{NB—there may be some changes from pgs 1-50, sent to Gretchen Stelter, not reflected here. That was a modification with some removed sections, but may want to add the Brazilian family history back. Make sure the versions match up.}

Prologue

The farmers gazed out fearfully upon their fields as the sky continued to darken, amidst clouds of menace and a chilling, blood-red streak that grew and filled much of the horizon. The sinister clouds engendered a premature sunset as they continued to gather, while rings of lightning billowed outward from an unseen source. Suddenly, the disturbances coalesced in a rapidly spreading electrical discharge, sending the farmers tumbling as a shock wave radiated outward. The sky traversed a spectrum of colors before settling on an eerie, violet-colored glow that slowly diffused as the inexplicable cloud cover began to clear. The frightened peasants anxiously lifted themselves up, slowly crossing their fields to a nearby wilderness where the bizarre phenomenon appeared to have been focused. As they pushed back the tall grasses and reeds at the edge of the woods, they came across an otherwordly sight. Large, stone-like objects lay arrayed in an irregular series on the wilderness floor—each of them twisting and folding in upon themselves repeatedly, with marks scored throughout them on all sides. A majestic flock had perched itself atop the objects: Birds of prey, sitting regally atop the assemblage, as bewildered human eyes beheld the scene unfolding before them.

Chapter 1: Prelude in an Infernal Chord

Wenn die Samen einer Pflanze in den Grund gesät werden,

Wissen sie was hält die Zukunft, ihr’ Verwandlung in dem Erden?

Weiß die Blum’ wovon sie kam, von Blättern, Stielen, bescheidenen Samen?

Wann sagt die Pflanz’, von Samen bis Blumen, “Ich weiß ja, was doch ich bin!”

May 5, 1643, 3:38 p.m.

Herbstmond Village, Holy Roman Empire

“Karl, Karl! They’re coming again!” The young woman burst anxiously into the cottage, half-clutching the linens she had set out to collect merely moments before. Her anguished voice cracked as tears began to well in her distraught eyes. “I prayed to God that His mercy would spare us this time; but the heralds are warning everyone in the village. The legions, they’ve already overrun the town nearby, and now we are in their sights…”

The cobbler, reflexively gripping a hammer-like tool, narrowed his eyes as his face blanched in dismay. It was a day he had long dreaded since migrating to the modest hamlet merely three years before, fleeing a prior rampage that had decimated nearly all he had and everyone he had loved.

“Maria, are you sure?” he queried in a heavy voice, its tone laden with the bitter onus of a young life lived entirely under the unyielding shadow of war, following them relentlessly no matter their attempts to evade it. He and his wife had each endured more than twenty years in a savage earthly netherworld of atavistic plundering, gratuitous cruelty, and scorched-earth invasions, carried out by avaricious mercenaries and contemptuous armies on multiple sides. From the earliest days that memory had seared images into their impressionable minds, they had never known a day of peace nor savored the blessings of a civilized society. The bitter conflict had convulsed the heart of Europe since 1618, and some said it would be a Thirty Years’ War—three decades of misery and ruin—before the desperate prayers of starving peasants and plague-stricken town-dwellers would ever be answered.

“They said that Sankt Florian is in flames. The marauders sacked the town—they took their spoils in the blood of its inhabitants, putting most to the sword. The wounded and the terrified, whoever could run… they’re fleeing here, Karl, and the fiends are following close behind, held back only by their lust for further plunder.” Maria’s sharp mind and melancholy eyes—pensive, grayish-blue orbs obscured by tears and the widened pupils of a fearful psyche—peered out beneath slightly disheveled strands of auburn hair that streamed down to her shoulder blades. Her locks surrounded lightly bronzed, dimpled cheeks and full lips, parched at the edges from the ravages of constant deprivation. Her visage evoked a sense of haunting beauty, submerged underneath layers of struggle and misery that were all she had ever come to comprehend or expect from the world.

Bearing a resigned, nearly impassive expression, Karl made his way to the threshold of the cottage and ducked outside, to survey the developing scene before him. Rows of cramped homesteads, hastily assembled from mud, thatch, and damp wood, haphazardly flanked a series of obliquely intersecting roads that led out into chaotically tilled fields of barley, wheat, and rye. There were panicked expressions and signs of a hurried evacuation in some places, but overall, the villagers exhibited a grim composure as they heeded the news. Some gathered their meager belongings for yet another exodus, while others stoutly resigned themselves to the oncoming storm—feebly arming their calloused hands with a motley variety of tools and farm implements, if only to fall in a faint gesture of bitter resistance to the onslaught. As Karl paced slowly to the north, he descried an unmistakable and painfully familiar sight, far off in the distance—a straggling vanguard of exhausted townsfolk, fronted by grizzled survivors guarding the young, the old, and the sick, with women of many ages desperately clutching their crying infants to their bosoms.

“I suppose this means,” he said, hurriedly pushing his way back into the cottage, “that we shall shortly be seeking accommodation in another parcel of this blessed land.” His grim musings exemplified the dark-robed humor that only the most miserable and forsaken could truly appreciate—the stoicism that accompanies an existence in which every day’s survival is a cherished, yet uncertain triumph. He slowly made his way to his still-tearful wife, nearly overwhelmed by the anticipation of yet another traumatic uprooting in the midst of a seemingly interminable bloodbath. Karl had noticeably bushy eyebrows that seemed to mimic his dark, curling hair in its numerous meanderings, coupled with a salt-and-pepper beard and a solid, baritone voice that would rasp on occasion when his mind reached inward to contemplate a hostile world. He projected the stubborn equanimity of a protective figure in troubled times, a demeanor reinforced by his sinewy frame and shoulders, their bulk and vigor reinforced daily by his unstinting exertions as a skillful cobbler.

“Karl, I just don’t know how much more of this I can bear,” began the young woman again, directing a tearful gaze toward her husband before glancing furtively downward. “There are moments when I wonder if we should be bringing…” She paused as a lump formed and took hold in her throat. Karl inched toward her as she averted her attention again, staring out forlornly toward the entrance.

“Maria,” he said, slowly drawing his arms about her slumped shoulders, gently rubbing them with large, rough, yet deeply compassionate hands. “We’ll survive this, as we have before. I don’t know if our prayers will ever be answered in this world, but perhaps miracles can spring on occasion from the depths of despair.” The couple embraced briefly yet tenderly, a parting gesture to a home that would soon be engulfed in the conflagration of senseless conflict. They then moved immediately to fill whatever tattered sacks and satchels were available, with anything of value—foodstuffs, cobbler’s tools, a few coveted keepsakes.

“We should move southeast,” said Karl, slightly out of breath as he hoisted a sack atop his shoulder. “The traders told me three days before, that Wenceslaus town will take in those who flee. They’re provisioned and have an armed garrison at the city walls; the local princes reached an agreement to ensure it stayed neutral, so it may finally offer us some shelter from this bloodbath, and…”

“Karl! Can you hear it? Listen…”

The burly cobbler set the sack down suddenly, as Maria spun around at a distinctive sound that sent their hearts jointly sinking. Karl edged toward a window of the cottage opposite from the entrance, breathing heavily as he listened intently to the commotion outside. “It can’t be,” he said, in abject dismay. “Those hoofbeats—they’re coming from the south.”

“Who? Karl, what does this mean?”

“It means that none will be spared,” he replied chillingly, glancing aside before turning again to face his wife. “If the rumors are true, then the leader of this army—they call him Robert the Brute. He was once a nobleman, a count, now reduced to the basest savagery from this war. A messenger visited the artisans’ guild two days ago; he said something about Robert massing his forces to the south, in a bid to envelop both Herbstmond and the town of Sankt Florian. But then other couriers denied this, claiming that Robert had withdrawn his forces and shifted westward. If the first messenger was correct, then we’re not facing merely raiding parties to the north, Maria; Count Robert has split his army to join forces from several directions, to trap the village in a vise.”

“Why? Why target Herbstmond?”

“Robert has been bitterly at war with Prince Philip the August. Philip had been quartering his soldiers here, even before we had ourselves arrived to escape the devastation at the Schwarzwolf hamlet years before. The rivals had ceased hostilities, but their truce lapsed the year before.” Karl exhaled audibly, as though in a vain attempt to banish the morbid thoughts that were gathering inside him. “Robert is coming here to deny a haven for Philip, and we are little more than pawns in his bloodthirsty ambitions. Even among the feral creatures that this war has spawned, Robert stands out for the cruelty he visits upon his victims. He’ll decimate the village, seize the crops and livestock, send in the beasts that he commands and…”

At once, Karl gazed into his young wife’s eyes, his countenance suffused with the horror of grim forebodings; no words needed uttering to express the frightful atrocities that they knew awaited all who remained. Their dread magnified as the hoofbeats drew closer, and as the shouts from ferocious horsemen grew ever more strident—men who had once been soldiers, now transformed into roving, sadistic opportunists, thriving on pillage and murder.

“Karl, we don’t have much time; they must be at the edge of the village.”

“But I don’t know where to go, now. They have us trapped on all sides!”

Maria moved resolutely toward the threshold of the doorway, instinctively peering out to the right side. “Due east, through the fields and into the forest. There’s no other way.”

“The Katzenwald?” asked Karl in astonishment, balking at the suggestion. “Maria, don’t you know what’s happened to people who’ve…”

“I’ve heard the same tales, Karl—about all the farmers and straying mercenaries who’ve been swallowed up, disappearing within its thickets. Perhaps the myths do indeed bear truth, but if we don’t leave now… you know what Robert’s forces will do to us, to you and to me. We have to place our trust in the Lord and take a chance.”

“He seems to have been indisposed to protect any of His charges who wander into that darkness.”

“But the raiders have heard the same legends; perhaps they would hesitate to follow us. We could traverse the forest, turn south and then make our way to Wenceslaus town on foot as you said, maybe even wait out the fiends in the Wald until they’ve departed the region.” She looked up and clasped his cheeks gently in her outspread hands, seeking to reassure her husband as much as to assuage her own exhausted psyche, overwhelmed as it was by a nauseating surfeit of looming dangers and hidden menace. “Karl, we’ll stay at each other’s side; whatever awaits us in the forest, we’ll face together.”

The acrid odor of smoldering wood and straw began to intrude upon the cottage, while the pandemonium of a village swept by blood-curdling terror filled the air with howls of anguish. The whistles of loosed arrows and the ululations of crazed men in the distance added to the cacophony. Maria gathered the belongings which they had assembled, but Karl quickly placed his hand on her trembling arm.

“They’re already upon us,” he said abruptly. “We’ll have to leave all this here. Just the small sacks with the food, it’s all we can afford to carry without being slowed down; hopefully, the forest will at least be merciful enough to permit us an occasional drink from its streams.”

The couple quickly bolted out the door hand-in-hand, fellow refugees already taking flight helter-skelter before them. The cobbler and the milkmaid were as antelopes fleeing an ambush of hungry lions, pouncing on their prey as the opportunity arose. The wounded, screaming bodies of humans and livestock, the stench of burning fields, the sights of ruined homes and agonized innocents, all abounded to greet them as they ran.

They traversed a half-tilled field and breathlessly advanced toward the woods, tracing out a weaving course. Maria paused momentarily, surveying the scene ahead with a forceful intensity like that of a prowling cat. “There’s a… a pass in the vicinity, and it becomes a short path about ten paces into the forest. Presumably cleared by someone contemplating a foray once but… not daring to continue. There, there it is,” she said, pointing slightly leftward at an oblique angle. “It’s a bit concealed if I recall, in the thornbush; just make sure to duck underneath.” The harried couple sprinted toward a camouflaged gap between some shrubs at the forest’s edge, and vanished.

Inside the dense canopy of the Katzenwald, Maria and Karl continued to push ahead to an unknown destination. In spite of their lingering apprehension about the mysteries of the forbidding terrain before them, they held far greater dread for the murderous hordes in the village, whose nefarious presence never seemed more than a few steps behind, if only in their anxious minds. They leapt over fallen logs and forded earnest little streams, occasionally stopping to slake their burning thirst. As they forged inexorably forward into the Wald, rows of sturdy oaks and sprawling yews combined with thickening underbrush to envelop them in a cocoon of daytime obscurity. They strained to take note of any landmark that stood out on the trail they were unwittingly blazing—a rockface with an oddly jagged protuberance, an ostentatiously colorful line of shrubbery, a hillock flanked by rivulets meandering in a sinuous pattern toward a nearby brook.

Maria and Karl soon arrived at a blueberry patch, halting in their tracks to sample the bounty and to harvest what they could for their respective satchels. They leaned back against a nearby oak tree to savor a much-needed respite from their desperate flight. The sickening odor of the burning village had permeated into the forest, while persistent echoes from the tumultuous scene rustled through its scattered groves—resonating in a jarring aural distortion that only amplified the horror befalling the unfortunate souls still trapped and besieged within the hamlet.

**************************************

“Martin, are you sure they came through here?” As the remains of Herbstmond smoldered behind them, the general in charge of the rampaging forces delivered a pointed inquiry to a young cavalry scout. The commander had a grizzled appearance, his face rough and sporadically peppered with the scars of war, physical and otherwise; his wrists, peeking out slightly from his gloved hands, bore conspicuous burns. His jaw was lined with a dark, graying beard visible inside his battle helmet, sculpted in a curiously angular form—with sharp edges and turns accentuating his malevolent countenance. He retained a paradoxical vestige of aristocracy in his demeanor, a shadow of a former life that had mixed hideously with the ruthless warlord into which he had transformed.

“Yes, sir,” replied the nervous scout, a boyish figure who had yet to reach his 16^th birthday. He stammered slightly as he spoke, and his ruddy cheeks and eager eyes further bespoke a sense of lost innocence, magnifying the grotesque incongruity of the scene: a mere teenager, likely a precocious yet clearly bereft orphan in that merciless conflict, who had pledged his services to a ruthless leveler of towns and villages across Europe. “I saw them bounding through this pass into the forest, just as we swarmed into Herbstmond. Look,” he continued, motioning with a stubby index finger and tracing an imaginary line on the ground, “the footsteps, they cross the field and continue here into the forest. A man and a woman, villagers from Herbstmond.”

The cold-eyed general with the graying beard dismounted without nodding, inspecting the observation with his own eyes. He pushed back the brush at the edge of the forest, kneeling downward before rising again, in apparent satisfaction at what he had beheld. “Excellent, young Martin; so pleased to see your progress.” His compliment was laced with a distinctly sinister intimation, as though taking pride in the monster that his apprentice was becoming under his tutelage.

“Gentlemen,” he said, waving his arm to address the rough crowd gathered about him, “our mission resumes here. I want a company of dragoons to lead a siege team into the forest, to be joined by a score of musketeers,” he continued, motioning toward his selected audience. “Then threescore among the pikemen and lancers to join me and the lieutenants. The footprints of those peasants will lead the way. The rest of you, remain here and reinforce the encampment in Herbstmond. One can never know the whereabouts of the enemy, but if the coward and his lackeys decide to pay a visit, be sure to offer them a heartfelt greeting with our cannon, courtesy of an old friend.”

The soldiers stood in uncharacteristic apprehension before their commander, reluctantly sorting themselves to volunteer for the foray into the Katzenwald. As the general turned again to further investigate the path of his quarry in the forest, he was surprised by a thunderous voice approaching on horseback from behind, filled with unwavering rebuke and indignation.

“Robert!”

“Well,” said the commander as he pivoted around. His voice dripped with hostile irony as he eyed the approaching man and his entourage. “General Nathaniel Bonifacius! Such a pleasant surprise to see my valued ally so soon.”

“Don’t patronize me, Robert! Such temerity you have, to violate our pact in so heinous a fashion,” replied Nathaniel, bypassing pleasantries as he vented his fury. “Herbstmond and the town of Sankt Florian were to be under my protection; you were supposed to maintain a presence in the vicinity to trap Prince Philip if he came, not to take the town and village themselves.”

Nathaniel slowly dismounted as his steed neared the forest’s edge. He was of modest height yet undeniable authority in his voice and mien, an experienced commander in a vast battlefield that spanned a continent. He was clean-shaven but with a rough-hewn countenance and sagging eyes, his very visage an apparent casualty of battle. His swarthy complexion and dark hair graced a muscular frame, suggestive of a man who could have flourished as a dashing courtier or a handsome troubadour poet in a more settled epoch, rather than a hardened warrior incessantly at arms. “When I supplied you with the intelligence from my scouts, Robert, and when I allowed my men to fight under your banner, it was with the express understanding that we would not trouble the long-suffering people in these villages, let alone put them to the sword. My men are soldiers; they are not pillagers, and they are certainly not murderers!”

“Murderers?” laughed Robert dismissively. “You say this was murder, what we did to these villagers? It is the harsh justice of a harsh time, Nathaniel. These peasants were in the service of our common foe, and they paid their penalty in blood!”

“Prince Philip may be our adversary,” responded Nathaniel, slowly approaching his unsavory ally, “but these people in Herbstmond were never the enemy. All the fiendish armies in this bloodbath have demanded quarter from those who dwell in the villages, and the poor souls here have no power to resist. Philip himself is an honorable man; he would never perpetrate such an atrocity against the salt of the earth in these hamlets.”

“Yet you, dear Nathaniel,” sneered Robert, “are willing to join with such an object of your revulsion, to defeat this ‘honorable man.’”

“It is a battle to usher in the peace, Robert, not an end in itself. Philip is fired by religious fervor, and so long as he persists in taking up arms, his name alone will attract armies from across these lands; peace will never come, and the folk of every kingdom and principality will continue to suffer in this senseless struggle. We must check his power, to compel the truce talks again; only then can we bring the hostilities to a halt.”

Nathaniel briefly averted his gaze to cast a skeptical eye on the pass in the forest, where his ally’s forces were slowly gathering, before turning back to face Robert the Brute. “Philip believes in his cause, far too much I’m afraid. Such is the curse of this war, too many in power far too sure of themselves and their opposing convictions of that which could never be proven, to the point of invoking the name of God to justify even their most atrocious deeds.”

“An invocation, my old friend, that I recall often hearing issued in your own voice.”

“Yes, until I realized my own folly and the misery my false certainties were visiting upon this forsaken realm,” replied Nathaniel, his response tinged with bitterness. “But there is a conviction we all share, Robert. It matters not whether we swear fealty to the Pope or to the Protestant armies, or whatever lord or king to whom we may declare our secular allegiances. Even as we still fan the flames of this Inferno that we have misbegotten with our own hands, we can at least attempt to spare the innocents of this devastation, of all the blood that we have shed in the name of God or any other authority on this plane.”

Robert snarled in a low growl and protruded his jaw, in a gesture of mocking contempt as he further approached his wavering ally. “I don’t shed this blood in the name of any higher power, Nathaniel.” His voice seethed, the underlying anger now boiling over as it fed his scorn. “I first raised my standard more than two decades ago, a pious fool just like you. I relinquished my own birthright, my noble inheritance, for the honor of serving a higher cause, or so it was claimed. I saw the beast in the human heart emerge in my clashes over those years, the prevarications used by powerful men to draw us in. I saw my own brothers turned into blood enemies of each other. And I came to embrace a truth you still deceive yourself into ignoring: that whatever the greater causes to which we pledge ourselves on these fields of conflict, it is only our power here that is real and tangible, and ultimately, few will mourn the passing of the wretches already condemned to such misery in these domains.”

“All of us have been baptized in those same flames, Robert, and paid a price most dear,” countered Nathaniel, in a firm voice that quivered with rueful undertones. “I lost my own son at Breitenfeld; he was a boy soldier who shared your very name, just becoming a man when he was stricken down. But as I mourned him, as I wept for the sons and daughters of countless others who lay in that field, their souls needlessly ripped from their bosoms—I came to understand what truly confers power within this accursed realm. Any tyrant can raze a city or torch a village; but the leader who creates something, bestows mercy and humility, inspires the poor wretches even in this earthly Hell to improve their collective lot—that general will attract the dedication of legions.”

“In case you have failed to take heed, General Bonifacius,” retorted the count, his voice teeming with uncharacteristic pique, “I am not wanting for loyalty.”

“A mere patina of loyalty, Robert. Your troops fear you, and they share in your plunder, but rest assured that none respect what you represent.” He gestured toward the ruined hamlet behind them before incredulously eyeing the pass in the forest, its threshold marked with a line of anxious pikemen clearing the underbrush for their hesitant comrades to enter. “A naked lust for pillage and power begets its own undoing; one day, your men will take your example to heart, and it is you who will fall at their hands.”

“I think not, Dear Nathaniel!”

“And you pretend to inspire your forces here, Robert? Look at them! They see the madness that rules you. Dispatching an entire regiment, to suffer whatever horrors the Katzenwald holds for those foolish enough to intrude upon its grounds—all to cut down a terrified peasant couple fleeing your wrath? Has your thirst for blood so completely seized hold of your mind?”

Robert responded with a low-pitched, growling laugh, as though deriving a perverse satisfaction in the loathing with which he had filled the heart of his erstwhile ally. “I would never spurn the chance to teach a lesson to these wretches,” he taunted, “but it will perhaps be to your astonishment that I am acting in our mutual strategic interest. You see, dear Nathaniel, Prince Philip has twice slipped our grasp in the past half-year.” Robert unfolded a battle map for his skeptical fellow commander, resting it atop an impromptu assemblage of equipment near the pass.

“In December of the prior year, my forces had him encircled here, to the north between Sankt Florian and Nassau town,” continued Robert, jabbing his finger at a marked spot on the crumpled map. “Then in March, we waged a pitched battle far to the east, at the edge of the Lilienthal valley. We very nearly acquired your coveted peace for you, Nathaniel, but the wily fox again escaped our trap, spiriting away his battalions in the dead of night. We could never determine the manner in which he eluded us, but of all his potential routes, one in particular adjoins these sites, not to mention his refuge in Herbstmond itself.”

“You really believe that his men simply filtered into the Katzenwald?” queried Nathaniel in conspicuous skepticism. “How could he possibly feed and supply an army of thousands on the meager victuals that he could scavenge in the Wald? Far more likely that he merely sought cover and succor among his sympathizers in the vicinity.”

“That, Sir Nathaniel, is why I choose to establish ‘examples’ among those who would render him their assistance, and I can assure you that they were not inclined to come to the prince’s aid in those sieges.”

“I still find it preposterous that he would choose to regroup in the forest; he could never maintain an intact force there, not to mention….”

“Unless,” interrupted Robert, “he had a stronghold somewhere within the vast expanse of the Wald.”

Nathaniel briefly pondered the conjecture, before frowning resolutely and shaking his head. “Are you truly mad? Besides the impossibility of maintaining a supply line, not even the emperor’s elite guard dare enter that forest, Robert. I have never troubled myself to confirm the tales surrounding the Katzenwald, but something wicked inhabits that domain; how many villagers and soldiers have vanished entirely from this earthly plane upon wandering therein? What of the ghostly lights, the storms that so often settle upon the place? Only a fool would site his bastion in the Wald. Look at them again, even your own troops tremble at the forest’s edge.”

“And what better cover for an escape, Nathaniel, than a place too terrifying for most mere mortals to set foot? The town lore in this region is filled with the desultory claims of a superstitious peasantry—covens of witches and sorcerers, alchemists able to transmute metals into the deadliest of weaponry, gateways to the netherworld itself. But among these fantastical imaginings are scattered reports of strangers emerging from the depths of the Wald, of supplies transported within, of tunnels from wells and homes within the hamlets. Your own scouts declared that Philip was no more than a day’s march from our current position. Either he will appear at Herbstmond hoping for quarter, or he is already hiding out within the forest, and I suspect those peasants may be our unwitting guides.”

Nathaniel glared silently at his now-animated partner-in-arms, vacillating in a rare moment of indecision.

“Perhaps I should restate my intentions,” continued Robert, failing to elicit a response. “If Philip is indeed conforming to my suspicions, and you covet that treaty with the prince’s royal seal, then I suggest you and your men accompany my regiment within the Wald. Your sappers are of consummate skill, Nathaniel; if we require trenches to storm a forest stronghold, they would be of great assistance. But know that I will hunt Philip with or without your participation. I will avenge all the scars and insults he has visited upon me, and the punishment I shall mete upon him will be swift and unsparing. I will, however, indulge your pretensions to civilized warfare if you are in my presence, and grant you an audience with Philip to acquire what you seek—before I kill him with my own hand. These are the terms of our alliance now.”

The old warrior persisted briefly in his stern ambivalence before heaving a coarse sigh, as if to audibly relent in the face of an ally he had come to abhor. “This is our last mission together, Robert. I joined forces with you, in a day I am already beginning to rue, because it is only your thirst for revenge against the prince that drives you into the battlefield; and in this monstrously unsettled realm, perhaps only a butcher like you could stop Philip from prolonging this war, extending his misguided crusade throughout Europe. Yet your vengeance seems to strike far more than your archenemy alone.”

He cast a penetrating glance toward the forest, then craned his neck around to inspect his own armored soldiers and engineers, looking on with collective discomfort at the heated exchange still playing out before them. “I will bring a company of my sappers and dragoons into the forest,” he resumed, facing Robert again, “and if Philip has a redoubt within those woods, I will give the order to commence the siege; but they will remain under my command at all times. Whatever the outcome when the operation is completed, our alliance terminates; and if you thereafter tread upon my domains unannounced, you will be regarded as a hostile force.”

“I suspect,” laughed Robert cynically, “that I am already held in such esteem by you, my dear Nathaniel. No matter, for our hostility has a common object at our present juncture. Come, gather your men while the sun still shines to bless our endeavor.”

Nathaniel nodded gruffly, as the two commanders moved to rally their forces.

**************************************

“Maria, be careful! Stop there, don’t move…”

Maria froze in terror as an unseen being coursed through the undergrowth, manifesting its presence in the wobbling leaves and stalks around it. Karl snapped off a low-hanging bough from a nearby oak, inching toward Maria’s position and dipping the stick into the underbrush. He painstakingly probed about, eventually lunging toward a spot of recent activity and twirling the rod, lifting it out to reveal a coral snake coiled at the end of the branch. Maria stifled a shriek and maintained her position, as Karl delicately maneuvered away to the left. Finally, reaching an open patch of the forest floor, he undulated the stick from side to side at a safe distance, sending the snarling creature slithering away.

“Karl,” she said, regaining her poise, “we should stay close to the exposed ground, probably best along the banks of the streams around here.”

“A prudent suggestion, Maria,” he replied, resting his hands on his thighs as he slowly caught his breath. “There could be more such serpents lurking about. Are you—” he pivoted around, surprised to see his wife some distance away, approaching a felled log near a rustling creek. “Dear, what’s wrong?” he asked, slowly advaning toward her.

“Karl, I have to rest, I can’t keep…” Maria kneeled down abruptly, clutching her abdomen in a gesture of persistent pain, then poising herself precariously on an outstretched arm as she continued to lean forward. Her husband rushed to her side to support her.

“Maria, Dear, what is it?” he asked, a look of patent trepidation crossing his face.

“It hurts, Karl,” she said, between shallow breaths. Maria paused, closing her eyes momentarily as a wave of pain and nausea swept across her, before gradually dissipating. “It aches now,” she continued, as she adjusted herself into a more upright posture, “but it was burning when it started. It reminded me of the last time, when we had to flee suddenly and we lost…”

“Maria, please, don’t say that. It was two weeks before you came out of mourning; you barely ate, hardly spoke to anyone. I feared I might lose you too.”

“That’s why I can’t bear the thought of it happening again, Karl. When we were there in the cottage, preparing to gather our belongings—I shudder to acknowledge the thought invading my mind then, but I truly did wonder if our child will have a place in this cruel realm. You and I both, we have never tasted peace since we saw the light of day. And so it would be again, our own child emerging into the same storm, raging onward just as it always has for us.”

“Maria,” replied Karl, gently massaging the ridges of her shoulders, “I realize, given the horrors we’ve witnessed with our very own eyes, that sometimes faith alone may be our only salve. When I myself was a mere innocent within the Wurttemberg province, I saw entire communities collapse around me before I had attained my twelfth birthday. It has since been said, by the officials who survey the lands for the princes, that out of every ten souls in my homeland, seven no longer walk the earth—such has been the devastation wrought by this scourge. But even if this is the only child we bring into the world, we will prevail, if we do not succumb to despair. Then perhaps, even if you and I never come to know a day without war and bloodshed, our child will grow to experience a far different world.”

Karl halted suddenly, lifting his head up and rapidly assessing the scene on all sides, like a bird alerted to the possible presence of a predator. Beads of perspiration coursed down from his forehead and temples, for reasons beyond the heat of the day alone.

“Karl, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t—I’m not sure. A sound, I thought I heard coming from the west; I could swear it was more than one pair of footsteps.” Karl paused again, this time directing his gaze to the ground behind them, his expression transmogrifying into a look of profound trepidation. He turned back toward his wife, gingerly helping her to her feet, his concerned eyes fixing themselves squarely upon hers.

“Our footprints!” she exclaimed, anticipating his thoughts. “Robert’s forces must have seen us fleeing into the forest, but… why? Why would they follow us here? What could they possibly gain from overtaking two frightened peasants?”

“I don’t know, Maria. This war exerts noxious powers upon the minds of the men on the field; their bloodlust alone may be reason enough. It could just be other villagers, seized by the same desperate impulses as you and I to flee into this dark expanse. But we can’t risk tarrying here any longer. We should continue to the east,” he said, pointing obliquely upward behind them in the direction of the sun, its rays obscured by the abundant foliage, before signaling just ahead of them and to the right. “We should proceed roughly in parallel to the winding stream.”

The couple set off at once, following the meandering course of the humble rivulet as it gradually broadened and joined with other tributaries, becoming a small brook dividing the forest. They attempted to plant their steps on firm ground, so as to obscure their prints and reduce their trail, but their path remained a distinct eastward movement by whatever means possible, to elude whatever pursuers had followed them in from the village. They traversed distinct regions of the forest filled with a menagerie of trees, vines, and unusual shrubbery, pausing periodically to imbibe from the ever-widening stream. Sturdy oaks alternated with sleepy willows and proud pines throughout the landscape. Eagles flapped their wings and foxes scampered about them, bemused by the unusual pair of visitors darting about the woods.

After more than an hour of inexorable progress through the sylvan expanse, the forest began to take on a vaguely unsettling character. The twilight had begun to descend, and the gray tints upon the trees in the setting sun were giving way to an altogether different sort of flora. Moss lined the surrounding rocks, lilies and violets claimed their tiny niches, and tall grasses intruded in from an unseen source. As the couple pressed further, the ground became increasingly marshy and sponge-like, even at a distance far from the line of the stream. The air seemed to fill with a panoply of essences from deep within the earth itself, as though seeping out from a natural cauldron hidden somewhere nearby. Strands of mist in multiple hues—faint orange, sulfurous yellow, even hints of volcanic red—flitted about the crepuscular ambience, as the ground continued to soften amidst the chirping of frogs and crickets.

“Karl, look, ahead past the tall grasses,” said Maria, pulling up to catch her breath. “It must be a swampland here; part of the creek probably feeds into it. It’s hillier off to the south, on the other bank of the stream,” she continued, motioning across the waterway.

“You’re right; we should head for the higher ground. We may need to spend the night out here in the forest and besides, the hills are in the direction of Wenceslaus town. We should be able to eat from the trees here, maybe catch some fish in the streams. Who knows what perils may be hiding out in these domains, but it’s our only choice. Robert’s men will have likely taken their surfeit of plunder by tomorrow or the next day; perhaps they will spare us then, and decamp from this region for good.”

Maria nodded without uttering a word, by now laboring under the fatigue of a flight deep into uncharted territory. They quickly neared the edge of the stream where the burly cobbler, noticing Maria’s exhaustion, slung his left arm behind her shoulders and lifted her off the ground, cradling her carefully in his arms. He tentatively waded into the stream, the water level slowly climbing up to his knees as he advanced across, one painstaking step at a time. Finally, after mounting the opposite bank, he moved in deliberate paces toward a nearby pine tree with a broad trunk, gently setting down his wife so that they were both able to lean against the structure and catch their breath. Following a brief respite, they set off again for the hilly stretches to the south and east, navigating a series of slopes throughout the moist ground that still surrounded them.

As they rounded a grassy hillock, they were surprised to see the outlines of what appeared to be other pairs of footprints amidst the knolls and ridges. Perplexed, they hesitantly set out upon the trail they seemed to blaze, curious about their source and destination.

“Karl,” queried Maria, “who could have walked this trail before us?”

“I don’t know, Maria,” he replied, a frisson of anxiety permeating his voice. “Possibly other villagers, like us fleeing the onslaught of the marauders. But I… I can’t imagine why a trail would just appear here, flush in the middle of the Katzenwald.” As they continued along the path, the hills in the distance gradually gave way to mountainous clusters of steadily climbing altitude, their slopes shrouded in an impenetrable layer of thick fog that tracked along the meandering tree line.

The footprints eventually began to angle down a series of foothills sharply toward the southeast. Karl and Maria soon found themselves in the midst of an apparent nadir among the hillocks, with the trail eventually terminating near a ledge that overlooked a trickling stream, emerging from one of the hillsides. Puzzled, Karl kneeled down cautiously by the ledge, searching for a lingering trace of the inexplicable footprints—abruptly spilling forward and downward, as the moist ledge crumpled before him.

“Karl!” screamed Maria as she neared the ledge herself, fearful that the dark rumors about the Wald were now manifesting before them. “Karl! My God, are you all right?”

“Maria…” beckoned a slightly hestiant voice from an unseen point below. “I’ll be fine; I bruised my shoulder in the fall, but it’s not too far a drop.” He inched closer to the stream, within Maria’s field of view from her vantage point above. “It appears to be a path down here; the wall next to me,” he said, pushing off against it, “it’s stony, but someone has carved a ladder into it; this must be how they made it down here.” Intrigued by the observation, he probed about the area, his eyes eventually fixing upon a spot on the wall flanked by moss and draped by vines and ivy. He cast the overhanging structures aside, to reveal what appeared to be a tunnel extending deep within the foothills.

“Right here,” said Karl, without revealing what he had just seen, “the ladder is just in front of me, where I’m standing.” He edged forward, disappearing momentarily as he mounted the rungs himself, suddenly emerging before his surprised wife at the ledge and motioning her downward. Tentatively, Maria approached the border adjacent to the ledge as Karl firmly embraced her, allowing his young wife to rest on him as he gradually descended and deftly brought her to solid ground below.

“Honey, look…” He at once revealed the tunnel entrance, to which Maria responded with both curiosity and a measure of anxiety.

“I wonder,” she mused, “if these tunnels are connected to the legends that have surrounded this forest. When I was just a lass myself, my family spirited me away from danger through a hidden tunnel like this; the soldiers used them to ferry supplies into their forts, while the villagers used them to slip away.”

“A possibility worth considering,” replied Karl laconically, as he meditated on the idea. “If refugees have used this path to escape harm—what better way to conceal their tracks, than to spread false rumors about demons and night creatures, to deter any pursuers into the Katzenwald? I suspect that wherever this leads, we should follow.”

Maria approached the edge of the entryway, her weary but focused eyes studying the corridor which it spawned. It was illuminated somehow, its floor gradually climbing and angling abruptly leftward. She wavered as she tested the threshold, kneeling momentarily to examine its surface and borders. After a moment’s further hesitation, she quickly resolved to lead the way in. “We must not lose any time, my love,” she said, rising to her feet again and turning toward Karl, who nodded his assent. “This is firm ground, and the tunnel should hide our paces from Count Robert. Hopefully, these passages will lead us through the foothills to the east; this path may be our salvation.”

The corridor was broad, its meandering course guided by what appeared to be rococo-styled oil lamps, discharging their light in a kaleidoscope of hues baffling to untrained eyes. The tunnel’s walls periodically boasted elaborate, often inscrutable ornamentation aimed at an equally inscrutable audience: ancient forged tools, antiquarian maps, and messages carved in a mysterious, exotic-appearing script. The passageway bent and twisted beneath the hilltops, rising and falling with each little peak and dale amidst the mountains.

The couple’s unwitting journey continued for miles and grew ever more mystifying with each marvel they encountered. At times, they traversed artificial caves filled with menageries of crystals and subterranean streams that seemed to flicker with an otherworldly glimmer. On other occasions, they emerged into sculpted open plains or terraced, Colosseum-like structures overlooked by a tapestry of mirrors and lenses. Crafted with mind-boggling precision, the devices filtered the rays from the waning sun or the awakening stars, with the entire array flanked by footpaths that burrowed once again into the seemingly endless tunnels. Nearly overtaken by wonderment, the couple finally arrived at a humble downward incline, passing through a misty corridor into a yawning valley amidst the hilltops, their eyes widening in awe at the scene before them.

“Perhaps,” began Karl as he caught his breath, turning in bemused disbelief toward his equally exhausted wife, “you were right about our eventual destination Maria, on far more levels than either of us imagined.” She cast a quizzical gaze toward her husband, to which he responded in laconic understatement. “Our salvation.”

May 5, 1643, 7:28 p.m.

Marienburg Valley, Katzenwald Forest, Holy Roman Empire

Karl and Maria stood atop a shallow and gently declining ridge, an immense plateau laid out before them—its vastness concealed amongst layered rings of towering, mist-shrouded mountain peaks on all sides. At one edge of its periphery was a ravine that sloped abruptly downward into a lake housing pristine waters, while majestic spruce and firs ringed its borders near the surrounding hills. The immense valley resembled a town in itself, with well-kept roads and fields yielding vital crops. Several streams coursed about the vast expanse, fed by rainfall draining off the mountains’ slopes themselves and collecting in the lake. Most intriguing, however, was the sight just ahead of the awestruck couple: an enormous, castle-like fortress near the center of the yawning valley, a fusion of Romanesque ingenuity and the Byzantine complexity of an impregnable stronghold. Several paths led into the structure from a series of passes in the mountains, each of them ensconced for most of their length by a thick line of flanking trees.

“Whoever inhabits this place,” said Maria, her mind still struggling to absorb what her eyes were conveying, “I suspect they were not intending for us on the outside to know of its very existence.”

“Yes,” replied Karl, biting his lower lip slightly, “which is why I harbor doubts about the reception we shall receive. But night is falling, and this place may be our only refuge for the night.”

Maria offered a vacillating nod, concurring with both his plan and his doubts. Cautiously, the two of them made their way toward the fortress, soon arriving at one of its stylized entrances. To their surprise, the gate seemed to be open, leading into a labyrinthian series of corridors inside.

The threshold of the castle was designed in a cryptic, elliptical form with carvings etched about its flanking stone walls, resembling those the couple had observed on the borders of the preceding tunnels. The keystone at the top of the entrance bore a strange symbol, resembling a pair of ferocious hawks perched atop bizarre objects vaguely resembling large eggs in a grotesquely distorted shape. For once, Maria and Karl reacted with curious indifference to the disorienting unfamiliarity all about them; at this point, they could look forward only to resting their exhausted bodies in this oasis of civilization, oddly planted in the uncharted heart of the Katzenwald.

They edged forward, tentatively as before, setting foot within the cavern-like hallway just beyond the threshold of the fortress. There were bizarre structures about the walls, not merely carvings but framed rectangles in the form of paintings, filled with panels comprised of what appeared to be segmented glass with notched patterns on the surfaces. There were metallic doors sealing off a series of adjacent chambers, and a maze of corridors and subsidiary passages leading away from the main hall. As the couple nervously advanced, they crossed one of the junctures in the corridor, at which point their ears rang with the disapproving chords of a human voice nearby.

“Halt! Stop where you are, both of you!”

Karl anticipated such a reaction, but his heart filled with apprehension nonetheless. A man with his face and body obscured in a draping brown outfit, resembling a monk’s cowl, emerged from a passage just to their left and stood before them. “What are the two of you doing here? How did you find this place?” he demanded.

Instinctively, Maria knelt down with a silent Karl by her side, both of them bowing their heads in a gesture of deference. “Please, sir,” she began, “we beg your mercy. We are from the village of Herbstmond nearby. Our homes, our entire village were overrun by an invading army, and we had no choice but to flee into the Katzenwald if we were to escape their pursuit. We knew nothing of this place; we happened upon the tunnels, and thus we were led here.”

The man in the cowl stood stolidly before them, without uttering a word. Pearls of sweat coalesced on Karl’s forehead and Maria shuddered slightly, as the couple awaited the intentions of the taciturn figure before them. “Please, stand,” he finally said. “What are your names?”

“I am Karl,” said the cobbler, with a touch of lingering trepidation, as he and Maria rose to their feet. “This is my wife, Maria.”

The man nodded solemnly, before dropping the hood of his cloak to reveal himself to his unexpected guests. He was of uncommon height and build, with slightly uneven shoulders but otherwise uncannily upright in his posture, as though projecting authority with his stance alone. His jaw and chin were sharp and well-demarcated, and he sported a carefully-trimmed beard of a vaguely orange hue. The man’s hair, blond and tinged with red, was straight and closely-cropped in a Roman imperial style, reminiscent of classical statues depicting the Caesars. He appeared to be in his late 30s, his face and demeanor a curious hybrid of the scholar and the warrior, his left cheek emblazoned with a distinctive crescent-shaped scar coursing down from his upper jaw. Most notable, however, were his eyes—ice-blue orbs that seemed to reflect and embody everything shined into them, like the surface of a clear lake near the shoreline.

“They call me,” he said, “Christoph der Augenspiegel. This, all around you, is the Schloss Heilbrunnen.”

“The Heilbrunnen castle?” queried Karl, soon fixing his gaze on the attire of the mysterious man. “Is this a monastery of some sort?”

“In a manner of speaking,” responded Christoph in a cryptic tone. “All of us here, are indeed involved in an undertaking that demands the most strenuous devotion—far away from the core of the very civilization we are sworn to protect.”

Maria and Karl eyed each other obliquely, puzzled at their host’s inscrutable references. “So then,” began Maria tentatively, “the legends about the Katzenwald…”

“All our doing,” interrupted the man in the cowl. “We have inhabited Schloss Heilbrunnen for hundreds of years, and we needed to ensure that we could carry on our work here, unimpeded by outside intrusions. So we fostered the myths about the forest to discourage others from treading these paths. Some of us even posed as villagers, merchants, soldiers from the surrounding towns, and feigned a calamity of some sort, vanishing in the Katzenwald to convince the outside of the supposed veracity of the claims. We walk among you; our tunnels even extend into the homes, the unused wells of the communities all about the forest, so that we can transport supplies here. But otherwise, we live off the land that surrounds this place, the Valley of Marienburg as we call it, and meet all our needs from its abundance.”

The couple continued to look on without uttering a word, a trace of angst streaming through their minds as they pondered the circumstances of their own unwitting intrusion—and whoever may have pursued them therein. The same thought was not far from the mind of their host. “You said you were fleeing an attack on Herbstmond. Were the two of you followed here?”

May 5, 1643, 7:28 p.m.

Friedensbach Creek, Katzenwald Forest, Holy Roman Empire

“All of you in the sapper team up there, dragoons, lieutenants: I want you to ferry the siege equipment from the ridge above, one item at a time, to our position here next to this tunnel. Create a ramp for the heavier devices, and disassemble what you must for the time being. Each of you should climb down the latter as we move the equipment into the tunnel and assist with the transport. There’s no telling what we’ll face inside those passages, but if our conclusions are grounded, these corridors are designed for precisely this purpose. Now, to work! The twilight is upon us.” Nathaniel rested momentarily against the wall by the stream bank as activity buzzed around him, slowly turning in a gesture of persistent incredulity to his dubious ally nearby. “It would seem, Sir Robert, that your hunches about this forest may prove true after all.”

“Yes,” responded the bloody-minded count and field commander, with a soupcon of ironic satisfaction, “and what greater reward, than to have my suspicions confirmed by my valued ally, the venerated General Bonifacius himself.”

Nathaniel turned squarely toward his taunting colleague, addressing him with an earnest scowl. “Remember, Robert, our alliance ends after tonight, whatever we encounter on the other side of those tunnels.”

“Why so solemn, my dear Nathaniel? The coming demise of our common foe should inspire rejoicing! And I intend to relish every moment of it.” Robert grinned with malice and anticipation as he removed a dagger from its holster, whetting its blade to the sharpest of edges against the rocks that abutted the entrance to the corridor. Nathaniel stared grimly at his fellow commander but said nothing, proceeding at once to assist in the tasks of the moment.

**************************************

“We’ll need to prepare the fortifications, seal off the tunnels, ready ourselves for battle even if we are blessed enough to escape it tonight,” said Christoph to his two guests, leading them vigorously through the maze of corridors that laced the castle. They passed amongst a frenzied, motley array of figures—many clad in the same monk-like cowl as that worn by their host himself—rushing about the halls, arming themselves and readying for the feared clash ahead. “Those of us who dwell here in Heilbrunnen, we train for such contingencies and can defend ourselves if necessary, but this is not a military stronghold; we’ve relied for centuries on our secrecy, and the sheer remoteness of this place, to carry on our work undisturbed. We are yet untested in a prolonged siege.”

“But sir,” replied Karl in mild protest, “we never actually saw Robert’s men tracking us into the forest. We did fear his pursuit when we heard some activity near the western edge of the woods; that is why Maria and I set off in such haste, and stumbled upon your tunnels. Yet we never truly witnessed his presence.”

“Given the history and intentions of Count Robert, you were justified in your precautions. What we are pursuing on these grounds—it is far too important to leave anything to chance, and so we must take the same measures.”

“I still fail to see why Robert would pursue such a vigorous offensive against… two frightened peasants fleeing into the forest.”

“It is not the two of you who draw his wrath,” responded Christoph, finally halting and turning to address his visitors directly. “He thirsts for vengeance against Prince Philip, as both of you are already aware, and Robert has unfortunately concluded that you have blazed the trail to find him.”

“Us?” inquired Maria, as distraught as she was incredulous.

“Robert is hunting his archenemy with an infernal determination,” explained their host, “and he seems to have decided that Prince Philip is sheltering himself here, within the confines of the Katzenwald. He must have followed both of you in the expectation that you would lead him to Philip’s supposed hideout in the forest. It is a horrid misunderstanding, and this entire earthly realm may pay a bitter price for it.”

The ominous words stunned his two guests into an anxious silence; without elaborating, he proceeded matter-of-factly to lead them down the passages of the fortress to an unknown destination. As they veered leftward at a corner of the long corridor, Christoph abruptly halted his progress as a heavy-set uniformed man, bearing a musket atop his right shoulder and a businesslike grimace on his face, approached the three of them at the bend. “Dr. Augenspiegel, we have a report,” he said, facing squarely in Christoph’s direction.

“What is it, Alexander?” queried the glassy-eyed man in the monk’s cowl.

“Our scouts at the northwestern passages—they’ve confirmed that Robert is leading his men here, dozens of them. They’ve found the tunnels, and it appears that General Bonifacius himself is among them. His sappers are part of the siege team.”

Christoph gnashed his teeth together and seethed, absorbing implications that he dearly wished had never entered his mind. “Good work,” he said stoically, attempting to deflect his own mounting concern. “Issue an order to the forward defense battalions, to post the musketeers in sniper positions surrounding each of the possible entry points. Have the engineers collapse the tunnels leading in from their positions in the northwest; we’ll supply ourselves from the south and east tunnels if need be.”

“Should we send a negotiating party?”

“If they gain access to the valley through the tunnels, we should try an appeal to General Bonifacius; presuming that we can trust the reports our scouts have assembled on him, he is likely to be a reluctant participant in this operation. But I’m afraid it may not yield much, Alexander; if Robert is convinced that Philip is sheltering here, not even the direct word of God would disabuse him of the notion. We are in the path of the storm that he brings, and there is likely nothing that can spare us now.”

Alexander sighed ruefully, pausing before completing the briefing. “What about the observatories, sir?” he said, casting an ambiguous glance in Karl and Maria’s direction.

Christoph wavered in a moment of indecision, flustered by the impossible dilemma now cast upon his shoulders. “Send lookouts to the Khayyam and bar Hiyya observatories; try to obstruct or divert Robert’s forces in case they send detachments there. These two villagers from Herbstmond,” he said, gesturing toward his guests, “seem to have passed through the von Peuerbach observatory; it lies on the most direct route from the Friedensbach Creek, where they first entered the tunnels, and so Robert’s army will likely be traveling that way. Dispatch a recovery team to retrieve the optical grids and whatever other findings the instruments have collected in the past month, then seal the exits; we may lose von Peuerbach if the siege party blasts through it, but we have to buy ourselves more time to prepare.”

Alexander nodded brusquely, then disappeared along the angle of the corridor behind Christoph and his guests.

“What have we done?” asked a crestfallen Karl, bowing his head as unsettling thoughts raced through his mind. “We brought those fiends here, didn’t we?”

