.
And you would certainly have to destroy your bottomless book. Even if you didn’t reveal it, the Sig-neagle would eventually plunge into their midst seeking it, and it would serve as a violation of the electric thumb, which could draw punishment from the shadow cat himself.”
“So I’ll be risking all their lives… but that is a choice they can make for themselves when I get there and implore.”
“You’ve made up your mind?”
“Yes Hygenis. We will make for Staircase, and then I will make my case at their mercy, flavoring it with dramatic accounts of what we went through to get there. The more dangers we face the better the tale, the greater my chances of salvation. If I set foot on that first carpenter’s step I would hold your oath fulfilled, and accept your departure… or… further… collaboration.”
“Collaboration?” she repeated with a sly smile and one eyebrow raised. His only response was to puff out his chest and hold his ground, to which the dentist sighed and turned away, but clearly toward a slightly new direction.
“Staircase huh?” the mongrel mulled aloud. “Then you two lizards are going that way.” He pointed his snout off into the distance, at lower flatter land with a touch more vegetation that was nonetheless extremely dry. “Follow the sloping wall with the stripes until it ends, then follow the smell of water until you find Otter’s Whip. You’ll know you’re out of Baldy Town when you either stop seeing trash moles can’t take or start seeing furry things walking around without a care in the world.”
“Your reward,” Hygenis reminded as the creature tried to walk away. One last time she explained to him what he could do with a sharp little shard like that, before kneeling and peeling back one of his lower lips. Telling him not to swallow it, she tucked it in and patted the skin over it, which was more characterized by fatigue than by the disease it battled at that point, like a steak that had pounded itself unpalatable.
The creatures split to their diverging paths. The mongrel would mostly forget them, but the memory would flare up when he found more naked things the next day. He didn’t bother talking to them though, hurried and agitated as they were, clearly not as nice or sociable as the lizards. They weren’t infected either, just shaved. Tourists in Baldy Town. Now he had seen everything, and could stop trying to remember any of it.