“You are not responsible for this,” replied Christoph in a calmly soothing tone, as he resumed the group’s march down the yawning passages of the castle. “Both of you acted in a manner befitting anyone in such desperate straits, in these wretched times which it is our curse to inhabit,” he continued, his gaze drifting slightly toward Maria’s belly; although it was not yet visibly distended, he had come to infer and sympathize with the couple’s plight. “Robert is a man obsessed with revenge, his rage against his adversary so all-consuming that he would slaughter entire communities for the mere suspicion of aiding Prince Philip, even unwillingly; the nuances matter not to him. This is why he set Sankt Florian ablaze, and then unleashed his Hell upon your village itself.”

“Why?” asked Maria in plaintive disbelief. “How did this start? Why must he continue this blood feud?”

“It is the unmatched fury of a bitter apostate, turning against everything and everyone he once believed in,” explained their host in a deep, pensive tone. “Robert was once a man of letters in his youth, a charming and cultured nobleman adored by the courtiers and the ladies about the palace. He had even been a personal friend of Prince Philip the August himself; they were riding and sparring partners in their youth. Then the war came, and Robert answered what he thought was his call to duty, everyone believing that the hostilities would cease decades ago with a treaty perhaps no later than 1625 in the Year of our Lord. But the hostilities dragged on, unresolved and smoldering, and Philip himself took up his standard, fighting in opposition to Robert. When a clash of arms carries on for so long, when it wreaks so much ruin on our civilization, it acquires its own mind, and perverts that of its most ardent participants. Even our own brethren across Europe, their efforts joined with ours in Heilbrunnen, have not escaped the bitter divisions and resentments of this conflict.”

“So Robert and his erstwhile friend,” inquired Karl, “eventually faced off on the field of battle?”

“Yes, six years ago to the northwest, in the Schlacht von Buxhoeveden—one of the bloodiest engagements of this carnage waged in God’s name. Robert set out to besiege the fortress in the Buxhoeveden township, where Philip had gathered his forces, but it was a trap. Philip’s cavalry bolted from the forest while his infantry took the high ground, raining salvos on their foes; then, they sent flaming tar pouring down upon Robert’s army from the surrounding hillsides. Robert was burned across much of his body; his face was spared, but it too bore scars from the combat against Philip. Somehow he survived, even as the soul of a once noble man perished inside.”

“And so,” interjected Maria, in a melancholy realization, “Robert now seeks his retribution, no matter the cruelty that he must perpetrate to taste it.”

“Correct,” replied Christoph. “Since that battle, he has lived for nothing more than vengeance against his old friend, establishing alliances of convenience with others who hope to end the war by defeating the prince. Such a tragic irony, since our own spies have learned that Philip is already on the verge of laying down his arms. His allies have fallen, his subsides have vanished; he likely persists in his fight, only out of fear for the reckoning that Robert would visit upon him, were he to disband his armies. And now it seems,” he concluded bitterly, “that we in Heilbrunnen are about to pay the price for Robert’s bloodlust, aimed at a man who knows nothing of this place.”

As their host finished speaking, he halted at a wide, arched entrance to a chamber like nothing that his guests had witnessed before. It appeared to be constructed directly into the rockface of the hills surrounding the Marienburg Valley, and its size alone defied comprehension. It contained a central passage flanked by Greek columns that continued well into the distance, more palatial than even the most extravagant royal banquet hall of the era. There were lamps on the walls that drew illumination from an unknown source, as bands of what appeared to be bottled lightning ringed the chamber on every side. There was a structure beckoning from the distance, scintillating as the rays from an unseen source glinted off its surface—a fountain of some sort, yet one in which the water seemingly rose and tumbled down the surface of its own will and intent, deviating from its prescribed path.

To Karl’s eyes, the area immediately beyond the entrance was reminiscent of a blacksmith’s workshop, crossed with the chaotic productivity of an artist’s atelier. There were a number of figures inside shuffling about, working or engaged in inaudible yet apparently vigorous conversation. Most of them were shrouded within monks’ habits or concealed within the cloaks sported by local nobility, yet a few were unhooded, their facial features indistinct in the dim and hazy illumination of the room. Most perplexingly, there were frames about the walls resembling those that Karl had first glimpsed upon entering the castle, as well as what appeared to be mirrors, with busy individuals standing intently before them. Letters, numbers, even complicated symbols of some sort flitted about the panels circumscribed by the frames and mirrors—boggling the mind of the two untrained observers. Some of the figures inside cast a quizzical gaze toward Karl and Maria, as they were doubtless not accustomed to visitors in the chamber; yet in the urgency of the moment, they quickly returned to their prior tasks.

“Maria, Karl, wait here by the entrance of this room. I need to confer with the Ritusleiter here; he’s the leader of our efforts at Heilbrunnen. I can’t foresee how much time we’ll have before Robert and his forces storm the ramparts, but it’s too dangerous for you to stay here.”

“Where can we go?” inquired Maria nervously.

“To Kirchenburg; it’s one of the neutral sanctuary towns amidst the raging passions of this war, and we have allies there who can take you in. Our tunnels lead directly from the Marienburg Valley into the forests to the east, and the trails there will take you to the city. We’ll provide you with food and supplies, and an escort; there are some items, of inestimable value, that we’ll have to send along with you.”

Maria and Karl met their host with an expression of bafflement at yet another cryptic, unsettling reference to the shadowy activities in Heilbrunnen; they said nothing, as Christoph swiftly made his way toward another cloaked figure in the midst of the bustling whir and hum of the chamber. Their conversation seemed serious enough to require some mutual gesticulation, and the two men continued for another two minutes before Christoph, with a concluding nod, made his way back to his guests. The Ritusleiter, for his part, signaled a trio of other men within the chamber, who quickly exited with a burst of urgency out a concealed egress in the chamber’s left side.

“Come with me,” said Christoph, addressing his two bewildered visitors. “Naturally, we have no guest quarters in Heilbrunnen, but we have a room nearby where the two of you can eat, drink, and rest awhile before you disembark.” He led them around a sharp turn, before fetching a skeleton key within his cowl and using it to open a vault-like door leading into a recessed chamber. He immediately proceeded ahead of his two guests, into a conspicuously large wardrobe at the back of the room, returning with garments that he set before Karl and Maria. “You’ll need to change into some dry clothes before your night journey; Kirchenburg is more than a day’s voyage on horseback. Rest for now; hopefully we’ll be able to hold off the hordes for another few hours. I’ll return when the caravan is ready to depart for Kirchenburg.”

Christoph moved quickly to shut the chamber door and tend to the fortifications that were desperately being assembled. Karl and Maria changed into their new attire, then seated themselves on a cot not far from the entrance, collapsing in each other’s arms in a mixture of apprehension and sheer exhaustion.

May 5, 1643, 11:26 p.m.

Schloss Heilbrunnen, Katzenwald Forest, Holy Roman Empire

“Maria, Karl! Please, you must come quickly—Robert’s forces have already breached our defenses, far sooner than we expected.” Christoph’s booming voice reverberated throughout the windowless room, waking the couple from a distressingly abbreviated slumber. Their blood curdled as the howls of battle emanated from unseen corners in the valley, permeating the dark corridors of the castle. “Hurry,” he continued, “we’ll have to avoid the main halls; they’re already swarming in!”

Christoph clasped a lantern as he ushered the couple out the room and darted right, the tumultuous ring of battle echoing through the cavernous maws of the corridor. They quickly bolted into another hall to the right, and after passing a brief series of locked rooms, they turned once again in the same direction, slipping into an artfully concealed corridor tucked behind a narrow archway. From there, they traversed a dizzying maze of nested passages and camouflaged rooms until halting at a spot they had previously glimpsed only from a hazy distance: The back of the long, mysterious chamber where Christoph had earlier stopped to confer with the Ritusleiter, behind that strange fountain with its eerie glint and leaping streams of water.

As Maria peered in to glimpse the fountain, she doubled back in a startled fright; the shine on the water’s surface was not a reflection, but the fountain illuminating itself. Apparent within those fluorescing streams, gushing with such urgency from an unfathomable source, were the seeming contours of distorted faces in all manners of expression—whether human or demonic, Maria was not sure. She stifled a scream as Christoph reflexively turned toward her, before shifting his gaze immediately to the left and facing another cowled figure emerging from the shadows beyond the columns.

“Please, don’t take fright,” said Christoph in a rushed tone, attempting to reassure the startled couple. “This is Georg von Liebig, the Ritusleiter of Heilbrunnen with whom I was speaking earlier. He’ll help usher you to safety.”

The man removed his cloak, revealing a bald pate and greenish eyes that seemed to glow faintly even amidst the dull light of the chamber. He uttered nothing but gestured toward the couple to follow him, a deceptive equanimity on his face masking an implacable fear of their deadly adversary already streaming into the fortress. The group moved still farther toward the rear of the chamber, reaching a back wall that deceived the eye—appearing to wave and seethe in the dim, strangely pulsating light of the area. Georg placed his hands against the wall and gripped notches carefully scored within it, like a blind man groping his way around an unfamiliar room, yet in a clearly purposeful and determined fashion that puzzled the couple as they looked on. Suddenly, a spiraling gap appeared in a portion of the wall and expanded outward. The fissure grew as if impatiently seeking an edge until it had reached the floor, leaving an opening large enough for human passage.

“Should we seal the entrance to the chamber, Georg?” queried Christoph.

“Not yet; unless they’ve been detained, Jan and the other high officials are on their way as we speak, to help us protect the artifacts.” Christoph nodded as Georg turned his attention to their two guests.

The Ritusleiter motioned toward Karl and Maria, as the group stepped into the rear chamber. “We are now deep within the eastern hills bordering on the Marienburg Valley. There’s a trapdoor at the back of this room which will lead you into tunnels that exit on the opposite slope of the hillside. Your escort to Kirchenburg will be at the departure point.”

The Ritusleiter was jarred by an unexpected sound resonating within the vast hall behind them, whirling rapidly to his right like a feral cat ever alert to an attacker. Seeing nothing, he eased back toward his guests. “Dr. Augenspiegel and I will lead you through the room. We cannot allow outsiders to see what is contained within these grounds, and so the only light within the chamber will flow from the devices within our hands; make sure to stay close by.” He and Christoph reached into small pouches that they had carried into the chamber, simultaneously fastening them to a sash of their cowls; each emerged with an object resembling a finely crafted amulet, carved meticulously with overlapping rings that immediately began to emit a soft blue light from within.

“You must follow this light as we advance,” continued Georg. “Do not allow your eyes to wander, and keep your hands close together; you must absolutely not touch anything within the room.” The couple nodded meekly at the firm yet mysterious command, shuddering as they looked on with groggy, bloodshot eyes.

**************************************

“Robert, can’t you see? They were imparting the truth when they parleyed with us at the castle entrance. Philip is not here, he was never here!” The two grizzled soldiers sped down the ample passage of the evacuated main chamber of the castle, their eyes dumbfounded by the objects around them even as the chaos of the battle raged in the burning corridors behind.

“You trust the monks in this place, dear Nathaniel?” queried Robert cynically, his attention briefly drawn to the unearthly fountain in the back of the room. “Whether they be alchemists, or black magicians, or conjurers of some other sort, they clearly harbor many secrets on these premises.”

“Philip’s presence is not one of them!” exclaimed Nathaniel, halting in his tracks near an elaborately-styled wall, with a lotus motif at its edges. “There has been no sign whatsoever of the prince’s legions, his standards, his royal retinue or his honor guard; even if he were hiding out, Robert, he would leave some token of his presence!”

“I will not stop now!” growled Robert, angrily pressing his colleague against the wall. “Philip has eluded my clutches far too many times, Nathaniel. He could only be here, in the Katzenwald; and if not at this moment, then he has certainly received succor upon these premises many times before.”

“Your obsession, Robert, has driven you to madness. I will not let you butcher still more innocents in your loathsome quest!”

Nathaniel suddenly groaned as his eyes widened, blood spattering upon the sculpted stone lotuses of the wall behind him. He slowly sank to the floor, wheezing as Robert removed the dagger that he had plunged beneath the general’s left shoulder.

“You,” said Robert menacingly, standing before his fallen ally, “will have no say in the course of this battle, dear Nathaniel. But fear not, for your coveted peace will come soon enough.”

**************************************

The brief journey to the end of the darkened chamber was interminably distressing to Maria and Karl. Wandering thoughts about their unseen surroundings discomfited them as much as their fear of being detected by the marauders overrunning the compound. The dull bluish light from their guides’ devices was enhanced only by a flickering source along a back wall in the distance, pulsating in a strangely sinister red and violet pattern—as though stemming from a pair of eyes clandestinely watching them. The room’s unsettling effect on the senses was amplified by faint, eerie music that streamed in from some point beyond the walls; like a will o’ the wisp, it faded in and out, tantalizing its listeners as it refused to disclose its secrets, and slinking from earshot the more vigorously one strained to detect it. The odors in the chamber were similarly elusive; like goblins taunting from the shadows, they seemed to address the couple in a subtle manner that filled them with dread. Yet whatever their message, it never congealed as something they could clutch and hold within their consciousness.

Maria and Karl attempted to set aside the stray musings and concentrate. Only a few minutes more, they thought, and they would embark upon a long-sought path to a protected realm, free of the turmoil and ruin that the war had visited upon so many wretched souls trapped in its merciless march. As they continued their steady progress, the couple gasped as their surroundings unexpectedly began to manifest themselves out of the darkness.

The chamber was filled with metallic, mineral, and glass objects arranged in bizarre geometries and scattered about its left side, as though materializing from a nightmare: Assemblages of interlocking spirals with fine wires converging at unseen vanishing points; amorphous and blob-like objects covered with surfaces constantly folding in upon each other; and rows of tablets in stone and clay, etched with strange symbols and depictions that chilled the spine despite their inscrutability. Most shockingly, the room was populated with large, irregularly formed stones, vaguely reminiscent of oversized eggs yet curving inward to form countless layers, and inscribed with still another series of symbols arrayed in a pattern of unknown significance.

The otherworldly conundrums of the room quickly faded in the face of a danger far more immediate and terrifying—the source of the light that had suddenly shone upon objects that were not intended for outside eyes. The answer became jarringly clear as a lantern neared the group, borne by a singed hand that illuminated a scarred, grim countenance.

“Count Robert!” exclaimed Christoph as their antagonist drew his saber.

“So pleased,” grinned the man maliciously, “to see that my reputation precedes me even within such a majestic hall of mystery. Tell me, how long has Prince Philip known of this place? I must say, I could never fault his choice of refuge.”

“We told you and your men at the tunnel,” replied Georg in a harsh voice, “that Philip has never been to these grounds and would never be accepted here; you have no idea what you are endangering! Our work at Heilbrunnen far transcends all the petty quarrels and the spilled blood that you indulge in so verily, Robert, and it has long been our guiding principle, to never jeopardize our efforts here on behalf of anyone on the outside, you or the prince.”

“Petty quarrels, sir? Is that what you think this is? If you will not deliver Philip to me,” he continued, brandishing his saber as he set the lantern aside, “then I shall have to feed my sword with the blood of others!”

“Karl, Maria! Stay back!” Georg yelled to his two guests as he and Christoph quickly took hold of metal staffs perched against the side wall with the unearthly objects. A bitter clash broke out before the terrified couple, their horror amplified by the disorienting confusion of the darkness and the cacophonous exchange before them. Metal clashed amid the grunts of battle and nearby articles toppling to the rigid stone floor, a blizzard of rage and fury that soon gave way to an even more sickening sound—that of the Ritusleiter himself, shouting in agony as he slumped to the floor.

“Georg!” called out Christoph, perceiving a terrible event that remained out of view of the cowering couple behind. He and Robert resumed their pitched fighting, Christoph’s voice calling out with each blow he attempted to land on his bitter foe, who nonetheless succeeded in parrying every one of his opponent’s srikes. Suddenly, the room filled with the sound of a body crashing into rows of tumbling metal next to the wall bordering the bizarre objects; Maria and Karl were initially unsure of the victim, but their question received a dreadful answer when the lantern quickly approached them again, illuminating a bloody blade clearly intended for them.

“Stop!” Karl lunged at Robert, pinning him against the right wall and attempting to dislodge his saber, but he was thrown back against the opposite side with a force of extraordinary might. The bloodthirsty count immediately turned his attention to Maria, who desperately groped about the wall in search of an escape, but soon fell before the approach of her deadly pursuer. As Robert neared, she instinctively kicked out, tumbling her attacker to the ground and bloodying his forehead as she continued to pound away. But he regained his footing while she attempted to scramble away, grasping her ankle and drawing her toward him. He quickly bounded forward and knelt down like a predator before the pounce, angling the blade of his saber to thrust into his intended victim.

“No!” Karl, arisen again, abruptly tackled the man and pushed him hard into one of the bizarre stone objects lining the right wall. Robert winced as his frenzied opponent vigorously struck him with his bare hands, to the point of bloodying his own fists as they occasionally contacted the unyielding armor that surrounded and protected the count’s body. Robert pushed back, sending the two men spinning and crashing against the wall and the various objects set alongside it. As they carried on their violent scuffle, they eventually reached a strange pillar acting as a platform for an eerie, encased glass orb housing a dark, turbid fluid within its thin walls. Their bitter struggle brought them to the edge of the casing, crushing it and sending the orb flying backward—cracking it open against the hard floor and releasing its contents, a dark and swirling mist, directly in the vicinity of a still shell-shocked Maria, perched on one knee against the left wall. Upon taking in the noxious vapors, she collapsed abruptly to the ground, her apparently lifeless body sprawled supine before her terrified husband.

“Maria, my God!”

In the brief moment that Karl took to witness the unfolding horror, Robert seized the opportunity to strike him hard with his gloved right hand, sending the young man spilling helplessly to the ground. At once, he seized Karl by the hair and lifted him, the cobbler’s bruised face and bleeding lip grimacing in agony. “You, boy, have hindered me one too many times today!” said Robert, raising his sword and preparing the coup de grace.

Before he could, a metal rod struck Robert forcefully on the back of the head, shattering his helmet and sending him and his sword crumpling to the ground. Karl, dazed and bewildered by the recent turn of events, instinctively gripped Robert’s lantern and rushed over to his wife, desperately trying to detect her breathing or other signs of life.

Christoph, bleeding from his forehead but having regained consciousness, reached for an oil lamp amidst the now-scattered items in the bloody, disheveled chamber. He rushed to its right wall and knelt down next to his friend Georg, who was biting down on a small flint-like object, dulling the pain as he sought to stanch the bleeding from a gash in his lower left torso, just above his hip. “Christoph, I—I can take care of this; please, go and check the others.”

Christoph nodded reluctantly after a moment’s hesitation, proceeding quickly to a point a few paces ahead, where another fallen man lay collapsed in pain against the side wall, feebly clutching the iron staff that had felled Robert the Brute. “General Bonifacius!” remarked the man in the cowl as Nathaniel grimaced in pain, blood oozing out from his left collarbone. “Here,” he continued, retrieving a clean cloth from amongst the room’s fallen articles, “press hard right there, just above the wound—it’ll slow the bleeding.”

Nathaniel nodded meekly but said nothing, still struggling to breathe between attempts to tend to his own shoulder. To Christoph’s surprise, the Ritusleiter—still nursing his own wound—had risen up, slowly advancing to help the badly injured field commander. At once, Christoph moved to address his charge once again. “General Bonifacius, you saved the lives of two people here, and I have to help them now; hold on, we won’t be leaving you.” He again nodded silently, as the man with the glassy eyes rushed over to help the cobbler and his wife.

“Christoph,” began Karl in a frantic voice, as he cradled his wife in his arms, “she’s not breathing; please, help her!” Himself baffled by what he was seeing, Christoph scanned the vicinity with his oil lamp, quickly laying his eyes upon the fragmented glass orb, its shards littering the corridor next to them.

“My God,” he said, momentarily paralyzed by the shock of the moment. Instinctively, he turned Maria to her side and lifted her left eyelid, gingerly holding the oil lamp to elicit a frail indication that she was still alive.

Suddenly, to the joint surprise of the two men knelt beside her, Maria’s pupils widened rapidly; she then drew her legs to her abdomen in an abrupt motion while heaving deeply to take in air. She coughed and gasped audibly as they both cradled her shoulders, helping her gradually into a seated position, her back leaning against one of the peculiar stone objects near the left wall. “Maria! Thank God, I thought…” Karl cupped her cheeks in his hands and then gently embraced her as she struggled to do the same, still adjusting to the already disorienting circumstances of their dim surroundings. “Christoph,” said Karl, pivoting obliquely in the cowled man’s direction and gesturing toward the shattered orb, “what happened? What was inside that thing?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know myself, Karl; it’s one of the puzzles that we ourselves have been…”

“Christoph! Please, come here,” called out a voice from behind them.

“Maria, Karl, can you stand?” queried Christoph to the couple.

Sore and bruised themselves, they slowly rose up, following their guide and kneeling beside the wounded Georg von Liebig, who was still tending to the even more severely injured commander reclining against the wall beneath them.

“You… don’t have much time,” gasped Nathaniel, struggling to infuse breath into his words as he clenched his teeth through the pain. “It’s Robert—he already issued the order to his men, to set this castle ablaze and slaughter everyone inside. Not even I can hold them back for long. You, both of you,” he continued, turning toward the cobbler and the milkmaid from Herbstmond, “you must… depart this place as soon as you can.”

“Thank you,” said Karl, in a grateful nod to the wounded general.

“Christoph,” said Georg with an eye on the shattered orb, as his colleague moved to guide the couple to the exit, “I finally understand what the riddle has been trying to tell us, all this time. Please, go and retrieve the Tablet of Roland, and keep it in the convoy that will bring our guests to Kirchenburg.” Christoph nodded in businesslike fashion, disappearing for a moment into the darkness at the rear of the chamber.

“Maria, Karl,” continued the Ritusleiter, wincing as he turned to address the young couple, “please listen carefully because now, the two of you are a part of this as well, of everything here at Heilbrunnen and that of our predecessors, stretching back many centuries before our time. This caravan will take you to the Church of St. Olaf in Kirchenburg with a number of articles that we’re sending along, most from this very room. There is a monastery there, and the monks at St. Olaf will know what to do. They’ll house and care for you and your child; and over time, they will be forging a number of items that they will then give to you, and which you must ensure to keep in your family—generations and generations into the future. One day, about which we not even we ourselves can conjecture, they will become essential for…” He gnashed his teeth and heaved, as pain continued to throb and course throughout the left side of his body.

“Georg, please, rest,” said Christoph, arriving back at the Ritusleiter’s side while carrying a large clay tablet, bearing images and messages in an unfamiliar script carved meticulously upon its surface. Karl and Maria, despite the exhaustion etched on their wan and drained faces, reacted with unsettled wonder at the object. “I’ve sealed the entrance to the artifact chamber; that will hopefully buy us more time before the rest of Robert’s hordes show up. Are you sure you can handle things here yourself?”

“I’m fine, Christoph,” replied Georg breathlessly. “I’ll take care of General Bonifacius, as best I can. Please, go; bring our two guests to the convoy safely.”

“Good luck, brother,” he responded, grasping Georg’s hand to reassure him before at last shepherding the couple to the back of the chamber. He retrieved a pair of small rectangular pins from the pouch affixed to his cowl, each with a highly stylized motif on one end, and placed them both within corresponding receptacles of a hidden panel on the ground. “Stand back,” he said to Karl and Maria, turning the pins simultaneously to reveal an opening—resembling an opened trap door—beneath the panel, leading to a well-illuminated tunnel below. “Come, this way.”

**************************************

Mere minutes had passed before the couple—bruised, exhausted, and overwhelmed by the inexplicable tide of recent events—finally stumbled out a nondescript exit on the eastern side of Schloss Heilbrunnen. They were on the other side of the hills, near a small stream that ducked into a cavern, eventually feeding into the castle. Christoph preceded them, leading the way to a camouflaged path buried in the midst of some thorny shrubbery.

As a bright crescent moon nourished the sky with its reflected light, the coos and mating calls of songbirds pierced the nighttime air, oblivious as they were to the bloodbath still raging about the stronghold. Christoph guided his charges to a shallow ravine beyond the shrubbery where a horse-drawn carriage, loaded with provisions and a number of tightly-chained wooden and metallic cases, was ready to decamp for Kirchenburg. As their knees buckled while descending the slope of the ravine, Karl and Maria collapsed almost in unison in the midst of the stress, trauma, and crushing fatigue of their ordeal, lying supine and embracing each other’s hands as they savored a moment by the cool open hillside. Christoph, despite his urgency to bring the couple and the precious items on the carriage to safety, allowed them to rest as he conversed briefly with the carriage’s driver about navigating the treacherous route to Kirchenburg, and protecting the precious cargo being borne thereupon. He then solemnly approached the shell-shocked villagers and helped them to their feet.

“Karl, Maria,” he began, “It pains me that we cannot afford the luxury of a proper farewell here, but you must be going now, as must I. Your own safety depends on it, as does that of far more people than you could imagine at this time.” Christoph glanced at the rising smoke beyond the hills, billowing up from the charred, smoldering scene behind them.

Karl looked somberly upon the stoically calm man in the monk’s cowl, his face betraying a curious amalgam of resignation and fierce resolve. “Christoph,” he said, “Maria and I live today thanks to you. We will honor you with every breath we take.”

Christoph nodded as he prepared to rejoin the maelstrom raging behind him, before abruptly turning to address the couple once more. “Maria, Karl, please wait.” He grabbed hold of what appeared to be a necklace dangling about his collar, its threads virtually invisible before in the dim illumination of the castle. He lifted it to reveal a medallion with engraved symbols, each surrounding two initials in a highly ornate, medieval cursive style: FG.

“Karl, I am giving this to you and Maria. Bring it with you and present it to the abbot at the St. Olaf’s monastery in Kirchenburg.”

Karl took the medallion and briefly inspected it, perplexed at its significance. “Think of this as an invitation,” resumed Christoph, “to an apprenticeship for you and your descendants. Georg himself would want this; both of you have now become intertwined with us, for better or worse.”

Karl, his mind disoriented and his nerves frayed, puzzled briefly about Christoph’s words and what lay ahead in Kirchenburg; but he and Maria appreciated that there was little more to discuss at such an urgent moment. “Thank you Christoph, and Godspeed to you in there. Our prayers are with you.”

Christoph turned and disappeared in the obscurity of the tunnel, as he rushed to rejoin his wounded comrades. Maria and Karl briefly embraced in their relief and exhaustion, then boarded the carriage for their sanctuary beyond the forbidding woods of the Katzenwald forest.

each flanked by footpaths that burrowed back into the seemingly endless tunnels. fascinating with each mile, And and flanked by what appeared to be oil lamps of unusual sophistication to light the way forward. The coupled advanced briskly, carefully noting each of their steps as they progressed. The hall bent unpredictably around, swerving initially leftward, then directly forward for an extended stretch, then leftward again in a direction roughly parallel to the one that Maria and Karl had been tracing above ground. It eventually led down a gentle slope apparently within another hillside, and after an unexpectedly long and taxing procession, the couple emerged outside once again, to behold a spectacular sight before them: an immense open plain just below a ridge upon which they were standing.

The field was set within a concealed stretch of the forest and flanked by majestic spruce and firs springing up from the hills ringing the plain, with both natural and human architecture evident in the wooded canopy above. There were openings within the arboreal tent, and peculiar, mirror-like devices carefully suspended in the cloaking boughs of the pines. A kaleidoscopic array of lights, channeled from the rays of the waning twilight sun, filtered in from lenses mounted into a terraced, wooded edifice overlooking the site, to the left opposite from the couple’s position. An intricate network of exits and entrances had been carved into the surrounding hills, and there were concentric rings of footpaths leading down from a plateau above, like a Roman Colosseum made of clay and stone, and transplanted into the middle of the Katzenwald. The couple looked in their immediate vicinity, realizing that the ridge upon which they were standing formed part of a small earthen patio set off from one of the rings. As extraordinary as the spectacle before them was, they had little time to behold it; night was rapidly approaching, and they needed a place to secure themselves until the next day.

Karl and Maria descended from the patio toward the open plain, then turned rightward, eventually exiting the field via a hillside tunnel that seemed to stand out among its neighbors in its height and depth. This corridor was nearly as lengthy as the one which the couple had traversed before, shifting direction several times at sharp angles and ultimately heading eastward, directly into the mountainous zone that Karl had glimpsed from the footpath before. It branched off in multiple directions at various junctures, but the couple remained along the main path, which seemed to be marked by its sheer breadth and the curiously elaborate wall ornamentation that graced its borders at periodic intervals—replicas and artistic representations of what appeared to be ancient tools, old maps, and messages carved in an inscrutable, exotic text, a kind of historical survey of unknown significance meant for an equally mysterious audience. Finally, the flat course transformed into a steady downward incline, resembling a ramp, leading through a foggy stretch and once again to the outside—revealing a scene that bewildered the couple even more than the one they had just taken in minutes before.

Maria and Karl were now standing at the edge of a deep valley, concealed amongst layered rings of towering, mist-shrouded mountain peaks on all sides. The immense valley resembled a town in itself, with well-kept roads and fields yielding a variety of crops. Several streams coursed about the vast expanse, fed by rainfall draining off the mountains’ slopes themselves. Most intriguing, however, was the sight just ahead of the couple as they emerged from the corridor: an enormous, castle-like fortress near the center of the yawning valley, a fusion of Romanesque ingenuity and the Byzantine complexity of an impregnable stronghold. Several paths led into the structure from a series of passes in the mountains, each of them concealed for most of their length by a thick line of flanking trees.

“Perhaps this is why so many legends have arisen about the forest,” said Maria, her mind still struggling to absorb what her eyes were feeding it. “Whoever inhabits this place—I suspect they were not intending for us on the outside to know of it.”

“Yes,” replied Karl, biting his lower lip slightly, “which is why I harbor doubts about the reception we shall receive. Nevertheless, this place may be our only salvation, at least for the night; we should make our way there.”

Maria looked in his direction and offered a vacillating nod, concurring with both his plan and his doubts. Cautiously, the two of them made their way toward the fortress, soon arriving at one of its stylized entrances. To their surprise, the gate seemed to be open, leading into a labyrinthian series of corridors inside.

The threshold of the castle was designed in a cryptic, elliptical form with carvings etched about its flanking stone walls, resembling those the couple had observed on the sides of the preceding tunnel. The keystone at the top of the entrance bore a strange symbol, resembling a pair of ferocious hawks perched atop bizarre objects vaguely resembling large eggs in a grotesquely distorted shape. For once, Karl and Maria reacted with curious indifference to the disorienting bizarreness all about them; at this point, they could look forward only to resting their exhausted bodies in this oasis of civilization, oddly planted in the uncharted heart of the Katzenwald.

The couple now edged forward even more cautiously than before, setting foot within the cavern-like hallway just beyond the threshold of the fortress. There were strange structures about the walls, not merely carvings but framed rectangles in the form of paintings, filled with panels comprised of what appeared to be segmented glass with notched patterns on the surfaces. There were metallic doors sealing off a series of adjacent chambers, and a maze of corridors and subsidiary passages leading away from the main hall. As Karl and Maria nervously made their way forward, they crossed one of the junctures in the corridor, at which point their ears rang with the disapproving chords of a human voice nearby.

“Halt! Stop where you are, both of you!”

Karl knew this was coming, but his heart filled with apprehension nonetheless. A man with his face and body obscured in a draping brown outfit, resembling a monk’s cowl, emerged from a corridor just to their left and stood before them. “What are the two of you doing here? How did you find this place?” he demanded.

Instinctively, Maria knelt down with Karl by her side, both of them bowing their heads in a gesture of deference. “Please, sir,” she began, “we beg your mercy. We are from the village of Herbstmond nearby. Our homes, our entire village were overrun by an invading army, and we had no choice but to flee into the Katzenwald if we were to escape their wrath. We knew nothing of this place; we happened upon the tunnels, and that is how we were led here.”

The man in the cowl stood stolidly before them, without uttering a word. Pearls of sweat coalesced on Karl’s forehead and Maria shuddered slightly, as the couple awaited the intentions of the taciturn figure before them. “Please, stand,” he finally said. “What are your names?”

“I am Karl,” said the cobbler, with a touch of lingering apprehension, as he and Maria rose to their feet. “This is my wife, Maria.”

The man nodded solemnly, before dropping the hood of his cloak to reveal himself to his unexpected guests. He was of uncommon height, with slightly uneven shoulders but otherwise uncannily upright in his posture, as though projecting authority with his very stance alone. His jaw and chin were sharp and well-demarcated, and he sported a carefully-trimmed beard of a vaguely orange hue. The man’s hair, blond and tinged with red, was straight and closely-cropped in a Roman imperial style, reminiscent of classical statues depicting the Caesars. He appeared to be in his late 30s, his face and demeanor a curious hybrid of the scholar and the warrior, his left cheek emblazoned with a distinctive crescent-shaped scar coursing down from his upper jaw. Most notable, however, were his eyes—ice-blue orbs that seemed to reflect and embody everything shined into them, like the surface of a clear lake near the shoreline.

“They call me,” he said, “Christoph der Augenspiegel. This, all around you, is the Schloss Heilbrunnen.”

“The Heilbrunnen castle?” queried Karl. “Is this a monastery of some sort?”

“In a manner of speaking,” responded Christoph, in cryptic ambiguity. “All of us here, are indeed involved in an undertaking that demands the most strenuous devotion—far away from the core of the very civilization we are sworn to protect.”

Maria and Karl obliquely eyed each other, puzzled at their host’s inscrutable references. “So then,” began Maria tentatively, “the legends about the Katzenwald…”

“All our doing,” replied the man in the cowl. “We have inhabited Schloss Heilbrunnen for hundreds of years, and we needed to ensure that we could carry on our work here, unimpeded by outside intrusions. So we fostered the myths about the forest, to discourage others from treading these paths. Some of us even posed as villagers, merchants, soldiers from the surrounding towns, and feigned a calamity of some sort, vanishing in the Katzenwald to convince the outside of the supposed veracity of the claims. We walk among you; our tunnels even extend into the homes, the unused wells of the communities all about the forest, so that we can transport supplies here. But otherwise, we live off the land that surrounds this place, the Valley of Marienburg as we call it, and meet all our needs from its abundance.”

The couple continued to look on without uttering a word, a trace of angst streaming through their minds as they pondered the circumstances of their own unwitting intrusion—and whoever may have pursued them therein. The same thought was not far from the mind of their host. “You said you were fleeing an attack on Herbstmond. Were the two of you followed here?”

May 5, 1643, 7:28 p.m.

Friedensbach Creek, Katzenwald Forest, Germany

“All of you in the sapper team up there, dragoons, lieutenants: I want you to ferry the siege equipment from the ridge above, one item at a time, to our position here next to this tunnel. Create a ramp for the heavier devices, and disassemble what you must for the time being. We have marked the ladder down to the stream bank; each of you should climb down as we move the equipment into the tunnel and assist with the transport. There’s no telling what we’ll face inside those passages, but if our presumptions are grounded, these corridors are designed for precisely this purpose. Now, to work! Night has already begun to fall.” Nathaniel rested momentarily against the wall by the stream bank as activity buzzed around him, slowly turning in a gesture of persistent incredulity to his dubious ally nearby. “It would seem, Sir Robert, that your hunches about this forest may prove true after all.”

“Yes,” responded the bloody-minded count and field commander, with a soupcon of ironic satisfaction, “and what greater reward, than to have my suspicions confirmed by my valued ally, the venerated General Bonifacius himself.”

Nathaniel turned squarely toward his taunting colleague, addressing him with an earnest scowl. “Remember, Robert, our alliance ends after tonight, whatever we encounter on the other side of those tunnels.”

“Why so solemn, my dear Nathaniel? The coming demise of our common foe should inspire rejoicing! And I intend to relish every moment of it.” Robert grinned with malice and anticipation as he removed a dagger from its holster, whetting its blade to the sharpest of ridges against the rocks that abutted the entrance to the corridor. Nathaniel stared grimly at his fellow commander but said nothing, proceeding at once to assist in the tasks of the moment.

**************************************

“We’ll need to prepare the fortifications, seal off the tunnels, ready ourselves for battle even if it blessedly does not come our way tonight,” said Christoph to his two guests, as he continued his vigorous pace down the maze of corridors that laced the castle. They passed amongst a frenzied, motley array of figures—many clad in the same monk-like cowl as that worn by Christoph himself—rushing about the halls, arming themselves and readying for the feared clash ahead. “Those of us who dwell here in Heilbrunnen, we are trained to defend ourselves if necessary, but this is not a military stronghold; we’ve relied for centuries on our secrecy, and the sheer remoteness of this place, to carry on our work undisturbed. I am not sure we could withstand a prolonged siege.”

“But sir,” replied Karl in mild protest, “we never actually saw Robert’s men tracking us into the forest. We feared the possibility when we heard some activity near the western edge of the woods; that is why Maria and I set off in such haste, and stumbled upon your tunnels.”

“And given the history and intentions of Count Robert, you were justified in your reaction. What we are pursuing here—it is far too important to leave anything to chance, and so we must take the same precautions.”

“I still fail to see why Robert would pursue such a vigorous offensive against… two frightened peasants fleeing into the forest.”

“It is not the two of you who draw his wrath,” responded Christoph, finally halting and turning to address his visitors directly. “He thirsts for vengeance against Prince Philip, as both of you already know, and Robert has unfortunately concluded that you have blazed the trail to find him.”

“Us?” replied Maria, in distraught disbelief.

“Robert is hunting his archenemy with an infernal determination,” explained their host, “and he seems to have concluded that Prince Philip is sheltering himself here, somewhere within the Katzenwald itself. He must have followed both of you in the expectation that you would lead him to Philip’s supposed hideout in the forest. It is a horrid misunderstanding, and this entire earthly realm may pay a bitter price for it.”

Christoph’s ominous words stunned his two guests into a temporary silence, as he pivoted forward once again to lead them down the passages of the fortress to an unknown destination. As they veered leftward at a corner of the long corridor, Christoph abruptly halted his progress as a burly uniformed man, bearing a musket atop his right shoulder and a businesslike grimace on his face, approached the three of them at the bend. “Herr Augenspiegel, we have a report,” he said, facing squarely in Christoph’s direction.

“What is it, Alexander?” replied the glassy-eyed man in the monk’s cowl.

“Our scouts at the northwestern passages—they’ve confirmed that Robert is leading his men here, dozens of them. They’ve found the tunnels, and it appears that General Bonifacius himself is among them. His sappers are part of the siege team.”

Christoph gnashed his teeth together and seethed, absorbing implications that he dearly wished had never entered his mind. “Good work,” he said matter-of-factly, attempting to deflect his own mounting concern. “Issue an order to the forward defense battalions, to post the musketeers in sniper positions surrounding each of the possible entry points. Have the engineers collapse the tunnels leading in from their positions in the northwest; we’ll supply ourselves from the south and east tunnels if need be.”

“Should we send a negotiating party?”

“If they gain access to the valley through the tunnels, we should try an appeal to General Bonifacius; presuming that we can trust the reports our scouts have assembled on him, he is likely to be a reluctant participant in this operation. But I’m afraid it may not yield much, Alexander; if Robert is convinced that Philip is sheltering here, not even the direct word of God would disabuse him of the notion. We are in the path of the storm that he brings, and there is likely nothing that can spare us now.”

Alexander sighed ruefully, pausing before completing his orders. “What about the observatories, sir?” he said, casting an ambiguous glance in Karl and Maria’s direction.

Christoph wavered indecisively, flustered by an impossible dilemma suddenly cast upon his shoulders. “Send lookouts to the Khayyam and bar Hiyya observatories, try to obstruct Robert’s forces and divert them in case they send detachments through there. These two villagers from Herbstmond,” he said, gesturing toward his guests, “they seem to have passed through the von Peuerbach observatory; it lies on the most direct route from the Friedensbach Creek, where they first entered the tunnels, and so Robert’s army will likely be traveling through there. Send a recovery team to retrieve the grids and whatever other findings the instruments have collected in the past month, then seal the exits; we may lose von Peuerbach if the invaders try to blast through it, but we have to buy ourselves more time to prepare.”

Alexander nodded brusquely, then disappeared along the angle of the corridor behind Christoph and his guests.

“What have we done?” asked a crestfallen Karl, bowing his head as unsettling thoughts raced through his mind. “We brought those fiends here, didn’t we?”

“You are not responsible for this,” replied Christoph in a soothing tone, as he resumed the group’s march down the yawning passages of the castle. “Both of you acted in a manner befitting anyone in such desperate straits, in these wretched times we have been cursed to dwell in,” he said, with his gaze drifting slightly toward Maria’s belly; although it was not yet visibly distended, he had clearly come to infer and sympathize with the plight of his fleeing visitors. “Robert is a man obsessed with revenge, his rage against his adversary so all-consuming that he would slaughter entire communities if he merely suspected them of assisting Prince Philip, even unwillingly; the nuances matter not to him. This is why he set Sankt Florian ablaze, and then unleashed his Hell upon your village itself.”

“Why?” asked Maria in plaintive disbelief. “How did this start? Why must he continue this blood feud?”

“It is the unmatched fury of a bitter apostate, turning against everything and everyone he once believed in,” said Christoph in a deep, pensive tone. “Robert was once a man of letters in his youth, a charming and cultured nobleman adored by the courtiers and the ladies about the palace. He had even been a personal friend of Prince Philip the August himself; they were riding and sparring partners in their youth. Then the war came, and Robert answered what he thought was his call to duty, everyone believing that the hostilities would cease decades ago with a treaty perhaps no later than 1625 in the Year of our Lord. But the hostilities dragged on, unresolved and smoldering, and Philip himself took up his standard, fighting in opposition to Robert. When a clash of arms carries on for so long, when it wreaks so much ruin on our civilization, it acquires its own mind, and perverts that of its most ardent participants. Even our own brethren across Europe, their efforts joined with ours in Heilbrunnen, have not escaped the bitter divisions and resentments of this conflict.”

“So Robert and his erstwhile friend,” interjected Karl, “they eventually faced off on the field of battle?”

“Yes, six years ago to the northwest, in the Schlacht von Buxhoeveden—one of the bloodiest engagements of this carnage. Robert set out to besiege the fortress in the town, where Philip had gathered his forces, but it was a trap. Philip’s cavalry took the high ground and rained salvos on their enemies, eventually sending flaming tar pouring down upon them from the surrounding hillsides. Robert was burned across much of his body; his face was spared, but it too bore scars from the combat against Philip. Somehow he survived even as the soul of a once-noble man perished; since then, he has lived for nothing more than vengeance against his old friend, establishing alliances of convenience with others who hope to end the war by defeating Philip. Such a tragic irony, since our own spies have learned that Philip is already on the verge of laying down his arms. His allies have been vanquished, his subsides have vanished; he likely persists in his fight, only out of fear of the retribution that Robert would visit upon him, were he to disband his armies. And now it seems,” he concluded bitterly, “that we in Heilbrunnen are about to pay the price for Robert’s bloodlust, against a man who knows nothing of this place.”

As their host finished speaking, he finally stopped at his apparent destination: a wide, arched entrance to a chamber like nothing that Karl and Maria had ever witnessed before. It appeared to be constructed directly into the rockface of the hills surrounding the Marienburg Valley, and its size alone defied comprehension. It contained a central passage flanked by Greek columns that continued well into the distance, larger than even the most extravagant royal banquet hall of the era. There were lamps on the walls that drew illumination from an unknown source, as bands of what appeared to be bottled lightning ringed the chamber on every side. There was a structure beckoning from the distance, scintillating as the rays from an unseen source glinted off its surface—a fountain of some sort, yet one in which the water seemingly rose and tumbled down the surface of its own will and intent, deviating from its prescribed path.

To Karl’s eyes, the area immediately beyond the entrance was reminiscent of a blacksmith’s workshop, crossed with the chaotic productivity of an artist’s atelier. There were a number of figures inside shuffling about, working or engaged in inaudible yet apparently vigorous conversation. Most of them were shrouded within monks’ habits or concealed within the cloaks sported by local nobility, yet a few were unhooded, their facial features indistinct in the dim and hazy illumination of the room. Most perplexingly, there were frames about the walls resembling those that Karl had first glimpsed upon entering the castle, as well as what appeared to be mirrors, with busy individuals standing intently before them. Letters, numbers, even complicated symbols of some sort seemed to flit about the panels circumscribed by the frames and mirrors—boggling the mind of the two untrained observers. Some of the figures inside cast a quizzical gaze toward Karl and Maria, as they were doubtless not accustomed to visitors in the chamber; yet in the urgency of the moment, they quickly returned to their prior tasks and resumed work.

“Maria, Karl, wait here by the entrance of this room. I need to confer with the Ritusleiter here; he’s the leader of our efforts at Heilbrunnen. I can’t foresee how much time we’ll have before Robert and his forces storm the ramparts, but it’s too dangerous for you to stay here.”

“Where can we go?” inquired Maria nervously.

“To Kirchenburg; it’s one of the neutral sanctuary towns amidst the raging passions of this war, and we have allies there who can take you in. Our tunnels lead directly from the Marienburg Valley into the forests to the east, and the trails there will take you to the city. We’ll provide you with food and supplies, and an escort; there are some items, critical items, that we’ll be needing to send along with you.”

Maria and Karl met their host with an expression of bafflement at yet another cryptic, unsettling reference to the inscrutable activities in Heilbrunnen; they said nothing, as Christoph quickly made his way toward another cloaked figure in the midst of the busy whir and hum of the chamber. Their conversation seemed serious enough to require some mutual gesticulation, and the two men continued for another two minutes before Christoph, with a concluding nod, made his way back to his guests. The Ritusleiter, for his part, signaled a trio of other men within the chamber, who quickly exited with a burst of urgency out a concealed egress in the chamber’s left side.

“Come with me,” said Christoph, addressing his two bewildered visitors. “Naturally, we have no guest quarters in Heilbrunnen, but we have a chamber nearby where the two of you can eat, drink, and rest awhile before you disembark.” He led them around a sharp turn, before fetching a skeleton key within his cowl and using it to open a vault-like door leading into a recessed chamber. He immediately proceeded ahead of his two guests, into a conspicuously large wardrobe at the back of the room, returning with garments that he set before Karl and Maria. “You’ll need to change into some dry clothes before your night journey; Kirchenburg is more than a day’s voyage on horseback. Rest for now; hopefully we’ll be able to hold off the hordes for another few hours. I’ll return when the caravan is ready to depart for Kirchenburg.”

Christoph moved quickly to shut the chamber door and tend to the fortifications that were desperately being assembled. Karl and Maria changed into their new attire, then seated themselves on a cot not far from the entrance, collapsing in each other’s arms in a mixture of apprehension and sheer exhaustion.

May 5, 1643, 11:26 p.m.

Schloss Heilbrunnen, Valley of Marienburg in the Katzenwald Forest, Germany

“Maria, Karl! Please, you must come quickly—Robert’s forces have already breached our defenses, much sooner than we expected.” Christoph’s booming voice reverberated throughout the windowless room, waking the couple from a distressingly abbreviated slumber. Their blood curdled as the howls of battle emanated from unseen corners in the valley, permeating the dark corridors of the castle. “Hurry,” he continued, “we’ll have to avoid the main halls; they’re already swarming in!”

Christoph clasped a lantern as he ushered the couple out the room and darted right, the tumultuous ring of battle echoing through the cavernous maws of the corridor. They quickly bolted into another hall to the right, and after passing a brief series of locked rooms, they turned once again in the same direction, slipping into an artfully concealed corridor tucked behind a narrow archway. From there, they traversed a dizzying maze of nested passages and camouflaged rooms until halting at a spot they had previously glimpsed only from a hazy distance: The back of the long, mysterious chamber where Christoph had earlier stopped to confer with the Ritusleiter, behind that strange fountain with its eerie glint and leaping streams of water.

As Maria peered in to glimpse the fountain, she doubled back in a startled fright; the shine on the water’s surface was not a reflection, but the fountain illuminating itself. Apparent within those fluorescing streams, gushing with such urgency from an unfathomable source, were the apparent contours of distorted faces in all manners of expression—whether human or demonic, Maria was not sure. She stifled a scream as Christoph turned toward her and then shifted his eyes immediately to the left, facing another figure in a monk’s cowl emerging from the shadows beyond the columns.

“Please, don’t take fright,” said Christoph in a rushed tone, attempting to reassure the startled couple. “This is Georg von Liebig, the Ritusleiter of Heilbrunnen with whom I was speaking earlier. He’ll help usher you to safety.” The man removed his cloak, revealing a bald pate and greenish eyes that seemed to glow faintly even amidst the dull light of the chamber. He uttered nothing but gestured toward the couple to follow him, a deceptive equanimity on his face masking an implacable fear of their deadly adversary already streaming into the castle. The group moved still farther toward the rear of the chamber, reaching a back wall that played tricks on the eye, appearing to wave and seethe in the dim, strangely pulsating light of the area. Georg placed his hands against the wall and gripped notches carefully scored within it, like a blind man groping his way around an unfamiliar room, yet in a clearly purposeful and determined fashion that puzzled the couple as they looked on. Then, out of the corner of their eye, a spiraling gap appeared in a portion of the wall and expanded outward. The fissure grew as if impatiently seeking an edge until it had reached the floor, leaving an opening large enough for human passage.

“Should we seal the entrance to the chamber, Georg?” queried Christoph.

“Not yet; unless they’ve been detained, Jan and the other officials are coming this way as we speak, to help us protect the artifacts.” Christoph nodded as Georg turned his attention to their two guests.

The Ritusleiter motioned toward Karl and Maria, as the group stepped into the chamber. “We are now deep within the eastern hills bordering on the Marienburg Valley. There’s a trapdoor at the back of this room which will lead you into tunnels that exit on the opposite slope of the hillside. Your escort to Kirchenburg will be at the departure point.” The Ritusleiter seemed jarred by an unexpected sound resonating within the vast hall behind them, whirling rapidly to his right like a cat ever alert to an attacker. Seeing nothing, however, he eased back toward the couple. “Herr von Augenspiegel and I will lead you through the room. We cannot allow outsiders to see what is contained within these grounds, and so the only light within the chamber will flow from the devices within our hands; make sure to stay close by.” He and Christoph reached into small pouches they had retrieved shortly before, simultaneously fastening them to a sash of their cowls; each emerged with an object resembling a finely crafted amulet, carved meticulously with overlapping rings that immediately began to emit a soft blue light from within.

“You must follow this light as we advance,” continued Georg. “Do not take your eyes off the light, and keep your hands close together; you must absolutely not touch anything within the room.” The couple nodded meekly at the myserious demand, shuddering slightly in exhaustion and fear as they looked on with groggy, bloodshot eyes.

**************************************

“Robert, can’t you see? They were telling us the truth out there at the castle entrance. Philip is not here, he was never here!” The two grizzled soldiers sped down the ample passage of the evacuated main chamber of the castle, their eyes dumbfounded by the objects around them even as the chaos of the battle raged in the burning corridors behind.

“You trust the monks in this place, dear Nathaniel?” queried Robert cynically, his attention briefly drawn to the unearthly fountain in the back of the room. “Whether they be alchemists, or black magicians, or conjurers of some other sort, they clearly harbor many secrets on these premises.”

“Philip’s presence is not one of them!” exclaimed Nathaniel, halting in his tracks near an elaborately-styled wall, with a lotus motif at its edges. “There has been no sign whatsoever of the prince’s legions, his standards, his royal retinue or his honor guard; even if he were hiding out, Robert, he would leave some token of his presence!”

“I will not stop now!” growled Robert, angrily pressing his colleague against the wall. “Philip has eluded my clutches far too many times, Nathaniel. He could only be here, in the Katzenwald; and if not at this moment, then he has certainly received succor upon these premises many times before.”

“Your obsession, Robert, has driven you to madness. I will not let you butcher still more innocents in your loathsome quest!”

Nathaniel suddenly groaned as his eyes widened, blood spattering upon the sculpted stone lotuses of the wall behind him. He slowly sank to the floor, wheezing as Robert removed the dagger that he had plunged beneath the general’s left shoulder.

“You,” said Robert menacingly, standing before his fallen ally, “will have no say in the course of this battle, dear Nathaniel. But fear not, for your coveted peace will come soon enough.”

**************************************

The brief journey to the end of the darkened chamber was interminably distressing to the couple. Wandering thoughts about their unseen surroundings discomfited them as much as their fear of being detected by the marauders overrunning the compound. The dull bluish light from their guides’ devices was enhanced only by a flickering source along a back wall in the distance, pulsating in a strangely sinister red and violet pattern—as though stemming from a pair of eyes clandestinely watching them. The room’s unsettling effect on the senses was amplified by faint, eerie music that streamed in from some point beyond the walls; like a will o’ the wisp, it seemed to fade in and out, tantalizing its listeners as it refused to reveal its secrets and slinking from audibility the more vigorously one strained to detect it. The odors in the chamber were similarly elusive; like goblins taunting from the shadows, they seemed to address the couple subtly in a way that filled them with dread, yet whatever the message was, it refused to congeal as something they could clutch and hold within their consciousness.

Maria and Karl attempted to set the stray musings aside and concentrate. Only a few minutes more, they thought, and they would embark upon a long-sought path to a protected realm, free of the turmoil and ruin that the war had visited upon so many wretched souls trapped in its merciless march. As they continued their steady progress, the couple gasped as their surroundings unexpectedly began to manifest themselves out of the darkness. The chamber was filled with metallic, mineral, and glass objects arranged in bizarre geometries and scattered about its left side, as though materializing from a nightmare: Assemblages of interlocking spirals with fine wires converging at unseen vanishing points; amorphous and blob-like objects covered with surfaces constantly folding in upon each other; and rows of tablets in stone and clay, etched with strange symbols and depictions that chilled the spine despite their inscrutability. Most shockingly, the room was populated with large, irregularly formed stones, vaguely reminiscent of oversized eggs yet curving inward to form countless layers, and inscribed with still another series of symbols arrayed in a pattern of unknown significance.

The otherworldly conundrums of the room quickly faded in the face of a danger far more immediate and terrifying—the source of the light that had suddenly shone upon objects that were not intended for outside eyes. The answer became jarringly clear as a lantern neared the group, borne by a singed hand that illuminated a scarred, grim countenance.

“Count Robert!” exclaimed Christoph as their antagonist drew his saber.

“So pleased,” grinned the man maliciously, “to see that my reputation proceeds me even within such a majestic hall of mystery. Tell me, how long has Prince Philip known of this place? I must say, I could never fault his choice of refuge.”

“We told you and your men at the tunnel,” replied Georg in a harsh voice, “that Philip has never been to these grounds and would never be accepted here; you have no idea what you are endangering! Our work at Heilbrunnen far transcends all the petty quarrels and the spilled blood that you indulge in so verily, Robert, and it has long been our guiding principle, to never jeopardize our efforts here on behalf of anyone on the outside, you or the prince.”

“Petty quarrels, sir? Is that what you think this is? If you will not deliver Philip to me,” he continued, drawing his saber as he set the lantern aside, “then I shall have to feed my sword with the blood of others!”

“Karl, Maria! Stay back!” Georg yelled to his two guests as he and Christoph quickly took hold of metal staffs perched against the side wall with the unearthly objects. A bitter clash broke out before the terrified couple, their horror amplified by the disorienting confusion of the darkness and the cacophonous exchange before them. Metal clashed amid the grunts of battle and nearby articles toppling to the rigid stone floor, a blizzard of rage and fury that soon gave way to an even more sickening sound—that of the Ritusleiter himself, shouting in agony as he slumped to the floor.

“Georg!” called out Christoph, perceiving a terrible event that remained out of view of the cowering couple behind. He and Robert resumed their pitched fighting, with Christoph’s voice calling out with each blow he attempted to land on his bitter foe, who nonetheless succeeded in parrying every one of his opponent’s srikes. Suddenly, the room filled with the sound of a body crashing into rows of tumbling metal next to the wall bordering the bizarre objects; Karl and Maria were initially unsure of the victim, but their question received a dreadful answer when the lantern quickly approached them again, illuminated a bloody blade clearly intended for them.

“Stop!” Karl lunged at Robert, pinning him against the right wall and attempting to dislodge his sword, but he was thrown back against the opposite side with a force of extraordinary might. The bloodthirsty count immediately turned his attention to Maria, who desperately groped about the wall in search of an escape, but soon fell before the approach of her deadly pursuer. As Robert neared, she instinctively kicked out, tumbling her attacker to the ground. But he quickly regained his footing as she tried to scramble away, grasping her leg and drawing her toward him. As she lay on the floor, he kneeled down and positioned the blade of his saber, preparing to thrust his sword into her torso.

“No!” Karl, arisen again, abruptly tackled the man and pushed him hard into one of the bizarre stone objects lining the right wall. Robert winced as his frenzied opponent vigorously struck him with his bare hands, to the point of bloodying his own fists as they occasionally contacted the unyielding armor that surrounded and protected the count’s body. Robert pushed back, sending the two men spinning and crashing against the wall and the various objects set alongside it. As they carried on their violent scuffle, they eventually reached a strange pillar acting as a platform for an eerie-appearing, encased glass orb housing a dark, turbid fluid within its thin walls. Their bitter struggle brought them to the edge of the casing, crushing it and sending the orb flying backward—cracking it open against the hard floor and releasing its contents, a dark and swirling mist, directly in the vicinity of a still shell-shocked Maria, perched on one knee against the left wall. Upon taking in the noxious vapors, she collapsed abruptly to the ground, her apparently lifeless body sprawled supine before her horrified husband.

“Maria, my God!”

In the brief moment that Karl took to witness the unfolding horror, Robert seized the opportunity to strike him hard with his gloved right hand, sending the young man spilling helplessly to the ground. At once, he seized Karl by the hair and lifted him, the cobbler’s bruised face and bleeding lip grimacing painfully as awaited the coup de grace. “You, boy, have hindered me one too many times today!” said Robert, as he raised his sword and prepared to strike.

Before he could, a metal rod struck Robert forcefully on the back of the head, shattering his helmet and sending him and his sword crumpling to the ground. Karl, dazed and bewildered by the recent turn of events, instinctively gripped Robert’s lantern and rushed over to his wife, desperately trying to detect her breathing or other signs of life.

Christoph, bleeding from his forehead but having regained consciousness, reached for an oil lamp amidst the now-scattered items in the bloody, disheveled chamber. He rushed to the chamber’s right wall and knelt down next to his friend Georg, who was biting down on a small flint-like object, dulling the pain as he sought to stanch the bleeding from a gash in his lower left torso, just above his hip. “Christoph, I—I can take care of this; please, go and check the others.”

Christoph nodded reluctantly after a moment’s hesitation, proceeding quickly to a point a few paces ahead, where another fallen man lay collapsed in pain against the side wall, feebly clutching the iron staff that had finally felled Robert the Brute. “General Bonifacius!” remarked the man in the cowl as Nathaniel grimaced in pain, blood oozing out from his left collarbone. “Here,” he continued, retrieving a clean cloth from amongst the room’s fallen articles, “press hard right there, just above the wound—it’ll slow the bleeding.”

Nathaniel nodded meekly but said nothing, still struggling to breathe between attempts to tend to his own shoulder. To Christoph’s surprise, the Ritusleiter—still struggling to cope with his own wound—had risen up, slowly making his way over to help the badly injured field commander. At once, Christoph moved to address his charge once again. “General Bonifacius, you saved the lives of two people here, and I have to help them now; hold on, we won’t be leaving you.” He again nodded silently, as the man with the glassy eyes rushed over to help the cobbler and his wife.

“Christoph,” began Karl in a frantic voice, as he cradled his wife in his arms, “she’s not breathing; please, help her!” Himself baffled by what he was seeing, Christoph scanned the vicinity with his oil lamp, quickly laying his eyes upon the fragmented glass orb, its shards littering the corridor next to them.

“My God,” he said, momentarily paralyzed by the shock of the moment. Instinctively, he turned Maria to her side and lifted her left eyelid, gingerly holding the oil lamp to elicit a frail indication that she was still alive.

Suddenly, to the joint surprise of the two men kneeled beside her, Maria’s pupils rapidly widened, and she drew her legs to her abdomen in a jerking motion while heaving deeply to take in air. She coughed and gasped audibly as they both cradled her shoulders, helping her gradually into a seated position, her back leaning against one of the peculiar stone objects near the left wall. “Maria! Thank God, I thought…” Karl cupped her cheeks in his hands and then gently embraced her as she struggled to do the same, still adjusting to the already disorienting circumstances of their dim surroundings. “Christoph,” said Karl, pivoting obliquely in the cowled man’s direction and gesturing toward the shattered orb, “what happened? What was inside that thing?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know myself, Karl; it’s one of the puzzles that we ourselves have been…”

“Christoph! Please, come here,” called out a voice from behind them.

“Maria, Karl, can you stand?” queried Christoph.

Sore and bruised themselves, they slowly rose to their feet, following their guide and kneeling beside the wounded Georg von Liebig, who was still tending to the even more severely injured commander reclining against the wall beneath them.

“You… don’t have much time,” uttered Nathaniel, struggling to infuse breath into his words as he clenched his teeth through the pain. “It’s Robert—he already issued the order to his men, to set this castle afire and slaughter everyone inside. Not even I can hold them back for long. You, both of you,” he continued, turning toward the cobbler and the milkmaid from Herbstmond, “you must… depart this place as soon as you can.”

“Thank you,” said Karl, in a grateful nod to the wounded general.

“Christoph,” said Georg with an eye on the shattered orb, as his colleague moved to guide the couple to the exit, “I finally understand what the riddle has been trying to tell us, all this time. Please, go and retrieve the Tablet of Roland, and keep it in the convoy that will bring our guests to Kirchenburg.”

Christoph nodded in businesslike fashion, disappearing for a moment into the darkness at the rear of the chamber. “Karl, Maria,” continued the Ritusleiter, wincing as he turned to address the young couple, “please listen carefully because now, the two of you are a part of this as well, of everything here at Heilbrunnen and that of our predecessors, stretching back many centuries before our time. This caravan will take you to the Church of St. Olaf in Kirchenburg with a number of articles that we’re sending along, most from this very room. There is a monastery there, and the monks at St. Olaf will know what to do. They’ll house and care for you, your husband, and your child; and over time, they will be forging a number of items that they will then give to you, and which you must ensure to keep in your family—generations and generations into the future. One day, about which we not even we ourselves can conjecture, they will become essential for…” He gnashed his teeth and heaved, as pain continued to throb and course throughout the left side of his body.

“Georg, please, rest,” said Christoph, arriving back at the Ritusleiter’s side while carrying a large clay tablet, bearing images and messages in an unfamiliar script carved meticulously upon its surface. Karl and Maria, despite the exhaustion etched on their wan and drained faces, reacted with unsettled wonder at the object. “I’ve sealed the entrance to the artifact chamber; that will hopefully buy us more time before the rest of Robert’s hordes show up. Are you sure you can handle things here yourself?”

“I’m fine, Christoph,” replied Georg breathlessly. “I’ll take care of General Bonifacius, as best I can. Please, go; get Karl and Maria to the convoy safely.”

“Good luck, brother,” he responded, grasping Georg’s hand to reassure him before at last shepherding the couple to the back of the chamber. He retrieved a pair of small rectangular pins from the pouch affixed to his cowl, each with a highly stylized motif on one end, and placed them both within corresponding receptacles of a hidden panel on the ground. “Stand back,” he said to Karl and Maria, turning the pins simultaneously to reveal an opening—resembling an opened trap door—beneath the panel, leading to a well-illuminated tunnel below. “Come, this way.”

**************************************

Mere minutes had passed before the couple—bruised, exhausted, and overwhelmed by the inexplicable tide of recent events—finally stumbled out a nondescript exit on the eastern side of Schloss Heilbrunnen. They were on the other side of the hills, near a small stream that ducked into a cavern, eventually feeding into the castle. Christoph preceded them, leading the way to a camouflaged path buried in the midst of some thorny shrubbery.

As a bright crescent moon nourished the sky with its reflected light, the coos and mating calls of songbirds pierced the nighttime air, oblivious as they were to the bloodbath still raging about the stronghold. Christoph guided his charges to a ravine beyond the shrubbery where a horse-drawn carriage, loaded with provisions and numerous, tightly-chained wooden and metallic cases, was ready to decamp for Kirchenburg. As their knees buckled while descending the slope of the ravine, Karl and Maria collapsed almost in unison in the midst of the stress, trauma, and crushing fatigue of their ordeal, lying supine and embracing each other’s hands as they savored a moment by the cool open hillside. Christoph, despite his urgency to bring the couple and the precious items on the carriage to safety, allowed them to rest as he conversed briefly with the carriage’s driver about navigating the treacherous route to Kirchenburg, and protecting the precious cargo being borne thereupon. He then solemnly approached the shell-shocked villagers and helped them to their feet.

“Karl, Maria,” he began, “It pains me that we cannot afford the luxury of a proper farewell here, but you must be going now, as must I. Your own safety depends on it, as does that of far more people than you could imagine at this time.” Christoph glanced at the rising smoke beyond the hills, billowing up from the charred, smoldering scene behind them.

Karl looked somberly upon the stoically calm man in the monk’s cowl, his face betraying a curious amalgam of resignation and fierce resolve. “Christoph,” he said, “Maria and I live today thanks to you. We will honor you with every breath we take.”

Christoph nodded as he prepared to rejoin the maelstrom raging behind him, before abruptly turning to address the couple once more. “Maria, Karl, please wait.” He grabbed hold of what appeared to be a necklace dangling about his collar, its threads virtually invisible before in the dim illumination of the castle. He lifted it to reveal a medallion with engraved symbols, each surrounding two initials in a highly ornate, medieval cursive style: FG.

“Karl, I am giving this to you and Maria. Bring it with you and present it to the abbot at the St. Olaf’s monastery in Kirchenburg.”

Karl took the medallion and briefly inspected it, perplexed at its significance, as Christoph continued. “Think of this as an invitation, to an apprenticeship for you and your descendants. Georg himself would want this; both of you have now become intertwined with us, for better or worse.”

Karl, his mind disoriented and his nerves frayed, puzzled briefly about Christoph’s words and what lay ahead in Kirchenburg; but he grasped that there was little more to discuss at such an urgent moment. “Thank you Christoph, and Godspeed to you in there. Our prayers are with you.”

Christoph returned to the tunnel, disappearing into its midst as he hurried to rejoin his wounded comrades. Karl and Maria briefly embraced in their relief and exhaustion, then boarded the carriage for their sanctuary beyond the forbidding woods of the Katzenwald forest.

Chapter 2: Beckoning Enigmas

Wenn die Glieder einer Kette sich einander vereinigen,

Sagt man nie, sie sich im Netz, an ‘was bewusst beteiligen.

Also gibt’s auch so eine Kette in dem Raum hinter die Stirn,

Wieso dann, verleiht die Kette das Bewusstsein ans Gehirn?

Thursday, May 12, 2016, 12:45 p.m.

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

“Zach, I know you don’t want to hear this, but there comes a time in an aspiring young engineer’s career when he must receive the unvarnished truth, no matter how unsavory.” The professor summoned the exhausted, haggard-appearing student over to the sharply bordered wooden table, cluttered from edge to edge with papers, journals, and a menagerie of technological bric-a-brac. Beads of sweat trickled about the young man’s furrowed brow as he sucked in air, running his hand through thick black hair and quivering in anxious anticipation. “As your willing advisor and mentor for what I know has been an arduous five years, and as someone obligated by my station to level with you on the good, the bad, the ugly… well, I suppose you knew this was coming.”

The young man, his eyes bloodshot and ringed by pitch-black circles that obscured an otherwise handsome face, could barely look up, let alone meet the eyes of the hard-nosed engineering professor, clutching a heavily marked-up folder. So his head continued to droop as the esteemed figure focused his relentless gaze upon him.

The professor’s voice dipped as he addressed the young man again. “Zach, allow me to make this clear… you really must learn how to clear your tequila in one shot. However impressive the performance in your thesis defense just now, I simply cannot bestow the PhD until you master the refined art of the shot glass. Cheers!”

“Cheers, to the Magnificent Zachary Choi!” ensued the echo in unison, reverberating throughout the small amphitheater. A rhetorical query soon followed from a corner of the room. “Or I guess, it’ll now have to beis it now ‘Dr. Zach,’ eh?”

The young man at the center of the festivities sucked down the tequila and, after unwinding his puckered nose and mouth, replied to the questioner. “Sorry, I can’t handle handle hearing ‘Dr. Zach,’ let alone ‘Dr. Choi’ uttered in my direction, not unless one of you rock stars here has arranged an afternoon talk show slot and I retire filthy rich in three years.” The room burst out in laughter. Zach had a knack for defusing even the tensest of scenarios with a well-placed and disarming quip, and even at the apex of his academic career, his dry wit was always close by at his disposal.

After more than a year of toiling at his dissertation on implantable, color-responsive mimics of the retina in the human eye—in a bid to once again enable the blind to see—Zach had passed his thesis defense and become a newly-minted member of an exclusive club. He had won his PhD in biomedical engineering under the mentorship of the distinguished Dr. Timothy Shoemaker, and was now at long last ready to embark on the next step in his career. If only he could decide what it would be.

“Renee, for goodness’ sake, Hon,” called out Zach, cupping his hands around his mouth while motioning to a smiling young woman in the back of the room, “I’ve been waiting a near eternity to peer into those pretty brown eyes again!”

“No, Zach,” quipped the young woman with the flowing black hair and piercing gaze, slowly approaching her soulmate. “Just four months. But if you ever subject us to another four months like that, you’ll have to wait more than an eternity to stare into these eyes again!”

The two embraced as Zach lifted her off the floor in a burst of energy. “Congrats, wild man,” said Renee with a broad smile, as Zach gradually returned her to the ground, “you really did make me wonder if I was ever going to see this day.”

“Just thought I’d make things interesting, Hon,” replied Zach, with an ironic click of the tongue. The two kissed briefly as Zach turned again toward his admiring entourage.

“So Zach,” began another voice within the room, “what’s on the horizon for you these days, buddy?”

“ZachMatt, my friend” came the reply, “I thought I asked you never to let the tiny matter of making a living intrude on the bliss of having a few extra letters by my name. You’re just in your third year of this program, and you and your pals over at Electrical Engineering are already starting a company; whereas knowing me, I’ll be lucky if someone’s paying me to fix car stereos in a junkyard two years from now.”

Zach’s self-deprecating irony carried a tinge of genuine concern, which he instinctively set aside for the moment. “But hey,” he continued, “how many other biomedical engineers can say they’ve been immortalized on national TV during the Duke-Carolina game, shamelessly air-balling the halftime shot while sporting a bright Duke Blue mohawk for the cameras to dwell on?”

“Zach,” laughed Matt Hansen in mock derision, “I’m not so sure you should be rekindling that bit of history. Remember, we squandered that 10-point lead at halftime and went down in flames to our archrivals—and on our home basketball court no less. Right before they went on to win the national championship.”“Zach,” laughed Matt Hansen in mock derision, “I’m not so sure you wanna rekindle that bit of history. Remember, we blew that 10-point lead at halftime and went down in flames to our archrivals, none other than those dastardly Tarheels of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—and on our home basketball court no less. Right before they went on to win the national championship, as my cousin from Chapel Hill never stops taunting me about.”

“People really do remember that part, ehhuh?” replied Zach sarcasticallyinquired Zach sheepishly.

“Don’t kid yourself otherwise,” rejoined Matt with a chuckle. “We were all convinced that you jinxed us into that abyss of misery; after all, you didn’t merely air-ball the halftime shot., iIt very nearly became a guided missile and sent half of Row 2 to the emergency room. Not exactly the best omen for your team in the second half, pal!”

“So considering the televised audience for that game, my notoriety has now reached, what, up to 25 million households? Ah, nationwide infamy by my 25^th birthday. Maybe that afternoon talk show idea is a viable option after all…”

With the mirth and merriment of the moment filling the room, Tim Shoemaker beamed as his protégé continued to regale the audience, while fending off the slings and arrows of creeping exhaustion. The professor stood well over six feet tall, projecting authority and rigor from his sharp gray-blue eyes under arched reddish-brown eyebrows, with rounded shoulders and closely-cropped, chestnut-colored hair. Yet this aura was countered by a curiously boyish appearance in his face and in the spontaneous, excited gesticulation with which he peppered his comments and sprang in his step, like an eternally curious young explorer in the body of a military man, looking out proudly over his boisterous platoon of fellow trailblazers.

It had been five long years of relentless trial-and-error, questioning, blind alleys, failures, frustrating false starts, embarrassing retractions, tinkering, all-night marathons, and rare but coveted epiphanies in the Doghouse, as Dr. Shoemaker’s laboratory had been dubbed in mock affection by the budding biomedical engineers who haunted its halls like ghosts around the clock. Now at long last, the young man at the center of the crowd’s adulation had completed his thesis, and ushered in this long-awaited day. Tim himself had been approaching the peak of his own career, after years of uncertain funding and the unrelenting challenge of charting his own path. In Zach Choi, he had found not only a protégé but the perfect complement to his own MO: a young, brash, offbeat but clever mind who concealed a vigorous work ethic behind the guise of a full-time smart-aleck.

Now, after half a decade of effort, Tim and his young charge had taken a giant leap toward enhancing the technology needed to design modular, easily constructed prosthetic eyes and restore vision to those whose sight had become blurred or dimmed. It was just one of three major projects ongoing in the Doghouse, but it was Tim’s crown jewel—the project that had made his name, and the fruit of decades of effort. Zach had spent many a sleepless night during those taxing years working away, painstakingly studying and internalizing the intricate circuitry of the color-responsive cone cells in the eye’s retina. He then produced high-fidelity, digital replicas of these microscopic color gauges in fabricated optical implants for patients with eye diseases, an aim that had been Tim’s passion for more than two decades running. Zach had diligently built upon his mentor’s foundation, endowing the crude optical implants with a subtle refinement in their design; with them, a recipient could glimpse a garden, a rainbow, or a longtime lost love in vivid, living color once again.It had been five long years of relentless trial-and-error, questioning, blind alleys, failures, frustrating false starts, embarrassing retractions, tinkering, all-night marathons, and rare but coveted epiphanies in the Doghouse, as Dr. Shoemaker’s laboratory had been dubbed in mock affection by the budding biomedical engineers who haunted its halls like ghosts around the clock. Now at long last, the young man at the center of the crowd’s adulation had completed his thesis, and ushered in this long-awaited day. Tim himself had been approaching the peak of his own career, after years of uncertain funding and the unrelenting challenge of charting his own path. In Zach Choi, he had found not only a protégé but the perfect complement to his own MO: a young, brash, offbeat but clever mind who concealed a vigorous work ethic behind the guise of a full-time smart-aleck. Now, after half a decade of effort, Tim and his young charge had taken a giant leap toward enhancing the technology needed to design modular, easily constructed prosthetic eyes and restore visionsight to those whose sight had become blurred or dimmed.e blind.

It was just one of three major projects ongoing in the Doghouse, but it was Tim’s crown jewel—the project that had made his name, and the fruit of decades of effort. Zach had spent countless many a sleepless nights during those taxing years working away, painstakingly studying and internalizing the intricate circuitry of the color-responsive cone cells in the eye’s retina. He then, then recapitulating produced digital replicas of thesethese microscopic color gauges in the fabricated optical implants for patients with eye diseases, an aim that had been Tim’s passion for almost two-and-a-half decades25 years running. Tim had already coaxed the eye’s optic nerve into pioneered a system to entice the human optic nerve itself to sprouting new nerve fibers to link up toward the implant, linking connecting this alien seeing device with the mind’s own internalprivate wiring, to transmit images from and make sense an outside world that had become distressingly inscrutable to so many afflicted patientsof it. Zach had then diligently built from this foundation, endowing the crude optical implants with a subtle refinement in their design; with them, a recipient could glimpse a garden, a rainbow, or a longtime lost love in vivid, living color once again., meanwhile, had equipped the implants with receivers and wireless feedback transmitters that could be analyzed at an external computer interface, the implants thus allowing for fine-tuning of the visual circuitry even after their introduction into the eye by a surgical team. In the past two years, in combination with other efforts worldwide, the first tentative attempts had finally been made to bring their device to patients.

The crowd in the conference room was now gathering about the table of hors d’oeuvres and other catered delicacies, as small talk mixed with the occasional offer for collaboration or business. Catching his protégé in a rare moment free from the group, Tim edged in his direction. “Zach,” he began in mock whisper from the young man’sZach’s right side, “you know this means that someday soon, you’ll have to wear that suit and tie on a daily basis. I harbor some doubt that tie-dyed T-shirts with homemade, spray-painted themes will suffice as corporate attire.”

“Tim,” the young man said while grinning sarcasticallygrinned Zach sarcastically, “that’s peculiar advice coming from an allegedly allegedly world-famous professor like, well, you— who’s gained infamy for giving conference talks in his ski gear right after arriving from the slopes. And where did you find that tie for today? A Peter Pan theme for a thesis defense?”

“Give the old man a break, buddy,” laughed Tim. “Besides, every now and then, they call on me to give talks to the bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed kids at the North Carolina middle schools, to try and sucker them into being crazy enough to consider an engineering career. You know I never actually grew up in the first place, so this way I can work my own silliness into my official business.”

As the two laughed by the hors d-oeuvres, Tim felt a twinge of sadness as his own mention of the middle school rekindled a painful memory from three years before. But the levity and triumphant jubilation room convinced him to shelve the thought for the time being. However, his own happy Tim’s lively participation in the festivities was interrupted anywaywas interrupted, suddenly, as he his ostentatiously vibrating cell phone announced a callfelt the unmistakable trembling of his cellular phone announcing a call. He was surprised at first; he’d made an effort to advise nearly everyone on his contact list since he had advised all of his colleagues to refrain from calling during the thesis defenseon that red-letter day. , yYet, when he checked the number on the cell phone’s answering screen, he immediately recognized the area code—from Tennessee.noticed a Tennessee area code.

“Excuse me for a minute, Zach; looks like I’ll have to take this.”

**************************************

“Tim Shoemaker here, how may I make your day today?”

“Tim! Hi—Sorry—I’m so sorry, I heard about the thesis defense today, are you free to talk?”

Tim paused momentarily, as the voice on the other line quickly triggered long-buried but familiar memoriesconjured up a familiar face from the fog of his haziest memories. “Rachel? My goodness, Rachel Bloom—is that really you? So nice to hear from you! It’s been almost two years—yes, yes we just finished Zach’s defense. He was the rockstar star performer as always;, we’re just decompressing now, doing a littledoing the obligatory schmoozing with the white knuckles and long nights behind us. How are you? Or, as long as we’re breaking the ice of two years’ absence—where are you? I noticed you were calling from Tennessee.”

“I’m at Oak Ridge now, Tim, in the National Laboratories, Biomedical Engineering Division. They recently opened up some dream facilities for prosthetics work;, I’m half-surprised they haven’t been knocking on your door already, trying to add some marquee attractions to the cast. There are military labs across the campus here, so, the funding’s like manna from heaven, no grants to get ulcers aboutfret over, no worries. It was a plum spot to have until… until recently,” she said with a sigh.

Tim smiled as her voice triggered long-buried but instantly recognizablefamiliar memories. Dr. Rachel Bloom had been one of the top prospects in Tim’s field. Fresh out of graduate school, she had just begun her own research fellowship shortly after Tim had been awarded a tenured professorship at Duke. He had collaborated with her on sight restoration projects at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, near Tim’s own facilities on Duke University’s campus. She had gone on to win a Macarthur Genius Fellowshipcoveted national fellowship for her own pioneering studies on occipital lobe mapping, to tracingmap the physiology of human vision sight to specific neural networks in the brain’s vision center,occipital lobe of the brain, which could then be recapitulated reproduced in the computer-assisted visual aids that had been Tim’s own lifelong passion. To his own dismay, he had fallen out of contact with her in the wake of excruciating circumstances. Hers was a voice he had long been hoping to hear again.

“No, no I’ve definitely been hearing stories about the talent in Tennessee!” Tim replied. “I’ve got a few old contactsnames in mythe Rolodex now haunting the halls at Oak Ridge, all hours of the day. No sense in name-dropping; I’m just glad to hear from you. I’ve long been endeavoring to shoot off an Email to you but you know me, the acknowledged authority on the fine art of procrastination!.”

“No worries, Tim; it’s my fault as much as yours! I lost touch after the Indianapolis conference despite my best efforts. I was new to the position and the pace of affairs at this place, and I didn’t have a second to catch my breath.” Rachel paused for a moment as she transitioned into a more serious and concerned tone. “Tim, I’m really sorry to call you and cram your schedule further with a request, and . I stumbled onto your lab Website yesterday and I know you’ve got your talk at Salt Lake City soon, plus theknow your sabbatical’s on the horizon; —it’s just that, something’s come up here. None of us has any inkling about what’s hit us and—well, things have gone from bad, to worse, to horrendous I mean, I’m talking Black Box-level head-scratching on our end.”

Tim was mildly rattled by Rachel’s change in tone, but he tried to sound reassuring. “Rachel, what is it? Is everything OK?”I have a few days free now that Zach’s basically lord of the manor around

“Well,” she began tentatively, “Tim, you remember—the AP-278 retinal implant prototypes, and the trials for sight restoration in the Iraq and Afghan War veterans?”

Tim’s hazy recollections, after a slight delay, came roaring back as he imbibed Rachel’s words. “Of course, yes, I do remember! It’s been a while, and the AP-278 was of course not our brainchild; it started as a rival project, in fact. Around the same time, we’d received approval from a separate clinical review committee, to implement our Argus neural network as the learning computer for sight restoration—to activate the wireless link between Argus and the eye implants, and so to tweak and fine-tune the vision that the implants were restoring for the patients. After that presumed success, I myself got the coveted invitation to serve on the next review panel for the AP-278 clinical trials. It was three years ago, when everything with Susan—” Tim’s enthusiastic reminiscences were interrupted by fragments of distraught emotion, and memories of events that he fought mightily to banish from his mind.

Tim’s memory, after a slight delay, was immediately jogged bycame roaring back upon hearing Rachel’s words. “Of course, yes, I do remember! It’s been a while, and the AP-278, naturally that didn’t come out of our effortsthat of course didn’t originate with us; it started as a rival project, in fact. We had put the finishing touches on Argus, worked out all the kinks to create that functioning wireless link between Argus and the implants—we’d just gotten the go-ahead ourselves from the review committee, in fact, to use Argus as the master computer interface to tweak and fine-tune the retinal implants. And so they invited me to serve and I started on the next review panel for the AP-278 clinical trials, three years back, right when, everything with Susan—” Tim’s enthusiastic recollections were interrupted by fragments of distraught emotion and memories of events that he fought mightily to keep out ofavoid coalescing in his mind.

He regained his composure and re-focused. “Anyway I, I obviously got a little distracted around that timethen and that’s why I left the panel before casting a formalfinal vote, but I did recommend approval in the written evaluation I submitted before taking off. The AP-278 had its flaws but as far as retinal implants went at the time, it was class valedictorian. I’m still dumbfounded by the cleverness of the AP-278 design team, their secret recipe of nerve growth factors or… whatever magical elixir they cooked up. They created an implant that could grow its own nerve fibers, to link up with the optic nerve in the eye itself. We spent a decade chasing that Holy Grail and never came close, not even with Zach’s wizardry. I heard the committee eventually granted their blessing and…” Tim paused awkwardly, exiting his own memories as he contemplated what his talented ex-colleague had been implying. “Rachel, I recall now, the clinical team was seeking a leader to run the trials. So you’re saying—you were the one recruited for the project? And it migrated to Oak Ridge?”

It still amazes me, that secret recipe the design team came up with—the growth factor cocktail they used to coax the fabricated nerve fibers on the implant, to synapse with the optic nerve machinery in the eye so efficiently. Even, even with Zach’s wizardry here, we’ve never figured that out ourselves. Then I heard afterward that the project won the committee’s blessing, then the great news that you were being invited as one of the clinical trial managers—I’m sorry, I guess it just fell off the radar screen after, the accident.. everything with Susan. Anyway, you were starting the trials for the Marines back from the wars, correct? I never knew you all had a niche at Oak Ridge, though.”

Rachel inhaled with a conscious breath, before settling in to explain further. “Exactly, Tim. Everything I’m telling you is confidential but… the primary efforts commenced in Missouri and Maryland, at Fort Detrick and the Naval Hospital. Then the supervisory committees authorized Oak Ridge as a satellite site. It must have been after you left the panel; in fact, I was a latecomer to the project myself, after I’d been recruited here for another line of work. But we were later awarded a lion’s share of the Defense Department money, since we were designated to be the ones planting the flag and making history, giving sight to the blind.”

Rachel inhaled with a conscious breath before breaking what Tim immediately recognized would not be pleasant news. “This is all confidential but… yes, the main efforts began elsewhere, in Missouri and Maryland, both at Fort Detrick and the Naval Hospital. Then, but the supervisory committees later selectedauthorized Oak Ridge as a satellite site. It must have been after you left the panel; and in fact, I was a latecomer to the project myself, I only came in later myself to the project whenafter I’d I got been recruited here for another line of work. Anyway, we were eventually awarded a lion’s share of the Defense Department money because, I guess, we were supposed to be the ones planting the flag and making history I guess.”

Rachel’s anxiety mixed with a measure of pride at her participation in the effort, as she continued. “They gave us the go-ahead to flip the switch here in Tennessee. After the surgeons had introduced the implants into the patients, we were tasked to activate the wireless link-up between the AP-278 and the Argus network, to train those vets to see.”

“So,” interjected Tim in incredulous astonishment, “Argus really did graduate to a higher calling. After things went so awry for me three years ago, I licensed Argus out on the open market, basically gave it up for adoption. My grant funding was calling a different tune for our research in any case, so I never did learn all the places that Argus wound up carving out its own niche.”

“Well, we’re certainly on that list at Oak Ridge, Tim,” remarked Rachel matter-of-factly. “Argus is still basically the same beast as when you first conjured it up and licensed it. The state-of-the-art version we use here has a few added bells and whistles around the edges, but otherwise it uses the identical modulating software you put together three years ago. Because of the confidentiality clauses, I couldn’t tell even you about it before; but it’s been working exactly as you’d hoped, teaching the blind soldiers how to regain their sight at high resolution in a matter of months. We were literally popping champagne when we first tasted success. Take a look.”

As though to rekindle a coveted moment of happier times in the midst of her recent melancholy, Rachel dispatched a picture to Tim’s cell phone. A gaggle of eleven frazzled, exhausted, yet unmistakably exuberant engineers and technicians held cocktail glasses aloft. In the background could be glimpsed a signature image that Tim recognized all too well: the face of Argus, an otherwise unremarkable large, black rectangular case with a spiral motif in the center, flanked by knob-like concentric circles in the upper left- and right-hand corners, like reddish round eyes with pitch-black pupils.

”We were so happy for the patients in the trials, Tim. They’re mostly Marine veterans, spirited and courageous to a man and woman—many of whom put their own lives on the line, for the people on the ground as much as the others in their units. They’d lost their sight in the line of duty, blinded by shrapnel wounds or flashes from explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we took such pride in helping them to see again. Upon the insertion of the implants, the Marines saw blurry and generally unrecognizable images at first; but with the help of Argus and its fine-tuning, we were able to coax the AP-278 to sync with the Marines’ seeing centers in the visual cortex. In the span of weeks, our patients could make out objects, distinguish colors; soon they could recognize family members, and one of them was even starting to read large text and dance salsa with his fiancée again.”

Rachel again halted her words, crestfallen by the events that she would soon relate to Tim. “Here we were, making history and restoring sight to these heroes, Cloud 9 for everybody… And then it just started falling apart.”

Tim furrowed his brow in sympathetic concern. “Rachel—what do you mean? What happened?”

“That’s the source of our gloom lately, Tim; we just don’t know. We’ve been subjecting ourselves to all-nighters for two months now combing through the data, talking to the docs, and I’m telling you, nothing makes sense. It’s been varying interludes for the different soldiers in the trial but inevitably, after a few months… they begin acting erratically.”

“Behavioral changes?”

“Yes, but that’s just the start. All of them in the trial, who’ve received the AP-278 implant and been connected to Argus—they’ve done wonderfully, begun to see again. But then a few months in, they lose touch with us and seem to withdraw. Then they start telling us… it’s as if something had lodged inside their minds, sending them messages. They chant, they sketch these, these pictures—God, the most dreadful images. It’s clear that their restored vision remains intact, since they can react sensibly to their environment, but eventually they don’t respond to us much, or even to their families. And then the nightmares begin, the visions that they project out to everyone around them…”

Tim puzzled over Rachel’s description. “I assume the doctors have ruled out obvious diagnoses?”

“Yes, all the usual suspects and then some, like post-traumatic stress disorder, or schizophrenia—all out of the picture. Besides, what would suddenly cause an epidemic of neurological or psychiatric disease, just in this limited group of people? The doctors are flummoxed; they can’t isolate an infectious agent, and they’ve run out of possible diagnoses. They’ve considered all the farfetched possibilities and rare diseases, even done brain biopsies to rule out encephalitis, or a mad-cow disease variant affecting the brain matter. But it’s been fruitless; we still have no leads.”

Rachel sighed deeply and plaintively as she resumed her account. “But there’s something else that’s profoundly spooking the team here. The Marines are not simply suffering from an obvious disease, like some loss of brain function. Their behavior may be bizarre, but it’s purposeful; there’s method in the madness. Even though they’re isolated from each other, they still chant some of the same things, draw many of the same terrifying pictures. It’s as though—I don’t know Tim, when we implanted the AP-278 into their visual machinery, something else was implanted into their minds along with it.”

Tim continued to digest Rachel’s alarming message as others in the room carried on the revelry, oblivious to the unsettling picture that Tim was sketching in his mind. Flabbergasted, he settled on a straightforward offer of help to his brilliant ex-colleague. “Rachel, is there anything I can do? I’m not an expert on that particular implant but…”

“I know—I’m sorry to be imposing on you, Tim, but could you come here… this weekend perhaps?”

“You mean, this Saturday? The day after tomorrow?”

“If you can,” said Rachel, vacillating slightly at the urgent request. “I’m so sorry to come out of the blue like this, but in our meeting yesterday, the supervising committee dropped the whole ton of bricks on us; they were warning of a shutdown to the trials here on very short notice, possibly even removing the implants as a stopgap measure, even though that would likely do little good at this point. The higher-ups are worried that the entire funding pipeline for vision restoration will be endangered if bad press leaks out—with good reason, I have to admit.”

“I understand,” replied Tim sympathetically.

“Even worse, our counterpart clinical trials in Maryland and Missouri have just started up with the same wireless link-up between the retinal implants and Argus, and now they’re tossing out an SOS themselves. They haven’t seen this same phenomenon there, but they’re at an impasse about whether to continue or pull the plug. For their part, the medical officers coordinating the project back at the Naval Hospital in Maryland—they say they need a report by the end of next week on how to proceed.”

Rachel halted her recounting and sighed in her evident anxiety, calming herself as she pitched her pleadings more directly toward Tim. “My colleague yesterday remembered that you were on the AP-278 panel, and we realized that as the designer and developer of Argus as well, you’re one of the few people in the country, outside of the project, who could see the forest for the trees here. Tim, you have an intuitive feel for everything that can happen with the implantation; you know this field and the ins-and-outs, better than anyone else we could cite. And we need a miracle-worker to break this logjam. I’m so, so sorry to be laying this on your shoulders right before your sabbatical this summer, but as your friend and someone in dire need of a lifeline here, I’m at the end of my rope. Could you swing by, spend a couple days poring through the data, maybe sift through the Argus files—anything that might yield some answers?”

Tim responded without hesitation. “Rachel, don’t worry; I’ll be happy to help. That’s what I’m here for. I’m not sure how much I can contribute but I’ll hopefully point you in a productive direction. I do have a research talk over at Wake Forest University next Wednesday but otherwise, I have a little breather on my end. Zach’s done with the thesis defense, final exams for the undergrads are all wrapped up, and there are blessedly no more grants to write in the near term. In fact, that reminds me—my cousin Ernie lives out in Kingston right in your neck of the woods, and he’s been harassing me to finally pay him a visit! No better opportunity than now, I figure. I’ve been hoping for an excuse to indulge in a road trip over the mountains anyway, and this coming Monday is essentially a day off for me. What would be a good time for you on Saturday?”

“Thanks so much, Tim. On Saturday, we’re running a scheduled diagnostic of the system in the early morning; it’s already pre-set and we’re convening for an emergency session at 8:30 a.m. I’ll be in there by 5 a.m.”

“5 in the morning? On a Saturday?”

“Sadly, yes,” sighed Rachel, “that’s how matters have been for us lately. So if you could overnight it on Friday, and drop by sometime between my arrival and our meeting the next morning—we’d be grateful beyond words, Tim. Don’t worry about lodgings; I’ll arrange for the institute to put you up in a five-star hotel right off the research campus, given how far you’re going out on a limb for us.”

“Don’t worry, Rachel,” laughed Tim congenially. “I’m more of a rustic log-cabin kind of fellow for what it’s worth! Whatever you can manage, no need to pull too many strings. I have to give a lecture tomorrow morning for the graduate students, then I’ll take off to hopefully visit Ernie on the way over; I should arrive in the Oak Ridge area by around 9:30 tomorrow night.”

“We all appreciate it Tim; you’re a lifesaver.”

Rachel’s anxiety mixed with pride at her participation in the effort, which she continued to relate to her old colleague. “They gave the go-ahead for us to first activate the device here in Tennessee—after the surgeons finally introduced the implants into the patients, we were the ones to turn on the wireless link-up between the AP-278 and the Argus network.”

“Ah, Argus,” replied Tim in mock reminiscence. “So, they wound up using it after all. How is that wayward child of mine working these days for you? hAfter all my ordeals three years ago, I decided to give up Argus for adoption; we just re-tailored our efforts on souping up the implants themselves, it’s what our grants were paying for anyway.” ow is that wayward child of mine working these days for you?”

“Oh, Argus is still basically the same beast as when you conjured it, Tim,” remarked Rachel, in a lightly facetious yet increasingly strained voice. “The state-of-the-art version we use here just has a few minor new bells and whistles around the edges, but otherwise it’s the same modulating software you put together three years ago. It works as advertised, and we’ve been using it to help the patients learn rapidly how to see again, just as you had envisioned: to fine-tune and teach the retinal implants how to restore full-fledged visual function at high resolution, in a matter of months if everything were to fall into place. So we were popping champagne when it first happenedWe were literally popping champagne when it seemed we’d tasted success. Take a look.”

As though to rekindle a coveted moment of happier times in the midst of her recent melancholy, Rachel sent a picture to Tim’s cell phone. A group of nine frazzled, exhausted, yet unmistakably exuberant engineers and technicians held cocktail glasses aloft. In the background, one could glimpse a signature image that Tim recognized all too well: the face of Argus, an otherwise unremarkable large, black rectangular case with a spiral motif in the center, flanked by knob-like concentric circles in the upper left- and right-hand corners, like reddish round eyes with pitch-black pupils.

There were especially a couple guys in the trial”We were so happy for the patients in the trials, Tim. They’re mostly Marine veterans, spirited and courageous young soldiers who put their own lives on the line, for the people on the ground as much as the guys in their units. They’d lost their sight in the line of duty, they were blinded by shrapnel wounds or flashes from explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we took such pride in our efforts to help them see again. Upon the insertion of the implants, and after we had and linking the implant ed themwith to Argus, the Marinesy saw blurry and generally unrecognizable images at first; but gradually we taught the AP-278 to sync with the Marines’ seeing centers in the visual cortex, and weand were able to fine-tune the neural links. In short order, these guys could make out objects, could distinguish colors; they recognized their family members, and one of them was even starting to read large text and dance salsa with his fiancée again.”

Rachel again halted her words, crestfallen by the events that she would soon relate to Tim. “I mean, Hhere we were, making history and restoring sight to these heroes, it was Cloud 9 for everybody… And then it just started falling apart.”

Tim furrowed his brow in concern. “Rachel—what do you mean? What happened?”

“That’s the source of our gloom lately, Tim; we just don’t know. We’ve been pulling all-nighters for two months now combing through the data, talking to the docs, and I’m telling you, nothing makes sense! It’s been varying periods for the different soldiers in the trial but inevitably, after a few months… they begin acting erratically.”

“Behavioral changes?”

“Yes, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. All of them in the trial, who’ve been connected up to Argus via the wireless link to their implants, they were doing wonderfully and starting to see. , bBut then a few months in, they begin… they lose touch with us, they withdraw. Then they start telling us… it’s as if something had lodged inside their minds, sending them messages. They chant, they draw these, these pictures—God, the most dreadful images. They can obviously still see, they and reactspond to their environment, but eventually they don’t respond to us much, or even to their families. And then the nightmares begin, the visions that they project out to everyone around them….”

Tim puzzled over Rachel’s description. “I assume—they’ve ruled out anything obvious, right?”

“As far as we know. All the usual suspects, like post-traumatic stress disorder, or schizophrenia—all out of the picture. Besides, what would suddenly cause an epidemic of neurological or psychiatric disease, just in this limited group of people? The doctors are baffled; they can’t diagnose it. They were ruminating over all the farfetched possibilities, even something like CJD—mad-cow disease in people basically, when their brain tissue is progressively altered by a catalytic protein, in a modified form, to cause dementia. But it’s nothing like that, and we have no leads. No encephalitis virus eating away at their gray matter, no infectious agent of any kind that we can isolate.”

Rachel paused to catch her breath before continuing her account. “But there’s something else that’s really spooking the team here. The Marines are not simply suffering from an obvious disease, some loss of brain function. Their behavior may be bizarre, but it’s purposeful; there’s method in the madness. Even though they’re isolated from each other. they still chant some of the same things, draw some of the same terrifying pictures. It’s as though—I don’t know Tim, when we implanted the AP-278 into their visual machinery, something else was implanted into their minds along with it.”

Tim was still trying to process Rachel’s alarming message as the others in the room continued in the revelry, oblivious to the unsettling words that Tim was hearing. He finally replied to his former colleague. “Rachel, is there anything I can do? I’m not an expert on that particular implant but…”

“I know—I’m sorry to be imposing on you, but could you come here… this weekend even?”

“You mean—this Saturday? Day after tomorrow?”

“If you can,” said Rachel, vacillating at the urgent request. “I’m so sorry to come out of the blue like this but… In our meeting yesterday, the supervising committee dropped the whole ton of bricks on us; they were talking about shutting down the trials here on very short notice, possibly even removing the implants as a stopgap even though we all doubt that’d do much good at this point. The higher-ups are worried that the entire funding pipeline for vision restoration will be endangered if bad press leaks out—with good reason, I have to admit.”

“I hear you,” replied Tim sympathetically.

“Even worse, our counterparts have only just started up at the Maryland and Missouri sites with the wireless link-up, and now they’re tossing out an SOS themselves. They haven’t seen this phenomenon there, but they at an impasse about whether to continue or pull the plug. For his part, the medical officer coordinating the project back at the Naval Hospital in Maryland—he says he needs a report by the end of next week on how to proceed.”

Rachel halted her recounting and sighed in her evident anxiety, calming herself as she pitched her pleadings more directly toward Tim. “My colleague yesterday remembered that you were on the AP-278 panel, and we realized that with everything you did on Argus as well, you’re one of the few people in the country, outside of the project, who could see the forest for the trees here. Tim, you have an intuitive feel for everything that can happen with the implantation; you just know this field and all the ins-and-outs, better than anyone else. And we need a miracle-workersomeone to break this logjam., We need and rescue us. I’m so, so sorry to be laying this on your shoulders right before your sabbatical, but as your friend and as someone in dire need of a lifeline here, I’m at the end of my ropesome suggestions here, I’m imploring you. Couldan you swing by, spend a couple days poring through the data, maybe sift through the Argus files—anything you think might help?”

Tim replied without hesitation. “Rachel, don’t worry, I’ll be happy to help. That’s what I’m here for. I’m not sure how much I can contribute but I’ll hopefully point you in a productive direction. I do have a research talk over at Wake Forest University next Wednesday but otherwise, I have a little breather on my end—Zach’s done with the thesis defense, final exams for the undergrads are all wrapped up, and there are blessedly no grants to write in the near term. In fact, that reminds me— and besides,my cousin Ernie lives out in Kingston right in your neck of the woods, and he’s been harassing me to finally stop procrastinating and pay him a visit! No better opportunity than now, I figure. I’ve been hoping for an excuse to indulge in a road trip over the mountains anyway, and this Monday is more-or-less a day off for me. What would be a good time for you on Saturday?”

“Thanks, Tim, thanks so much. Saturday—we’re running a scheduled diagnostic of the system in the early morning, it’s already pre-set and we’re convening for an emergency session at 8:30 a.m. I’ll be in there by 5 a.m.—yes, you heard that right, that’s how things have been for us of late. So if you could overnight it on Friday, and drop by sometime between my arrival and our meeting the next morning—we’d be grateful beyond words, Tim. Don’t worry about lodgings; I’ll arrange for the institute to put you up in a five-star hotel right off the research campus, given how much you’re going out on a limb for us.”

Tim laughed. “Don’t worry, Rachel; I’m more of a rustic log-cabin kind of guy for what it’s worth! Whatever you can manage, no need to pull too many strings. I have to lecture tomorrow morninggive a lecture tomorrow morning for the grad students, then I’ll take off to hopefully catch Ernie on the way over; I should bearrive in the Oak Ridge area by around 9:30 tomorrow night or so.”

“We all appreciate it Tim, you’re a lifesaver.”

**************************************

“Boss, what’s wrong? The ranch dip didn’t sit all that well with me either, but it wasn’t that awful. Why the long face all of a sudden?” Zach had noticed his mentor behind the hors d’ oeuvres table, dwelling on a matter that appeared to be troubling him deeply. There was something about the cadence in Rachel’s voice, traces of an almost primal fear in the face of an enigma that was as ominous in its concealed menace, as it was inscrutable in its very nature.

“Ah, it wasn’t the ranch dip; rather, it was the way the cheese and crackers were laid out on the platter. You know I’m a stickler about such matters,” rejoined Tim, playing along with the trademark wit of his young charge. His mood quickly turned somber. “Zach, that was a call from an old colleague of mine; something’s gone badly amiss with an old project from many moons ago. It was back in the days when I was serving on that confidential clinical trial review panel, the one that I had to be so top-secret, cloak-and-dagger about three years before.”

“So… this is an old collaboration?”

“More like a last-ditch distress call. I’m not fully abreast of developments myself, but it seems that matters there have made the leap from worrisome to desperate in quite a hurry. Anyway, it’s short notice but I agreed to pretend as though I know something of value and consult for them; they’re out west in Tennessee for the project, so I’ll be road-tripping it tomorrow after the lecture, meeting them over the weekend.”

“It’s that urgent?”

Tim nodded with a resigned sigh. “For your part, the thesis committee recommended a few cosmetic changes on the dissertation that you could wrap up on any rainy Monday afternoon, so you might as well go and play hard for the weekend; I’m afraid I’ll be skipping the festivities.”

“No worries, Chief; we’ll be sure to down a few shots in your honor.”

“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t,” he replied with a smile, before again addressing his young protégé with an earnest expression. “Zach, I… I really wish you’d reconsider the offer I made last week. I know you and Matt Hansen were just chatting aimlessly there, about your career now that you have that coveted degree by your name but—”

Zach looked back impassively, grimacing slightly as he turned obliquely away. “Tim, damnit—I thought we agreed to give it a rest, just for today. I’ve been cooped up like a sardine for months prepping my thesis defense, it’s my first day in God knows how long to actually be with Renee; it’s just too much for me to think about.”

“I understand, Zach, and I wouldn’t be harping on this if I didn’t have to hit the road on such

“Anything serious, Boss? Anything I could lend a hand with?”

“No, though I’m sure they appreciate the very sentiment of your generosity. You might as well tie up any loose ends with the fine job you did today. The thesis committee recommended a few cosmetic changes on the dissertation that you could wrap up on any rainy Monday afternoon, now that you’ve met all your graduation requirements. You’ve worked without flinching for this; now go and play hard, just spend the entire weekend goofing off and doing absolutely nothing productive for once, OK? I should be back in town late Monday or Tuesday; we’ll touch base again when I’m around.”

Zach nodded slyly toward his mentor. “It’s a pity that you can’t join us Friday night in our grand plans to go bar-hopping in Raleigh and make complete and utter fools of ourselves in public. But I know you have to don your cape and fly to the rescue from time to time. Anyhow, we’re planning to get a head-start downtown in Chapel Hill this evening, so I figured I’d just gather all my belongings here and take a cat-nap back home, before dashing out tonight.”

“Sounds like a splendid plan,” replied Tim wryly. “Congrats again on a job well-done, Zach.”

As the professor reached for his cell phone to call his cousin in Tennessee, Zach wheeled back around, gratefully addressing his mentor once more before setting off. “Hey, Chief—thanks, I really do appreciate it, suffering through five years of my imbecilic questions and assorted blunders to get here. Anyway, don’t hesitate to ring me up if there’s any housekeeping you need done with the equipment in here over the weekend. Peace out and have a nice trip tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Zach, and don’t worry yourself with the equipment in the Doghouse; Matt’s been churning out data all day and night lately. Despite my own repeated entreaties for him to indulge in a spontaneous week-long trip to Aruba sometime soon, he insists on sticking around here until the research talk at Winston-Salem next Wednesday, so I’m sure he’ll be on the premises again over the weekend to do any dirty work that has to be done. You just go and have a blast, all right?”

“Thanks a million, Chief,” said Zach, signaling a thumbs-up as he exited the door. As Tim prepared to touch base with his cousin Ernie and announce his surprise visit, he halted for a moment and mentally replayed the conversation with Rachel Bloom, mixed as it was with both nostalgia and an intangibly disturbing sense of helpless uncertainty. His mind then fixed again upon his newly vivid recollection of the review panel for the AP-278 implant, and most of all on what caused him to cease his own participation in the panel, on that horrible late spring day when it all fell apart.

“Everything with Susan…”

**************************************

“Boss, what’s wrong? The ranch dip didn’t sit all that well with me either, but it wasn’t that awful. Why the long face all of a sudden?” Zach had noticed his mentor behind the hors d’ oeuvres table, dwelling on a matter that appeared to be troubling him deeply. There was something about the cadence in Rachel’s voice, traces of an almost primal fear in the face of an enigma that was as ominous in its concealed menace, as it was inscrutable in its very nature.

“Ah, it wasn’t the ranch dip bud, it was the way those cheese and crackers were laid out on the platter; you know I’m a stickler about these things,” rejoined Tim, playing along as usual with the trademark sarcasm of his young charge.

“Zach, that was a call from an old colleague of mine,” continued Tim, his mood quickly turning more earnest, “and something’s come up with an old project from many moons ago. It was back in the days when I was serving on that confidential clinical trial review panel, the one that I had to be so top-secret, cloak-and-dagger about.”

“So… this is an old collaboration?”

“More like a last-ditch distress call. I’m not fully abreast of developments myself, but it seems that matters have turned pretty desperate there in a hurry. Anyway, it’s short notice but I agreed to pretend as though I know something of value and consult for them; they’re out west in Tennessee for the project and so I’ll be road-tripping it tomorrow after the lecture, meeting them over the weekend.”

“Anything serious, Boss? Anything I could lend a hand with?”

“No, though I’m sure they appreciate the very sentiment of your generosity. You might as well tie up any loose ends with the fine job you did today. The thesis committee, they just recommended a few cosmetic changes on the dissertation that you could wrap up on any rainy Monday afternoon, now that you’re done with all your graduation requirements. You’ve worked without flinching for this; now go and play hard, just spend the entire weekend goofing off and doing absolutely nothing productive for once, OK? I should be back in town late Monday or Tuesday; we’ll touch base again when I’m around.”

Zach nodded toward his mentor. “Well, Chief, I have to say I’m bummed that you won’t be able to join us Friday night in our grand plans to go bar-hopping in Raleigh and make complete and utter fools of ourselves in public. But I know you have to don your cape and fly to the rescue from time to time. Anyway, we figured we’d get a headstart downtown in Chapel Hill this evening, so I figured I’d just gather all my junk here and take a cat-nap back home before dashing out tonight. Take care, all right?”

“Absolutely, Zach,” Tim replied to his protégé. “Congrats again on a job well-done.”

As the professor reached for his cell phone to make a call to his cousin in Tennessee, Zach turned wheeled back around, to briefly addressgratefully addressing his mentor once morehis mentor once again before setting off. “Hey, Boss—thanks, I really do appreciate it, suffering through five years of my imbecilic questions and screw-upsassorted blunders to get here. Anyway, don’t hesitate to ring me up if there’s any housekeeping you need done with the equipment in here over the weekend. Peace out and have a nice trip tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Zach, and don’t worry about the equipment in the Doghouse; Matt’s been churning out data lately all day and night. Despite my own repeated entreaties for him to take a spontaneous week-long trip to Aruba sometime soon, he insists on sticking around here all day until the Salt Lake City conferencetalk at Winston-Salem next Wednesday, so I’m sure he’ll be on the premises again over the weekend to do any dirty work that has to be done. You just go and have a blast, all right?”

“Thanks a million, Chief,” said Zach, giving gave his mentor the thumbs-up as he headed out the door. As Tim prepared to touch base with his cousin in Tennessee and announce his surprise visit, he paused briefly as he halted for a moment and mentally replayeded the conversation with Rachel Bloom, mixed as it was with both nostalgia and an intangibly disturbing sense of helpless uncertainty.weirdness. His mind then fixed again upon his newly vivid recollection of the review panel for the AP-278 implant, and most of all on what caused him to cease his own participation in the panel, on that horrible late spring day when it all fell apart.

“Everything with Susan…”

Friday, May 13, 4:33 p.m.

Pine Gulch Filling Station, Gatlinburg, Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee

“So yes, rain, rain, and more rain blanketing the roads for the weekend and no relief in sight, that just about sums up what’s on tap for all you determined Great Smoky picnickers and hikers out there. This is Carl Roland with the WBRG Weathertracker, over to you Vivian.”

“And thank you, Carl. We will have more on the weekend weather forecast, including live updates and road conditions, later in the broadcast. But first, an update on the worrying events first reported early last week, when a computer virus of unknown origin was reported to have infiltrated and hijacked the networks at local branches of the Humboldt Memorial Hospital and the Khemia Corporation, based in the town of Farragut.”

Tim’s mouth gaped open in a deep yawn as he queued up before the checkout counter at the filling station, clutching a salty snack to tack onto his gasoline tab. He fixed his attention sporadically on an old TV perched precariously behind the counter, beaming out fuzzy images from the local news. The weather along the drive had been oppressively dank and dreary, and his winding course about the meandering mountain roads had faced seemingly interminable delays; it had been no trivial struggle to navigate through the dense, hazy nebula of fog and drizzle carpeting the road. Waging a Herculean struggle against the Hydra-headed assaults of fatigue and abject boredom that had set in over the journey, Tim’s interest was briefly piqued by a curious, violet-hued image materializing on the grainy television before him, vaguely resembling a nut twirled around a bolt, yet with notched grooves around its perimeter and a multitude of exotic etchings inscribed within the figure.

“Experts have recently dubbed this electronic intruder the Chakana Virus, a name originally suggested by retired local anthropologist Haley Rasmussen, who spoke briefly with WBRG reporters this morning at her home in Gatlinburg. ‘In the… Inca mythology, which was my focus years ago while stationed in Ecuador, there is a symbol called the Chakana, which in their belief system symbolizes the links between the everyday world we experience… and the unseen realms of the gods, their underworld and heaven above, as it were. When I saw that image, the one that had been flashing on the screens at Humboldt Memorial, I thought to myself—looks just like the Chakana. Couldn’t guess at any deeper meaning for it, though.’”

“Not something you see every day, eh?” mumbled the clerk behind the counter, his attention briefly diverted as Tim advanced to the front of the queue.

“In my line of work, hardly anything surprises anymore,” responded Tim with a jovial grin. “I’m at pump #6 by the way, $20 for the premium unleaded.”

“Sure thing,” replied the young man behind the counter, rubbing his slightly stubbled chin as he rang up the tab.

The poised narration of the TV reporter continued on screen. “Authorities have sought to reassure anxious local residents that personal records and hospital test results have not been compromised or made public, yet these soothing words have met with growing skepticism, as days continue to pass with little explanation for the recurring intrusions. An unnamed hospital staff member at Humboldt Memorial, on condition of anonymity, disclosed to WBRG investigative reporters that the Neurological Imaging Center had been especially hard hit. Meanwhile, a Khemia company representative reported that the biotech firm had suffered persistent attacks on its own brain scan databases, used in its clinical trials for stroke rehabilitation drugs.”

“Brain scans?” inquired Tim rhetorically, looking on in baffled incredulity.

“That’ll be $22.57 altogether,” said the clerk to Tim, who lifted his eyes from the TV screen as he reached for his wallet. “So—you’re a professor out in Carolina, eh? What brings you out to our mountain hideout here in Tennessee?”

“I—” began Tim, interrupting his thought in mild surprise as he placed the cash on the counter. “How’d you know…”

“Not much mystery with your badge on, Dr. Shoemaker,” laughed the clerk in affable reply.

“My badge—oh, forgot I still had that thing pinned on my vest,” said Tim, unclasping the insignia and consigning it to an anonymous side pocket in his travel knapsack. “Those roads out there, all the fog closing in on you like a flood tide; it’s surreal, I felt zombified half the time behind the wheel. And I suppose you’d be Ted, at least if your own badge has anything to say about it.”

“The folks call me ‘Theodoric,’ believe it or not,” said the clerk with a bemused grin, as though incredulous of his own moniker. “My Pa owns this place but he’s an amateur classicist when he’s not busy running the show, and he and Ma picked out a slate of names from ancient Rome for me and my little sibs. Always made for awkward introductions so I’ve just stayed with ‘Ted’ ever since high school.”

“Well, then Ted it’ll be for me, too.”

“Much obliged, Doc. You’re right, that fog can get mighty thick and sticky sometimes but never quite like this. Thicker than pea soup? Heck, might as well be our homemade Tennessee corn chowder,” quipped Ted as he handed over the change.

“Tennessee corn chowder, huh? I guess I’ll have to sample a bowl of it myself to see.” Tim chuckled faintly as he slipped the change into his wallet. “As for me, I came out to answer a request for help from an old friend at Oak Ridge, but I figured I’d multitask as long as I was roaming around out here anyway. My cousin in Kingston’s been pestering me for months to visit, and besides, I’ve long craved an excuse to take the scenic route through all these mountain passes. Just, not much scenery through the corn chowder fog, unfortunately.”

“Yeah, I’m with ya, even for us local folk it’s been a real puzzler,” replied Ted, shaking his head. “We don’t get fog and cloudbursts up here like this, especially not this time of year—heck, most years in May my Pa has me out choppin’ wood for the stove and plantin’ trees, but the whole forest is soaked over like a wet dishrag this time around… You know, livin’ up in the mountains like this, you can just feel things in the air sometimes, like electric jolts boltin’ through the sky. And you can call me crazy, but there’s something awful brewin’ out there, like a storm straight outta Hell itself.”

“Something…” Tim narrowed his eyes in anxious curiosity at the clerk’s words. “You mean, out there on the mountain passes?”

“Yeah, and I’m bettin’ it’s not gonna stay confined to these parts either. Can’t quite put my finger on it but… you know how the weather forecasters on the radio get all in a huff about Biblical storms sometimes, peltin’ the hills up here, trying to warn you out-of-towners I suppose. Well, this is gonna be the real thing. Not sure I could get a weatherman job makin’ predictions on that basis but, you get pretty good at sensing these vibes around here. This thing’s a comin’ and awfully soon. Don’t mean to scare you but, just look out for yourself out there, and Godspeed to you, Doc.”

“Hey, you too, Ted, thanks, uh… thanks for the heads-up.”

**************************************

As Tim steered cautiously through the fog-beset meanderings of the mountain thoroughfares, his tank now full and his tired eyes refreshed, waves of anxious reflection flitted through his mind. There was something gnawingly disconcerting about the clerk’s precautionary words, not only in their foreboding but in the perplexing certainty with which he had uttered them. The effect was only compounded by the disorienting ambience of the mountain climb, as the slow crawl through mist-covered roadways periodically gave way to passages through dimly-illuminated hillside tunnels, the enveloping darkness of their arched walls punctuated by the persistent rumbling of the cloud-saturated sky. The fog grew so thick in many places that Tim barely noticed the headlights of oncoming cars, as though they were simply materializing beside him. It seemed so otherworldly, he thought to himself.

As Tim slowly neared the threshold of yet another mountain tunnel, his eyes darted to the inscription on the arch of its entryway: a prosaic monogram of the local Highway Authority that nonetheless seemed to menace the road below, bathed as it was in the harsh glow of a red safety lamp that struggled to illuminate the fog- and rain-swept entrance. The light occasionally pierced the swirling mist, like flaming arrows aimed at oncoming drivers. As the gray-hued daylight gradually subsided within the mouth of the tunnel, Tim could hear the unsettling echo of the clerk’s cryptic warning, reverberating loudly in his mind: “There’s something awful brewin’ out there, like a storm straight outta Hell itself.”

Friday, May 13, 7:22 p.m.

Home of Ernest Shoemaker, Kingston, Tennessee, USA

Tim paused to stretch his aching back and shoulders as he marched up to the threshold of the cozy Colonial Revival-style home before him. The seemingly interminable journey west had finally reached its first destination, the faint flicker of an obscured twilight dancing in the midst of the stubborn fog and drizzle. Tim collapsed his umbrella and rang the doorbell of his cousin Ernie’s home, being greeted seconds later by a host eager to usher him inside.

“Well, if it isn’t the delinquent yet distinguished Professor Shoemaker himself, right on my doorstep after all these years,” said Ernie, firmly shaking Tim’s hand and removing his guest’s waterlogged overcoat. Ernie’s light brown eyes beamed out warmly beneath his dark, bushy eyebrows, framing a slightly heavy-set yet gentle face topped by a tousled mop of dark brown hair. His voice was deep and gruff, but welcoming in a curiously avuncular way.

“Delinquent yes, not so sure about the distinguished part,” chuckled Tim. “Nice to see you too, cuz.”

“Come in, please, make yourself at home—I’m not sure I even want to know how you fared on your drive out to these parts!”

“And I’m loath to reminisce about it,” laughed Tim in response. “Half the time I harbored doubts about whether I was still on Planet Earth; the fog out in the mountains there might as well have been a river, visibility of six inches if we were lucky.”

“You must be famished, Tim; I can’t imagine you had many rest stops winding about the hills out there,” said Ernie, gesturing toward a round platter of finely dressed-up appetizers that had been meticulously laid out on the coffee table before them.

“Oh, Ernie, you shouldn’t have!” replied Tim. “I think I more than stuffed myself with my weekly quota of hors-d’oeuvres yesterday after Zach’s thesis defense. Though I must say, I’m quite impressed by what’s on offer. Quiche on a chafing dish? Caviar? Tomato fondue? And a fine Merlot to wash it down! When did you of all people don the chef’s hat?”

“Ever since I went into semi-retirement, I’ve been indulging all my long-postponed hobbies, for better or worse,” replied Ernie with a wry grin, as he reached for a bottle and decanted half-a-glass of fine Merlot into two waiting tumblers on the coffee table. “Besides, I can’t take all the credit here; Connie decided to lend her own expertise prior to her potluck tonight. She sends her warm regards, by the way.”

“Sorry I missed her, buddy—I slipped out on such short notice, I didn’t have time to plan the getaway.”

“Speaking of unexpected getaways, Tim, what exactly is this rescue mission you’ve stumbled into? I was spacing out in the backyard yesterday when you first broke the news to me—something about that sight restoration trial you were empanelled for years back?”

“That’s the one,” sighed Tim in consternation, “at least that’s how it started, those state-of-the-art retinal implants that were going to ‘open the eyes of the world,’ as the tagline went. They seem to have worked as advertised in the initial trials; unfortunately, it looks as though the docs were greeted with some unwanted surprises after they implanted them. Much of it’s confidential but…” Tim interrupted himself briefly to imbibe from the wine set before him, gulping down nearly half of the cup’s contents to soothe his parched throat. “Ah, what the heck, not even the people there know what’s hit them.”

“In terms of side effects, complications from the implantation?”

“That’s one way to describe it, if you could tolerate an almost ludicrous degree of understatement” said Tim, shaking his head incredulously. “The AP-278—that retinal implant I OK’d three years ago when I was serving on the ‘Frontiers of Vision Research’ clinical review panel—it received the green light for trials in some of the military hospitals, for the Marine veterans back from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars who’d lost their sight from wounds in the line of duty.”

Tim clutched the wine tumbler again, this time limiting himself to a tentative sip as he gazed momentarily out the living room window. A drizzling rain continued to strafe the glass and dribble down from above, as whispers of a gossamer-thin fog billowed about the front yard. “From what my old friend was telling me yesterday, everything was following the plan, and the vets regained their sight. But in the aftermath, seems like all Hell is breaking loose. Like a spreading… psychosis emerging suddenly in those poor guys who received the treatment, and nothing the medical team has seen before. There’s no doctor from here to Moscow who has the slightest idea about what’s causing it. I’m not sure what kind of epiphany I’ll have poring through their logs, but the suits back in Maryland and Washington, D.C. are apparently on the brink of yanking funds for the whole trial. I’m their Hail Mary attempt.”

Ernie continued to scan his cousin’s face, looking on with an equal mixture of sympathy and puzzlement. “A spreading psychosis, huh? Gosh, given the hours those poor folks hold down in those labs, I’m surprised it hasn’t hit everyone on their payroll. If it makes you feel better, you’re not the only one getting Maydays from Oak Ridge these days.”

“You too? Didn’t you retire filthy rich two years ago, Ernie?” asked Tim in gently mocking sarcasm.

“More like a glorified semi-retirement. I still take house calls; after I left the firm, I put up my shingle as an independent contractor, if nothing else as a courtesy to all my old contacts at Oak Ridge and the universities around town. I guess I’m a walking museum of knowledge on all these antiquated, customized pre-Internet systems they still use around here for their special applications, and besides, computer repair guys in a town like this all but get canonized when you show up at their doorstep.”

“You always did like playing the hero, eh?”

“All the more so when I can be one,” chuckled Ernie, sipping from his own wine glass. “But this latest one’s got me stumped. Just a little over a month ago, they called me into one of the engineering departments about a virus ripping through the networks across the campus, from who knows where. I ran all my top-secret diagnostics on it, did my trademarked voodoo chants and got nowhere; I’ve never been so thoroughly stymied before. And then, a couple weeks ago, the virus abruptly pulled a disappearing act. It’s made only sporadic visits since then, nothing like what we encountered before.”

“Wait a minute, a… a virus in the networks? They were expounding on that today on the news; it was on a local broadcast during a quick pit stop I made en route—something striking a hospital around here, in the brain imaging department of all things.”

“That’s right, Chakana—believe me, I’ve fielded calls at all manner of ungodly hours about the Chakana virus, but despite the suggestive timing, we can’t find a concrete link to the one that struck Oak Ridge. Every virus has a signature in its code that specifies its, ‘taxonomy’ I suppose you could say—and Chakana’s a different species in a different family as best we can tell. Except, perhaps, for those calculations it runs.”

“Those… what?”

“All those strange computations,” replied Ernie, gesturing as though in simulation of what he was about to describe. “Both Chakana and the Oak Ridge virus, whenever they hijacked a PC or mainframe, they’d henceforth go on a spate of indescribably complex calculations. Usually just for a few minutes and they weren’t the same thing for each virus, but we’ve called in some of those crack mathematicians and code-breakers from the National Security Agency, and not even they can make heads or tails of it. One of their experts suspects it’s related to hacking disparate security firewalls, hopping across different network architectures. But it’s just a hunch, and an equivocal one at that. Whatever this beast is, it’s wild and untamed, and certainly not from any of the paths we’ve regularly crossed.”

“Hmm, a virus that hacks into brain-scan databases and then hijacks computers not to steal sensitive information but… to perform complex mathematics. Sounds like it’s gunning for a PhD,” said Tim sarcastically as he worked on the remainder of his wine.

“Heck, it’d take a team of PhD’s working full-bore to devise something like this; I’ve never seen the likes of it before. And it probably is trying to infiltrate the networks to steal sensitive data in some form, we just can’t yet make out its target. I’ll tell you that in my more cynical moments—let’s just say whoever these hackers are, I’d like to invest top dollar in whatever heist they’re about to pull off. Still, it’s all starting to creep out the folks around here. Every time I’ve set foot inside that Oak Ridge facility lately, I’m telling you there’s something to it that just gets under your skin. You couldn’t bribe me to work in that department these days.”

“Such a pleasant thought,” replied Tim with tongue firmly in cheek, as he cupped a cracker in his hand to dip into the fondue. “And I’m heading right into the lion’s den.”

“No need to fret, Tim, where’s that ol’ Shoemaker can-do spirit?”

“The torture of the drive out here must have squeezed it right out of me. By the way pal, congrats on getting the wine cellar up and fully stocked,” Tim said, eyeing a prized unopened bottle of full-bodied, Loire Valley red wine on the coffee table. “I demand a guided tour before I take off tonight.”

“Well now that you mention it, why don’t we head downstairs for a look-see? I can’t resist a little shameless showing off, especially considering all the toil and trouble Connie and I endured to get it up to standard.”

“Can’t wait. But first,” said Tim, turning aside to clutch his wine glass, “Cheers, to belated reunions and procrastinating cousins!”

“Cheers,” replied Ernie with a jolly laugh, “to reunions that are never a day too late.”

**************************************

“Finely-aged Cabernet straight from the Rhone Valley,” said Ernie, proudly pointing to a cask in the cellar. The cramped quarters were filled with a meticulous array of wooden compartments mounted carefully on cinderblocks, testifying to the owner’s painstaking attention to detail. A cool, moist draft percolated through the cellar, carrying vestiges of the merciless rain outside. “This was years ago, and Connie and I must’ve broken about a dozen French laws to smuggle this beauty out from the vintner’s auction in Lyons. But after planning for nearly a year to make that trip, I wasn’t going to leave empty-handed!”

As he surveyed his cousin’s handiwork in the cellar, Tim’s attention was drawn to a lattice-like framework used to encase some of the smaller bottles. Its edges were bowed outward, and each compartment was capped by a flexible metal seal, inscribed with initials that Tim recognized all too well: MGS.

“So, that’s what Uncle Mitch did with all that hardware when the business went under all those years ago,” said Tim, shaking his head at the memory.
“Indeed, all that excess stock and not even the scrap dealers were taking it. He and your Pa naturally weren’t on the best of terms when their joint venture went down… so I guess all your cousins relieved him of the inventory,” replied Ernie, smiling reassuringly amidst the jostling of unwelcome memories.

“Speaking of our dear uncle, Ernie—how’s he holding up since his latest trip to the hospital? I got the message last week, along with the rest of the Shoemaker clan.”

“Last I heard, Mitch’s true grit was winning the day again. The docs take no chances ever since he had the pacemaker implanted, and there was some concern that he was dipping into early-stage heart failure after recovering from the latest attack. So he’ll be an honored guest in the coronary unit for a while.”

Tim grimaced as he made halting attempts to utter half-formed, half-acknowledged thoughts. He eventually relented, craning his neck away from Ernie and pretending to fix his gaze upon a conspicuous bottle of Riesling to his right side, perched precariously on the edge of a compartment still under construction. Finally, he sighed deeply and turned obliquely back toward his cousin.

“Damn it, Ernie—so much I could have learned from Mitch, so much my father and I could have gained from the relationship if not for the way things spun off track after the business went under. Dad blamed Mitch for playing fast and loose with the company finances. Mitch always shot back that Dad lacked the necessary vision. And then that night when Mitch stumbled in, three sheets to the wind… they didn’t know I was eavesdropping, still awake and leaning against the bedroom door to see that God-awful exchange unfold between them. Dad hardly talked to Mitch after that, in fact my uncle was persona non grata for the entire household.”

“Tim, don’t beat yourself up over that. Mitch said a lot of things he wished to God he could’ve taken back; even he admits he was grossly out of line.”

“But under those circumstances, that could have been any of us. He and Dad were broke, Mitch was losing his home, Amy had left him at the altar, even the repo man was stalking him whenever he slept in the car overnight. It was a true rock bottom. How many days in our lives do we squander, pointing fingers at even our friends and family, piously assigning blame for this or that offense, real or imagined—when for the most part, we’re not much more good or evil, right or wrong than the next poor Joe or Jane, just caught up in different circumstances?”

Ernie nodded sympathetically as Tim continued. “Mitch just read the tea leaves wrong and one stumble led to another; his heart wasn’t into even the most hurtful words he uttered to Dad, they were the ramblings of a lost soul lashing out. And we all lost when Dad pulled our respective families away.”

“It wasn’t just that, Tim. Mitch once confessed to me and Connie, after we briefly took him in—he and your Dad never quite connected, never fully understood each other. And when things went sour at the engineering firm, your father saw the worst of Mitch and little of what made our uncle into the great man he eventually became. And it hurt Mitch even more so that it was his own brother who never quite grasped what made Mitch tick—a classic 90/10 mismatch as he called it.”

“A… a what?”

“A 90/10 mismatch, one of his ‘Mitch-isms’; Mitch always said that at the heart of so much of the strife we all encounter is this, information mismatch, as he called it, between the person that others see and the more complex mosaic we all are inside. The rest of the world, often even our family, appreciates perhaps 10% of our being and extrapolates from it, the all-important 90% remaining unknown or un-appreciated.”

“So Mitch felt a constant tension from this, mismatch…”

“Right,” replied Ernie, reaching for a specific bottle of white wine ensconced in a nook of the cellar, “a tension between the person that others see and draw conclusions about, and the person that we understand subjectively, internally; who knows how many feuds, vendettas, even wars have been kicked off because of this discrepancy, as one might say, between who we all are and how we’re seen?”

“90/10, huh?” laughed Tim in amused deference, his initially somber reflection giving way to jocular reminiscences of a figure he had come to admire. “Mitch always did have that engineer’s knack for attaching a number to just about anything, even the maze of human relations. Back when I first re-established contact with him after those trying years, he was always entertaining me with his ‘Septego’—the notion that within the mind of every human being, there are at least seven different… ‘people’ I suppose one could say, distinct personalities who make our decisions as though debating by committee.”

“Seven, eh? How did Mitch arrive at the magic number?” inquired Ernie, as he gave a perfunctory twirl to the neck of the bottle.

“I had pulled some strings at the university back then to secure a gig for Mitch, constructing some newfangled brain scanners for functional-MRI, and it always struck him how these—grids of activity in the brain, could in certain patterns give rise to whatever makes us human. On some lark, he recorded his dreams over several months and his moods every morning: what made him tick, what caught his mind when he first awoke, what bothered him and cheered him.”

“Well, Connie’s always saying that I wake up as at least eight different possible ‘Ernies,’ depending on whatever mood my quirky dreams set for the day.” He reached for a corkscrew hidden beside a small cask, almost imperceptibly bringing it to the exposed cork of the wine as the conversation progressed.

“Per Mitch though, it wasn’t a matter of merely shifting moods,” came Tim’s reply, as he covetously eyed the wine that his cousin prepared to uncork. “He said he was able to identify seven distinct individuals in himself, intact ‘people’ with their own quirks and idiosyncrasies—that were constantly at loggerheads with each other and arriving at the consensus that we take as our own, I guess you could say vantage point or outlook on the world. The Septego was Mitch’s way of explaining why we so often look back on ourselves in the past, asking what in the world we were thinking or doing, why we had such ridiculous tastes, why we tried out that foolish pick-up line in the bar…”

“Oh, yes, that I can certainly sympathize with,” laughed Ernie in boisterous amusement. “I only wish I’d had such an explanation handy during my own salad days; I could singlehandedly tally up an impressive list of incidents, to bolster Mitch’s case beyond any doubt!”

“Agreed,” laughed Tim alongside his cousin, his mood quickly turning more somber, “just one of those delightful eccentricities that made Mitch stand out, made me realize the depth in the man that Dad would never allow himself to glimpse, after everything collapsed between them. Whether or not Dad had seven such individuals within his own mind, it seems as though—at least one of those people died within him after Dad and Mitch both moved on. He was never the same.”

“Maybe he was mourning some of the people who died within him then. Maybe we all do, every time we embark on a major shift in our work, our relationships… Weep for the ‘people’ inside us who get left behind. If that’s the case, those former selves still leave a mark that we can always revisit.” Ernie pulled the cork from the bottle in a vigorous but fluid upward tug, then directed Tim’s attention to a photo spread laid out meticulously along a panel on the cellar’s back wall.

“Speak of the devil,” said Tim with a knowing tip of the forehead, recognizing the ruddy complexion, broad shoulders, well-manicured moustache, and beaming round eyes of his Uncle Mitch under a wide-brimmed straw hat, clad in a sunny casual outfit and standing beside Ernie on an ocean pier. “Which tropical paradise did you invade to make all those silly faces for the camera?”

“You’re just jealous, Tim!” teased Ernie in reply. “This was our little jaunt to Porto Alegre in Brazil, about 7 years ago, and this” he said, laying out cocktail glasses to pour the wine, “is an award-winning Moscatel we managed to haggle out of one of the local vintners. It was our Uncle Mitch’s favorite wine after that, and with every glass that we savor, a part of Mitch is there enjoying it with us. Cheers, to the legend himself.”

“And cheers to lush Brazilian excursions, whatever the lame excuse used to embark on them.”

The two laughed heartily and toasted the moment. Ernie set the bottle aside, and Tim sidled up gradually to the photo display. He eyed the images in close-up as his cousin resumed his own reminiscences. “Mitch was officially a multimillionaire at that point—this was just after Magister Engineering, which is what he called his company at the time, had gone public. Among other things, he’d linked up with partners in some of the Brazilian architectural firms to give tutorials on his ‘evolving designer’ software but in reality, it was more a pretext for both of us to revisit our insouciant days of youth and goof off in the South American sun.”

Without responding, Tim gazed with a perplexed expression at one of the enlarged photos near the end of the set, with Ernie and Mitch flanking a tall, imposing bald man, clad in a designer vest and staring out, with a look of steely determination, from sea-blue eyes. Towering buildings, arching outward and upward in a strangely sidewinding geometry, loomed in the background while a gale-force wind apparently gusted through the scene, yanking the men’s outfits and the surrounding foliage to and fro. Tim’s attention was drawn in particular to a pair of bizarre-appearing objects, laid out on what appeared to be a shallow bench in front of the bald man. One of them vaguely resembled a primitive mini-typewriter set within the frame of a small, but elaborately adorned gyroscope. Adjacent to this curious instrument was a peculiar sort of wire sculpture, a kaleidoscopic assemblage of fluted tubing that centered on three distinct, colorful crystals, with the tubes ramifying outward like the stems of a flowering plant and culminating in regularly-spaced, diamond-tipped points.

“Ernie, uh… this photo, right here,” said Tim, pointing to the bald man in the center of the image. “I’m hardly sure where to begin but—where, what in the world and…. and who?”

“That—that one has a story behind it, Tim. We took that at the Largo dos Açorianos; it’s a park in Porto Alegre. And the man in the center is a Brazilian who was working there at the time. His name’s Rodrigo Schumacher.”

“Hmm, Schumacher, Shoemaker; any relation?”

“Indeed. Rodrigo is from one of the long-lost branches of the Schumacher clan after we began emigrating from Germany centuries ago. Some of us wound up in the eventual United States, others in Canada, Australia, or South America.”

“From South America, eh? Never knew we had kin there.”

“Perhaps because there’s some related family history that we’ve never been too keen on revisting,” replied Ernie, with a look of ironic amusement. “The Brazilian branch is descended from a certain Daniel Schumacher and his brother Gerhard, in the 18^th century. The latter was a ne’er-do-well of sorts who was banished from more than one of the small German villages that our ancestors once called home. He became a soldier of fortune, eventually making his way to South America where he served as a mercenary in the Battle of Cartagena de las Indias in 1741. It was a titanic naval clash between two admirals, among the largest of the millennium, and it carried on for nearly six months.”

“Hmm, so with which side was Gerhard serving?”

“That’s just the point. Mitch’s genealogical investigations could never determine whether he took up arms with Admiral Vernon’s forces or those of Don Blas de Lezo. Eventually, the amassed evidence suggested that he was a free agent working for both at different points—literally re-negotiating his contract every week and fighting for whichever side delivered the best deal, in a battle that essentially determined the balance of power in the Americas.”

“Such a savory figure,” quipped Tim with tongue firmly in cheek. “I only wish we Shoemakers in North America had that sort of business acumen, albeit hopefully with a more developed sense of ethics.”

“Well, Gerhard’s antics might have been a footnote for us, if not for the fact that he also absconded with many of the most valued Shoemaker family heirlooms when he set off for Colombia. Perhaps it’s fortunate for all of us that the battle did carry on for so long and Gerhard enriched himself so much from the fighting, since he apparently planned to pawn off the heirlooms for his own hacienda in Spanish America at the time. Fortunately, his brother had more scruples and a sense of self-sacrifice; Daniel sold virtually all his possessions in Germany and tracked Gerhard down in Cartagena just as the battle was concluding. Incredibly, he had to bargain with Gerhard to buy back the items, but he ultimately succeeded. Daniel was virtually penniless and unable to return, so he simply stayed in South America. He eventually made his way to Brazil, one of the first of the German immigrants there as the records suggest, where he earned a small fortune as a builder and blacksmith. Which his children and grandchildren quickly proceeded to squander away.”

“Ah, true to Shoemaker family form,” laughed Tim sarcastically. “So this Rodrigo Schumacher is a descendant of Daniel, I take it?”

“That he is. Mitch has been spending a small fortune of his own to track down these other branches of the Schumacher clan, and Rodrigo was close to the top of his list.”

“His list? What’s all this about, Ernie?”

“It’s about—well, exactly what we were just discussing, those family items handed down from Daniel Schumacher all the way to Rodrigo, which you’re glimpsing with your own eyes in the center of this picture before you. Those are two of the missing Schumacher family heirlooms that Mitch acquired upon tracking down Rodrigo; they’d been dispersed over the course of our clan’s migrations over the centuries, and Mitch has been virtually obsessed lately with, trying to re-assemble them again, I guess you could say. Ferrying those things through customs was a feat in itself, but Mitch would move heaven and earth to gather them all together again. It seems that at least some of that lore to which you and I were treated as tykes, may have some truth to it after all.”

“The heirlooms…” repeated Tim, as he probed the recesses of his youthful memories. “I can recall all those curious tales from childhood about these tools, artifacts, or something else depending on the version, that we Shoemakers were ‘entrusted’ with, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Such curious timing—a couple weeks ago, I received a parcel in the mail from Pegasus Atlantic Bank in Charlotte. It was where Uncle Mitch had set up all his business accounts years ago, before he took off for Oregon. Something about Mitch planning to bequeath the heirlooms to me. I was so wrapped up in administering the final exams to my undergrads, prepping my grad student for his thesis defense, that I didn’t pay it much heed, and I certainly balked at calling up Mitch and pestering him about some centuries-old trinkets while his heart was still on the mend at the hospital.”

“I can promise you that when Mitch is back on his feet again, you’ll be getting an earful. And quite an earful it will be; Mitch always has a lot to say about them.”

Tim tilted his head in an askance gaze at his cousin. “What exactly is the intrigue behind those things, Ernie, that one of our ancestors would make himself destitute in the middle of South America to retrieve them; and our cold-eyed, hard-nosed Uncle Mitch himself would dedicate so much to gathering them? I don’t see what’s so special about a motley collection of… antique cobbler’s tools from some little German hamlet in the 1600s.”

“They’re more than cobbler’s tools, Tim” said Ernie with a shallow sigh, “at least if Mitch’s suspicions have any merit to them. That gizmo on the left side in the picture there, the one that resembles a primitive keyboard in a gyroscope…”

Tim peered in for a closer look at the device, scanning its uncannily smooth ridges and precise assembly, as Ernie continued his explanation. “Mitch ascertained that it was rigged up to etch messages, or even a code of some sort. Of what significance, who knows—but it’s designed to introduce some kind of text onto a tablet that could be moved and held in the device’s jaws, much like the platen of a modern typewriter. And the other object, the one made out of metal and crystals, resembling some quirky avant garde flower sculpture—turns out that those are piezoelectric crystals. You can run a fine electric current through those links and modulate the device to generate a very specific output in… well, whatever that gadget links up to. You put it all together, and Mitch thinks that they’re…” Ernie paused, as he abortively tried to express what he was about to say.

“Ernie, you’ve got me on pins and needles here—what?” queried Tim, narrowing his eyes in anticipated skepticism.

“Components—of an advanced computational device, built centuries ago. Capable of dealing with complex algorithms and calculations, running programs and spitting out an intricate output, designed for… who knows what.”

Tim grimaced slightly as he shook his head in doubt. “I know Mitch has had some unusual meanderings before but… hardware for an ancient computer? That just happens to have been passed down through our family?”

“Believe me Tim, I was as bewildered as you when Mitch first gave me his spiel about them. But he’s been probing, dissecting those things like any of his other engineering projects over the past few years, filled about six notebooks with all the data. So maybe he really has found something.”

“But there are limits to even Mitch’s ingenuity, Ernie,” replied Tim skeptically. “An ancient computer? Even if it were possible, I can’t imagine where he even got the idea.”

“The computing device itself, that’s not as farfetched as it seems, depending on how many liberties you take with the imagination. Mitch has long been a bit of a ‘technological antiquarian’, I suppose you could say—he used his own money to fund that conference four years ago that attracted so much local TV coverage, on the ancient engineering advances developed by the Greeks and Romans, the Chinese, the Indus Valley civilization.”

“That was Mitch’s doing? Always wondered what quirky mind would have sponsored a thing like that.”

“Yes, that’s vintage Mitch. He’d taken a more than passing interest in Hero of Alexandria, who was rigging up pre-programmed versions of ancient Greek tragicomedies two millennia ago. As far back as the early 1600s, Wilhelm Schickard was dreaming up and building the first calculating machines, what became our modern computers. There was Blaise Pascal a little later, and a handful of other clever minds around the same era. Those old tinkerers may not have enjoyed the technological luxuries we take for granted today, but even then they had a grasp of the fundamentals that make this very world possible.”

“But those were crude calculating devices, just mechanical number-crunchers; nothing approaching the almost magical properties that Mitch is attributing to our heirlooms, hailing from that very same period. Ernie, come on—you don’t believe any of this, do you?”

“If it’d been anyone else I’d have dismissed it outright, but Mitch has an uncanny way of being a dozen steps ahead of all of us, and he’s awfully serious about cracking this mystery and doing it soon. His once-harebrained schemes have wound up making more than a few stockholders filthy rich over the past decade—myself and Connie included—so I’ve learned to take even his wildest hunches seriously, even if I don’t necessarily see where he’s going with them. He doesn’t always find what he’s seeking, but he seems to uncover a gem on the trail. And if he’s handing those things over to you; well, I’m sure he’ll be giving you a guided tour of his thoughts soon enough.”

“Why’s it all so urgent though?” queried Tim, still skeptical. “The scattered Schumachers of the world have been letting these things gather rust in our respective attics for three or four centuries; what’s so suddenly special about them now?”

“I don’t—I don’t know entirely Tim, but something that Mitch discovered, or saw, or… experienced, it’s pushed him to accelerate his investigations. He did show me some of the other items among these heirlooms that he’s been collecting. Most of them were variations on the same theme as those objects in the photo—these weirdly anachronistic information processors, I suppose you could call them, engineered to read in a particular kind of output, then apply some sort of algorithm we haven’t been able to pin down, to obtain a result that has an as-yet unknown significance.”

Ernie paused to sip from the Moscatel, gathering his thoughts to deliver to his still-questioning cousin. “Many of the objects, they were reminiscent of antique tools one might find in a master Swiss clockmaker’s workshop or a blacksmith’s shed, but they all seemed to have these impossible geometries, spirals and twists all over, and the standard of craftsmanship—heck, even with our 21^st-century machine-tool shops and laser-guided equipment, it’d be a challenge to match it. And speaking of rusting in attics, that was another quirk to all these heirlooms—three, four centuries being handed down like this as you said, and very little corrosion over all this time.”

“Let me guess,” interjected Tim in mildly sarcastic overtones, “the alchemists found a way to make gold from scrap, and they charitably handed the goods to our peasant ancestors all those centuries ago.”

“If only,” quipped Ernie, playing along, “it would have made all those years after college a lot easier on my end. Just to illustrate the point,” he continued more earnestly, “among the heirlooms that Mitch showed me, four of them resembled a… something like a tool-and-die assembly that you could use to produce other devices of high precision.”

“So a 17^th-century craftsman’s version of a tool-making kit,” replied Tim with a shrug.

“More than that though, far more. There was also a paired system that went along with it, these left- and right-handed twins, designed to mold and modify fine objects in God knows how many combinations. They had these interlocking bars and… beads, that would fit together to make enclosures. And the walls of these enclosed drums, they were lined with pictures, symbols, glyphs from all manner of ancient languages, even three-dimensional shapes. When you put it all together, it’s ginned up to make the equivalent of punch cards, to program some sort of machine, or the same basic idea as Mitch was explaining it.”

“But Ernie—while all this is fascinating, I still just can’t fathom the urgency of it all. And if Mitch is so eager to hand these things off and fully comprehend them, why to me of all people, somebody without the foggiest idea what Mitch was working on and could care even less? Why not to you, since he’s already filled you in and… truth is, you and the others have always had a better rapport with Mitch since things fell apart between him and Dad?”

“I’m not sure Tim but, among all the whiz-bang gadgetry amidst those heirlooms, there were some artifacts too, including a… a tablet.”

“A tablet? You mean—carved in stone?”

“In clay, actually. Even older than everything else and... God what was on that thing, scared the living hell out of me.”

Tim tilted his head to glimpse Ernie’s visage in closer detail, as an expression of marked angst suddenly wiped away the amiable jocularity that had resided there merely moments before.

“You’d have to see it Tim, and I guess you will soon enough but… there was a warning there on that tablet. Must have been 1,000 years old, but it was as though they—whoever etched that tablet—they were peering at us from back in time, and calling out to us today.”

“Calling out to us?”

“Sure seems that way. It’s a wonder, how they could have known the things they did… But it’s clear that they were trying to get a message to us. I couldn’t tell you precisely what they’re saying, or why we Shoemakers have been caught up in all this or even if Mitch is right with all his hunches. But Tim, I’m telling you, there’s some menace out there in the shadows, and we’re about to encounter it in all the worst possible ways. And whoever forged all these devices that our ancestors handed down to us—they weren’t just doing it to show off their handiwork. Wherever Mitch is going with those things, we have to figure what they’re about, and soon. I couldn’t tell you Mitch’s reasons, but he thinks you’re the one to do it.”

Tim nodded tentatively, sipping nervously on the wine as he wrestled with Ernie’s words in all their discomfiting undertones. As his cousin turned to replace the Moscatel in its designated spot in the cellar, Tim stole another glance at the photograph, its windswept background and the ever-mystifying devices conveying an aura of foreboding mystery to the whole scene. “Mitch,” he worriedly thought to himself, “what are you dragging me into?”

Chapter 3: Epicenter

Wenn man vor den Spiegel steht, um das Bild darauf zu sehen,

Blickt das Bild zurück nach uns, folgt wohin wir selbst auch gehen.

Geb’ es denn vielleicht ‘nen Tag, wenn so ein gespiegeltes Bild

Könnt’ auch blicken, denken, gehen, selbst im Freien laufen wild?

Saturday, May 14, 5:25 a.m.

Biomedical Engineering Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee

The pre-dawn Tennessee air had been unseasonably frigid, a biting wind assaulting Tim’s face as he huddled uncomfortably outside the gates of the tightly-guarded facility. He sported a broad-brimmed, charcoal-brown fedora hat—a legacy, in part, of his youthful days as a detective novel aficionado and even a sometime consultant in criminal cases, designing esoteric mathematical algorithms to sniff out behavioral needles in haystacks. However stylish it may have been, in its appearance or in the cocktail banter it inspired, the hat nonetheless rendered the tips of his ears uncomfortably exposed; meanwhile, his ungloved fingers, clutching a slightly tattered briefcase in his right hand, stiffened in the relentless chill. Although the rain had abated for the moment, its chronic presence had obscured the soothing rays of the springtime sun that had otherwise graced those Southern skies, and the moist air and saturated soil seemed to concentrate the chilly currents that harassed any soul unfortunate enough to be trapped outside. In this, Tim was joined by two guards shivering at the front gate, their stoic exteriors pierced on occasion by a tangible agitation that drove them to frequent cigarette breaks.

The towering edifice housing the Biomedical Engineering Institute, clearly a recent addition to the hallowed research complex at Oak Ridge, exuded an ominous aura that unnerved Tim far more than he cared to admit. Its imaginative architects had designed it in partial imitation of the coiling, interlocking spiral structure of DNA molecules in a human cell. However, it was framed against a background of sparse, reflected light from the persistent cloud cover, and the net effect—a charcoal-gray chiaroscuro limning an already strange structure from base to roof—made the building itself seem uncannily alien to Tim. His surroundings were nearly pitch-black in the midst of a new moon, aside from the faint hues afforded by a row of multicolored fluorescent lamps, dangling like inverted bowls from an awning by the entrance as they tossed in the wind. They imparted a disorienting, dream-like illumination to the darkness, stirred only by occasional hiccups in the dull, groaning whir of the building’s on-site back-up generators.

As Tim quivered in the unforgivingly cold, gusty air of the early morn, he was further unnerved by the intermittent emergence of an eerie resonance amidst the background. It was vaguely reminiscent of a howl from a wild dog, but higher-pitched and mixed with what seemed to be a smoldering growl. The strange sound was barely audible even on the few occasions when it did pierce the darkness, as though taunting the senses of everyone in the area from a direction that could not be firmly determined. The area in general was rather quiet, but definitely not serene; it had the haunting feel of a calm spell just prior to the advent of a frightful tempest. with Tim standing right at the epicenter

“Thank God, I couldn’t stand another minute out here!” said Tim to himself, removing his fedora as he glimpsed the silhouette of his host approaching the darkened glass doors at the building’s entryway, chatting with a guard inside. One of the other sentries near the outer gate uttered something inaudible into a two-way radio before glancing toward Tim, motioning at him to come inside. As he neared the entrance, the doors swung open, revealing the visage of Dr. Rachel Bloom before him.

She was of medium height, with auburn-colored, shoulder-length hair that was slightly frumpy in the midst of her frenetic schedule, yet pretty in a sweetly unassuming way, framing dimpled cheeks and a soft, rounded chin. She looked out from wide brown eyes that were pensive and fatigued from chronic wakefulness, yet also conspicuously tender in the gaze they fixed upon anyone before her. She and Tim smiled warmly at each other as he ascended some steps to the entrance; before a word was spoken, they took a moment for a friendly embrace at the open doorway.

“Rachel, glad to see you again,” said Tim, in a tone at once comforting yet relieved, finally in from the cold and thoroughly unwelcoming exterior. “I admire you just for being able to work in this place, I was getting creeped out just standing there…” Tim halted abruptly and gently bit his lip after saying something that he wished he had kept to himself; given all the tribulations that Rachel had lately been enduring, such sentiments were probably the last thing she needed to hear.

“Tim, thanks so much for coming,” she replied, unperturbed by Tim’s offhand remarks and clearly grateful to see him before her. “It’s been so long—I just can’t, I can’t thank you enough for this.”

Tim gently pulled away, reflexively meeting his colleague’s eyes in an attempt to reassure; apprehension and frustration had carved themselves unambiguously on her face. “Hey, don’t mention it, I’m glad to chip in however I can.” He fetched a pen from his briefcase as a guard near the entrance handed Tim a notepad to sign in.

“Sorry you were stuck out here for so long, Tim; we used to be an adjunct to the Neurosciences Division, but the Biomedical Engineering Institute got its own personal fief here after enough pleading with the Director for Applied Sciences Research, so we moved everything over 2 years ago, when I’d barely gotten started myself. They even bestowed a cute acronym on our division, the ‘VRRC’ or the ‘Verc” as everyone calls it here—Vision Restoration Research Center.” Rachel pointed toward a multilingual signpost just within the entrance, with the VRRC given prominent recognition at the top.

Tim handed the notepad back to the guard at the gate, who quickly scanned the information into his own portable computer. “The military has a few projects running behind these doors that we never hear much about,” began Rachel, in a moment of light-hearted jest as she gazed at the guard, feverishly inputting Tim’s personal data, “who knows, maybe those cyborg warriors or souped-up flying armor they have in the movies. That’s why security’s been so tight here lately.” The guard nodded toward Rachel, who quickly faced Tim again. “Shall we go inside?”

“Oh, gladly. I’ve been practically trembling out here—since when did you folks import Minnesota down to Tennessee?”

“Oh, it’s been like this for almost 2 weeks, all this rain and then a cold front out of nowhere to rub it in for us early-risers. The hours we’ve been keeping lately, we’re usually pounding away here a good while before the first rays of dawn. So I’ve also had the dubious honor of ‘enjoying’ this off-season early morning winter spell most days on the way to work.”

As Tim traversed the cavernous halls beyond the entrance with his host, he was struck by the curious geometry and architecture of the building’s interior—an amalgam of mundane functionality and surrealistic style that played tricks with the eyes and mind. Classical patterns mixed with paradoxical forms in two and three dimensions, as though lifted straight out of a Magritte painting. The walls around him began as arched corridors etched in marble, like those in an old Roman pavilion, capped by skylights etched into the ceiling that spiraled upward as if consciously grasping the heavens. Beyond the entry corridor, however, Tim found himself surrounded by yawning bulwarks of reinforced concrete and steel mixed with a pitch-black, foam-like material at the edges and between rooms. It was a functional addition to dampen vibrations for sensitive laboratory measurements, but the faint lighting and the black edges visited a bizarre effect on the eyes, as though the walls had been floating within empty space, untethered to anything around them.

“This way,” said Rachel, leading her guest through an incongruously small opening on the right, and into a meticulously decorated hallway.

She and Tim passed through an interlocking series of corridors bridged to one another by domelike rooms, each with mirrors lining the walls and replicas of Italian Renaissance paintings adorning the vaulted ceilings. The mirrors’ array caused them to reflect off each other in some places, giving rise to regressing images that seemed, on occasion, to harbor something that whispered its presence in the corner of Tim’s eye—only to vanish like a phantom whenever he looked directly at the glass. A sentry in military attire was posted at one of the locked corridors, guarding a strange chamber with tightly restricted access.

“Looks like the architects of this place decided to try out all their experimental ideas at once in their blueprints,” said Tim incredulously, as he continued to marvel at his surroundings.

“Yeah, not the first time people have gotten that impression!” replied Rachel. “It was a collaboration between Li Wei Tan and Martin Nimitz, the two guys who’ve been constructing all those pre-fab, futuristic mini-cities in former industrial parks. They were given carte blanche to try out some of their untested designs here at the Biomedical Engineering Institute, and they seem to have taken full advantage of the opportunity. Martin designed the VRRC’s facilities upstairs, where we’re headed right now in fact, and he seems to have gone out on quite a few limbs to do it; our boss promised us that he’ll be closing down the labs and turning the place into a nightclub once we make it through this miserable stretch of late. And I’m not entirely convinced he was kidding.”

Tim laughed at the thought, as he and his host ultimately arrived at a large open court, shimmering with an almost unearthly feel amidstin the sparse fluorescent lighting and the fragments of dull moonlight that dribbled their way inside.s with an otherworldly feel. Office windows of multicolored translucent glass, a different color for each section, faced inward, and an array of shuttered gift shops and food kiosks stood interspersed within a seeming rain forest of exotic plants. Most impressive was the sight just in front and overhead: A sun roof peered down from several stories above, from which were suspended planet-like orbs that gently oscillated in distinct, elliptical orbits about a central platform. On the platform itself was stacked a pyramid of climbing cubes that emitted music whose notes seemed to be traced out by the ensemble of the orbs around it—ad hoc melodies that were generally sweet and pleasing to the ear, yet punctuated on occasion by jarring, clashing chords in minor keys that seemed conspicuously out of place. His curiosity piqued, Tim walked up to the curious contraption.

“The Music of the Spheres, or MOTS, they call that exhibit,” explained Rachel, verbalizing an answer to Tim’s evident puzzlement. “Typical of the crazy items that wind up on our budget somehow—the architect of this place teamed up with an experimental composer and some engineers to put it together. I’m at a loss myself on the details, but they say they’ve got electromagnets in the spheres that tug at some synthesizers within the blocks to produce musical notes and chords, and every time some configuration produces pleasing tones, they note it and tweak the motion of the spheres a bit. Somebody predicted you could ‘evolve’ appealing music, perhaps eveneven a symphony like this. It’s a big, elaborate, and… no doubt expensive test of those latest conjectures you may have heard about from the artificial intelligence whizzes around here—exploring how something to do with those theories about aesthetically interesting pleasing patterns in nature can arise , you know, arising spontaneously.”

“Rachel, you’re bringing out my inner pedantic selfUp to a point, I suppose,” replied Tim with tongue firmly in cheek. “I’m not sure Carnegie Hall would be so thrilled with those occasional forays into D and A sharp minor—just grates on the ears.”

“It’s not perfect, I guess; if anything, MOTS seems to have sounded a bit more discordant over the past month. It’s all based on an untested idea, after all; the Greeks, thousands of years ago, saw music as a branch of mathematics, with the most pleasing mathematical relationships corresponding to the sweetest music. The designers of MOTS figured that those relationships could evolve themselves in real time, just as our animal brains have evolved to higher intelligence—perhaps including both hard-wired and evolving mental structures that recognize and build upon this, ‘beautiful mathematics,” in music and art.”

“You’ve never ceased to amaze me, Rachel” said Tim, smiling in equal parts admiration and incredulous amusement. “If I’d ever doubted you before, now I know why you had to clear a shelf in your bookcase to hold all those Young Investigator awards you snapped up 5 years ago.”

“No great leaps of logic here, Tim” laughed Rachel, savoring a rare moment of levity. “There was an article on MOTS in the Elegant Egghead last month—oxymoron of a title if I’ve ever heard one. It’s that magazine that one of our sponsors dumps on our desks every so often, when they want to politely remind us to order from their catalog.”

“Speaking of making purchase orders,” chuckled Tim, himself relieved at the recent diversion from the anxiety that seemed to permeate the place, “where do you all get the spare change for this sort of thing? When I submit my grants, I’m lucky if they agree to fund our dilapidated little water cooler anymore.”

“It’s a DARPA thing—the Internet-inventor guys” said Rachel in response, gesturing toward an inconspicuous plaque at the base of the exhibit, which bore the unmistakable imprimatur of its sponsor: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “Even during these lean times, Tthey have the kind of discretionary budget we all salivate over, and it’s their job to spend taxpayer money on these screwy ideas in case one in twenty of them winds up leading somewhere.” She slowly turned and led Tim away from the exhibit, as though spurred on by her own choice of words. “Spontaneous self-organization, structure in nature, that’s the theme theme du jour du jour around here these days. Many of the engineers on the payroll are in the AI biz, and DARPA signssomebody must have bribed the DARPA people, since they’re signing an awful lot many of our paychecks. So MOTS is probably a vanity project for, whoever’s been paying the piper at the agency.”

Tim smiled as he followed his host down a long corridor leading to a bank of recessed elevators, away from the roofed courtyard they had just visited. After swiping her access card and signaling the elevator, the toll from months of long hours and frustrating uncertainty materialized in a single moment on Rachel’s face, her eyelids drooping as she leaned against a side wall and awaited the opening doors. Tim resisted the temptation to small-talk his host awake from her tiny reverie; he knew from his own all-night marathons how much a body under constant strain could crave a few precious seconds of shut-eye no matter how awkward the place and time. Finally, Rachel was jarred back awake by the digitized bell signaling the elevator’s arrival; she quickly resumed her gregarious demeanor towards Tim as they climbed into the elevator, as if consciously suppressing the exhaustion that was constantly lurking to ambush her upon the slightest drifting of her attention. She swiped her card again and inserted a key into a specialized lock on a panel within the elevator, allowing her and Tim to access the tower’s restricted 22^nd floor.

“On most days, we’re confined to a glorified dungeon in the 4^th sub-basement’s laser labs,” she said to Tim. “We have to laser-calibrate some of the devices for the optical testing, and the sub-basement labs are the most accurate on campus; the slightest angular deviations in our instruments, even a few arc-minutes of a degree, would commit the unpardonable crime of prolonging our miserable days here. Fortunately, we have an auxiliary facility up in the penthouse, as everyone calls it; that’s where Argus resides and that’s where we’re headed.”

Tim nodded, as his ears congested from the elevator’s rapid ascent to the roof of the tower. He and Rachel soon exited the elevator into a hallway with a surrealistically space-age feel. The ceiling boasted a mind-bending, swirling motif of colored glass panels, suggestive of ocean waves frozen in a moment of time. A carpeted footpath led through corridors arranged in a curious elliptical pattern, set off by movable banisters from walls whose imaginative design bore evidence of an architect who approached his task with a giddily playful enthusiasm. The walls had a faux-crystalline surface that refracted light like a prism, coupled with bands of a shiny, quicksilver-like chrome and inlays that harbored shifting, kaleidoscopic holograms as one advanced down the corridor.

Tim felt ineffably unsettled as the holographic images danced about the corridor; there appeared to be something far more than merely changing, pre-set shapes among them, even more pronounced than the shadowy presence he seemed to detect in the mirrored chambers linking the yawning corridors downstairs. Something about the holograms’ arrangement suggested a menacing countenance of some sort, watching the hall’s visitors from… eyes, or so it seemed, multiple eyes set within a frightening visage that lay just outside the ken of conscious discernment.

**************************************

“Here we are Tim, our home base, such as it is.” Rachel had led Tim through double doors and into a spacious but cluttered chamber, housing rows of experimental apparatus, detectors, and customized equipment to churn through the reams of data constantly generated in the facility. Liquid nitrogen tanks flanked fields of lasers in painstakingly constructed arrays. The room was nearly windowless to protect the delicate optical work conducted inside, save for a lone half-shuttered, wide pane in a forgotten corner, looking out on the hazy, frosty darkness outside. Perched on an enormous platform near the room’s center, was a black rectangular box, with the unmistakable spiral emblem of Argus on its face.

“So, my prodigal brainchild,” said Tim in a mock paternal tone, gazing at the serene surface of the large device, “at long last, we meet again.”

“Sorry this place is such a disaster area,” interjected Rachel, shoving the room’s dispersed bric-a-brac aside as she led Tim to a computer workstation in front of Argus. Anxious to see what insights her colleague could summon up, she hurriedly tapped in an encrypted code at the workstation, which obligingly opened up to a crowded screen with multiple overlapping windows.

“This is where we’ve uploaded a lot of the data and records for the sight restoration project,” she explained, hurriedly clicking and advancing from one window to another. “Because of all the classified document restraints and the assorted bureaucratic morass here—I guess you know the drill, we can’t export any of this outside of a few of the networked workstations on the Biomed Engineering server, so this is about the only place for you to work your magic. And on this station,” she continued, sidling over to an adjacent monitor, “we’ve stored most of our patient data, including the daily logs after the first link-up of the AP-278 implant to Argus—all annotated and filed by date. The engineers couldn’t resist tinkering with the Argus code around the edges but, for the most part, its bare essentials are the same as when your team first cobbled it together, and you’re one of about a dozen people in the world who can peek under the hood and see what’s going on.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Rachel. Can you get me access into the root directory, with the data logs and source code files? I’d like to check out some of the database and log files in particular; if these poor guys in the vision restoration trials contracted a central nervous system infection of some sort, it might affect the interface between their nerve fibers and the retinal implant, which Argus would reveal in the data logs. In the meantime, if there’s any significant data corruption, I could check the files in your network here with the backups I’ve held onto all these years.” Tim snapped open his briefcase to retrieve a colorful laptop, well-maintained but peppered with assorted bumper stickers and other quirky paraphernalia.

“Sure thing, Tim, I’ll get you in.”

The large phosphorescent screen before Tim began to fill with a bewildering array of customized programs for Argus’s arcane diagnostics and data analysis, replete with enigmatic symbols and commands that would have baffled even the elite engineers and other specialists who populated the Biomedical Engineering Institute. To an outsider, the display might as well have been ripped from the notebook of a self-styled magician, full of esoteric coded notes and ciphers that only he and a small circle of his apprentices could make sense out of. Tim looked on with a flash of pride, the kind befalling an inventor upon witnessing his fledgling brainchild as it sprouts wings and flies into public prominence. He had been one of the designers of the Argus system many years before, but had ultimately found it too cumbersome as his own projects began to take on a different focus from the clinical trials for which Argus had been designed. At least he could now derive a modicum of satisfaction from the fruits of his labors, even if he had turned the reins over to different hands… and even as something else had sadly intervened to foil the medical miracle that Argus had made possible.

“Tim, uh… there’s something you should know,” began Rachel, as she typed in a series of access codes at closely-guarded screen prompts.

“Something… about Argus?”

“Argus and everything else, the whole network here in fact. We got an unwelcome visit from a computer virus here, a little over a month ago. It wreaked havoc and then basically left us alone; but just recently it’s begun popping up again every so often, filling up the screen with—I don’t know, gobbledygook as far as we can tell, before everything comes up again fully functional a few minutes later. It can give you a stir, but it never seems to cause any damage so if it happens, just wait it out and you’ll be right back in business a short while later.”

Tim furrowed his brow and turned suddenly toward Rachel, exhibiting a look of obvious concern. “Fills the screen with… gobbledygook? Like what?”

“I know it sounds bizarre but… calculations,” said Rachel with a sigh. “It’s mystifying us and we can’t seem to keep the virus out entirely, but it doesn’t seem to cause any harm other than annoying us with 5 minutes’ worth of binary arithmetic or some other form of computation, for who knows what intent.”

Tim turned away briefly in worried contemplation, splaying the fingers of his outstretched left hand on his forehead as he recalled details from a jarringly similar conversation just a day before. “Rachel, I… I couldn’t tell you what this means, but when I met up with my cousin Ernie just yesterday, on my way out here—he was telling me about this virus, almost exactly what you’re describing. Ernie’s a systems expert who helps to troubleshoot the hardware and software of the customized networks you have at Oak Ridge, plus some of the schools and public institutions in Anderson County; he’s never gone here to the VRRC, but he’s been all over this campus and he’s encountered the same beast.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” replied Rachel in pained acknowledgment, as she sat down in a swiveling chair opposite from Tim. “We got campus-wide alerts about this virus from other departments in the weeks following the outbreak here at the VRRC. But ours is the first reported case; at least as far as the Oak Ridge campus is concerned, the virus seems to have first manifested right here, in this building.”

Tim’s unease with the revelation only magnified with these new details. “Tim,” interjected Rachel, reading the apprehension on his face, “is there something you’re suspecting here?”

He looked up and pulled back in his chair, carefully couching his thoughts. “Rachel I… it pains me to even raise a prospect like this, but is it possible that—somebody on the inside here is responsible for introducing this virus and then spreading it throughout the campus? I can’t see any other reason for it to originate here—let alone have the foggiest idea what it’s doing. Ernie was as baffled on that point as we are.”

“It’s reasonable to wonder that, but the suits wrapped up an investigation with a fine-toothed comb a couple weeks ago, and there’s nothing to indicate the virus was introduced by anyone here. As best we can tell—it’s some sort of industrial espionage, possibly to get schematics on the proprietary design portions of the AP-278 retinal implant. It could have infiltrated the premises with somebody posing as a delivery guy, who might have been given temporary access to the network.”

Rachel paused briefly and looked away, as she continued to gather her own thoughts on the persistent mystery. “And besides,” she said, “those calculations may just be a smokescreen, for all we know. In any case, there’s no apparent link between the virus and these… psychoses, that our patients have contracted since they got the implant and were linked to Argus. So I’m not sure it’s worth fretting about too much.”

Tim momentarily cupped his hands before his mouth, still immersed in thought. “Yeah, you’re probably right, just trying to cover all the bases, that’s all,” he said, nodding in assent.

She resumed her position at the Argus workstation’s display, wending her way through another series of screens before entering a long code at a password prompt. “Here, Tim, you’re in,” she said, pointing to a nested tree of windows sprouting up on the monitor.

“Deep in the heart of Argus,” said Tim, nodding in recognition of the esoteric file designations and code assemblies before him.

“This is the main directory for the system files,” replied Rachel matter-of-factly. “Everything’s in read-only mode for now. Ever since these… hack attacks lately, whatever they are, a few of the code warriors here have been trying to peek under the hood and check out the source code themselves, but just to warn you, we’ve been having some file access problems here and there—might be a side effect of all the new security firewalls the IT team has been installing on the fly. Go ahead and work your magic!”

“No guarantees,” replied Tim with a wry smile, as his host rose up from the chair, “but I’ll see what I can scare up.”

Rachel smiled weakly in the midst of her fatigue, then headed for a small kitchen in an alcove to the left beyond the computer bank. She turned back briefly toward her guest, already immersed in his work and typing away. “Tim, I’m already starting to get split-second dreams every time I blink my eyes; I think I’ll brew some coffee so I don’t go comatose on you. Would you like a cup?”

“What kind of coffee? Do I get a menu?” he replied facetiously, after a brief pause.

“You’ve been spoiled by all those coffeeshops springing up around the university, haven’t you,” replied Rachel, with a wry smile of our own. “Just one item on the menu here—it’s our patented ‘Oak Ridge Rocket’ that the engineers use at 3 a.m. to clamber through the worst stretch of an all-nighter. 4 shots of Espresso, 2 teaspoons corn syrup, and a tablespoon of some mysterious energy-drink combination they keep here but refuse to reveal to little old me.”

“4 shots, huh?” replied Tim, narrowing his eyes in mild incredulity. “I think I’ll pass on the offer for now; that much caffeine and my hands’ll flap faster than a hummingbird’s wings... But do save a pot for me—depending on how the day goes, I might be begging you for that rocket juice in due course.”

“Sure thing Tim,” smiled Rachel, disappearing into the small alcove.

Tim swiveled back toward the gargantuan workstation and began to immerse himself in the esoterica before him, teeming with cascading lines of abstruse code and meticulously crafted mathematical operations. The giant leap of restoring sight to the blind hinged upon these thousands of tiny steps, and Tim was determined to find out where, in the midst of their precise unfolding, an unwelcome influence had inserted itself to cause so much unexpected misery of late. As he pushed along at a vigorous clip, he broke occasionally to take in his surroundings. Amidst the background hum of the ubiquitous machinery were the occasional and unpredictable chirps of mainframe computers used to digest oceans of data, generated on a daily basis. Yet as with so much else in that oddly unsettling facility, the spontaneity of these digital coos seemed to beget a rhythm that was something more than random—like the subtle taunting of mechanical sprites who would emerge and gleefully frolic in the open, as soon as curious eyes and ears had left the room.

Saturday, May 14, 6:14 a.m.

Vision Restoration Research Center, 22^nd Floor

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty—looks as though the Oak Ridge Rocket didn’t quite work as advertised…” Tim stood at the entrance of the kitchenette with tongue firmly in cheek, his outstretched right hand leaning against the door frame as he eyed his exhausted colleague. She was fast asleep in her chair, her head inclining against a side wall.

“Uhh…” Rachel slowly lifted away from the wall and rubbed her eyes as Tim looked in, his expression an amalgam of mild amusement and concerned sympathy. “Tim, oh… how long have you been… hammering away at the monitor there?”

“About a half hour or so. I found something about 10 minutes ago but I didn’t want to stir you; between this and your little 10-second catnap by the elevators downstairs, I figured your body was broadcasting a signal we’d both be wise to heed,” he said with a lighthearted chuckle.

“You found… you mean, you found what’s behind all this?” Rachel continued to rub and blink her groggy eyes, adjusting to the harsh fluorescent lamp just above as she emerged from the fog of sleep.

“A clue at least, though I can’t quite decipher where it’s leading us. I’ve been checking the data against the backup files in my laptop the past few minutes and… well, why don’t I show you over here.”

“Something in the logs?” queried Rachel as she pulled into a chair next to Tim, now wide awake with her interest piqued in Tim’s findings.

“Nothing in the logs so far, in fact that’s what’s so astonishing. There’s something severely awry in the place I would have least expected to find it—in the executable files, the system directories that run Argus itself. Here, take a look.”

Tim alternated between the mammoth workstation and the upturned screen on his humble laptop, calling up a screen in an otherwise inconspicuous folder. “I don’t understand, Tim—why are you in the Typeface Fonts directory now?”

“It was a precaution,” he said, clicking on an artfully hidden folder tucked away in a nondescript file grouping within the directory. “Just as you mentioned yourself a short while ago, for a young engineer, it’s like tasting the forbidden fruit to go hacking away at the guts of a complex beast like Argus. So we stashed some of Argus’s mission-critical files in secured directories, away from prying eyes within the sorts of plain-vanilla folders nobody would think to go messing around in.”

“Like the Fonts directory,” nodded Rachel in respectful acknowledgment. “You think of everything, Tim,” she added, smiling.

“Can’t take the credit for this,” he chuckled in response. “This was Steve Latham’s idea, my colleague from the computer science department on the software design side of things. He moved out to Salzburg recently but when we were in North Carolina together, the poor guy must have spent half his workday debugging all the bells and whistles his overly helpful engineers kept sprinkling into the source code, for all those industrial robots he was designing. Anyway… here we are in the protected subdirectory, now focus your eyes on the Retinator file.”

“Retinator?” replied Rachel, tilting her head in puzzled curiosity.

“The Retinator file,” he said, pantomiming air quotes as he mouthed the name. “It’s one of those goofy file designations that we engineers always dream up to entertain ourselves; it helps to govern the feedback from Argus to the optic nerve implant. Retinator implements one of the learning algorithms that ultimately guide the Argus neural net itself, to help Argus learn and become more intelligent in the way it fine-tunes the patients’ vision perception. It’s one of the dozen or so critical files that you don’t want to tinker with until you’ve paid your dues in the trenches and know this kind of system back and front; only a handful of people besides me or Steve Latham would go anywhere near it. Now,” he continued, fixating his eyes back on the screen, “even I couldn’t peek at the Retinator file itself; I kept getting an ‘access denied’ error every time I tried to peer in at the code. I presumed it was just the file retrieval problems you told me you’ve all been having of late. But look…”

Tim pivoted his laptop toward Rachel, as he moved intently to air what was on his mind. “Even though I can’t access the file itself, I can at least see how large it is. Look at the file size of the original Retinator on my laptop, the backup I made several years ago—it’s 5.3 megabytes, roughly the standard size for Retinator in all the Argus prototypes that Steve and I designed. Now, take a look at the size on your workstation here at the VRRC.” Tim highlighted and clicked on a tag next to the file on the screen, producing a number that drew bewilderment from his colleague.

“I… I don’t understand, how…” Rachel paused in mid-sentence, her eyebrows arched and her mouth open as she struggled to digest the inexplicable figure before her.

“Couldn’t tell you, Rachel; I was as flabbergasted as you are. Retinator was already a monster at 5.3 MB, and now it’s a leviathan—at 23.3 MB, it’s more than quadrupled its file size.”

“Could it have… I don’t know, changed itself as Argus adapted?”

“No, not Retinator; it guides Argus’s learning curve, but it never changes itself. It’s supposed to be one of the stalwarts that stays as it was originally designed, throughout the entire visual learning process for the patients in the vision restoration trials. You just don’t touch Retinator, and it’s virtually impossible for anyone to even find it; it’s the last thing I’d have expected anyone to have mucked around with, but here it is, right before our eyes. And it’s just not Retinator. Here, check this out…”

Tim navigated through a series of crowded screens, before arriving at another hidden directory. “This file—Nightowl. Thatit’s a cousin of Retinator. —Steve and I set up Nightowl to help steer the data stream for the ‘rod cells’ in the retinal implants, the sensors responsible for night vision just as in a normal retina. It’s a critical file tucked away just like Retinator, in this case with the color background files for the monitor, so nobody would find it and there’s no real impetus to go screwing around with it. But look, just like Retinator—nearly tripled in size.”

Rachel leaned back as the information sank in, and unpleasant possibilities began to cross her mind. “My God, Tim, do you think—could this be connected in some way to the, these awful psychoses that the patients have been experiencing?”

“I don’t see why, Rachel; that’s what’s mystifying me. Retinator, Nightowl, and all their ilk are critical files for Argus, but their only real function is to optimize the learning curve for patients to see again, by modulating the way the retinal implant takes in light and how the patient’s nervous system responds to it. If these poor guys in the clinical trials are getting such severe complications—it’d take a heck of a lot more than some hacked software to cause it. And without something amiss in the data logs, I can’t imagine what the connection would be.”

“Any possibility,” queried Rachel, closing her eyes as she mentally rifled through a series of unlikely explanations, “that this software virus in Oak Ridge might be related?”

“Again,” said Tim, twisting his nose and mouth in a look of dubious contemplation, “I can’t see the rationale behind it. Whoever these guys are who designed the virus—they’d be doing it to steal trade secrets like the implant schematics, as you were inferring before, or they’d be trying to muck up the works for some reason, to sabotage the project. But you were saying that the patients’ restored vision is fully intact even with these psychotic symptoms, and Argus seems to be humming along just fine. Whatever’s happened to Retinator, Nightowl, and whatever other critical files have been altered somehow, if anything it seems as though they’ve been enhanced; why would a hacker go through all the toil and trouble of beefing up system files like this, and how could they even know of their significance? It just doesn’t add up.”

Rachel placed her index finger on pursed lips, pondering intensely as she groped for an answer. “I wonder… Tim, do you know when the Retinator and Nightowl files were altered by any chance?”

“Hmm…” he murmured, accessing a small data bubble next to the file designations. “I’m checking out the date when Nightowl was last modified here and it says… well, that’s curious. Says it was on May 16, at 22:43 hours.”

“That’s just… three days ago,” replied Rachel, her voice softening to an incredulous whisper as she digested the information. “What about Retinator?”

“Just a sec… OK, pulling up the hidden directory again… wait a minute,” said Tim, turning slowly toward Rachel in disbelief himself. “Says here it was just last night, at 21:39 hours!”

“Last night? That doesn’t make sense—it was Friday, that was one of the few nights when nobody was here late; nobody could have been here to even alter the files!”

Tim furrowed his own brow in worried reflection, as he puzzled over the seemingly farfetched implications. He quickly broke in with another suggestion. “Rachel, can you access backups of files on the servers here? Steve and I engineered the backup routine for Argus to include the hidden directories where Retinator and Nightowl are maintained, since we knew the systems administrators might not think to copy them otherwise. If you can access the backed-up files, I might be able to track down when they were first altered.”

“Yeah, that shouldn’t be a problem. The backups are done every 24 hours, and we maintain 120 days’ worth of them here at the VRRC; beyond that, the files are shipped offsite. That’ll take us all the way into January. Hold on, I’ll need to step in and unlock a few doors for you again…”

Tim pulled aside as his colleague moved in to enter a series of access codes on several screens, eventually pulling up a window with a stack of folders, one atop another. “OK Tim,” she said, standing aside for her colleague to take the reins again, “here they are, the backups for the past 4 months. The suffix at the end of the name for each directory is the date, and it’s all arranged top to bottom.”

“OK, I’ll delve in and take a look. Just out of curiosity… you said this virus first struck the VRRC computers about a month, month-and-a-half ago or so, right?”

“Made its first appearance—yeah, early April or so,” replied Rachel, leaning intently over the table housing the workstation as she followed Tim’s keystrokes.
“OK, let’s just try, for argument’s sake, April 3—my daughter Chloe’s birthday, has a standout quality to it… and, there we are, the Nightowl file. And… it must have been altered well before then, Rachel. Even on that date, Nightowl’s still well more than twice the original file size. Wherever this network virus came from, somebody was already wreaking mischief before it ever arrived on the scene.”

Tim looked up for a brief moment as a realization donned upon him. “Just got an idea, Rachel—I can set up a restricted search for the Nightowl and Retinator files based on their size attributes. I’ll just set the parameters to select out the backup directory corresponding to the last time they were at their original size. Let’s see, Retinator at 5.3 MB, Nightowl at 4.1MB, and, abracadabra…”

Tim pushed away from the keyboard with a flourish, as he awaited a result that might finally shed light on the conundrum. When the outcome appeared on the screen, he leaned back forward, looking on with surprise and skepticism. “That’s odd, says the last time those files were their original, unvarnished selves was over 3 months ago—both hits are from the backup on February 5^th. Does that date ring any bells for you? Rachel???”

When Tim peered back to glance at Rachel’s face, a look of anguished dread had etched itself firmly thereupon. She heaved a ponderous sigh as her eyes sank in an expression of unmistakable gloom. She feebly shook her head, mouthing a silent interjection of horror at the seemingly innocuous data persistently displayed on the monitor.

“Rachel, what is it?” Tim gently placed his hand over her own, perched heavily on the table as she began to droop her head. “That date—what does it mean?”

Slowly, she lifted her head again while eschewing eye contact with Tim, as though fearing even tacit acknowledgment of her thoughts with another pair of worried eyes. Finally, she slowly, hesitantly turned toward her partner. “That date, Tim… we, all of us here call it, ‘El Día del Diablo.’”

Tim’s heart fluttered nervously as Rachel’s words sank in. As though to confirm their cryptic horror, he gazed obliquely away before translating and repeating them back to himself, in a soft voice weakened by an ineffable sense of fear at their implications: “The Day of the Devil.”

Chapter 4: A Sinister Inspiration

Saturday, May 14, 9:34 a.m.

Vision Restoration Research Center, Biomedical Engineering Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee

. was suffused with incredulity, mixed with a puzzled anxiety.

Rachel slowly gathered herself emotionally in the face of Tim’s flabbergasted expression, in the manner of someone emotionally preparing for an agonizing and uncertain journey within her own memories.

“Our Patient Zero, the first one in whom we succeeded with the full sight restoration,” she began, “was a 19-year-old Marine lance corporal from Colorado—Pablo Acevedo. He’s from a military family through and through; his father was a gunnery sergeant, his elder brother a lieutenant. Pablo himself began as a private but rose through the ranks on the back of his heroism alone. Yes Tim,” said Rachel with a meek smile, reacting to Tim’s bemused glance, “I’m a bona fide army brat myself. Dad was a warrant officer stationed at Camp Lejeune off the Carolina coast when I was growing up, so I know my chevrons well.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “Pablo is a legend around here, and anywhere else you hear people recounting their war stories. He was a hero in Afghanistan—Purple Heart, Silver Star, more decorations than many of the experienced officers with years in the service. His story, at least the way it was related to us: His platoon was on a mission in the southeast of the country. They were clearing out a weapons cache in a safehouse that was booby-trapped with C-4 explosives, and it the place was blown to shreards when his unit entered the house. Pablo was standing guard outside, and he was tossed about 10 feet into the air with the blast. Somehow, despite being bruised and bloodiedbloodied to a pulp, he picked himself up and darted into the safehouse to save the others in his platoon.”

“Hmm, that is starting to ring a bell,” interjected Tim, as he attempted to picture a face to accompany the tale. “During one of our public fundraisers for the sight restoration research back in North Carolina, the marketing gurus were splicing in video clips from news broadcasts for our presentations, and. I think I recall this fellow’s story. At first, the cynic in me was saying that it was little more than adroit marketing of the patriotic variety——nothing like touting a war hero to bring in the donors with deep pockets. But when I learned about his courage under fire, even in my own jaded heart, it did move me. Quite a deserving pioneer to make history in your trials, no less.”

“My sentiments exactly. As I was saying, it was that incident gave Pablo his nickname. The safehouse was on fire, on the brink of collapsing and could have crumbled at any moment on top of him; even his commanders urged him to stay far away. But he thrust himself inside anyway, and wound up pulling three of his fellow soldiers as well as two civilians out of the fire, all badly injured and in critical condition—but they all made it because of Pablo. Since he’d crawled into the fiery inferno of the safehouse like that, the rest of the platoon dubbed him ‘Pablo el Diablo,’ and the moniker stuck in each of his subsequent engagements.”

Rachel paused to sip her coffee as Tim continued to absorb her words. She continued, “Pablo returned to the field after a couple weeks of convalescence, and he was transferred to a platoon in Western Iraq. He was on another mission out there when he sustained the injury that took away his sight. He and some guys in his squad were on a de-mining operation by a bridge, when suddenly these artillery shells ensconced nearby just detonated, sprayed shrapnel up, down, and around. Poor Pablo was in the vanguard, and a lot of the shards from the shrapnel struck his face. He needed a dozen surgeries for reconstruction alone, and his eyesight, obviously, was gone.”

“So, you all were angling to achieve the first full sight restoration…”

“In Pablo, that’s right. Such a brave soul, such a great attitude despite all his recent miseries, it just motivated us all the more to make the whole thing work. We’d already had success with the AP-278, hooked up with Argus, in the vision renewal trials in rats—similar to the ones you and I had collaborated on years ago, Tim. Rats don’t have great vision to begin with, but these cute critters could see like owls,” smiled Rachel, “one of those unqualified successes that we all dream about but rarely experience in our line of work. So, everything was lined up to score a breakthrough and enable Pablo to see againrestore Pablo’s sight. The surgeons implanted the AP-278 prototypes into Pablo’s artificial eyes in early November last year. We did some trial runs with the wireless link to Argus and everything was fine, but we weren’t having much success modulating the vision inputs so that he could resolve even simple structures.”

Rachel hung her head slightly before lifting it again, as though suddenly ambivalent about something she had once regarded as an unqualified success. “So, the medical team made a few tweaks to the implants the following month. Finally on February 5^th just after midnight, the big day arrived. We flipped the switch and established the wireless link between the souped-up AP-278 and Argus. And later that day, for the first time, Pablo started recognizing colors, contours of objects around him, even basic shapes from a distance. In Pablo’s honor, with all that pretension to commemorating a historic event, plus the guys’ quirky sense of humor here—we dubbed it El Día del Diablo.”

Tim nodded as he followed Rachel’s recollections. “The day that was supposed to mark the great leap.”

“Right! It was one of those wild, wacky, wonderful days you pencil in with red letters on the calendar, the highlight of a career. And we’re still dumbfounded at how quickly we began seeing results. There was a, you know, weirdness to the whole day—as soon as we activated the wireless link, there was something like a, like a blown transformer throughout the whole complex. The power waxed on and off, the monitors flickered, I could have sworn somebody got on the Public Announcement system here and started trying to weird us out—it was like, when you play a record backwards kind of thing, a faint voice but it broke through from time to time. A little creepy, we figured one of the guys in engineering was pulling one of those overcomplicated pranks they’re infamous for. But it was done in, literally, 10 seconds or so. Then throughout the day we started getting the results. And the champagne started popping, and then flowing, and flowing…”

Rachel laughed mischievously as she recalled the revelry. “Let’s just say, Tim, that we let our professional guard pretty far down that day as the data started pouring in. Imagine 5 crack electrical engineers at the top of their respective classes, drunk on who-knows-what and doing the limbo underneath a live helium laser—shielded, of course, but still—, and you get a sense of the drunken stupidity that wentgiddiness of on that day, after weeks cooped up working on the project. I don’t even remember everything myself,” she said, grinning. “But Sanjit Khan, one of the engineers there—funny guy, from MIT, always saying his real aspiration was to be a hack B-movie director—well, he recorded the incriminating festivities on his video cam. He took a position in Seattle last month but we always figured he’s still holding onto the tape to blackmail all of us in the future, you know, threatening to release it onto the Internet in case we don’t forward him enough money to make a down payment on his house,” said Rachel, laughing at the recollection.

Her expression became somber again, at which point Tim lightly placed his hand on her upper arm with concern, without saying a word. Rachel looked up and continued. “For two weeks after that, a blessed two weeks, it was Cloud Nine city for us, Tim. We’d made our careers, we’d made history… and then it just fell apart right before our eyes. It began… oh, poor Pablo. He’d gotten to the point where he could nearlybasically see the world as though he’d never lost his sight in Iraq like that. He still had to readjust a bit; after all,, you know, the world must seem a little foreignstrange after you’ve been blind for so long but… he was making so many strides. AndBut then he began acting, just, odd—anxious all the time, brittle, withdrawn. That wasn’t Pablo, he was so gregarious, so loose and friendly even with total strangers: He was the kind of guy who’d put on a Spanish reggaeton CD by Don Omar or Ivy Queen, you know, and then he’d all butpractically issue a military-style command for all of us in the laser lab to join him in gyrating to the music. Imagine, geeky engineers still in our full-metal-jacket lab garb, pounding the cold floor to the tune of a Daddy Yankee tune… I sometimes wonder how we got through the day without Pablo brightening up our spirits every time we ran into him.”

Rachel paused momentarily, as though hesitant to leave the refuge of the pleasant recollection that she had just recounted. “But first his mood went south. He never played the music anymore, he became irritable when we spoke to him, short-tempered. When Pablo was growing up, his elder sister Esmeralda, she’d been paralyzed in an auto accident, and he seemed to constantly start referring back to the incident, saying melancholy things in Spanish, crying as though , you know, he was addressing her in the hospital after the wreck, apologizing…” Tim winced with some discomfort as she spoke, memories flooding into his own mind before he refocused himself.d as Rachel continued. “It wasn’t his fault, he was just a kid himself, but he always felt a little guilty since he escaped injury in the backseat while Esmeralda—, she wound up paraplegic. The docs diagnosed him with deep depression, gave him some meds, but then his mind…he might as well have been possessed.”

Tim furrowed his brow in puzzlement. “What, what do you mean?”

“Cognitive changes, Tim, both his perception and his communication. Every day, the docs were required to do two thorough neurological exams on him, morning and night. His visual fields, they were always fine, ironically the best part of the exam. But on the Mental Status Exam, he started to register some mild disorientation on occasion, mostly to place. Most of the time he was OK, he knew where he was but at times, he thought he was home, or in Iraq, or… overseas somewhere else, probably just a prior posting on a Marine base but we couldn’t be sure. And then he started, saying things… acting a bit paranoid. They thought it at first it was, probably first just, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder, you know, classic PTDS;, even as strong as Pablo was, any human being would have been jarredhad their nerves jangled by what he went through in Iraq. The startle whenever a loud sound transmitted into his room, the nightmares, the agitation:, Aall walked, talked, and quacked like PTSD. But then, the voices he began reporting, the hallucinations, the paranoia getting worse—at this point, the docs are freaking outwere scratching their heads. It looked like psychosis, maybe the start of a full-blown schizophrenia, but given his medical, family history, it just made no sense.”

Tim focused intently on his anguished colleague’s words, a look of dread beginning to settle on his own face. “Rachel, how… how quickly was this happening to him?

“Tim, that’s the thing—in a little more than a month, he began manifesting these symptoms of frank psychosis. The progression of, whatever this is, it slowed up a bit but he hasn’t gotten any better. And what’s so, so incredible… the other poor guys, the other soldiers in whom we implanted the AP-278 and activated the Argus link, we began to see a similar progression in them, with the onset of the symptoms, maybe off by a few days, at most, in comparison to Pablo. One patient began to have the auditory hallucinations earlier, another sank into a deeper depression, but the mosaic of the condition, it matches up. As the condition progressed, for Pablo and for the others, the docs started finding other weirdnessoddities, too—mainly, hyperreflexia when their reflexes were assessed. with the the reflex hammer, Wheneverwhen the docs whacked their knees with the reflex hammer, their legs would just shoot up skyward like a martial artist, almostactually took out one of the poor interns doing the test one day,” said Rachel, allowing a brief look of amusement to pierce through her gloomy gloomy countenance.

Once again, her lookshe turned serious as her mood darkened. “And then the worst of it… those confabulations, those horrible, horrible visions and the tales they started to tell. The guys began to have, you know, gait instability, they lost coordination when they walked, began to trip up and fall all the time. And this time when the docs conducted their Mental Status Exams, asking the guys, you know, basic questions about short-term memory, where they’d just been or what they were doing, the answers—they made up stories, went off on tangents, I mean bizarretruly, bizarre things.”

Tim rubbed his chin as an idea began to coalesce. “Rachel, it’s been a while since my neuro classes all the way back in graduate school but that, that sounds a lot like…”

Rachel nodded in acknowledgement. “Yeah, Wernicke-Korsakoff’s, exactly what the docs were saying and the closest thing to a working diagnosis—some atypical form of Wernicke-Korsakoff’s with a weird onset and unusual progression. Just in case, they pumped these guys full of thiamine, just like what they do with the alcoholics they find on the street with Wernicke’s encephalopathy. That’s why they started wondering about, maybe some kind of encephalitis: one of our worst fears in this line of work, you know, a brain infection somehow transmitted during the implantation process by the neurosurgeons, perhaps some contamination of the equipment. But they’ve ruled that out, really, they’ve run the gamut of tests all the way up to brain biopsies. Just in case, they pumped these guys full of thiamine, just like what they do with the alcoholics they find on the street with Wernicke’s encephalopathy.”

Rachel paused in amusement as she took in the expression on Tim’s face, a mixture of awe and incredulous bewilderment. “I guess I’ve gotten a free medical education here after all these months in the trenches with the docs, just don’t ask me for the diploma!” she said, laughing and then turning aside with the faint residue of a smile, as though straining to hold onto a rare, fleeting moment of levity. Her next thought quickly washed it away again as she looked at Tim, her face burdened by an onrush of unwanted memories. “The thiamine infusions—like everything else, didn’t do a thing to help them. And besides, two elephants in the room, they don’t add up. iIn Wernicke’s patients, you know, they get the oculomotor signs, their eyes flitting around like that—that’s the one sign these guys don’t have. If anything it’s the opposite—they walk around with those cold, blank, fixed stares all the time.”

“With all this behavior… somehow jumping from one patient to another.”

“Exactly, Tim, and that’s why they started fretting about something infectious. Perhaps even a viral encephalitis of some sort: one of our worst fears in this line of work, a brain infection somehow transmitted during the implantation process by the neurosurgeons, perhaps some contamination of the equipment. The department chiefs started to sweat bullets when they thought it might be a contagious agent passing from one patient to another—it scared the medical officers so much that they actually imposed a brief quarantine, even donned whole-body protection suits out of fear that they’d be vulnerable to infection. But they’ve ruled that out; they’ve run the gamut of tests all the way up to brain biopsies and, thankfully, nobody on the staff has exhibited any symptoms, aside from this soul-draining exhaustion from being here for so many ungodly hours every day. If it were somehow infectious, seems like the route of transmission must have been confined to the operating room theater, but they’ve been running million-dollar assays to test that out, and still no sign of contamination in the surgical instruments, IV infusions, or in the AP-278 itself.

“And… no disruption in their visual field tests, their perception? Bumping into things as they walk?”

“No, again, that’s the thing—no decrement whatsoever in the visual processing. In fact their vision restoration, it continues to proceed apace. The resounding irony about this whole ordeal, our original aims, getting these guys to see again, it’s been an unqualified success. It’s just everything else… and that reminds me, the second thinganother reason why the docs ruled out Wernicke’s encephalopathy, it’s those confabulations. The alcoholics who make up those tales with Wernicke’s, they’re making up stories because they honestly can’t remember these things in their recent past. So they… they ‘fill in the gaps.’ And the stories can get a little offbeat, but not like this—whatever they tell, it usually bears some relevance to an actual event, even if the details ring false. But Pablo and all the other guys—by now, everything out of their mouths, it’s as though, their minds are just tuned on a different wavelength, nothing they say makes sense.”

“Like… like what?”

You know, t“The docs will ask him, after Pablo hashe’s just placed a book on the shelf 5 minutes earlier—they’ll just queryask Pablo what happened to the book that had been on the table in front of him, before he moved it to the shelf. Pablo will ponder for a moment, get stuck and look confused, then you can see that wave of anxiety overtake him. Then, then he’ll say something… weird, totally offbeat, but with a strange internal logic to it. He’ll say that he just took a brief trip to Saturn, hitchhiking on a comet, then when he got back somebody had stolen the book.”

“Heh, well, I used to do that too, at least until they started jacking up the fares so much for round-trip comet rides, like everything else these days,” interjected Tim, meekly attempting to lighten the somber atmosphere a bit, as Rachel continued to look on with little reaction, still immersed in the roiling seas of her recent memories. “Sorry Rachel, my usual lame attempt at humor when I shouldn’t be trying to be funny…”

“It’s OK Tim, with all the madness of the past few months, a different strain of madness is sometimes the only thing to keep us going... Anyway, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here, I remember, Dr. Simms gave me a voice recording from one of the sessions, it’s across the hall. You can have a listen.”

Back in the laser lab, Rachel obtained a small, portable digital recorder from one of the file boxes next to the large workstation where she and Tim had been working earlier. She advanced to the 5^th track in the device, preparing to play it aloud to her incredulous colleague.

“Here,” she explained Rachel, “Dr. Simms is asking Pablo about the weather that particular day, it’s one of those basic orienting questions they use to establish the patient’s awareness of the environment, simple things. This This is all confidential of course, but since you’re a part of the team now you can review all these medical records, and this one’s pretty telling. We were having a downpour that day, you can hear the thunder in the background, and to hear Pablo it’s as if—well, here, listen for yourself,” she said, activating the device.

A deep, steady, unflappable voice was heard first, launching a simple inquiry.

“Good morning again, Corporal Acevedo, sorry to interrupt your breakfast but I wanted to ask you a few more basic questions if I may…”

A second voice, strained and exhausted yet resolute in its message, responded to the first. “Claro, claro que si, Doctor… Mira, que esta pasando, out there, why’s it so loud outside?”

“Well, Corporal Acevedo, that was one of my questions for you this morning so I’ll ask it now, since you’ve brought it up. What do you think, how is the weather like today?” replied the first voice, in a reference to the unusually vigorous storm imprinting its presence on the recording through an open window in the room.

“Tan fuerte, tan fuerte… why so loud, why so loud is it happening already? So soon?”

A brief pause followed. “What… what is happening, Corporal? What are you referring to?”

“20 shouts, 20 signs, 20 clouds and 20 minds…” The Marine’s voice was pained yet almost breathless in his determination to communicate the cryptic words to Dr. Simms. “It echoes, the voice traverses the sky, we are beckoned, we are joined again. This world is no more, the branches again joined to the bough…”

A brief break in the conversation ensued, followed by the doctor’s voice, this time with a mild stammer. “Corporal Acevedo, can you… can you please elaborate further, what, what event are you referring to?”

“All will know, all will see, all will feel because he dwells amidst us now, he rises among us though he has always been in our midst, listen, outside… his call pierces the air. Nuestro mundo se une con su mente, our minds, together with the entity, the mind of eternity…”

A longer pause ensued, the furious pounding of heavy rain and thunder outside now clearly audible, no longer masked by human voices. The doctor continued, trying a different tack. “Corporal Acevedo… What you’re hearing out the window now, we had a thunderstorm last week, do you think this might be the same thing?”

The doctor’s words were followed by a brief laugh, more of meek anxiety than mocking, as the Marine spoke slowly, in a tone that seemed to attempt reassurance in spite of its message. “Esmeralda, I, I can see your face now… no te preocupes hermanita, todo se va a arreglar, te prometo mi hermanita… Dr. Simms, la tormenta, that storm out the window, it is like the echo when my hermanos and I shouted at the Arizona canyons as kids. It’s his voice, as he announces his presence and…”

Silence followed for what seemed like an hour afterward, before the doctor interrupted again.

“Corporal Acevedo? You were saying?”

“No more for now, doctor, no more!”

*****************

“Not much after that, Dr. Simms kept prodding him but he went silent,” said Rachel as she halted the recording.

“I’m… let’s just say, we didn’t have any briefings on this when the clinical review panel was discussing the implants,” replied Tim, shaking his head in puzzlement. “Sounds like a pretty nasty psychosis creeping up on himSomebody’s nasty idea of psychosis creeping up, certainly the delusions—all those apocalyptic ramblings, whatever the heck they mean. there. Maybe even a weird variant of In paranoid schizophrenia—, the auditory hallucinations, the voices that the patients hear, occasionally they’ll ramble on like that. The condition, it filters what they perceive so that even a garden-variety thunderstorm has something weird and mysterious behind it. I can’t tell you why in the world Pablo is exhibiting the symptoms likethose symptoms, but the docs must have come across it before.”

“But Tim, that’s what’s vexing us so muchthe thing—it started with Pablo, but then the other guys in the trial began manifesting the same bizarre behavior. And what’s most baffling about it, it’s not just that they were hallucinating, or misinterpreting weather events or whatever in their environment—these guys began to give stories that were overlapping, even their narratives with all that cryptic gibberish began to match up. That same kind of creepiness about the mind and soul of eternity, the trees and branches joined to the roots, something announcing his presence but not giving a hint of explanation… the other guys started doing that, minor differences in the warning and the way they related it but the same basic details, such as they were. Cpl. Davis, another one of the guys who’d been injured in western Iraq though not in Pablo’s platoon, that same gibberishbit about ‘“20 clouds and 20 minds,’” his phrasing was different but was it was the same brand of creepiness. basic thing.”

“Wait, so you’re telling me, all those blatherings, all that fantastical—bizarreness, the other patients are saying the same kinds of things? Could they have maybe just, I don’t know—overheard Pablo perhaps, just repeating the same delusions?”

“I only wish we could chalk it up to something that simple. These guys have been isolated from each other since Pablo began developing the symptoms and started being monitored for intensive treatment; even if they’re all going psychotic due to the implants, it makes no sense that they could all be telling variations of the same basic story—when alcoholics with Wernicke’s syndrome confabulate, the stories relate to an event but the fabrications are pulled out of thin air. I’ve never heard of contagious confabulations before—you don’t get a group of people with such symptoms, or any kind of psychosis for that matter, all giving the same basic narrative.”

Tim looked on incredulously. “Rachel—I, I sense I’m on the same wavelength as you are but I still can’t believe what I’m hearing.” All that bizarreness out of Pablo’s mouth, you’re saying, the other guys too—not just the weirdness and the style of it but, the content of the stories too?”

“I’m as bewildered as you, Tim, and believe me, all of us were looking for some kind of basis for this like, I don’t know, maybe an overzealous chaplain who planted theseis images in the guys’ heads at some point, somebody they all saw. Or maybe even just some, common image that for whatever reason, whatever part of the brain this condition is affecting, got distorted in the same basic way. But nothing. tThere’s no common link—the guys sometimes met in Iraq before the incidents that blinded thembefore each of their incidents, shared platoons, ran into each other here at Oak Ridge before the implantation but I’m telling you, the one and only common thread for all these guys is that they were in the trial, and for the most part have not been in contact. Even if they’re having delusions, no reason for them all to be telling the same story. And what’s more—they’ve recently started to fill in the picture a bit more. They’ve chanted things in their rooms on occasion, and then they’ve drawn images that basically run the gamut from incomprehensibly strange to downright terrifying to the extent we can make them out. This time, there’s more variation in the images, and the things they say, but still so many common features, it’s just dumbfounding all of us… here, I have a track from Dr. Simms a couple weeks later. , hHe’s dictating his notes after meeting with Pablo again, having talked to the other guys. Have a listen.”

As Rachel activated her digital playback device again, a calm, unwaveringly professional-sounding voice became audible, clashing in its detached tone with the jarring unsettling nature of its content.

“This is Dr. Allan H. Simms, staff physician with medical Team H, Oak Ridge Vision Restoration Project, dictating daily progress report datedon April 18, 2014 for patient #4718192, last name Acevedo, first name Pablo, Lance Corporal in the Ring of Fire Battalion of the US Marines.

The patient again reported a feeling of severe anxiety and a sense of being watched at start of session today. While continuing to deny specific auditory hallucinations indicative of frank schizophrenic state, he complained of ‘eyes, looking in from everywhere, watching all of you’, a recollection which elicited severe and generalized anxiety. The patient also exhibited notable associated with diaphoresis, with beads of perspiration evident on his forehead and the palms of his hands in particular, and an obvious sympathetic nervous response in general—, particularly including a marked level of pupillary dilation in his eyes that had frightened his morning nurse and summoned me to the patient’s room, to examine him, well before our normal meeting time for morningfor rounds. History-taking was temporarily suspended as the patient was reassured and calmed, but upon resumption of the interview, the patient made multiple references to ‘the mind that has always seen from within and now looks upon us from without,’ a phrase which he repeated verbatim and on which he did not elaborate. The patient then suddenly collapsed to the floor in an apparent seizure with marked clonus being exhibited, despite no prior history of epileptic or other seizures; he was stabilized by myself and others within the medical team, then allowed to rest briefly on his bed owing to post-ictal lethargy. Despite Other than a transient tachycardia with heart rate temporarily measured at 108 beats per minute, the patient’s vital signs remained stable.

“During this short rest from the interview, a visual inspection of the patient’s room drew attention to an easel with a canvas, on which the patient had been drawing or painting overlapping images on previous days. It had been covered this time by one of the patient’s hospital robes, but removal of the obstructing article of clothing allowed inspection of the images, which produced shock in members of the medical team who had rushed to the room upon the patient’s apparent seizures; two were visibly shaken and asked to be excused from the room. Image is surreal and difficult to describe but appears to have built upon disturbing images that the patient has sketched before, with additional detail particularly regarding the eye motif that has been central in earlier drawings by Corporal Acevedo. As before, the image bears similarities to sketches produced independently by other patients within the Vision Restoration Project, despite mutual isolation since their admission for medical attention. Photographs of the image have been attached in the online documentation.

“As patient regained strength and became responsive, physical exam was initiated. Despite occasional tachycardia, heart rate was generally not elevated, and vital signs were stable. Brief mental status exam noted significant yet highly variable deficits in attention and orientation; tests of language and memory again indicated deteriorating logic and information processing abilities coupled with bizarre confabulation upon forgetting specific details in a short-term memory test, yet punctuated by periods of remarkable lucidity inconsistent with remainder of test. His speech showed occasional slurring and nonsensical phrases consistent with a Wernicke’s aphasia, yet these symptoms spontaneously resolved within several seconds after being exhibited. The patient also continued to exhibit sporadic symptoms of hemineglect, yet these seemed to alternate between right sided and left sided neglect—he began the second half of the interview seemingly unaware of the left side of his body, but later seemed to exhibit a right-sided hemineglect. He then consistently exhibited spontaneous remission of the neglect coupled with full restoration of normal left and right-sided perception.

Cranial nerve exam once again revealed varying perceptions of common odors but otherwise no olfactory nerve losses, and no deficits whatsoever in visual fields or perception. Remaining cranial nerve examination was unremarkable, and strength and sensory perception continue to show no decrements. Reflex examination again indicated marked 4+ hyperreflexia bilaterally in both knees as well as in left-biceps tendon, and 3+ hyperreflexia elsewhere; examination of Babinski reflex again indicates toes upgoing bilaterally, consistent with prior neurological examination suggestive of central nervous system damage. Remainder of neurological exam was generally unremarkable; once again, examination of gait indicated sporadic episodes of unsteadiness yet no consistently reproducible signs of ataxia; the patient is able to walk unaided without falling down. Remainder of physical exam showed significant pallor but was otherwise unremarkable. Laboratory tests again significant for elevated blood sodium levels and low urine specific gravity, concerning for developing central diabetes insipidus and consistent with general picture of progressive neurological disease.

“Assessment and recommendations: Lance Corporal Acevedo continues to manifest signs of neuropsychiatric disease of unknown origin and inconsistent with recognized syndromes. His mental status exam, hyperreflexia, and lab tests indicating possible diabetes insipidus, are all consistent with a progressive process affecting his central nervous system, likely commencing in the wake of the patient’s retinal implant and subsequent uplink to the Argus device. Due to the timing and strikingly similar findings in Corporal Acevedo’s fellow soldiers within the vision restoration project, suspicion has focused on transmission of a hitherto unknown infectious agent into the central nervous system via the implants in the patients, or to some contaminating factor present in the operating theater.

“However, even detailed inspection of equipment and full replication of operating conditions have failed to reveal any obvious pathogen. We are awaiting repeat test results for a possible viral encephalitis or prion etiology, but all such causes thus far appear unlikely based on prior tests including direct biopsy of neural tissue by the neurosurgical team here. Extensive consultation with neurology and psychiatry faculty from US and international university departments has thus far not yielded a consensus or even hints regarding the nature of Corporal Acevedo’s condition. We have made several attempts to temporarily break the wireless link between the retinal implant and Argus, but this has had no effect on the patient’s condition.

“It should also be noted that many of his confabulations and statements seem to carry an apocalyptic tone, itself not unusual in the presence of frank psychosis, but puzzling in the level of correspondence between the narratives of Corporal Acevedo and his fellow soldiers, who have been recorded uttering similar phrases with overlapping visual and metaphorical content. Corporal Acevedo’s hand drawings have also consistently depicted nightmarish creatures and images of unknown origin, increasing in detail and their grotesque nature each day yet still consistently apparently incomplete in their subject matter. , and Aaccording to Corporal Acevedo’shis family, any such artistic tendencies are uncharacteristic, and he as he has nevernot been known for a propensity to sketch spontaneously before, let alone to draw images of such a fearsome nature. The medical team has been further baffled by similar such propensities in the other soldiers and even many points of resemblance in the sketched images themselves, particularly the eye motif in various forms. My colleague in the team’s psychiatric evaluation branch, Dr. Karen Katz, has compared the observed findings to a ‘contagious psychosis,’ with even much of the content of the delusions overlapping from patient to patient despite their relative isolation and a lack of prior experience to explain the common images and narratives.

AdditionallyAn , an extensive search of the medical literature in many languages has revealed no prior examples of such a phenomenon. While a common etiologic factor causing neurological disease and psychosis in our patients is slightly plausible, such as an encephalitis virus with a tropism for frontal or temporal lobe regions that might be involved in fostering the images that our patients claim to be visualizing, we are unable to conceive of rational mechanisms to explain why the content of such images themselves would bear such similarities from patient to patient, especially considering the graphic, fantastical, and detailed nature of these images and narratives. Other known disease processes have been eliminated from the differential diagnosis of possible causes already, as noted in prior reports.

Therefore Aat the present time, we can offer no diagnosis or treatment recommendations for our patients, other than to continue basichigh-level supportive care and proper nutritional provisions. Corporal Acevedo’s seizure today was without antecedent and we do recommend standard seizure precautions, but any further brain imaging would be of dubious value considering the battery of high-resolution scans that have already been conducted. In regards to any immediate dangers to patients and staff, it is perhaps fortunate that this neuropsychiatric condition has not significantly impacted activities of daily living, and affected patients are still able to feed, bathe, and dress themselves in accordance with their customary daily routines. The neurological effects of this disorder appear to have spared the patients’ motor and sensory faculties, with no attendant choking hazards upon consuming solid food or fluids, no evidence of vertigo or numbness that might precipitate injuries outside of any subsequent seizure episodes. There have been as yet no signs of frankly suicidal ideation or any hostility toward the care team.

However, the increasingly salient manifestations suggest a possible progressive course. Although this condition has not uniformly affected all of the patients in the vision restoration trials, I have come to the conclusion that a temporary moratorium on further testing is merited pending further resolution of this unexplained syndrome. We will continue to follow and update our findings.”

As the recording from Rachel’s device drew to a close, Tim gradually sat up without looking directly at his colleague. He had been hunched over the tape intently absorbing its messages, at once bewildering and alarming, and as he continued to process what he had just heard, he turned toward Rachel yet remained speechless, a mixture of anxiety and incredulity borne on his face. The otherwise unflappably professional voice of Dr. Allan Simms had itself begun to waver by the last four sentences inin the second half of the dictation, as though overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of inscrutability in what he was dutifully reporting in such a matter-of-fact way. As Tim continued to ponder the doctor’s report, his consternation seemed to bear the signs of an intense battle within, merely to convince himself that he had actually heard the words that his mind was now refusing to forget.

“Rachel, I…I’m sorry I’m at a loss for words here, I can’t wrap my head around it. Contagious delusions? The AP-278’s developers may have rigged up those implants to do amazing things, but I haven’t heard of any patents for bottling up thoughts and dumping them onto a computer chip yet.”

“Welcome to the club, Tim,” replied Rachel with a sigh of resignation. “I’m sorry to be dropping mission impossible onto your lap like this, but now you know what it’s been like for us in this dungeon the past few months. Sheer incomprehension, mixed with desperation and then even more confusion… It’s a wonder the rest of us haven’t been driven nuts ourselves.”

Tim shook his head in lingering disbelief as he continued to contemplate aloud, fruitlessly searching for some overlooked detail or obscure explanation from his own experience. “It reminds me a bit of all the hoopla 2 years ago, you know, ‘2012, the year of the Mayan calendar apocalypse’ and all that frenzy, but… no, what Pablo and, I presume, the other guys in the trial are saying, and sketching—it’s nothing like that. There’s no common inspiration or exposure in the environment, no, I don’t know, internal Jungian archetype etched into our brains—no reason they’d all be grasping at, whatever in the world they’re talking about. Totally out of the blue, yet their narratives matching up? It’s like in addition to the AP-278, someone implanted a… some device into their heads to flash these images, whatever they represent, into their mind’s eye, maybe dream sequences they can recall and now they’re feeding from the same pool of bizarre inputs. But unless the DARPA guys or some shadowy government agency have figured out mind control, and bribed one of the neurosurgeons…”

Tim paused momentarily before again turning toward his colleague and friend. “Rachel I’m sorry, I just can’t put any of it together. All I can say is that obviously, something—something happened on February 5^th, 2014 after Pablo was linked up to Argus. Something happened to Retinator and Nightowl and Lord knows what other executive files in the software routines that run Argus, though I haven’t the foggiest idea what since I can’t even peek at them. That’s why you called me out here I guess, and I suppose that by some mumbo-jumbo, whatever is responsible for mucking up those files—maybe there’s some connection to this neuropsychiatric syndrome poor Pablo and the others are suffering from now.”

“In what way, Tim?”

“I… I’m at a loss to say how, Rachel. What Argus does, it’s put us in uncharted territory after all—in a way, we’re entering the mind of another person from the outside, trying to re-work and refine their visual machinery so that they can see again.”

“Yeah, we’re seeing… through their eyes, or so one of the team leaders here described it to us.”

“Right, but it’s just seeing, nothing else. Not even seeing, really; more like catching a few fleeting glimpses here and there. What Argus actually does, how it links up with these guys’ minds, its mandate after all is pretty limited. Even if some evil genius hacker is out there fooling around with Argus—it’s just governing the optical machinery in the eye itself, the retina and grafting of the implant onto the optic nerve. So Argus supplies feedback modulation to fine-tune their ability to focus on objects and send meaningful information to the brain. Nothing in the, you know, the guts of the brain itself, in the vision centers—the ones in the occipital lobe in the back of the brain—or anywhere else for that matter. It doesn’t add up but… by the way, Pablo and the other guys, can we visit them, are they on site right now?”

Rachel squinted her eyes slightly, deciphering her partner’s intentions. “Uh… yeah, actually right now they’re in the medical annex just down the service road from here, not far from the main hospital campus itself. Anything you’re looking for if we see them?”

“I’d like to maybe go in with one of the docs and just sit down and talk with Pablo, listen and observe. Back when I was on the review panel for the AP-278, the committee produced a series of potential hazards we had to look out for, including neurologically-specific concerns of which, I remember, were quite a few oddballs we didn’t concern ourselves too much with initially. I’d like to see him with my own eyes, talk to the docs, and if nothing else just, you know, make whatever feeble attempt I can to reassure the poor guy during such an awful time. I guess I’m a part of this like any of the rest of us here, it’s the least I can do.”

Rachel smiled, as much at Tim’s hint of camaraderie as the faint glimmer of a resolution in his words. “Sure, Tim. I have full clearance to the medical barracks here, and I can escort you into the facility. Dr. Simms or Jose Grijalva, they’ve both been following Pablo lately and either could guide us in to check out Pablo. The docs should be rounding right now so I’ll hold off on paging them, but we might as well start heading off in that direction. I’ll be happy to introduce you.”

“Great, I could use a nice mid-morning walk outside at this point anyway, you weren’t kidding about the dungeon part!”

Tim and Rachel gathered their belongings before exiting the building, proceeding northward along a service road feeding the campus. The day’s weather had revealed its hand by now, the soothing rays of the Tennessee sun attenuated by a crescendo of billowing clouds that grew thicker and darker with each passing minute, interrupted occasionally by open channels between the cloud layers allowing the sun to gently caress the campus below. The air was permeated by a cloak of moisture that stopped short of the stifling humidity so dreaded at that time of year, amplifying the pleasant aroma of honeysuckle from a grove near the road. The two colleagues crossed a bridge over a small stream, then headed left along a tree-lined boulevard toward a gaggle of pillbox buildings packed snugly against each other, like cornrows in a nearby field. The pair approached a painstakingly manicured traffic circle, boasting a fountain pool, a garden, and impressive marble statuary within the ring, apparently to soothe the eyes of stressed drivers awaiting their turn to enter the circle during rush hour.

“This little ad hoc village,” began Rachel, as the two continued forward, “is part of CINDEPT, another one of our cutesy acronyms around here. It’s the Clinical and Investigative Neurology Department, ground zero for the docs doing clinical trials for the Iraq vets with traumatic brain injury and sensory losses. Prime real estate—we’ll concoct any lame excuse to wander over and roll out a picnic mat around here if we’re not totally tied down at lunchtime. They recruited the chief from Northwestern University, so he decided to bring a bit of Chicago with him down here to Tennessee, minus the wind and hail in winter we all hope. Those statues are ersatz versions of the originals straight out of Lincoln Park up there in the Windy City, they even have decent replicas of the Hans Christian Andersen and Friedrich Schiller statues, just like the ones near the Conservatory in the park. Being a household name in a field like this, has its perks I suppose…”

Rachel halted and signaled toward a drab brick building with a light bluish-gray exterior, sandwiched between two sleeker, more eye-catching neighbors more recently erected on the site. The nondescript structure housed many of the most challenging and difficult cases throughout the entire campus, its unassuming presence a mere whisper amongst the surrounding structures, concealing the tumult behind its walls.

“They’re in there, Tim,” said Rachel as she caught her breath in the unusually humid springtime air. “Pablo and the others, they’re up on the third floor in a secure wing. Just follow me, they’re touchy about allowing guests into the facility but I’ll see if I can bribe someone on your behalf.”

“So cynical-sounding, my dear… you’re taking after me, I warned you about that, you know,” laughed Tim sardonically.

As the pair approached the clinic’s entrance, nestled behind a small loading dock and flanked by shrubbery, Rachel paused briefly in her steps, surprised at the security presence by the gate. Usually, a solitary guard maintained vigil near a reinforced glass door requiring a punch code, but he had company this time—armed guards who glared menacingly as the two neared the gate. She and Tim exchanged puzzled sidelong glances. “From your expression, sounds like you weren’t expecting to chitchat with a semiautomatic to each side…” quipped Tim. “Did someone declare martial law without giving us the memo? I swear, this whole place is on a war footing.”

Rachel turned toward her colleague, equally bewildered. “Tim, uh—why don’t you wait here for a moment. I’m not getting a good vibe from this.”

As Rachel approached the guards, she recognized one of the figures in uniform, standing sternly and silently by his post. “Henry—Henry, it’s me, Dr. Rachel Bloom. Is there something wrong? They don’t…”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Bloom,” interrupted the guard tersely, tensing his lips and averting his gaze in the manner of an old friend, duty-bound by circumstances to maintain a frosty distance. “There’s been an incident… no one but essential personnel through those doors.”

Rachel’s eyes sank in a combination of alarm and gloom, her already exhausted psyche assaulted by the suddenly cold demeanor of an old friend. “Henry, come on, please just don’t… not the all-of-a-sudden stranger brush-off, you know about all our ordeals there at the VRRC, I really don’t need this now. I was just here on Thursday… please, I have one of my old colleagues here today, to try and help us make sense out of all the madness here lately…”

The young guard sighed in resignation, turning aside before looking squarely into Rachel’s eyes in a knowing manner, as if to communicate his sympathy even as his position muzzled his ability to air it before her. “Dr. Bloom… Rachel,” he began again, “some of the patients in the facility… their condition has deteriorated and they’ve put the place on lockdown. I’m sorry, I can’t elaborate.”

Rachel nodded forlornly as she stepped away, making her way back toward her partner when suddenly, a bell rang behind her, signaling that someone was exiting the secured entrance. Rachel craned her neck slightly over her right shoulder, but continued moving toward Tim. She hung her head low as Tim spotted her traversing the short path through the bushes around the entrance; he needed little introduction to what she was about to say. The guards by the entrance parted way as the door opened, and a uniformed figure crossed the threshold toward the path. As she was about to offer a word of explanation to Tim, a voice called out from behind her. “Rachel? Dr. Bloom, is that you?”

Rachel’s eyes brightened momentarily in relief as she recognized the voice behind her. “Diane!” she said as she turned around. “Diane, I’m sorry, we were trying to enter just a few moments ago and…”

“Rachel, I’m so sorry, it’s been like that for everyone here since last night…”

The woman greeting Rachel spoke rapidly yet in an oddly soothing manner, her intensity moderated by a slight Southern twang and a welcoming smile, all of which belied the exhaustion that her dark-circled eyes could not conceal. She stood barely 5’1” tall with shoulder-length dirty blonde hair, yet projected focus and authority; slightly disheveled in her worn-out doctor’s white coat yet clearly in charge of whatever crisis came through the door.

“Oh, Diane, by the way, this is Dr. Tim Shoemaker, my colleague from North Carolina that I mentioned to you a few weeks back. I begged and coaxed him here this weekend on short notice to see if he could work some of his magic.”

“No promises and no money-back guarantees,” chuckled Tim as he shook the hand of the woman before him.

“Tim,” continued Rachel, “this is Dr. Diane Mellon, she’s one of the directors in the psychiatry division here and has been on the team following Pablo. She’s a Carolinian herself, though of the South Carolina variety I’m sorry to say for us—Clemson Class of 1982.”

“And still roaring like a good Clemson Tiger I might add,” laughed Diane in response. “If I didn’t have so much Southern hospitality in my heart, Professor Shoemaker, I’d have to rub your nose in that little victory our Tigers just pulled off against your Blue Devils on the court last week.”

“Oh, not to worry,” smiled Tim in a spirit of facetious self-deprecation. “The way our basketball season’s going this year, I’m sure you’ll have another opportunity to rub it in soon enough. It is a sincere pleasure to meet you, Dr. Mellon; please feel free to call me Tim. Sorry if I didn’t pick the best time to drop by around here.”

“No, it’s OK Tim, we’re always glad to have someone of your caliber on our team. We, um… it sounds like Rachel’s briefed you on the patients back at the VRRC. Well, that’s why we’re in lockdown—we’ve never had it easy here, but things came undone last night.”

“Yeah, so we’ve heard” interjected Rachel, casting a sidelong glance in Henry’s direction. “Usually I get a briefing in the morning on any incidents but there was nothing today.”

“Even we’re still trying to take it all in,” replied Diane glumly. “Here, I can get both of you inside, I’ll explain as we make our way toward the rooms.”

Tim and Rachel followed their guide inside. Henry nodded silently at Rachel as she proceeded ahead, entering the dim corridor of the clinic. “The elevators are on emergency status today, for patient deliveries only so we’ll have to take the stairs to the 3^rd floor,” explained Diane to her guests. “Here, this way, to the right.”

The group entered a musty stairwell with slatted windows and the metallic clang from footsteps far above resonating throughout the chamber. The stairwell seemed to echo back a century, conjuring up the feel of fin-de-siecle academia and the low-tech, yet fervid spirit of curiosity that engendered the revolutions in medical science that began the 20^th century. As they made their way upward, Diane began to fill in details she knew they were anxiously seeking. “Pablo last night, he awoke from a nap and began to report delusions not unlike those we’d become accustomed to in the past few weeks. He seemed to become agitated, so a nurse checked him out, then left to seek out Dr. Grijalva, who was on duty last night. When she returned a few minutes later to check on him, she screamed—Pablo had somehow fashioned a cutting tool out of some eating utensils before, and used it to make several deep incisions in himself. In that short span, he used his own blood to sketch messages, images, all over the room… He was tachycardic from the blood loss, but aside from the heart rate, the vital signs were stable. He was hardly agitated in the slightest even as he bled from his own self-inflicted wounds, no indication of acute distress—just matter-of-factly cutting into himself and going about his messages even as the nurse tried to restrain him.”

As the trio ascended to the third floor and exited the stairwell, Diane impatiently punched in a code at an intercom to open a sliding glass door before them. “Dr. Grijalva rushed in,” she continued breathlessly as they entered the hallway, “trying to… disarm Pablo, but Pablo’s strength was, almost superhuman, everyone said later. Finally he was able to restrain Pablo with the help of two orderlies, but then the night had more surprises… two of the other patients began doing the same thing. Etching messages in blood, on the walls helter skelter-style, as though Pablo had prompted them. Fortunately we had no more bizarre episodes after that, but the whole incident jarred the staff here so much—they’ve all but shut the place down, moved Pablo and the others to 24-hour watch.”

Diane finally paused before a highly secured chamber at the end of the corridor, retrieving two data cards from her white coat pocket as she caught her breath and gathered her thoughts. “We might as well be living in the Twilight Zone here, the way all the guys took this up, scribbling blood-soaked messages, same night, one after another... Dr. Grijalva only half-jokingly suggested we transfer them out of Neuropsychiatry and just find a good exorcist. Here,” she said, swiping the two cards simultaneously through parallel slots flanking the door jamb, “obviously the room’s been cleaned up since the drama of last night, but the team made sure to videotape the scene in Pablo’s room after the fracas was under control, in case there’s some overlooked clue about whatever’s been haunting this place lately. The conspiracy theories are already starting to brew, so the powers that be have designated all clinical data from Pablo as Class A Confidential as of last night, and they’ve stashed everything in this locked-up Records room; I’ll have to sit in and babysit while you look through the archives.”

“Well,” replied Rachel in a moment of grizzled irony, “I can’t vouch for Dr. Shoemaker here, but I promise I’ll be well-behaved.”

“A good thing,” chuckled Tim sardonically in response, “I’d never trust myself to do the same.”

The two followed Diane into the cramped chamber, piled to the ceiling with compact discs, mainframe computers, and old-fashioned paper dossiers. She quickly fetched a CD from a filing cabinet and immediately inserted it within a disc player on a high counter, as though burning with urgency to share the jolting imagery of the night before with her two guests. As Rachel and Tim eyed the monitor before them, a video recording appeared before their eyes, without audio and apparently captured in haste on an antiquated camcorder that happened to be quickly available. The images had a strangely anachronistic feel to them, like the grainy footage on old 35-mm films used for public service announcements during the 1950’s; the color contrast was dulled, and the lighting seemed strangely distorted in a manner reminiscent of sepia-tinged images.

The camera first focused on the eerily placid visage of Pablo himself after he had been subdued in one of the hospital gurneys, an IV drip in his arm and several orderlies flanking his shoulders, just prior to his transfer to 24-hour watch.

“In most other cases like this,” explained Diane, “we’d have had a bolus of haloperidol ready to calm things down in a pinch. But Pablo was calmer than a halcyon Tennessee lake in midsummer here, after we’d gotten the restraints on. Eyes fixed ahead like that, nothing registering on the face… And he’d just bled himself of a couple pints to do those blood murals.”

Rachel and Tim strained to get a decent view of the man, surrounded seemingly on all sides by frazzled hospital personnel working frantically through the night. Amidst the whir of activity, they were able to steal occasional glimpses of the young Marine, a handsome and rugged man with wispy black hair and a web of healed scars across a broad forehead, all framing a pair of dark eyes bearing hardly a faint sign of the heroic surgical efforts he had undergone to restore his vision. His pensive eyes seemed almost oblivious to his surroundings, save for an occasional fleeting sideways glance at the hectic scene he himself had brought about.

Diane fast-forwarded the recording past a continuing whir of activity and seemingly dozens of personnel entering and departing the patient room, finally advancing the CD to a point about 15 minutes into the recording, with the room emptied of all but a skeleton clean-up crew.

“Dr. Grijalva himself took over the filming at this point when Pablo had been fully stabilized, trying to collect some clue that maybe someone in the Department of Psychiatric Arcana, somewhere in the world could make sense out of” continued Diane. “Now he’s about to focus on one of the… well, you know Rachel, Pablo’s latest watercolor.”

Rachel nodded nervously, tensing her jaw and blinking her eyes closed as though preparing for an anticipated yet sorely unwanted shock. “Yeah, I uh… I filled Tim in on Dr. Simms’ dictations.”

“Well,” replied Diane with a heavy voice, looking in Tim’s direction, “now you’ll get to see a nightmare with your own eyes.”

The camera panned across the room, with indistinct yet jarring glimpses of the bloody wall lurking in the background, toward an easel that the patients in the ward used to paint or sketch images—an expressive outlet provided to the patients in the claustrophobic isolation of the patient wards. The initially unfocused image took shape as the camera backed gradually away, the lens focusing and then wrapping its eye around the horror.

The painting depicted monstrous entities with some human features but also unusual anatomic structures, vaguely resembling the nightmarish appearance of hardened deep-sea aquatic creatures dwelling in the deepest ocean depths, almost devoid of the sun’s warming rays from the surface, yet just above the level of nurturing thermal vents on the ocean floor. The images seemed fragmentary, without full rendition of structure and incomplete facial features. There were multiple eyes arrayed in a bizarrely hyperbolic distribution, seemingly multiplying and melting away as they approached the edges, all flanking a single enormous orb in the image’s center. The jarring pattern chilled the spines of its onlookers, as though it had been channeled from the surrealist painter M. C. Escher in a fit of temporary, fevered madness. The eyes peered outward in a gaze that conjured up ferocious hostility, seemingly aware of and menacing the image’s viewers, and were anchored by a structure resembling a person’s upper face from the cheekbone to the lower forehead, with something akin to a protruding reptilian tongue at the image’s base.

The perimeter of the ghastly image was vaguely elliptic but asymmetrical, pinched slightly inward at points on the right side, with a series of ridged and winding surfaces looping inward from the surface at irregularly spaced points, like lobes of a brain that had failed to form. The perimeter was fringed by the occasional protrusions of arm-like appendages ranging from octopus-like tentacles or the blobby pseudopods of an amoeba, to the resplendent wings of a bird of prey. Capping the image was yet another, much larger eye within the orb at the image’s center. This eye differed markedly from the others; it had an angular, vaguely cat-like structure with a sharp, diamond-shaped pupil and an iris that featured a kaleidoscopic range of hues from one side to another. It was not menacing like the other eyes outside the central orb, but seemed to be probing and questioning intensely. Much of the picture was clearly incomplete, with strange staccato outlines and seemingly impossible geometries representing something that, as best its observers could tell, was not of the outside world, but a product of Pablo’s suddenly preternatural imaginative power.

“Those geometric forms in the image,” began Tim, nervously vocalizing his thoughts to break the anxious silence of the room, “the patterns—they’re… what, exactly?”

“According to the more knowledgeable observers here,” responded Diane, briefly pausing the recording, “fractals, recursive motifs. To my untrained eye it just reminded me of one of those drug-induced mind-benders that the college crowd used to experiment with back when I was growing up in the 70’s, going off and painting or sketching who knows what nonsense after frying their brains with the newest hallucinogen on the block. But this? Fortunately one of the docs here was a math major in college, and he was able to make some sense out of it. Still doesn’t stop my head from spinning every time I see Pablo’s latest update on these images. It’d be weirding us out enough if it were just Pablo, but even the other guys seem to have an affinity for drawing or painting these creepshows for no good reason that we can discern. The images are all different but a lot of overlap, especially those God-awful eyes in some form or another.”

When Diane resumed the tape, the camera jarred around a bit as it scanned about the room—strangely pristine and calm, without evidence of conflict or distress aside from the bloody messages that lined the walls. As the lens panned in on some of the messages, it revealed a collection of cryptic messages in several languages, paralleling those voiced by Pablo in the recording earlier. Yet there were also what appeared to be mathematical operations, even differential equations scrawled out in blood on the walls.

“No, Pablo had no advanced mathematics background,” said Diane, reading Tim’s puzzled expression and anticipating his thoughts. “He was a good student, apparently excelled in algebra and calculus in high school, but he didn’t train as an engineer per se—he enlisted in the Corps right after graduation and was specializing in radio-frequency jamming, per the briefing we got. There’s nothing in his background that could conceivably push him to do something like this. And of course, nobody has the foggiest idea what any of the symbols stand for or what in the world he’s ‘solving’ up there.”

Tim nodded as the camera panned about the walls, which continued to display messages using characters in exaggerated proportions, as though cribbed from a medieval clerical writ scribed in an elaborate Latin font, well before the simplification and standardization offered by a Gutenberg printing press. As the group continued to gaze at the screen, Rachel’s pager suddenly announced its presence to the group.

“Well, I guess we’ve seen… as much as we can see under the circumstances,” she said, staring down at the message on the tiny device. “That’s my signal that the team’s gonna meet and have another probably fruitless head-scratching session down in the laser lab, so I should probably start heading in that direction.”

“I’ll come along Rachel,” replied Tim, “I think I’ll find a nice quiet corner to sit down and do some head-scratching myself. My mind’s still too beset by disbelief to even begin making sense of anything here.”

“Well, sorry I couldn’t be more helpful,” interjected Diane, “but if any bolt of blinding clarity hits either of you today—let’s just say we’re as stumped and boggled as all of you are by this, so don’t be a stranger.”

“A pleasure and an honor, Diane,” said Tim as he sidled toward the door beside Rachel, “I’m sure we’ll be keeping in touch.”

As Tim slowly followed Rachel out of the Records Room, he continued to catch the last few seconds of the recording before Diane ejected the disc. His eyes caught a fleeting glimpse of a number seemingly etched in blood on the walls, and curiously set apart from the other cryptic messages as though consciously hiding from their presence, nestled in the lower right corner of the camera’s view: 4611007.

Chapter 5: A Curious Legacy of Puzzles

Monday May 16, 10:23 a.m.

Parking lot, Pegasus Atlantic Bank, Charlotte, North Carolina

Tim turned onto the rain and grease-slicked asphalt of the bank’s parking lot. His bloodshot eyes were ringed by haggard dark gray circles, vestiges of the grinding, vexing, and ultimately fruitless weekend he had endured in Tennessee. He had spent the rest of the weekend with Rachel Bloom in the drab laser lab of the Vision Restoration Research Center, sifting through cabinets full of data and vexing reports about the mysterious ailment afflicting Pablo Acevedo and the other Marines, yet he and Rachel were unable to advance beyond their initial findings that Saturday morning. The Argus system’s files, mysteriously altered from the strange Día del Diablo in February when the Argus-retinal implant connection first went live in Pablo, remained frustratingly inaccessible. He had departed the hotel in Oak Ridge during the dead of the predawn night, heading back home. On his way, traveling the rain-slicked interstates to the east, he struggled mightily against his drooping eyelids, battling to stay awake on the monotonous drive home. Finally, he was rescued by an early morning phone call that seized his interest: A bank representative, contacting him on behalf of his Uncle Mitch, who had left something of apparent urgency for Tim to receive at the bank. He had no teaching sessions that day and was not expected in the laboratory until the afternoon, so he decided to make a detour to the bank’s main branch in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a foggy and dreary morning, hardly welcoming Tim on his way back home, yet upon collapsing his umbrella and ascending a few steps to the bank’s entrance, he was surprised to see two impeccably-dressed bank individuals standing beneath the bank’s awning, awaiting his arrival.

“Dr. Shoemaker, I presume,” said one of them, a smartly dressed woman in her early 40’s, with flowing black hair and a wide smile.

“How’d ya know?” quipped Tim in repartee. “Is it the disheveled tie, the dark circles, the rumpled hairdo?”

“No worries, Doc,” replied the other representative, a young man with a ponytail and sideburns juxtaposed with his crisply tailored professional attire. His lilting drawl and congenial demeanor were also joined with an unmistakable air of confidence and sure-footedness. “For a man as busy as yourself, you’re holding up mighty well!”

The woman smiled warmly, her reassuring countenance joined to a sharp and focused mind. “Dr. Shoemaker, I’m Tanya Jemison, Pegasus director of operations for the Carolinas. This gentleman beside me is TJ Duncan; he’s an attorney with the Marsden-Kyle law firm here in Charlotte, and he’s been an associate of your uncle’s for many years now. Lately he’s been handling wills and bequests for your uncle, and his firm agreed to have both of us meet you here in person this morning.”

“My,” replied Tim in bemused astonishment, as he shook the hands of his respective hosts, “to what do I owe the red carpet treatment?”

“Your uncle is both a valued customer and a personal friend, Dr. Shoemaker,” replied the bank director. “I knew your Uncle Mitch like family before he left for Oregon; he even coached my own son’s Little League Baseball team.”

“Man of many talents,” quipped Tim dryly, “never knew Mitch had that side to him!”

“I could tell you stories, Dr. Shoemaker, if Mitch himself doesn’t beat me to the punch,” laughed Tanya congenially. “During the early days when he was getting his engineering firm off the ground, I helped him to secure financing. A few months ago, he rang me up, saying he wanted to bequeath something important to you if his heart sent him back to the hospital. Since then, we’ve been storing what he sent us in our main safe at his request, and we’ll brief you on what we know.”

Tim raised his eyebrows while momentarily shaking his head in amusement. “Yeah, those family heirlooms—my cousin filled me in a bit just this past Friday. Ah, Mitch… much as I love the guy, he always had a knack for dragging everyone else into his harebrained projects.”

The young man smiled broadly, clearly having anticipated the professor’s reaction. “Actually, Doc, your uncle was a far more successful entrepreneur than he ever let on to you and the rest of the clan, apparently. I reckon he felt comfortable with his reputation as the eccentric backyard inventor, you know, laboring quietly in the toolshed on all his designs. But sometimes those garage tinkerers strike it big. Mitchell Shoemaker was a gifted man indeed.”

Tanya Jemison again smiled at Tim’s reaction of quizzical curiosity, then motioned for her guest to enter. “We know you’re probably pressed for time, Dr. Shoemaker, so let’s cut right to the chase. Please, come on in!” The bank’s spacious interior design was a curious, experimental mixture of styles. It was equal parts high Parisian or Marseillaise—with soft, deep maroon and violet-colored furnishings redolent of an upscale hotel on the French Riviera—and brisk information-age functionality, with currency-conversion monitors and international market quotes seemingly floating within otherwise transparent glass monitors suspected between sections of the bank. There was also an aura of fin-de-siecle extravagance to much of the decor, with rococo spiraling wooden banisters and Neoclassical marble ornaments adorning otherwise staid Corinthian pillars, and even the teller windows themselves ringed by offset figurine carvings to massage the eyes of impatient customers—all remnants of the bank’s original architecture from the late 19^th century when it first ascended to the role of Southeast Regional hub, as a plaque near the entrance proudly attested.

The regional director led Tim behind the bank’s main counters, and into a cozy hidden alcove away from the cacophonous hubbub of the bank’s lobby. The sweet, cinnamon-laced aroma of stewing apples permeated the air. “Please, have a seat, Dr. Shoemaker!” she said warmly. “It’s a bit out of season,” she said, gesturing to a pewter-style carafe in a corner of the room, “but since our weather’s been so unseasonably damp and chilly lately, we have some old-fashioned, hot Carolina apple cider for our guests while they wait on all of us to do our dirty work here. There’s also doughnuts, Danishes, and some scones on a platter back here if you want a snack while you’re waiting. Your Uncle Mitch designated everything as ‘high-security,’ so I’ll have to retrieve it from the main vault while Mr. Duncan assembles some of the paperwork for you. Please make yourself comfortable in the conference room here, we’ll be right back.”

Exhausted and thirsty, Tim enthusiastically helped himself to a cup of the piping hot, steaming cider once his hosts had left the room. Pleasant reminiscences of childhood family outings in rural North Carolina and Pennsylvania filled his mind: Outings to collect firewood and plant trees, roughhousing with siblings and cousins on the chilly and hardening soil in early November, as the fire-hued leaves of autumn scattered themselves about the mountain valleys and open fields. His jangled nerves were happy to take solace in whatever balm could soothe them, and for the moment, a memory-jogging cup of banker-brewed apple cider was more than sufficient.

Tim’s brief reverie was interrupted by the unmistakable voices of his two hosts, chatting on unrelated business as they approached the conference room. Both were carrying plastic crates stacked chest-high, each crate packed with smaller cartons, cases of electronic storage media, and some oddly-shaped, antique-appearing objects. TJ set his burden down on one of the tables beside Tim, then helped his colleague to deposit her own cargo right alongside. Both then briefly stretched their shoulders and lower backs following an on-the-job morning workout.

“Normally we’d just… pawn off a cart from one of the delivery guys,” said Tanya, catching her breath, “but Mondays are standing room only at the loading docks these days, so sometimes we’ve just gotta improvise.” Her smile and warm demeanor resumed as she turned toward Tim. “Sorry to weigh you down with such a heavy load on your way back to Durham, Dr. Shoemaker, but your uncle insisted we have everything ready the moment you arrived. As I mentioned, Mitch wasn’t just a VIP customer for us, he was a personal friend, and we promised to devote a morning and make sure we had everything in order for you. So, here it is… Anyway, now to fill you in briefly on what this is all about, at least as your uncle communicated it to us. Mr. Duncan, over to you.”

The eager, amiable young man grinned slightly before positioning himself alongside one of the overstuffed crates, removing two items seemingly at random. “Dr. Shoemaker, your uncle was an unsung master of anything electronic. When he was assembling this bequest for you, he told us that he never disclosed to any of the ‘young’ins,’ the extent or accomplishments of all his entrepreneurial forays—he did bring up some difficulties he’d once had in partnership with your father, then left it at that, as will I. But he ran a certifiable Grade A operation improving solid-state electronics, and optimizing the communications infrastructure for the Carolinanet system that runs throughout our great state. The routers, the Wi-fi nodes, the individualized communications protocols for the business centers around here, including for this bank—Mitch had a knack for teasing out the smartest algorithms to get everyone talking without too much damage to the balance sheet. He was the wizard behind-the-scenes around here, and he ran this fine operation with a small staff right out of his own home, and the floor of an old warehouse that he rented off Wilkinson Boulevard.”

TJ paused and cleared his throat following the brief encomium, allowing his mind and his thoughts to transition. “So, anyway, the gist of why he’s brought you in here to receive these things with such fanfare, and why he recruited us to give you this extended spiel on all of it… your Uncle Mitchell had been handed down a collection of family heirlooms from your great-grandfather a few decades ago, back when Mitch was distinguishing himself as a teenage prodigy in math and engineering. I reckon you already know the basics: These items are always maintained in the possession of the Shoemakers, and particularly in the hands of the chief technical whiz among the Shoemaker clan, an honor which is no doubt yours today, Doc. Now in addition to filling us in on the family lore, Mitch also hired a private investigator by the name of Mr. Ezra Gordon. He’s one of the most resourceful and talented new folks under our firm’s auspices, and he first undertook a little research in the genealogical database out in Utah, as well as in the Pennsylvania state archives.”

“That puts a smile on my face,” quipped Tim. “My own father had always been nagging me and my cousins to go and do some detective work, you know, on all those lost branches of the family tree that the grown-ups would always talk about when we were growing up. Looks like you’ve finally ended the procrastination for us!”

“Glad to be of service, Doc; my family’s long been urging me to do some root-searching myself, chasing down the first wave of Donnchadhs from Scotland before we became the Duncans here in the Carolinas. So I must say I got a vicarious kick out of this particular assignment,” replied TJ cheerily. The young man’s voice was crisp and sharp as he enunciated to Tim, pausing ever so slightly at a new phrase or sentence to gesture in a spirit of personalized communication. “Anyway, the original Schumachers before they changed the spelling of their surname, as your family has long suspected, came to colonial Pennsylvania from Germany sometime in the late 17^th century, most likely in 1678 or thereabouts. The Dutch were settling Philadelphia at the time, and the Schumachers were probably sojourning with other German families for a few years in one of the Dutch port cities, likely Rotterdam or Lelystad on the basis of the shipping manifests, before heading for Germantown in the Philadelphia colony. There’s a hiatus in the written records for most of the next century, unfortunately; when the British occupied Germantown in the Philadelphia campaign, during the American Revolutionary War, a good number of the old courthouses and other archival sites were razed in the fighting with George Washington’s forces. So we have a general idea about your ancestors in the 18^th century, but I’ll admit it’s a vague picture, and we’re not even certain about the identity of the original Schumacher here, the one who’d set out from Germany in the first place.

“What we do know,” he continued, “is that whatever has been handed down by the Shoemakers over generations, and what your Uncle Mitch is now passing on to you, was already in the possession of the first Schumacher to set foot on this side of the Atlantic, before he’d even departed from Europe. Some of the items bear inscriptions in German, but this was hardly unusual for the wares produced in the German communities in colonial America; whatever you’re inheriting, however, originated before the first Schumacher crossed over from your ancestral homeland. A modified Dutch sloop, De Ontdekker, was chartered in late 1677 for freight and passenger transport to North America, and in the following year made a voyage to the port of Philadelphia. The cargo manifests of the ships were exhaustively detailed for accounting purposes, and our intrepid investigator even made a brief trip overseas to press the issue—maybe angling for that mid-year bonus with the firm, you know,” quipped the young attorney.

“If so,” came the rejoinder from Tim, “I’d have to say it’s well-deserved! Sounds like your private eye has a tendency to far exceed the call of duty.”

“Your uncle wouldn’t have had it any other way,” smiled TJ genially in response. “It was a personal recommendation, no less. Anyway… as luck would have it, one of the Dutch historical societies is in the process of digitizing the maritime archives into searchable databases. They’ve got one of those international expos coming up where they draw in all the tourists to see the old sailing ships, and they’re focusing on the peak of the Great Seafaring Age when the Dutch ruled the sea lanes. I’m a little lax on my history, but according to our private eye Mr. Gordon, the expo’s focus is on the 17^th century just after the Anglo-Dutch Wars—exactly when your ancestors were en route from Germany. Lo and behold, our man in Holland tracked down De Ontdekker’s cargo manifest, and there was a record of ‘items of fine metalworking and exquisite sculpture,’ with descriptions corresponding mighty close to what you’re inheriting today.”

Tim wrinkled his nose and forehead in a look of amused disbelief. “It’s interesting that you’ve finally confirmed this… so all these things really do stretch back to that first voyage across the Atlantic. Still… well, this is family lore so I’m not sure how much Uncle Mitch shared with you but, there’s been this orally-transmitted legend attaching some mysterious importance to all these trinkets. Something about how the Shoemakers had to guard them jealously until somehow, somewhere their significance would be unveiled. And our ancestors took it all very seriously, I’ll grant that… all kinds of tales surrounding, you know, passing them from house to house during the Civil War, spiriting them away during the Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania. Yet as far as I can tell, they’ve just been sitting in glorified storage for generation after generation. I’m still a bit puzzled as to why my Uncle Mitch would have contracted you to do a full-scale detective operation on what might as well just be a collection of fancy Old World antiques that you’d find at any respectable auction.”

“Well, your Uncle Mitch himself spent much of the past few years trying to answer some of those questions, and that’s part of what he’s bequeathing to you today, all his findings from that search. Along with all the heirlooms themselves, your uncle’s been checking up on the ol’ family tree the past few years using his own resources, as I understand he recently informed you. So he put together a scrapbook…” TJ paused as he fetched a thick, laminated notebook out of one of the crates, laying it down before Tim. “I tell you, any historian would walk over hot coals to get their hands on that—it’s got old antique photos, newspaper clippings, old billboards stretching back 3 centuries…”

“Yeah, when I spoke to my uncle last night, he said he was able to cajole some top-secret goodies out of one of the archivists in Pennsylvania. Loopy as the guy is, he can really whip out the charm when you least see it coming.”

“No doubt it runs in the family, Doc!” replied TJ, with almost instinctual affability. “At any rate, whatever your uncle found, he seems to have had little doubt about some pretty hefty importance attached to whatever is in those crates.” He then turned toward Tanya Jemison seemingly on cue, as Tim cocked his head and squinted his eyes slightly in curious anticipation.

“Dr. Shoemaker, your uncle has created a special account for you at our bank,” she began. “He knew you were going on sabbatical soon, and so he set aside a significant fraction of his bequest, $150,000 to be exact, specifically to pay for expenses—travel, search costs, a per diem as needed—for you to investigate these family heirlooms whenever you’re free, going all the way back to their source in Germany, wherever it is. Based on the references your uncle would make whenever we talked, he’d found something notable enough to consume his attention over the past 2-3 years. And he was impressed enough by, whatever that was—that he wanted you to pick up on the trail.”

“So… my Uncle Mitch, he’s… designated this account for me, just to track down the origin of these things?”

“And then to apply them… whatever they’re supposed to be applied to, and not even your Uncle Mitch was sure of that. That’s all that either I or Mr. Duncan can really say at this point, Dr. Shoemaker, and I’m sorry we can’t be more specific; we’re only relating what your uncle wanted to communicate to you with his bequest. So perhaps it’s best to turn things over now to your uncle himself.”

Tim looked on in bewildered astonishment as the bank director retrieved a carefully sealed plastic case from on top of the contents in one of the crates. “Your uncle created a videodisc for you, and it’ll hopefully clarify some of the background here—what your uncle found, and why he wanted to go as far as summoning us all together like this. You’re welcome to play this on any of the terminals here in this conference room; each one is hooked up to a projector so you can see it in grand big-screen theater style up on the wall here,” quipped Tanya as she gently handled the case. “Well, anyway, it’s a busy start of the week for us here and I’m sure Mr. Duncan has his own matters to attend to, so we’ll just leave you here to go through these things at your leisure. Everything else, the expense account, the transfer of the items into your ownership, Mitch has taken care of everything. We just need you to put your John Hancock on these two forms here to make the new account and the transfer official, with Mr. Duncan and myself witnessing… and we’ll be on our way.”

Tim nodded, briefly scanning the legalese on the two forms before hastily signing and dating them, impatient to find out more about what his uncle had been handing down to him.

“Thanks a million, Doc,” smiled TJ, extending his hand as Tim handed the forms to the bank director. In exchange for the signed documents, the attorney furnished Tim with a business card. “The contact information at the firm for me and Mr. Gordon, it’s all right on that card, so don’t hesitate to ring us up. It’s been a pleasure to finally meet you, and I do hope you’ll keep in touch.”

“The pleasure’s all mine, sir,” replied Tim, shaking the young man’s hand, “and I do appreciate your dedicating so much of your busy day to fill me in on all this.

“Not a problem, Dr. Shoemaker,” smiled Tanya, proceeding to shake Tim’s hand herself. “As I said, your uncle was a personal friend as well as a customer of ours here, and we’re glad we could be of help. Please, just take your time, help yourself to as much cider and pastries as you’d like; nobody will be in this conference room until 3 p.m. this afternoon. If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to give me a holler, I’ll be around.”

Tim nodded and thanked his two hosts again as they waved and left the room, closing the door behind them. He began by spending a few minutes leafing through his uncle’s carefully organized scrapbook of genealogical gems, filled with everything from antique signets to proudly preserved diplomas of Shoemakers from generations past. Tim then set it aside, sidling over to the two crates and peering at the items therein, all carefully wrapped and cushioned with Styrofoam padding. Gingerly, he removed and unwrapped the crates’ contents one-by-one, making sure not to disturb whatever configuration his uncle may have maintained for them prior to packaging.

The first few items were reminiscent of antique tools one might find in a master Swiss clockmaker’s workshop or a blacksmith’s shed, albeit with eye-teasing, spiraling geometric forms and an extraordinary standard of craftsmanship. Four of the articles resembled parts of a tool-and-die assembly to fashion devices of high precision, while two others defied any attempts by Tim to classify them: They were the left- and right-handed twins of a system designed to mold and modify fine decorative objects in a large variety of combinations, so remarkable in their precision, even by contemporary standards, that Tim could scarcely believe their attested history as heirlooms from the 17^th century. Each of the twin devices featured a system of interlocking bars and large beads culminating in a hinged, rotating collection of finely etched walls and insertion rods, which could be enclosed to create a series of drums that would function as molds. Tim marveled at the workmanship of the components and the complexity of their functionality. The matrix forged by the drums could assume a staggering variety of patterns; the walls and rods could generate not only a myriad of 2- and 3-dimensional shapes, but even pictures and symbols resembling written characters. There were elaborately stylized variations on the Greek and Roman alphabet, Runic symbols, ideograms resembling ancient Chinese characters, and a variety of other glyphs of unknown provenance that mystified and puzzled Tim.

Mystifying as these objects were, they seemed almost prosaic compared to what Tim next laid his eyes on. The largest article in the crates was an intricate network of pipes and delicately constructed, double-sided panels in brass and bronze. It vaguely resembled a miniature cathedral’s organ from a distance, yet as Tim examined the components, it seemed to him that the panels were designed to align themselves in some fashion, carefully controlling a signal that would apparently course through the intricately arrayed pipes.

The remaining devices from the crates pushed the envelope even further, mystifying Tim’s eyes with their almost otherworldly design. There was an enigmatic triptych, its stone panels folding out to reveal three different diagrams vaguely resembling a human form in several variations—each juxtaposed above a disturbing motif, with various limbs and sense organs of the body in exaggerated proportions, reflecting some unknown pattern or perhaps a strange 17^th-century conception of human physiology. The most bizarre device of all was an irregularly-shaped structure consisting of plates and fine wires that formed weaving and twisting loops and planes, resulting in a series of infolding surfaces that seemed to contort themselves endlessly. There were snaking, twisting patterns and a motley variety of shapes that continually curled in on themselves, coupled with hollowed-out, convex-shaped lens-like structures suspended at the tapered ends of what appeared to be horns. The lenses, or whatever they were supposed to be, sported engravings of strange glyphs and eerie geometric symbols that repeatedly miniaturized themselves from the periphery to the center, like the shrinking wave of portals appearing on two mirrors set opposite each other. To Tim, the device seemed born of the frenzied imagination of a late medieval mystic or alchemist, seeking inspiration in some kind of sacred geometry in his fruitless attempts to convert rusty base metals into gold.

Rounding out and starkly contrasting with most of this mysterious toolset, in all its dizzying intricacy, was a humble clay tablet, carved with an unknown message in some unfamiliar alphabet and peppered with distinctive yet puzzling symbols on its periphery. His mind already stretched to the point of an incredulous awe, overwhelmed by everything he had just seen, Tim set the strange tablet aside momentarily.

He stood for several minutes longer and leaned over the tables, alternately admiring and puzzling over his bizarre inheritance. Since his own youth, he had been bathed in lore and legends about the Shoemaker family heirlooms, so much so that he had largely dismissed all the tradition as tall tales—gilded and dressed up with pomp and circumstance, to inspire and pique the curiosity of each new generation and give the youngsters something concrete to trace themselves back to the Old Country. The Shoemakers had supposedly been a clan of skilled craftsmen dating all the way back to tiny family workshops in some charming, bucolic village in Germany, and the heirlooms were a precious, tangible link to this heritage: a link designed to focus the minds of restless youth, constantly tempted to stray from the family’s proud tradition of turning out generations of artisans, scientists, and engineers. But Tim now realized that the myths were interspersed with some truth; if anything, they understated the marvel of what had been passed down through the generations. The level of detail and innovation in the instruments surpassed even many contemporary standards for upmarket, custom-made tools; Tim could scarcely believe that these were the products of hands that had shaped them over 3 centuries before.

“Uncle Mitch must have been… thinking the same things,” murmured Tim to himself, as he fixed his eyes upon the videodisc that Tanya Jemison had carefully set aside on the table. Before the thought drifted from his mind, he seized the disc’s plastic case and painstakingly removed the wrapping to avoid any damage to its precious contents, then inserted the disc into one of the open computer terminals nestled in the back corner of the room. He followed the screen prompts to display the disc’s contents onto a projecting screen on the chamber’s north wall, situated like that of a corporate boardroom to be visible and prominent to VIP’s seated on both sides of the table. As the disc began to spin and whir within the computer terminal, an initially grainy image began to coalesce on the screen before Tim.

The first, slightly out-of-focus image from the disc was of a cluttered locale recently buzzing with purposeful activity, apparently within one of his Uncle Mitch’s electronics workshops—still in North Carolina, or on the vast property in Oregon to which Mitch had moved several years before, Tim was initially unsure. Uncle Mitch, in the affably clumsy way that he himself would often poke fun at, had begun the recording without himself in the picture; just a souped-up armchair with rows of work benches in the background, each covered with assorted gadgetry and seemingly miles of overhanging wires, all within what seemed to be a large tarpaulin outdoor tent. A figure stepped in before and then past the camera, adjusting its angle and focus while tapping the microphone to test the signal. He was close enough in at the outset that Tim could not see the person’s face. Nevertheless, the heavy-set figure and the colorful, eye-catching paisley design on the disheveled tie left no doubt that it was Tim’s Uncle Mitch passing back and forth, even as he continued to fiddle with the gear just offscreen. Finally, after tinkering to his apparent satisfaction, the figure gradually lowered himself into the armchair, unmistakably revealing the visage of Mitchell Shoemaker, brilliant electronics engineer and clandestine entrepreneur extraordinaire. He was already mildly pale in his hands and even slightly ashen-faced, his flagging heart beginning to display its travails when the video was shot; yet the clever engineer was surprisingly animated when he addressed the camera, with an almost uncanny awareness of his nephew on the other side of the screen.

“Tim, hello out there, wherever you’re watching this thing,” he began. “I won’t go into some overlong introductory spiel here; if you’re checking out this recording right now, I guess that means that things have been going downhill for me at the hospital… In any case, I’ll just assume that the wonderful folks at the bank have filled you in on the background of your uh, your first inheritance from me… and I also suspect that you’re wondering what exactly I’ve dumped on your shoulders with all this. Believe me, whatever questions are swirling in your head right now, they coursed through my own mind a dozen times when I myself came into possession of all these heirlooms. Heck, I was a confused teenager in high school when your grandfather first handed them down to me. All I was thinking about, when I wasn’t zapping myself messing around with who-knows-what gizmo and generally getting into trouble, was impressing the pretty girls at the soda fountain or the drive-in theater—and all of a sudden, your Grandpa is passing these things down to me, complete with some sober speech about family responsibility and items of great value. Might as well have been mystical relics for all the significance attributed to them, even though nobody could figure out why the heck they were so darned important. And probably like you, I just thought it was a case of those crazy grown-ups telling embellished grown-up stories about some family inheritance that for some reason I could never remotely divine, we Shoemakers were duty-bound to pass from generation to generation with great care. So I did what any self-absorbed teenager would do and… sealed everything up in one attic or another for decades, not bothering with it except to make sure I didn’t stub my toe on these things whenever I went scavenger-hunting in the attic.”

“And so one day a few years ago, when I must have had too much spare time in the workshop… well, my tinkering instinct finally extended itself to all these trinkets the Shoemakers have been holding onto for centuries. And I soon came to realize—I don’t, quite know how to put this—however that first Schumacher from Germany, embarking on the long voyage to America, however he got in possession of them, they were intended for something very… spectacular. And I have good reason to believe, Tim, that you’re finally going to be the Shoemaker with the dubious honor of actually putting these things to use, because whatever purpose they’re meant for—as I’ve been learning lately, it may already be on the horizon.”

Mitch Shoemaker paused and turned aside for a moment, both to gather his own thoughts and apparently to give his one-man audience a moment of his own to process what was coming, to suspend the initial, inevitable recoil of disbelief. “Tim, you’ve probably noticed, if you’ve rummaged around all these items and taken a good look at them—their level of craftsmanship is, just uncanny. Even with modern high-precision machine tools this wouldn’t be a straightforward job, and all these things are supposedly of vintage late 17^th-century design, forged from whatever tools and knowhow they had in those days. There’s very little corrosion on the metal, and these aren’t mere decorative pieces to dazzle visitors to home sweet home—they’ve clearly been engineered for some function, to work as active devices. As I was trying to make heads or tails out of all these devices, I actually ran some analyses with all my gear here, crunched some numbers and took measurements, just as I would when testing out any electronics component or newly fabricated manufacturing platform. Even now, I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I found.

“For example those crystals, in that device with all the wires—they’re rigged up to dance and jiggle when you pump an electric current through the system, and then to transmit… some kind of message in some sort of meaningful pattern. I kid you not, Tim—it’s classic piezoelectric engineering, the same kind of thing as in our microphones and stereo speakers of today. But nobody had an inkling of this phenomenon until the late 1700’s, let alone a device to exploit it—yet supposedly, our Schumacher ancestor from Germany already had this among his personal effects when he docked in Pennsylvania around 1677 or so. Those two twin gizmos with the drums that can be formed out of all the different symbols on the walls? Turns out, it creates stencils from all those symbols there—you know, kind of like a master document that’s used for printing or photocopying, or the mold that’s used in a mint to print currency. As far as I can tell, weird as this may sound, those things are put together to produce… something like cards with particular insignias or messages, much like the magnetic strip that we have on ID cards today. And that typewriter-looking gadget—mystified me, I spent months wringing my hands about that thing, tweaking and testing it to shine some light on what in the world it was designed for. Then it just came to me one day when I was stumbling around and got a piece of acetate from the photo lab stuck in that thing: It’s an etching device, and it produces something like old-fashioned punchcards, you know, like the ones that were used to operate the antique player pianos. Or those things that were fed into the old Jacquard looms in the textile mills in France, back in the 19^th century when they wanted to program the looms to more or less run on auto-pilot.”

Mitch paused again briefly, apparently to give Tim’s incredulous mind an opportunity to absorb—and perhaps begin to accept—the flabbergasting conclusions that he had just been uttering into the camera. Tim slowly nodded with furrowed brow, as though conditionally following along with the narrative even if he could not quite bring himself to believe what his uncle was saying. “Tim,” Mitch continued on the recording, “knowing your skepticism and—heck, knowing both of us, how we’d even doubt the sunrise half the time unless we could see and verify it, well I obviously don’t expect you to buy into all this off the bat. But I’m gonna jump out on my creaky limb anyway with, I guess, whatever passes for a conclusion here… all these oddball hand-me-downs that the Shoemakers have been so uptight about for generations, they add up to a… a computer, a centuries-old prototype assembled with whatever passed for state-of-the-art equipment in those days, and run on the basis of old-fashioned codes and passwords that are generated from symbol combinations forged with the other devices here. And it’s not just any computer, it’s a mighty specialized machine that’s pretty finicky about its inputs, whatever they happen to be. In fact, I’d venture to say that whoever assembled this humdinger had an awfully specific set of functions to carry out.”

Mitch paused again in the recording in apparent response to what he suspected would be an incredulous response from Tim, and in preparation to expound further to make his difficult case to such a skeptical audience. “I had the… the same kind of reaction as I’m sure you’re having now Tim, but think about it for a moment, think back to those countless lectures on, you know, cryptography and computer science that you and I had to sit through en route to becoming engineers. What are our computers at ground level after all, behind all the wires and gadgetry? How do we create the codes we need to run them… how do we break the codes? All these sages over the centuries, they knew some of those things well before anyone had an inkling of a transistor or a microchip. I remember once, you and I were out at a barbecue soaking up the Carolina sunshine, and somehow the conversation drifted to that old master mechanic, Hero of Alexandria in ancient Greece, how even back then he knew how to rig up and program devices to automate all kinds of things, all the way up to wholesale Greek dramas… Those old craftsmen were a lot more clever than we often realize, and they knew something about information processing, about… rigging up their machines, however crude they’d seem to us, to crunch data and produce an output. Or how to send coded messages on, who knows… the latest royal intrigues, prospects for the next harvest, from one privileged recipient to another. And when you consider all these items together, it’s the only thing that makes even an iota of sense, Tim—these gadgets are rigged up either to accept complex inputs or to generate what look like the keys for some kind of symbolic code, and then to churn out specific outputs on that basis. I still can’t figure out how a guild of metalworkers in some 17^th-century Alpine village could have figured things out to this level though, and it’s what’s been flustering every attempt at my playing detective these past few months. What were they trying to accomplish when they created these things? What were they meant for? How did they get the know-how? Is there anything missing from whatever we’ve been passing down over the generations?”

Tim paused the playback momentarily as he gazed again at his inheritance sprawled out on the nearby tables, straining in vain to use his uncle’s conjectures and conclusions to inject some modicum of familiarity into what was laid out before his eyes. He had already been baffled to the point of exhaustion by the bizarre events of the weekend at Oak Ridge, his very grasp of the plausible versus the incredible shaken so much that he was reluctant to take on further such challenges for the time being, to invite in any further mysteries to jar the fragile consensus his mind had created to cope. “I don’t know, Uncle Mitch,” he murmured to himself, mildly clenching his left jaw in persistent yet largely fruitless contemplation. “I think this little mystery is gonna have both of us stumped for a good long while.” He shrugged mildly and shook his head in bemused resignation, then resumed his uncle’s earnest recording on the videodisc.

“I’m hoping that young Mr. Duncan and the folks from the law firm have filled you in on some of the Shoemaker family background we’ve been able to dig up,” continued the voice on the recording. “Which brings us to the problem here, Tim—all this family lore we pass on from generation to generation, I’m convinced it’s the residue of something a lot more concrete that our ancestors must have known centuries before but, I suppose like a lot of messages that get carelessly passed through dozens of hands, winds up getting a bit tweaked and distorted each time. The original 13 colonies of the USA were pounded by epidemics in the 18^th century and unfortunately, the Shoemakers in Pennsylvania saw some of the worst of it. That infamous yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1762, the one that Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote all those famous monographs about—apparently our ancestors were at the epicenter of it, and then the smallpox epidemic that hit right during the American Revolution itself, the Shoemakers were right in the thick of that one too. All those old tales about our proud Shoemaker ancestors, working as the humble cobblers traveling with the ragtag Continental Army—there’s some truth to it… which also means those poor souls were constantly getting exposed to smallpox, typhus and God knows whatever else was raging through the camps at the time. So a good number of the old-timers who may have known the full story, going back to the first Schumacher to set foot in Germantown, they perished in the epidemics, probably before they could set the record straight for the younger generations. And all the wars, barnyard fires, all those disasters great and small in those days, they decimated a lot of what we had in terms of written records. Like a lot of families in that early colonial period, we’ve got a gap in our history, probably from around the mid-1700s when a lot of these calamities were hitting hardest. And whatever it is about all these items that made them so central for our family and so critical to guard and protect, across all these generations—it’s a riddle, Tim, but it’s one we’ve got to solve.”

Tim squinted his eyes in a mixture of eager anticipation and persistent doubt; this was supposedly the part where his uncle would underscore the urgency of hunting down the origin of these heirlooms, to the point of justifying a dedicated travel account with a 6-figure allocation to boot. Nodding cautiously, in the manner of someone about to assume a task he still could not quite embrace, the weary professor refocused his attention on the screen. “Tim, take one more look at all the items piled into those crates and focus on that carving, the one on the clay tablet with that unfamiliar lettering. It’s one of the few articles amid all these things that’s shown a bit of wear and tear, but it’s still mostly intact. I was mystified as much as I’m sure you are by what it was trying to say and where in the world it came from. Luckily, I caught a break when I moved out to Oregon. Renee Petrovic, one of the top experts on old Germanic languages and literature in North America, was recently given an appointment at the University of Oregon, shortly before I moved out there. I had a hunch and squeezed myself into one of her lectures one day, then spent what must have been an hour after the lecture puzzling over that clay tablet. After hoarding the thing for a couple of weeks in her office, she came through in a big way for us.”

“Professor Petrovic was able to date that tablet to around the late 11^th or early 12^th century, maybe half a millennium earlier than most of the other things in there, and she discerned what the strange script was. Turns out, it’s the old Gothic language that was spoken by some of the Germanic tribes that established kingdoms in Europe after Roman authority collapsed in 476 A.D. The script used on that tablet closely parallels the kind used in the Codex Argenteus, which Professor Petrovic said was a manuscript dating all the way back to the 6^th century A.D., when the Ostrogoths had a kingdom in Italy. She couldn’t figure out why the same script was being used for a document from five centuries later—according to her, the Gothic language had basically fallen into disuse by that time. But she had no doubts about the language or the timing.”

At this point, Tim’s uncle retrieved a rumpled notepad from somewhere just off-screen, its pages filled with various and sundry scribblings from Mitch’s ever-mushrooming array of projects. He flipped it to one of the few pages that seemed to have been more carefully maintained, then adjusted his reading glasses slightly while exhaling in a slightly exaggerated fashion, apparently preparing to convey a bombshell to his nephew.

“The, uh… the big news came when she was finally able to translate it, Tim. The message was a bit cryptic overall but it gets down to brass tacks in some places. And the standout passage is clearly a warning, as… as concrete, I guess, as they could have come up with for something scribed in the thick of the Middle Ages. Apparently Professor Petrovic and her colleagues had a good give-and-take on exactly what it means, but they arrived at something like a consensus: That old medieval message, it’s saying that when ‘the kingdoms convert the smallest speck to the mightiest of cannon’, that… and this was a part that they had some difficulty translating… that ‘his thunder will again shake the world.’ Whose thunder that is, what that means… they photographed the thing to continue making sense out of it but at this point, the exact reference is anybody’s guess. And then another tough-to-translate part: ‘Seek at once the counsel of the Ancient Others, or all shall succumb to the web he weaves.’

“Now, if you were like me when you first heard this Tim, you were probably thinking that some practical joker spiked something in your coffee, but this is all real Tim. They’ve run enough analyses on that tablet to soak up their annual budget, and they’ve confirmed those early suspicions enough that, last I heard, they’re planning on publishing a paper on their findings sometime soon. I think that what that tablet is saying, it’s pretty doggone specific, too. Dr. Petrovic and the others couldn’t make sense out of it at first, but take a look at the images etched into the tablet in its top right corner. There’s a bit of erosion at the edges but it’s still mostly in place there—what does it remind you of? That little circle on the left side with what looks like wings on it, that… what looks like a dotted line to the right, followed by something like a volcano, with the smoke and rocks above it? Stand back and, just let the images dance around in your mind for a moment: what do you see?”

Tim halted the recording momentarily. Even though he knew his uncle’s explanation was soon to follow, that the old engineer had already spent months putting the pieces together, he needed to allow his uncle’s suggested mental dance to proceed anyway—to make some attempt, however feeble, to synch his own mind with whatever paths his Uncle Mitch had blazed to comprehend something so elementally inscrutable. He eyed the clay tablet again more carefully, scanning its center with the mysterious script and gazing at the symbols etched along the periphery. There were eerie rubrics carved in at seemingly random intervals around the tablet’s edge, seemingly rendering a message like the visual narrative within a pharaoh’s tomb, and just as inscrutable. A slightly distorted, cat-like eye, with upturned lashes and something resembling a bolt of lightning within the stretched-out pupil, peered out from the tablet’s lower right side in a vaguely menacing stare. The bottom margin boasted a spindly collection of lines arranged in an irregular grid, with helical tube-like objects projecting off from the grid’s surface. The other symbols seemed to mix images of celestial bodies with mythological beasts, like the template of a medieval astrologer using the tablet to issue divinations for his rapt audience.

Tim finally fixed his eyes on the engraving that his uncle had referenced in the upper right corner. It was indeed as his uncle had described, with a large orb—intended to represent a circle or a medieval approximation of a sphere, Tim was unsure—flanked above and below by shapes vaguely resembling the wings of a bat, as best he could tell. Then the stippled line, and an erupting volcano. What struck Tim most conspicuously was the violence of the eruption portrayed in the etching; there was a fiery, thick smoke that was carved in exquisitely detailed relief on the tablet, along with crashing rocks and sharp objects, apparently in the form of daggers, raining down on all sides. It was perhaps a reference to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ancient Rome, a catastrophe that buried entire cities and often gripped the imagination of medieval scholars then rediscovering Europe’s classical heritage. Yet the almost gratuitous level of violent detail in the eruption, a sort of architecture of impending ruin, was unusual and rather unsettling; and the odd juxtaposition of images in the etching seemed to suggest that this eruption, whatever it represented, was not merely the earth boiling over but something perpetrated from outside, as though from a human hand itself. His curiosity now piqued even further, he resumed the recording, anxious to hear whatever epiphany his uncle may have already achieved.

“That picture, Tim,” began the voice on the recording again, “it’s a diagram of a chain reaction—a nuclear chain reaction, just like what you and I have seen a hundred times in any textbook. That’s a particle on the left, striking a target to cause the chain reaction and the subsequent mushroom cloud explosion. They must have conceived of it as something like an overwhelming volcanic eruption so many centuries ago. Who knows if they had an inkling about the details, neutrons and nuclear fission and all that; the point is, they had a clear picture of the concept and they were able to represent it here. And that passage, about the speck giving way to the mightiest of cannon—it’s a reference to an atomic bomb, Tim. Somehow, couldn’t tell you how or why, but those sages from all those centuries ago anticipated how such a powerful force in nature, derived from manipulations of the tiniest particles, could be harnessed to make such devastating weapons. So they laid out these 11^th century diagrams of an atom bomb, in the midst of… some broader narrative, that none of us has a clue about.”

Tim nodded cautiously again, his eyes shuffling between the tablet and the screen. He was increasingly able to follow the logic of his uncle’s hunches, even if he could not convince himself of the conclusions. His Uncle Mitch, true to form, then continued his own words on the recording in full anticipation of his nephew’s reaction.

“I might have become a little batty after all these years tinkering around in the workshop, Tim, but this is unmistakable. Truth is, this whole collection of items is one big anachronism, and I’m as flummoxed as you are by how these things could have been manufactured so many centuries ago, but it’s here, before my eyes and now before yours. It’s as though—somebody, for whatever reasons and however they obtained the knowledge for it, began surreptitiously developing technology way ahead of their time. Who knows who they were, but all their discoveries and innovations tracked way ahead of their societies in general, and it seems they wanted to use this knowledge to provide us with an early warning system of a… of a threat in some form, that we’ve not even begun to grasp yet. I couldn’t begin to imagine what they’re referring to on the tablet, but whatever it is… they think we’re soon going to be right in the teeth of it. So this is maybe the message they’ve sent down to us through the centuries, Tim. The Shoemakers have always been a clan of craftsmen since as far as we can document, and perhaps that first Schumacher to set foot in America was linked to… whoever developed all these things and was passing this warning on to us. Everything you see before you, it must have been part of something a lot bigger, with our ancestral Schumacher safeguarding a piece of this puzzle when he set off from Germany.”

The old engineer then turned briefly from the camera; his nephew took the opportunity to pause the recording and give his stretched and increasingly exhausted mind a much-needed respite. Tim knew what was coming, whether or not he wanted to hear it; sighing in resignation, he decided to hear out his uncle’s plea, whatever his initial intentions to follow it. “This, Tim,” came his uncle’s words as Tim resumed playback, “is why you need to pick up where I’ve left off, to… to follow all this, back to its source in the Old Country. There’s a reason that our ancestor came in possession of all these things and took the task seriously, to ensure that they would be faithfully passed on through each Shoemaker generation. He must have known something about them, and something about who… created them, in the first place. Whatever this nexus was, the people who forged these devices had a very good reason for entrusting them into our hands, and for warning us that one day perhaps soon, we would have to use them. And if that tablet and all these devices are 500 years apart in their origin… then maybe they are the products of the same source ultimately, the same guild or clan that has been passing its knowledge down through the centuries. We have to find out Tim, we have to piece these things together and find out what those warnings are referring to. I know your sabbatical is coming soon, and so I’ve delegated an account with Pegasus Atlantic to cover all your expenses to Germany, and wherever else our ancestor may have been involved in, whatever all this is related to. Keep everything close by; since you probably can’t transport them on an aircraft with you, I’ve arranged to make sure they can be shipped wherever you need them. If nothing else—it may be spare consolation, but just think of this as an opportunity to do a little roots-tracing, and to re-connect with a linchpin of our heritage that, seems to be connecting with something a lot bigger than us alone. It’s up to you to find out what that is, Tim.”

Tim carefully retrieved the videodisc from the terminal, glancing skyward and exhaling deeply while protruding his lower lip in resigned consternation. His shoulders then hunched forward, as though physically reflecting the psychological weight of the albatrosses that had been cast about his neck in the past three days alone. He was moved by the passionate pleas of his uncle, yet also resolutely ambivalent, if only because he had no idea where to begin. This first Schumacher in America, mused Tim to himself—where exactly did he hail from in the first place? What was his name? And even if Tim could resolve these questions, he still had only a bare inkling of what he could expect to find there. What could possibly be so significant, let alone so urgent, as to merit what might as well have been sleuthing with a blindfold on, with so little to guide his quest? He was not terribly enthusiastic about devoting the first month of his sabbatical to chasing down loose threads in the family history. Yet Tim was equally pulled by the gnawing desire to shed a few faint rays of light on his perplexing inheritance. Not only was their very existence a galling conundrum; Tim could not help but concur with his uncle that these heirlooms were at the heart of something much greater. He could almost hear the importunate voices of their mysterious creators, beckoning through time from their 17^th-century workshops. It was as though they were imploring Tim to revive an undertaking that, for reasons he could not begin to divine, had been suspended all those years ago.

He decided to set the matter aside for the moment, hoping that some future epiphany or unappreciated angle to the mystery would reveal itself and make his choice obvious. His exhaustion from the long trip was overtaking his best efforts to resist it, and he finally allowed himself a moment of unguarded relaxation in the conference room chair, his mind no longer engaged by earnest bank representatives or artifacts of obscure origin. As he inclined his head gently on his left hand, propped up with his elbow rested on the arm of the chair, Tim’s mind began to drift, exchanging the duties and anxieties of the moment for the sweet tranquility of some late-morning shut-eye.

Tim’s catnap ended abruptly about 10 minutes later, his arms flailing as he jarred himself awake. He had a queasy, unsettled feeling, with a strange sense that he had traveled somewhere unpleasant even though he could not recall the journey. Instinctively, he reached for a sharpened pencil on the table and began scribbling something on a notepad he had carried in his briefcase. He felt dazed and foggy, and his hand seemed to be working frantically without the conscious guidance of his mind itself. After several minutes, he lifted the pencil and pushed the paper aside, as the sights and sounds of the conference room finally re-oriented him away from whatever ethereal voyage his mind had just traversed.

Yearning for a precious injection of familiar company to break the lingering spell of discomfort, Tim reached instinctively for his cellular phone, speed-dialing a number now well-known to him since the weekend.

“Good morning, Vision Restoration Lab, this is Rachel Bloom,” answered the voice on the other line.
“Hey, Rachel, sorry to uh… to call you on the laser lab phone but I figured your cell wouldn’t have great reception all those floors down in the dungeon,” began Tim, assuming a consciously soothing and sympathetic tone despite his own enduring disquiet.

“Tim, hi there,” replied Rachel, instantly recognizing the weary voice addressing her. “How was the trip back over the mountains?”

“I almost had the road to myself, which isn’t exactly a good thing when you’re alone on the interstate in the dead of night, with only your half-busted car stereo to keep you company. Just me and a fleet of tractor trailers swerving in the lanes while pounding down who knows what caffeine concoction to stay awake. Anyway… just checkin’ in on you after the weekend.”

Rachel smiled at the sentiment. “The same crazy, inhumane schedule as it’s been here for the past 2 months, I guess. We’re now having daily conferences to bang our heads fruitlessly against the wall about this, up from our weekly pace before. The one tiny nugget of good news is that the tandem vision restoration trials in Missouri and Maryland are so far proceeding without incident; our earlier anxieties about a similar pattern of events there turned out to be a false alarm. Gives us a little more breathing room with the command center at the Naval Hospital up there in Maryland, I guess, though still cold comfort with everything going on here. Any profound insights hit you on the ride back?”

“Nothing yet,” replied Tim, “in fact now I have yet another dilemma on my platter to bother me endlessly… just, family issues basically. Anyway, after spending the whole weekend at Oak Ridge poring through those medical records and the lines of code in Argus, I’m just as perplexed as all of you are. It’s still vexing me that the computer files for the Argus protocols have been altered so much, I just can’t comprehend who’s doing that and why. I realize that all these oddities in the Argus source code probably don’t explain these guys’ medical condition; seems that the sight restoration function is still working without a hitch, and last I checked, people don’t speak binary or hexadecimal, so I doubt that whatever’s been ailing Argus lately has much bearing on what’s been affecting all these guys.”

“Yeah, my sentiments exactly Tim, it’s just that… what you were able to dig up in the Argus protocol files, it’s the only semblance of a lead that we have so far.”

“Right, and I still can’t help but conjecture that somebody’s involved in big-time industrial or military espionage here using some channel we haven’t figured out yet, trying to hack into Argus and use it for, I don’t know, whatever nefarious scheme they have in mind. If they were able to tap into Argus, maybe somehow they’ve hit another aspect of the trial that’s causing this… this syndrome that’s striking all these poor guys in the trials.”

Rachel sighed deeply, mindful of the difficult day that lay ahead yet relieved to have her old mentor’s comforting voice on the phone, dispensing his wisdom. “Tim, I’d better take off, I have a few hours of mindless number-crunching before our little afternoon conference today so I’d better get right to it. Please keep in touch as you can, OK? You can’t imagine how much of a relief it is to have you backing us up like this. And hey, never hurts to have a famous name like Tim Shoemaker on our team when indulging our latest wild speculation about what’s going on.”

“Well, I have a suspicion that ‘infamous’ may better describe my name when it comes to the officials with the purse strings,” said Tim, chuckling. “I bet I’d recognize quite a few of them from conferences during our grad school years together, and I doubt any of them have forgotten all the antics I used to pull in those days.”

“Your legend really does precede you—uh, Tim, could you hold on a minute? I… I think I have to take this page.”

“Sure Rachel, take your time.”

As Tim waited for her to return to the phone, his eye caught a glimpse of the notepad where he had just been scribbling feverishly upon awaking from his brief nap. He brought it closer, his memory still vague and unsure what to expect from something he himself had just put to paper. As he focused more intently on the image, gradually making out the lines and filled-in shapes that he’d felt such an inexplicably urgent need to sketch out, a shudder fell upon his shoulders. There was an image of some kind of structure, a room with a vaulted ceiling perhaps as well as a series of grotesquely ornate, though incompletely rendered pillars holding it up. There were shapes resembling flames, burning from what appeared to be large urns deep in the background of the picture. There was someone’s arm in the meagerly rendered foreground, apparently clambering onto what seemed to be an entrance into the mysterious chamber. Finally, slightly right-of-center in the picture, there was an irregularly-shaped form, with what appeared to be multiple arms and a single large, unmistakable eye in its center. It was an eye that Tim instantly recognized: He had seen it drawn by the hand of another, just two days before.

“Sorry, Tim, I’m back. Tim, you still there?”

“Uh, yeah, sorry, just got a bit distracted for a moment. Rachel—could I ask you, uh… Something’s been a little off lately and I…”

Tim went silent as he hemmed and hawed in ambivalence; he was trapped in a conversational bottleneck, the kind that one encounters when he desperately wants to voice an angst gnawing him on the inside, but cannot quite imagine how to verbalize it.

“What… Tim, what is it?”

“It’s… oh, nevermind, just a lot of discombobulated things going through my head lately,” said Tim, relenting. “Listen, I don’t want to take any more precious seconds out of your busy schedule, so I’ll just let ya go for now. I’ll keep dropping a line every now and then, to see how this little conundrum is developing, so stay strong and keep your chin up, OK?”

“Thanks Tim, I’ll keep you posted.”

Chapter 6: Piercing Echoes of a Silent Anguish

Monday May 16, 2:17 p.m.

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

“Hey, Boss, didn’t expect to see you here today! You missed all the fun here this morning.”

The unmistakable voice of Zach Choi, ebullient and effervescing with energy as always, greeted Tim as he trudged wearily into his office, nestled in the back of his cluttered laboratory.

Tim managed a feeble smile, happy to see his ace student again, yet unsure that he could match his protégé’s storied wit in such an exhausted state. “Don’t tell me you guys have been goofing around with the liquid nitrogen tanks again!”

“This time even better! Matt suggested that we ought to recalibrate the lasers this morning, since the last few kinetics experiments with the zinc films have had such off-the-wall results. So I decided to step in and be the hero, except I didn’t check too carefully to confirm that I was actually putting the standard solutions into the cuvettes…”

“Hm, I have a feeling I know where this is going,” interjected Tim.

“Yeah… something a little more volatile wound up in the tubes. Those old catalogs from yesteryear sitting beside the spectrometer, they turned out to be excellent kindling for the little brushfire that I managed to start up. We put it out quickly but of course, the smoke alarms had a field day and the fire department had to evacuate the whole building. I made sure to take full credit for the feat outside.”

“Zach, pal,” laughed Tim, “I warned you about following in my footsteps! Sounds like the kind of thing I would have done back when I was in your shoes—except in my case, it would’ve been deliberate and I’d have planned the thing well in advance. And made sure to do it right in the middle of a national conference with plenty of cameras to capture the mayhem on film.”

“I’m not sure you should be sticking ideas in my head like that, Boss,” came Zach’s wry rejoinder. “You of all people should know what I’m capable of!”

Tim chuckled in amusement as he turned to enter his office. He had stashed his recent inheritance safely at home and temporarily put the conundrum in Tennessee out of his mind. Even though it was a day off for him, he decided to skip lunch and hurry back to his office at the university, hoping to immerse himself in the refreshingly prosaic tasks of his daily grind as a way to re-orient away from the intractably puzzling questions that had suddenly appeared to vex him. Unpleasant thoughts nonetheless intruded on more than one occasion: What drove him to sketch that disturbing, yet clearly fragmentary image after he awoke from the catnap? What did it represent? And the eye, that haunting eye that so closely resembled what Pablo and the other Marines had been painting on their own canvases as they descended into madness… The implications were too distressing to ponder, and Tim forcibly redirected his attention elsewhere.

Yet his attempts to focus on the mundane tasks of the day were repeatedly thwarted by unwanted reminders of the heirlooms from his Uncle Mitch and the grand, glorious, and seemingly impossible mastery of their craftsmanship. How could the components of these instruments, whatever the mysterious task to which they were dedicated, have been forged with such exacting precision? Even equipped with the finest machine tools and high-frequency lasers, like those at the disposal of Tim’s cracker-jack crew of budding engineers, the etchings and interlocking gears of those strange devices would have required the finest, most experienced hands and a budget that would have strained the resources of a small company. Nothing made sense.

A thought crossed Tim’s mind, and he reached for his briefcase, retrieving a carefully-placed business card from a slot in the inside front pocket. He quickly scanned the card, turning it over to find a number that instantly drew his fervent interest. He briefly rehearsed for his upcoming conversation, then dialed the number on his cell phone.

“Ezra Gordon speaking,” answered the voice on the other line.

“Mr… Mr. Gordon? This is Tim Shoemaker, I’m the profess…”

“Dr. Shoemaker!” interrupted the other man genially. “No need for an introduction sir, I feel as though I’ve come to know you quite well throughout this last assignment; it’s an honor to finally speak with the man himself! Please, just call me Ezra.”

“You do the same, and the honor’s all mine, Ezra; you’ve managed to do in a matter of mere weeks, what more than 15 generations of Shoemakers have been too lazy to do for centuries. I can’t thank you enough for finally shedding some light on all these old, musty family puzzles.”

“Don’t mention it, Tim, it’s a pleasure; this has been quite an interesting change of pace for someone in my position, doing genealogical field work for a customer wasn’t exactly in my job description when I signed up for the Probate Law section with Marsden-Kyle, but it’s been an adventure, I must say! Anything I can help you with today?”

“That’s what I’m calling about, actually. I was in the distinguished presence of your colleague T.J. Duncan just this morning, and he… he laid it all out for me, everything you’ve been digging up. I got the whole spiel, about how that first Schumacher in America set off presumably from a port in the Netherlands, with all these curiosities that I’ve inherited listed in the shipping manifest of that Dutch sailing ship—De Ontdekker, if I remember right. What I’m still in the dark about though—it’s what led up to his voyage in the Dutch clipper across the Atlantic. Why was he leaving? How did he come into possession of all these things? Heck—where did he come from in the first place? I wouldn’t care much except… there’s just something so surreal about everything my uncle handed down to me, and now he wants me to play detective, trace down their origins. All we know, is that the first Schumacher here was apparently a village craftsman in some quaint German town, or at least that’s what the family lore has passed down to us. Beyond that… it’s all just tall tales looking for an author.”

“Your timing’s exquisite, Tim,” replied Ezra after a thoughtful pause. “I’ve been working on your case all afternoon, but unfortunately, I think I’ve hit a wall for now. We’ve shed a bit more light on the itinerary for De Ontdekker before the ship’s captain left to cross the Atlantic. It indeed stopped in Rotterdam and then left from Lelystad in the Netherlands, as we suspected, but as we’ve just learned from looking over these documents, the ship had first docked in the Bremerhaven—the harbor in Bremen, Germany, which was one of the free cities on the North Sea, essentially one big transit point for the wanderers overseas in those days. De Ontdekker was ferrying passengers both from what was then Holland as well as the German states to the east, so your ancestor could have disembarked from any of those ports.”

“Any news on the passengers themselves?”

“That’s just the problem. I was reviewing some of the information from the cargo and passenger manifests; the Dutch officials were kind enough to send translations, both from De Ontdekker and a few other sailing ships around the time your ancestor would have been crossing the open sea. Although I’d found a clear record of the heirlooms that T.J. had filled you in on, the manifests themselves are just lists and don’t link the owners to the belongings; I suppose that the passengers must have kept such documentation themselves. Furthermore, I couldn’t find a name like ‘Schumacher’ anywhere on the passenger manifest of De Ontdekker. We’re trying to dig up maybe some complementary documentation contained within the archives at those port cities themselves, but for now, I’m stuck.”

“Hmm, I wonder… Schumacher, and Shoemaker as our surname became sometime in mid-19^th century, it’s one of those old-fashioned occupational names that got attached to people based on profession. That first Schumacher—maybe he wasn’t called a ‘Schumacher’ when he was on De Ontdekker.”

“You read me like a clairvoyant, Tim, the same thought crossed my mind, too. Lots of those early Dutch and German migrants in the late 1600’s, they were artisans who ran their tiny workshops on a shoestring budget, on both sides of the Atlantic. Surnames were, optional I guess you could say, for a lot of the small farmers, the craftsmen and other humble folk who made the voyage; so for last names, they either just tacked on their father’s name as a patronymic, or identified themselves based on what they did. Hence all the Smiths and Schmidts, Millers and Muellers, Weavers and Webers in the phonebook. I figured your ancestor may have done the same, but he would have assumed some kind of surname—even just a pseudonym—before disembarking on De Ontdekker. If he was carrying belongings of such high value across the ocean, he would have made sure to have documentation with specific identification for himself, as well as whatever family might have been on board with him. And indeed, everyone on that passenger manifest had a specific surname in Dutch or German, with nothing even slightly approximating the kind of occupational name a cobbler would have taken on, in either language. I pored through every reference to the people actually on that ship, not only in the manifests but in the captain’s logs, a few fragmentary extracts from the notebook of a ship’s surgeon—nada, I’ve just been drawing blanks all day.”

“So, either he was on that ship and perhaps carrying a surname that he changed later when he arrived in Pennsylvania… or he wasn’t on the ship at all—which doesn’t hold water, no pun intended. The Shoemakers have always treated those items as dearly a bird treats its nest; there’s no way the first Schumacher in America would’ve just carelessly shipped them on a transatlantic voyage without being personally present. Unless… ”

“Have an idea in mind?” queried Ezra, following a brief pause.

“What if he had a family member, or a trusted friend who took the heirlooms over? Maybe that early Schumacher was already in Germantown, or maybe he was following later.”

“Well, that’s a thought, but offhand I can’t think of any such linkage. I did make a personal trip to the Pennsylvania state archives as part of the background investigation; admittedly I still have a box or two of documents to sift through, but I couldn’t find anything connecting a name in the archives to De Ontdekker itself.”

“Right, the archives,” nodded Tim, as the reference jogged his memory. “I remember when I spoke to my Uncle Mitch briefly last night, he said he befriended one of the newly hired eager beavers in the Pennsylvania Archives Department who was specializing in the state’s early commercial history. He was even able to inveigle copies of old billboards, shingles, plaques, legal documents, and contracts, all from slides that the archivist was preparing for a conference—active research that wouldn’t have necessarily been accessible to the public. It’s with me in fact, one of the things that TJ delivered to me this morning.”

Tim reached for his briefcase again, this time pulling out the scrapbook that his uncle had bequeathed to him alongside the heirlooms themselves. He leafed through its early pages, searching through collages full of newspaper clippings, old receipts, and other relics of transactions from centuries’ past, until one page finally caught his eye.

“Ezra—do you have the passenger manifest for De Ontdekker somewhere close by?”

“Yeah, I have the print-out from the Dutch government on my desk right now, in fact.”

“Koenig,” said Tim, spelling the name out slowly. “Is that name in the ship’s manifest by any chance?”

“Koenig… just a sec, I’ll take a look. Why that name in particular?”

“I was flipping the pages here, and I came across a scanned-in image of an old Pennsylvania contract written in German which, per the notes from the archivist’s slide, is supposedly from 1692. It has a monographed seal in the lower right corner for a cobbler’s shop, and I was just able to make out the lettering—Schumacher and Koenig. It makes sense, after all, our ancestor was trying to get himself anchored in a new and unfamiliar land, so he must have partnered up. If this is the right Schumacher, which it looks like my Uncle Mitch strongly suspected, then he must have had a pretty decent rapport with this fellow to make him a business partner—maybe even solid enough to entrust him with those heirlooms.”

“I see where you’re coming from,” replied Ezra. He continued to scan the manifests as Tim waited silently on the other line, anxious to hear whether his hunch would be validated. As Ezra ran his finger down each successive page, carefully perusing the documents in front of him, he finally halted at a name that drew his attention. Confirming his initial suspicion, slowly reading the text before him, he smiled in the fashion of a long-suffering gold prospector who had finally stumbled upon the real thing. “Yeah, Tim, it’s here, two names in fact: Sara and Daniel König, the last name has, you know, the letter o with the umlaut on top—but in America, that must’ve been how they spelled it, K-O-E-N-I-G. Bullseye.”

“Sara and Daniel König—of course, Daniel Koenig must have been our ancestor’s brother-in-law, or maybe a son-in-law, and Sara Koenig must have been his sister or perhaps his daughter. Can’t be sure which yet but… that’s gotta be it. When craftsmen were starting new businesses, they’d team up with blood relatives or with in-laws. They were friends, family members, trusted business partners…” Tim paused and grinned in satisfaction as he followed the trail of the logic. “Yeah—people who would’ve been trusted enough to protect something of such fundamental importance in their care. That still leaves the question of why the first Schumacher over here couldn’t transport those heirlooms himself, but Sara and Daniel König were the missing link on De Ontdekker. Ezra—anything else on the Königs there in the manifest?”

“Yep, the translation’s a bit rough around the edges but it says they came from—Sara and Daniel König, departed from the Bremerhaven, originally from… Leipzig, in the kingdom of Prussia… today in the state of Saxony in eastern Germany. It’s impossible to know for sure Tim, but extended families back then tended to stay close by. If your hunch is right, then that first Schumacher probably came from Leipzig too, or at least somewhere not too far away.”
“Leipzig, huh? Well, maybe I’ll have to take my uncle’s advice after all—I can’t survive these excruciating days around here without an occasional Bach concerto fix on the stereo system in the office, and now I have a genuine excuse to visit Johann Sebastian’s old stomping grounds themselves.”

“Great minds think alike,” laughed Ezra collegially. “I knew there’s a reason I had a good impression about you—any fan of Bach is a friend of mine.”

“Then I’ll just have to show you my classic rock collection, too—this could truly be the start of a beautiful friendship,” chuckled Tim in response. “I’ve gotta tend to a couple things back here in the lab, but it sounds like I’ve got some plans to put together over the next few days, so I’ll make sure to stay in touch.”

“Likewise, Tim. I’ll get the ball rolling on the Leipzig connection and start bugging some people, to see if I can narrow things down for you a little more.”

“Great, I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for everything Ezra, I’ll talk to you soon.”

As Tim continued his late afternoon stroll, in the midst of vibrant gardens just beginning to revel in their springtime majesty, he was disconcerted by the clash between his inner turmoil and the beauty that surrounded him. Amidst the soothing sight of blooming hydrangeas and the sweet, dewy aroma of Carolina honeysuckle that filtered into his nostrils, he could not assuage the uneasy feeling of entanglement within the strands of a discomfiting enigma; whatever lay at the root of the madness befalling the Oak Ridge patients, it had now ensnared him as well. Every idle reflection he allowed himself of the recent events—the dreadful disseminating madness at the Vision Restoration facility, the blood-soaked walls with the ominous messages and the mysterious digits, and the elementally chilling entity in Pablo’s sketches and his own—tinged the unsettling memories in ever darker hues. Dismayed at the unshakeable disquiet that continued to gnaw at him, Tim eventually made his way through the gardens to a café nearby; if nothing else, he mused, the irrepressibly cheerful mien of an old friend therein might furnish a welcome distraction for his own rattled psyche.

Monday May 16, 4:43 p.m.

Rush Hour Café, Duke University Medical Center

“Nice to see you Doc,” called out the chipper voice behind the sandwich counter, “it’s been a while, thought you’d disappeared from these parts all of a sudden! Let’s see if I remember the Shoemaker Special right… tomato and Swiss cheese surrounded by alfalfa sprouts, topped with spicy tahini on rye and… right, a dash of Dijon mustard and a touch of balsamic vinegar on the other slice. Close enough?”

“Right on target as always, Percy!” replied Tim, beaming in slightly incredulous admiration.

“Comin’ right up! Just tell ‘em it’s the daily special at the cashier, custom-prepared for a special customer.”

“You never cease to amaze me, buddy. I’ve just been brown-bagging lunch lately; one of my students had a thesis defense last week and I was sweating out a grant deadline just before that. Might as well have attached a ball and chain to my desk for the whole month. How’s this place been treating you lately?”

“Oh, the usual, another day, another soap opera on the way to the cash register. I tell you Doc, the best part of this job, I might as well be a fly on the wall hiding out in plain sight. Just preparing sandwiches back here behind the counter, I’ve heard so much gossip and drama from the people on the other side, I could cobble together a screenplay: ‘Tales from the Sandwich Aisle, Volume 1’ by Percy Laurence.”

“I see the thespian career is still on track, eh? Glad to hear it.”

“Well, now that you mention it,” replied Percy, effortlessly assembling each ingredient in the sandwich as he spoke, “I just found out there’s another career angle spreading its wings. I’ve been applying to cooking schools off-season, and by the grace of my guardian angel, just learned that I got an invite to the French Culinary Institute up in the Big Apple for a few months. Then it’s onto the CIA—no, not that CIA Doc, the Culinary Institute of America, on a scholarship. Just proves you’re never too old to get a fresh start!”

“You really are a man of many talents, Percy; if anything, I’m surprised it took so long for them to get noticed. Congratulations, my friend! French cuisine, eh?”

“Le Francais all the way! I never told you before Doc, but last summer I snuck out and spent a month interning at a little bed and breakfast in Provence in France, where they specialize in whipping up those colorful Provencal pastries, the ones so pretty you wanna seal ‘em up in an airtight glass case in a museum. I grew up in Cajun Louisiana after all, complete with that bayou accent whenever I start mouthing off in French—it was a big hit in Provence—and about half the childhood that I can recall was spent causin’ mischief in some French kitchen or another. So I guess it was a natural progression.” As Percy finished his sentence, he reached over the crossbar of the counter, proudly delivering Tim’s sandwich. “And besides, since I’ll be in New York anyway, I figure I can find some off-Broadway productions to coax my way into, and maybe keep the acting thing going.”

“Knowing you, Percy, I’m sure you’ll be headlining a marquee up there before the year’s out. In any case, I cannot let you leave North Carolina without sampling one of your signature Provencal pastries. Someday when you’ve got your own cable TV show, I’ll be able to tell all my friends that I knew you before you were famous!”

As the two of them carried on their impromptu chitchat, a woman seated at a nearby table looked on furtively, her heart racing. Her face blanched around a pair of sharp, cat-green eyes and anxiously pursed, rose red-glossed lips. She was impeccably clad in business attire, with shoulder-length light brown hair and a glistening, topaz-studded bracelet on her left wrist. Around her collar was a carefully draped necklace terminating in a circular pendant, featuring a miniaturized motif from a Salvador Dali painting. She tried to remove it but stopped in mid-attempt, sensing she would only draw further attention.

She had been carefully entering her daily tallies into a notebook spread out on a table before her, and as Tim headed for the cashier, the woman quietly rotated herself and her belongings to keep her face just out of view. She glanced out of the corner of her eye to see Tim seating himself with his sandwich about two tables behind her. She waited and ruminated for a seemingly eternal two minutes, calming herself as a blizzard of thoughts and memories blew through her mind. Finally, after summoning the courage to look squarely into Tim’s face—one that she had believed would never grace her eyes again—she turned around slowly and tentatively, trying to feign ignorance of his presence as though she were merely reaching for an item from her purse.

“Tim,” she called out cautiously. “Tim is… is that you?”

Tim felt a chill suddenly pulsing through his body at the very sound of her voice. He initially hesitated even to lift his head, knowing whose eyes he would be meeting. He felt an almost violent ambivalence in the span of a moment, one part of him desperate to avoid engaging the woman before him, another secretly happy to hear her voice again, if for no other reason than to be re-acquainted with a face that he had long allowed to drift from his mind’s eye. Finally, Tim looked up and directed his gaze toward her. His eyes first caught sight of the necklace, a pendant at once so humble and yet so fraught with turbulent, agonizing history. He then gingerly allowed himself to look into her eyes, strenuously muzzling any unspoken emotions that his own orbs might betray.

“Priscilla, Priscilla Lehto… I’m so… I never thought I’d…”

Both figures eyed each other with a mixture of nostalgia and barely concealed trepidation, seized by the same volatile brew of emotions. Priscilla made a first attempt at small talk to break the thick ice between them. “I, uh… I got a position with Nan Dao Pharmaceuticals this past March. Sales mostly, like before, as well as on-site support.” The cadence in her voice seemed to carry a light cadence to it, like a faint purr, but it also bore a slight and oddly discordant tinge, as if she feared the sea of intimations that her natural speech would bring forth. “Since I’ve just been revving up with Nan Dao… they wanted to place me in familiar surroundings, so they gave me a gig here in the Medical Center. How, uh, how’s everything been for you lately, Tim?”

“Up and down, I guess.” An uncertain pause set in as Tim pondered how to steer the conversation, finally settling on some open-ended catching-up to fill the uncomfortably quiet air. “Hectic here as always, just like you remembered it I’m sure. The kids… making Dad proud and driving me nuts in equal measure. Mark graduated from Northwestern last year, civil engineering, and he’s now all the way out in Dubai on a project. Though he’s warned me he’s gonna drop it all and become a traveling poet anytime now. And Chloe, she’s bright and adventurous as always, out at Puget Sound doing oceanography. As for me… well, nothing too special back here.”

“Great to hear, Tim. Any familiar faces still in the lab?”

“Maybe not for much longer. Zach Choi was his usual spectacular self on Thursday, aced his thesis defense; Tara Ivanov, she got her PhD last year, now in Pittsburgh and climbing the tenure track at Carnegie Mellon. Looks as though I’ll soon have a nearly empty nest in the lab as well as at home, the way all my charges are sprouting wings…”

Tim allowed himself a nervous laugh as Priscilla smiled warily, both still unsure what sentiments they could bear to entertain, let alone express. After staring past each other for a brief while, pretending to eye imagined events in the background, Tim fixed his eyes on Priscilla again, stuttering slightly as he moved hesitantly to speak.

“Priscilla, I, I’m… I still can’t…” He gnashed his teeth and drew a deep breath, compelling himself to utter a thought that seemed to scald him emotionally with even the faint connotations it carried. “Even just seeing you here, Priscilla, listening to your voice; there was a time when I would have given anything, in those difficult days, to hear it reverberate it my ears. But in the wake of… I’m sorry, I know none of it was your fault and I never, ever blamed you personally for it, and I hope, God I hope that you never presumed I did. I realize how awkward it must have been when we broke off all contact on such an incongruous note but…”

His voice seemed to descend into a kind of forced whisper as it cracked from one word to another, burdened as it was by the crushing weight of anguished recollections. “I don’t know how you to tell you this Priscilla; it’s just that, I never dreamt I’d encounter you under such casual circumstances, my mind so unprepared for everything… This is stirring up all that wrenching history that we, that all those around us still regrettably share.”

“I… I understand, Tim.” Priscilla pivoted to close her notebook and collect her belongings, before turning again in Tim’s direction and gradually rising from her chair. “It’s getting close to 5 and I, I have to debrief my supervisor here on the day, so I probably ought to hit the road. I’m… I’ll still be around here for most of the summer, we’ll probably run into each other again, I’m sure.”

Tim nodded in a mixture of gentle acknowledgment and thinly veiled relief, as he was finding it impossible to gather his thoughts, blindsided as he had been by the timing and sheer surprise of the encounter. There were so many things to be said, so many concealed subtexts and tangled narratives which neither dared to broach. “Take care of yourself, Priscilla,” he replied, “I’ll… I’ll be around too.”

“Bye, Tim.” Priscilla smiled meekly and started toward the exit. After taking a few vacillating steps, she abruptly stopped as Tim continued to look on. She was momentarily frozen, unsure whether to continue moving, or to once more behold the face of a man with whom she shared a persistent, yet agonizing bond of the heart. She looked upward initially without facing him, gradually shifting in his direction. “Tim, I... I realize, it’s always going to be, like this, whenever we meet. Still… it is good to see you.” Priscilla continued to gaze into Tim’s eyes after delivering the words, her countenance betraying a look of regret and plaintive reflection. She seemed anxious to add something else, twice opening her mouth but stopping just short of vocalizing her thoughts. Finally, she looked away and quickly headed for the exit.

Tim slumped back in his chair and stared obliquely toward the floor, unable to process the stew of emotions still percolating inside. His pained introspection was interrupted by a sympathetic voice.

“How’re you holding up there, Doc?”

After a slight delay, Tim cast a glance in Percy’s direction, wincing and slightly averting his gaze. “Speaking of soap operas unfolding in the dining room…” he uttered in a low voice.

“Like I said, Doc,” smiled Percy, “might as well be a fly on the wall in my line of work. The details are none of my business but I can tell you’ve been having that kinda day, I could see it writ all over your face the moment you stepped in here.”

“It’s been like this since Friday, one unwelcome surprise after another. When it rains it pours, right now might as well be a hurricane…”

“I hear ya Doc, I’ve been there before, maybe life has a way of packing all the misery together in chunks, to get it over with. That’s what my Auntie back in Baton Rouge always used to say. Hey Doc, it’s probably not much to cheer you up but…” He paused momentarily, reaching for a meticulously wrapped pita concoction that he placed on the sandwich counter. “I figured you’re probably not of a mind to cook tonight, so after you’re done with your Shoemaker Special there, I’ve got my newest creation, the Percy’s Palate Pleaser, to bring home and take your mind off it a bit. It’s on the house.”

“Aw, Percy… thanks for the sentiment, but I’ll be fine,” responded Tim, still in mid-sulk. “I don’t want to get you into trouble here.”

“No problem, Doc—this near to closing time at the cafeteria, we’d be dumping most of the leftovers anyway. I’d much rather leave a little going-away present for my favorite customer, and besides, nothing lights up the spirit like a touch of freewheelin’ Cajun-Creole cooking: Slice up some okra and avocados, dice up a tomato, steep ‘em for a minute in a cayenne pepper and Worcestershire marinade, place on a bed of rice and wrap it up. Et voila, mon copain! One bite soft, the next bite crunchy, some bayou spice and always nice.”

Heartened by his friend’s generosity, Tim finally relented and allowed the faint traces of a smile to stretch across his face. He retrieved a paper bag to take out Percy’s latest culinary innovation, along with the remainder of his now suddenly unappetizing attempt at a late lunch. “You’re a lifesaver, buddy,” said Tim.

“Anytime, Doc. Have yourself a wonderful evening and don’t be a stranger, OK?”

Thursday, February 19, 2013

Crijnssen Road, Paramaribo, Suriname

“My, my, Tim, if I’d known that your annual conferences here in South America involved detours to exotic Andean mountain passes and sightseeing in rain forests, I’d have signed up years ago to be your ‘traveling assistant.’ I’m already jealous about what I must have missed in years past!”

“Trust me dear, you weren’t missing much. I made special arrangements this time around; normally the sightseeing on these conference trips involves little more than a grand tour of the lobby at some cheap airport motel.”

“Aw, Hon, it’s so nice to see your romantic side slip its chains and sneak out every so often!”

“Well, dear, I did remember something about a much-anticipated day for us coming up soon. Wedding Aanniversaries always get a special mark on the calendar, but for once-starry-eyed fresh-out-of-college sweethearts like us, nothing beats a trip in the middle of nowhere to awaken those sweet post-adolescent memories of cluelessly stumbling about an exotic place together. Sans a map of course, to make sure we get completely and utterly lost.”

“Tim, you’re getting all sweetly Proustian on me again!”

“Susan, only you could find a way to inject Proust into screwball conversation on some winding road in South America. And I have to admit it makes you truly irresistible.”

“And you, my good Dr. Shoemaker, are as irresistible as that prankster who drove my parents nuts all those years ago. I’d hug and kiss you if we weren’t swerving around every 100 meters up here!”

“Not to worry my dear, we’ll have plenty of opportunities tonight. At that restaurant we have reservations for, there’s a secret veranda by a little lake on the premises. I’ve scouted it out and know exactly when to sneak over there. Ever since Mark and Chloe left the nest, I’ve been starting to like this idea of rekindling a little teenage puppy love.”

“Well, that makes two of us, Tim!”

“OK, Susie, we’ll be arriving at the tour site in about 10 minutes. Let’s see, the cooler’s all set, I’ve got the tickets with me and… what, what is it dear?”

“It’s, uh… nothing. Just…”

“Hon, I can recognize that look even out of the corner of my eye. The bridge of your nose, it… flattens out when something’s on your mind like that.”

“At the art museum this morning, Tim. When we split up briefly, I… I wandered into the European Masters section, with all the Surrealists, Miró, Ernst and then… there was a Dali painting, and it reminded me of…”

“Susie…”

“Tim, I can’t help it. I know what you’re going to say, all those sessions we did together—”

“The sessions, and the tears shed, and the days spent airing all our dirty linen to rediscover what we’d lost… Susie, we crossed oceans to find each other again after all those errant journeys; we don’t have to revisit that place in our minds now. It’s what the therapist was trying to say to us—even if we both had strayed with someone else, we came back to walk the same path together.”

“Tim, sometimes I think you still don’t get it. It wasn’t just that you had strayed with ‘someone else,’ it’s that you’d strayed with her Tim. Maybe anyone else and we could have put it behind us faster, but of all the people in this world, why her? It’s not something I can just stash away within some, crypt within my memory.”

“Seems like it’d never stay buried anyway. Amazing, just an unplanned stroll to a Surrealist exhibit, far from home, and all that history just comes gushing right back…”

“Tim, we all have these cues that trigger… our memories can well up no matter what kinds of barriers we put up. They’re all wrapped together in a package, you loosen one strand and you get the whole thing again, and I’m not just giving you psychology-speak here; it just happens sometimes.”

“Hon, you’re right in everything you say. Sometimes the heart betrays the ramparts that our minds spend years constructing, and every day that these memories intrude upon me, I wish that I’d never showed up unannounced to your event like that, that you’d never introduced her to me. But we can’t take it back, and we don’t need to now. We spent the better part of six months dealing with, agonizing about this. And Dr. Miles, in all those sessions, she said the same thing: ‘We can’t be blinded by the shadows cast from our minds.’ We can’t just, un-remember all those things, we can only make sure we don’t stay a prisoner to them.”

“I know, and I keep telling myself the same thing. If it had been anything but that painting… Those memories, they can still be such a prison for me, for us from time to time. And truthfully… I never gave you the key.”

“What? Susan, what do you mean?”

“Tim, I’ve never told you the whole story, even after all those months in therapy, I couldn’t bring myself to say it to you… but that necklace that she always wore, when I first introduced you to her at the art exhibition in Montreal—that was a present from me, that’s how she got it in the first place. I gave that to her when we were roommates.”

“You mean, back when…”

“Yeah, when we were both at Vassar College together. My junior year—Priscilla, free spirit as always, she’d switched her major for about the third time to art history, and she was in full bohemian mode. I’d returned to school following the Thanksgiving holiday, and Priscilla by then had turned her side of the room into a loft, with Dali’s clocks and Surrealist themes all over our ceiling. At first I wasn’t too keen on her little stab at spontaneous interior décor; my psych exams were on the horizon, and I didn’t need the distractions but, this was Priscilla after all… so one weekend, when she coaxed me into slipping out to join her for some souvenir shopping in New York City. I wandered into one of those quaint, art colony side streets in the SoHo district.”

“The ones... just like where we first met, right? When we ran into each other in Shanghai? Ah, you’ve gotten me reminiscing again… your senior semester abroad—that concealed alleyway with all the local artists hawking their wares on the blankets, and we got into that silly bidding war over the…”

“Yes, over that cute little jade obelisk with the calligraphy carved on the faces, the one that you and I both just had to have. You, this cocky and combative hotshot from Chicago, so important that even in grad school he was collaborating with colleagues in Shanghai, fighting with a poor Vassar co-ed like me, over some kitschy street-side art to send to Mom and Dad as a Christmas gift—but then strangely sweet enough to warm my freezing cheeks with your hands that you’d been secretly rubbing over the hot coals.”

“And also annoyed enough to just buy you the darn thing so we could stop quarreling. And then crazy enough to ask for the phone number of this gorgeous young lassie whom I’d just spent the past five minutes bickering with.”

“Yes, Tim, you always did have a, shall we say, paradoxical charm to you.”

“And I was never so glad to have gotten myself wrapped up in a heated argument with a total stranger. By the way, I never did find out what you sent your parents after you opted to keep the jade piece for yourself that winter.”

“Well, let’s just say I’d already spent many a lonely evening street-shopping in those Shanghai side alleys. Again, it’s just memory, all those things that trigger itReminded me of home.… Priscilla by that time of course, she’d quit before starting her senior year at Vassar, embarked on that decade of glorified vagabondage all over the world, as she later explained it. And so there I was, all alone in a distant land, my best friend just… disappeared, off the grid. Those humble little alleys with all the local artists, they were my only solace. Just like the one in SoHo where I found the…”

“The necklace.”

“Yeah, it’s why I could never relate it to you before Tim, if I told you how she’d gotten the necklace… everything about that wonderful night when you and I first met in Shanghai, I just thought, all those memories would have been held hostage to... But I guess I can’t take it back now. Priscilla and I, we used to pal around in SoHo whenever we could hop a ride into town. And that weekend right after Thanksgiving in our junior year, I felt like teasing Priscilla a bit on her newest dalliance with daydreams. On one of the blankets in the alley, an artist had laid out a collection of pendants that he’d been crafting for the past few months. He was a talented apprentice jeweler from Italy, returning back to Milan in a few days, so he was selling some of his best designs at discounts deep enough even for penny-pinching college students like me. And he had this gorgeous line of pendants, hand-painted replicas of Van Gogh, Vermeer, Dürer, Braque and… and Dali, The Persistence of Memory right on the necklace. So I thought about Priscilla and her latest flirtation du jour, forked over my past two weeks’ worth of waitressing money… and snapped up the pendant to give to my, to my best friend forever as I guess Chloe would say.”

“I understand. I still… if only you could have told me...”

“Tim—after what we went through to reconnect, I didn’t want to take the chance. Everything that necklace would bring back, especially if you, too, had known all the tangled backstory… In Montreal, I still remember it so clearly, when I introduced her to you as, as my crazy long-lost roommate from college. The first thing you noticed was the pendant, it’s what everyone notices first when they meet her. That and the bracelet, which she got herself, on the same trip in SoHo. All those years wandering trotting around the globeworld, and those were the only things she kept to stay connected to the world back home. And then, considering everything that happened over the next 2 years after Montreal, when we drifted away like that, you with her, then me with SteveJeff… I guess memory really does persist, because that pendant, it might as well have been a vessel bottling up all those unhappy days. It linked you to Priscilla, Priscilla to me… it bound the three of us together no matter how much you and I tried to rebuild again afterward. She knew it, too; I didn’t talk to Priscilla for months after everything came out, and when we finally mustered enough of a rapport to see each other again, she… Priscilla never wore that necklace around me again.”

“But we did rebuild, Susie, that’s what matters. Even after all my screw-ups, after I managed to do just about everything wrong, we did it in spite of all that. We never buried that past, but we put it in the background, together. We were stronger, we… are more resilient. And just as you were saying now, those recollections, they’re all wrapped together into different packages, and we can open them up again with the right cue, not just the awful memories but the ones that bring us together all over again… it’s what you always used to say, it may have taken us months to build that temple, but we can revisit and experience it all in the span of a moment.”

“I know Tim… and that little kiss on the cheek I just gave you, that’s my cue.”

“A kiss right back at ya, love. When we finally arrive up there, I’ll make it a real one.”

“It’s a deal.”

“That’s what I like to hear. All right, we should be pulling into the lodge any moment now, we’ve got a couple turns and…”

“Tim, Tim… what was that?”

“What? Honey, what?”

“That… there was a rumbling sound, just a moment ago, can you hear it?”

“Yeah, just some thunder in the distance. Tropical weather here in the rain forest… sunny like the beach one minute, then pouring like a cataract the next.”

“Tim, I don’t know... I’m getting a bad vibe about it, feels like it’s closer than that. Couldn’t we just, pull over somewhere around here?”

“Well, they don’t really have shoulders on a road like this, just the scenic overlooks here and there… don’t worry Hon, we’re almost there.”

“I know, just being me, I guess… Can’t wait to start this secret mountain tour you’ve been teasing regaling me with this whole trip.”

“I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

“And I promise to show you my full appreciation, Professor. As soon as we…”

“Oh my G—…”

****************

“Peter, Peter! Zijn bloeddruk! De Ringer-oplossing, bolus, 500 cc… wij hebben het nu nodig, stat!”

“Ja, maar zijn aders, elke keer wij proberen om…”

“Ik weet Peter, maar hij is nog niet stabiel… ond waar is de bloedgas? Hij is nog cyanotisch en…”

“What… uh… where…”

“Dr… Dr. Shoemaker, I’m Dr. Carl De Groot… please, sir, don’t try to move.”

“What ha—, happ—”

“You were in an accident, sir, there was apparently a rockslide where you were driving… you’re in a hospital ER now, in Paramaribo… please, you’ll be fine but we need to get you to the operating room.”

“My, my… wife, where, ow… where is…”

“She… Dr. Shoemaker, please, just… you’re weak now, try to rest, try to stay calm. I’ll be here the whole time, I won’t leave your side until we’re in the OR.”

“Su… Susan, where… Susan…”

****************

Monday, May 16, 8:21 p.m.

Home of Dr. Timothy Shoemaker, West Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Tim awoke with a gasp, startled and drenched with perspiration. A nagging pain surged up his neck on the right side; he had dozed off in his work clothes with the lamp on, curled up on his bed in an awkward position far from the headboard. Disoriented and shaken, Tim keeled over forward as a sick, almost nauseating sensation temporarily overtook him. Rubbing his bleary eyes, he instinctively reached toward a small coffee table next to the bedpost, groping around until he was able to snatch a framed picture on the surface. He peered through his still blurry corneas with eyes wide open as he held the picture underneath the lamp, staring at the snow-capped peaks in the background of the photo, which had been snapped at an Andean mountain retreat 3 years before. Then he slowly tracked his focus to the foreground, as though absorbing every tiny detail of the image, ultimately resting his eyes on a smiling pose of himself and his wife Susan embracing next to a rustic log cabin.

Tim closed his eyes again and set the picture aside, then stood up and began stumbling over to the washroom. He opened the faucet on his sink and splashed his face with cold water, still breathing heavily as though an anvil had just been lifted from his chest. He stared down toward the wash basin for a minute as he tried to resolve the flurry of images and thoughts still clouding his mind from the dream, then tentatively raised his face up, fixating his gaze on the mirror before him. He clenched his jaw, fighting back the tears welling in his eyes.

“Memory… really does persist,” he said softly, staring back toward the face peering at him from the mirror, his eyes red and raw.

Tim continued to rinse his forehead and cheeks with the cool water, pausing occasionally to stretch his sore neck, or to simply sort out the blizzard of thoughts and feelings still frothing like rapids through his mind. He felt an odd sense of disorientation that he was unable to shake. It was the same home, with the same rooms in which he had dwelled for years, yet the house’s space and angles, the sights and smells, the soft whir of the fan in the background—all seemed to strike him a bit differently than before, as though he had become a stranger in a familiar land. There seemed to be a faint glow permeating the hallway, visible within the door frame as reflected in the mirror. It was such an odd hour to rest and then to rise again, he thought to himself; let alone for his psyche to be jolted by such a vivid recollection of so terrible a day.

Tim wiped his face with the towel and filled a cup with water to slake his parched throat. As he emerged from the washroom, his eyes now wide awake, he tried to familiarize himself again with the contours of his own home, as though aiming to convince himself that he was not still there in Suriname, that he really was back on familiar terrain in North Carolina—at least, what should have felt far more familiar than it did. There was still a trace of that same uncanny glow permeating the hall, haunting the nooks and crannies of each room as though sneaking into the corners of Tim’s eyes, then vanishing as he tried to focus in on its source.

Tim marched back into his bedroom and lay fruitlessly for a minute, staring at the cream-colored ceiling above. His mind had been far too unsettled to allow the sweet embrace of sleep to relax his stiff, still-trembling shoulders. He sat up, clasping the picture on the coffee table again, then rose to exit the chamber with the photo still close to his chest. He looked out upon the lonely living room downstairs, then turned rightward, heading toward his small second-floor study. He pushed past the stacks of books and cluttered electronic media strewn about the room, setting the picture down near a windowsill as his desktop computer hummed behind him in a low-power mode, its monitor blackened and sleeping from inactivity.

Tim sat down in his chair and pulled up to a small washstand underneath the window, carefully opening the creaky wooden drawer on the top right. He exhaled deeply as he pulled out the carefully protected figurine therein: A small, meticulously crafted jade obelisk, carved with brief messages in Chinese characters on each of its upright sides. He grasped the obelisk firmly and rolled it across his fingers, the textures acting as a master key to the recesses of his mind, unlocking storehouses’ worth of mental journeys nestled deeply within the fog-strewn realms of his unconscious and half-formed thoughts. He then looked out the window of the room toward the woods nearby, their placid treetops hosting the prowling eyes of owls and other stalkers of the night.

As Tim moved to place the jade obelisk back into its cozy, cushioned dwelling within the drawer, he caught sight of something unusual in the corner of his eye. He looked toward the bookcase on the right wall first, seeking out whatever had just flittingly flashed its presence to him in the dimly lit study. His heart then leapt as his eyes caught sight of an old, framed varsity athletics letter from his college days, leaning back lazily at the edge of a shelf on the bookcase… with its glass reflecting something behind him, some kind of pattern that seemed to be shifting and weaving about.

As he pivoted around further, apprehensive about what he would descry, his eyes focused on the source of the strange image: His computer monitor, seemingly asleep in a low-power mode, was projecting something on its surface, its pixels diligently limning a distinctive image on the otherwise darkened screen. As he focused on the image, it continued to evolve into something more lucid and then strikingly, shockingly familiar to Tim. It was a face, still cast out of visible white lines etched on the monitor but unmistakably a visage looking out from the screen, though not specifically at Tim—vaguely aware, it seemed, of the world outside, seemingly trying to vocalize something from lips that moved ever so subtly and indistinctly amid the fuzzy array of pixels on the screen. It was a face that Tim recognized from pictures and videos, from memories equally as vivid… one that he had just seen moments ago.

“Susan! My God, Susan!”

Chapter 7: Revelations

Tuesday, May 17, 6:22 a.m.

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

“Tim? Is that you? My goodness you look so—ah, I’m just glad to see you again, Boss!”

“Shelley, if it isn’t my favorite postdoc, home from the Emerald Isle already—welcome back! Sorry I haven’t been in touch the last couple weeks, how have things been since your conference talk out there?”

“Oh, don’t even get me started—a bit like the feeling of finally climbing into that roller coaster you were always too terrified to mount as a kid, then being as freaked out and nerve-wracked as expected but somehow emerging in one piece afterward. The Pre-Fab Lipid Raft project of course became all the rage after the conference, and Dr. Kearney being… Dr. Kearney, he insisted that I, the nervous neophyte on the team, go on a little local lecture tour after the Dublin conference to sell the idea a little more. I always brag about my Philly Girl upbringing to assert my bona fides in front of tough crowds, you know—‘if you can handle an audience in Philadelphia, you can take it anywhere.’

“Which I will fully attest to any skeptical crowd, is amply true in the case of Dr. Shelley Deloria!”

“Well, that’s what I always thought before I had to do it an ocean away and 5,000 miles from home. The way they grill you after those lectures there, I swear I wanted to crawl up in a little corner half the time they introduced me to give a talk. I picked up some Irish Gaelic when I was in Dublin, nothing beats it for compacting several lifetimes’ worth of wisdom into a few witty aphorisms: ‘Is teann madra ar a thairseacht féin.’ Means something like, ‘any dog can be bold on its own doorstep.’ And I was definitely the dog, barking away on somebody else’s doorstep! But it ultimately went smoothly, I even got a hint-hint job offer from a vice-president on a business trip from some Seattle start-up, you know, one of those ‘look us up next year if we’re still in business’ kinds of things.”

“That’s great Shel, you always rise to the occasion! Sorry I’m walking in so lumbering and disheveled, I didn’t expect to bump into anyone in the Doghouse this early in the morn.”

“I got my flight bumped up a couple days. They were closing down the university housing there in Dublin now that the Spring semester’s wrapped up, and my friend had to skip town on short notice. So I did a little weekend sightseeing around Eire’s gorgeous countryside, and hopped on the first Aer Lingus flight back to North Carolina yesterday. Then promptly passed out at something like 6 p.m. last night when I got home—still stuck on Irish time, I guess. I figured I might as well get an early jump on the day when I got up at, oh, 3 a.m. this morning. Never could stomach jet lag all that well.”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

“Speaking of jet lag Tim, looks like you’ve been logging quite a few miles in your own right! It’s just 6:30 a.m., things are pretty quiet around here, finals over and done with; why not go home and grab a little shut-eye?”

“That bad, huh? I…I couldn’t sleep last night, lots on my mind. It’s been a tough week so far, well it’s been a nasty spell since Friday—long story. Anyway, there is a nice sterling silver lining to it after all: I got to preside over your illustrious colleague’s scintillatingly successful thesis defense on Thursday morning.”

“Yes, I heard! Zach, true to form, rang me up on Thursday night from the Cantina del Drago bar downtown, his big celebratory gig with Matt Hansen and the guys apparently. For me across the Atlantic, it was the wee hours of the morning, but I couldn’t resist the chance for a little vicarious rejoicing. It was about his tenth shot of whiskey and God knows what else, and it was vintage Zach on display: Despite having imbibed enough beer and shots to start breathing fire, he could discuss all our recent data more lucidly than any of the rest of us at full sobriety. Rumor has it though, even the legendary Zach himself found his limit that night; supposedly, the guys wound up having to carry Zach home in the back of Matt’s hay-strewn pick-up truck, and they have the incriminating photos to prove it!”

“No kidding! Ah, Zach, that sneaky devil; he took Friday off, and he never even mentioned it yesterday. I was giving him a hard time about one measly shot of tequila after his thesis defense, maybe he was just a little rattled then; well, I’m definitely gonna have to get the dirt on his wild night of wanton carousing on Thursday. Nobody ever escapes the Shoemaker Lab Doghouse without the obligatory roast, with all their most embarrassing photos on full public display for posterity. And certainly not Zach!”

“Glad to see a smile start gracing your face again, Tim, even if it’s at the expense of my esteemed colleague, the now ‘Doctor’ Zachary Choi!”

Tim nodded warmly. “It’s great to have you back here, Shel.”

As he approached the doorway to his office, Shelley addressed him once more, her soothing tone leavened by a note of concern. “Tim—are you, you sure you’re doing all right? I was planning on stepping out for a snack soon, and I’d be happy to snag you a cup of coffee or a, bagel if you’d like, to bring back.”

“I think I’m… well, maybe we could grab a quick bite down by the Early Bird Café in about, oh, 15 minutes or so? I’ve got that lecture that I mentioned in my last Email, the one at Wake Forest tomorrow, so I think I’ll just give a once-over for the lecture slides. Thanks for the offer, Shel.”

“My pleasure Tim, don’t mention it.”

As Tim entered the office, he made his way past a stack of unopened mail and research journals to a small cupboard, nestled alongside a window’s Venetian blinds. He opened the cupboard and gazed at the mirror mounted on the inside panel of its door. Despite the jocular camaraderie of their recent conversation, Shelley had clearly detected something in Tim’s countenance that worried her, even before she stated so outright; it had been evident from the beginning in her compassionate hazel eyes, in fleeting tweaks of her broad smile, and from subtle flutters in the cadence of her voice. As Tim peered into the mirror, he found himself nearly taken aback by his own reflection. His eyes were ringed by morbidly gray, ashen-dark circles. The whites of his bloodshot eyes were traversed by ramifying red stalks that flanked his pupils, each surrounded by an iris whose customary sea-blue hue had seemingly faded to a metallic dullness. The slight salt-and-pepper beard on his unshaven jaw was set against an almost ghostly pallor in his cheeks, and a slight bluish-violet tinge to his lips. Furthermore, just slightly to the right of his nose, there was the unmistakable signature of a fallen tear and its misty residue.

Tim’s woeful physiognomy assaulted him anew with memories of the previous day, returning as though driven by a self-fulfilling power: the meeting at the bank with all those bizarre family heirlooms, the encounter with Priscilla so fraught with history and memory, then the dream itself, so vivid that it still lingered in Tim’s conscious mind. Then there was the haunting image of Susan that had appeared almost spontaneously in the computer monitor, as though its phosphorescent blue pixels had become self-aware, channeling Tim’s mind and arranging themselves to reflect the face in the photograph that Tim had smuggled in. The image had remained on the monitor screen for almost half a minute after it had coalesced, then slowly faded again—or, at least, so was the narrative that Tim’s memory had recorded for him. He had tried desperately to convince himself that the image was merely an extension of that overpowering dream; that in his still-hazy, shaken, half-awakened state, with his senses still orienting themselves, his mind was merely sketching in sights that his eyes had never actually perceived. But he could not dispel the feeling that in this case, the surreal was all too real.

As he had instinctually done before when faced with a perplexing, insoluble problem, Tim simply pushed the issue out of his mind temporarily to focus on something he could handle—hoping that his unconscious mind would perhaps, in the interim, lock onto some unexplored angle and help him to piece together the puzzle when he returned to it later. The research talk on his recent medical collaboration was tomorrow, after all; might as well touch up his slides a bit, if for no other reason than to take his mind off… everything else.

“Hey Tim,” came the voice through the doorway 15 minutes later. Tim had trudged his way through three of the slides for the talk, his drowsy eyes struggling mightily to stay open. “I’m off to the Early Bird, maybe to get a Danish or some scones, and some orange juice—I’ve sworn off coffee for a while, I got a little addicted to those sweet blends they make up in Ireland. Would you like to come along or, maybe, could I grab something for you there?”

“Thanks Shel but, I think I’ll take a rain check for now. I’m still not too hungry, and caffeine and me probably would probably be a combustible mix under the circumstances—when I’m this wiped out, it just gets me jittery and bouncing off the walls. I’ll keep hammering away here for a while, might step out a little later in the morning. You think you could just, pull the door to? It can get a little noisy as people start filing in for the morning.”

“Sure, Tim. Well, I’m off; I’ll be around the rest of the day if you need anything!”

“Great Shel, I’ll see you back here.”

Tim pivoted his chair back around, eyeing the lecture slides before him and mentally rehearsing his talk. His mood brightened; simply engrossing himself in something that he knew back to front, instead of wrestling with the elusive dragons that had bedeviled him recently, cheered his spirits. As he continued his fine-tuning, Tim was buoyed by a surprising burst of vigor for the better part of the next hour, seemingly rooted in nothing more than relief at once again treading familiar territory. However, he had barely slept the night before, and as he advanced through the halfway point on his slides, the physical toll began creeping up on him. He found himself nodding off and, after a few brave attempts to ward off the Morphean onslaught, he ducked his head down and succumbed to the cozy embrace of a desktop catnap.

Tuesday, May 17, 7:50 a.m.

“Uh, not again…”

Tim awoke from his brief slumber with a sickly familiar feeling—the same one that had assaulted him the previous morning at Pegasus Atlantic Bank. He had bolted awake after yet another vivid, all-too-engrossing dream sequence, seemingly out of proportion with a mere half-hour snooze. His right arm was trembling while evanescent fragments of an event-filled narrative flitted through his mind, frustratingly out of reach of his conscious recall. Just as he had done the day before, he reached hastily for a pencil and the nearest piece of scrap paper, then sketched out a collage of images. He worked feverishly, confounded by the almost suffocating urge he felt to do so; he still could not mentally visualize the very pictures that he was creating on the paper however, as though the images were flowing directly out of his hand itself.

After several minutes of frenzied penciling, Tim beheld his most recent illustration. A horrifying stream of thoughts rushed immediately through his mind like a flash flood of trepidation, some of them intangible in their specifics, others far more palpable. There was something innately disquieting about the picture that went beyond the sheer grotesquerie of some of its images, and an implication that brought horror to Tim as his eyes wandered to a figure in its center. In an effort to calm himself, he looked away and covered much of the image, focusing first on its background and its upper portion, in a bid to reduce his viewing of the image to a task of technical analysis, drowning out the feeling of dread swirling in the pit of his stomach. The picture overall seemed to be a similar scene as the one from the day before at the bank, but with more detail, and viewed from a different vantage point. Tim reached into his briefcase nearby to retrieve his sketch from the day before; he had tucked it carefully into a small folder that he maintained for miscellaneous ideas that popped into his head unannounced.

As he compared the drawings, he focused in again on their respective backgrounds, which overlapped markedly. There was the same yawning chamber, with the same vaulted ceilings held up by what appeared to be the same grotesquely elaborate pillars, but this time the features were much pronounced. The ceiling in his first drawing was largely a blank slate; this time, it was populated with what seemed to be streaks and etchings. They were mostly indistinct, but occasionally seemed to coalesce to… something, which Tim nevertheless could not yet tease out.

The strange decoration on the pillars became more apparent; there seemed to be a patchwork of diamond-shaped panels interspersed with objects of a puzzling appearance—an array of ovals each surrounded by five of what appeared to be narrow fan blades, somewhat irregularly spaced and stretching out sinuously, like slithering snakes, from the central oval. At regular intervals from the ceiling down to the lowermost portion that he could see of each column, there were carvings and ornaments. They were oddly reminiscent, as best he could tell, of the bones, fangs, and wings of lizards, birds, and other creatures, though still without enough detail to know for sure. The same urns poured out a smoky fire deep in the background, though there were now the first hints of a grid-like structure, like the scaffolding for a new building, behind and beside the urns.

As Tim then focused on the images closer in, he noticed that the mysterious hand and arm in the foreground were now attached to the muscular shoulder and back of a person, who seemed to be pointing to an object through an arched entrance into the chamber—gesturing to a phantom nearby, perhaps someone else still not visible in the drawing. The center of the room now had another object, roughly suggestive of a lavish fountain in a city park or an upscale hotel, though still at a rudimentary stage of construction. Something already appeared to be emerging from the fountain, perhaps the first gush of water as the fountain’s pump was turned on.

Tim’s heart began to sink, however, as he focused in on the image just to the right of the picture’s center line: It was the enlarged eye from yesterday, in the middle of what appeared to be a distorted body with a variety of appendages protruding from an irregularly shaped periphery, like membranes tucked in on one another. There was also an Escher-esque distortion from the entity’s center to the upper right side, as a series of menacing eyes trailed off in a bizarre and disorienting, hyperbolic trail to the edge of its body. The central eye, in contrast, seemed more probing than hostile, and it was anchored within a central orb that sat just below features vaguely resembling characteristics of a human face. Finally, Tim noticed a number, penciled inconspicuously into a corner of the scratch paper away from the drawing itself: 46,11007.

Tim immediately set aside both sketches, as beads of cold sweat broke out on the ridges of his brow, amidst a suddenly overwhelming feeling of dread. His drawings were his own and the settings appeared to be unique from anything he had seen before, but there could now be no doubt that the being near the images’ center, whatever it was, had appeared in even sharper detail within the painting of Corporal Pablo Acevedo in the clinical wards at Oak Ridge—just as the young lance corporal, his mind mysteriously overtaken by an unknown syndrome, had cut his own veins to display blood-soaked messages on the walls of his room. Messages that included the very same number that Tim now saw tucked into his own sketch. Tim instinctively tried to reassure himself, convincing his distraught mind that he was merely dreaming up all this unnerving imagery because he himself had recently seen them painted by Pablo. They must have nestled themselves deeply into his own psyche for whatever reason, and reared up again in the fitful sleep of half-considered catnaps.

But why was the imagery so consistent and overpowering, over two consecutive days? The events at Oak Ridge were no doubt eerie and inexplicable, but they had little personal meaning for Tim. As discomfiting and painful as the dream about Susan the previous night had been, it had an obvious emotional connection and power; the mere sight of Priscilla in the dining room that day, let alone the conversation, was enough to reprise all his memories of that tragic day in Suriname with Susan, to infect his dreams themselves. But how could those images from Pablo’s hand over the weekend at Oak Ridge, disturbing as they may have been, have had the same power? What was the meaning of the scene? Why was it so inaccessible to his mind when he awoke, yet somehow almost flowing from his hand to the paper? And why did he feel such an urgent push to sketch it?

There was one clear possibility that Tim deeply dreaded to entertain, but that he could not ignore. He reached for his mobile phone and hurriedly dialed a number.

“C’mon, Rachel,” he mumbled anxiously as the phone began its fourth ring. “Good God, please just pick up…”

“Good morning, Vision Restoration Lab, Rachel Bloom speaking.”

“Rachel, hi… it’s Tim.”

“Hey Tim! How are things this morning?”

“Well, I’ve had better days…”

“What’s wrong?”

“That’s actually what I’m calling about. Rachel, I recall you mentioned over the weekend when I was there, that the docs temporarily imposed a quarantine when it was feared that some infectious agent, maybe an encephalitis virus or somesuch, might be behind whatever, neuropsychiatric syndrome has been spreading among the patients there…”

“Yeah—but that was a while ago, when a contagious encephalitis was high on the list of possible diagnoses.”

“Are you sure… have the white coats there really excluded it?”

“Nobody on the staff has shown symptoms, thank God, plus the docs have cultured everything from these poor guys exhaustively—no sign of anything bacterial, viral, or parasitic, no protein prions on the surgical scalpels either. For all practical purposes, it’s been ruled out; if any infectious agent was behind this, it must have been confined somehow to the operating room when the AP-278 was first implanted.”

“What about, has anyone on the staff… had problems with, strange dreams, nightmares in the wake of all this, even without overt symptoms of psychosis?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary, and besides, sleep’s been such a luxury these days… Tim, I’m getting a vibe from you here, and I’m sensing you’re not just asking all this out of curiosity; is there something going on?”

Tim exhaled slowly and heavily as he prepared his response; it would be difficult enough revisiting his chilling dreams as of late, but he hoped that merely opening up to another person might provide a cathartic salve to his jangled nerves. “Rachel, whatever that… thing is, that Pablo and the others have been imagining and, and drawing and painting like that, I… I’ve been seeing it too.”

“Seeing… what? Tim, what are you talking about?” asked Rachel in alarmed puzzlement.

“That—monstrosity, on the canvas that Pablo was painting when he cut himself… that God-awful, entity in his watercolors, the same thing that Dr. Simms had mentioned in his dictations about Pablo. It’s been in my dreams, too. For me it’s not, quite the same thing as what Pablo was illustrating; it’s a whole, I don’t know how to describe it—a whole scene for me, with that thing around the center… the particulars of it, I don’t know what they mean and I’m not sure they matter. What does matter—God, Rachel, what if somehow, whatever the hell seems to have infected those poor guys, what if I’ve contracted it, too?”

“I’m sorry to hear you’ve been getting nightmares like that; I admit I’ve had quite a few chills travel down my spine every time I see Pablo’s latest oeuvre, but I doubt it’s much to worry about, Tim. If you haven’t had the other symptoms—couldn’t it just be that, for whatever reason that image went subconscious on you, got lodged in your mind so that you dream about it? I couldn’t say why but, truth is, random things from the day intrude into my dreams all the time.”

“That was my first thought too, when that thing crept into my dream yesterday morning during a snooze—right around the time I called you, in fact. But then, it happened again today. And it’s not just the return visit… Rachel, a lot of things that you, and Diane, and Dr. Simms in his dictations were describing with respect to Pablo and the others, it’s been like that for me, too.”

“Tim, wh—what do you mean?” replied Rachel after an apprehensive pause.

“It almost seemed as though, Pablo and the other young soldiers in the trial, when this syndrome began to hit them—it was as though they were possessed, they had some kind of compulsion to go sketching these things, even to the extent of Pablo cutting himself and scrawling bizarre messages on walls. That’s what it was like for me, yesterday and just now—though minus the blood on the walls and the creepy messages, at least for now.”

“A… compulsion?”

“I’ve been pretty exhausted since the weekend,” replied Tim with a heavy sigh, “and sometimes when the schedule gets hairy like this, I just step out and nod off for a few minutes when I’m really wiped out, to get recharged for the day. I was at a bank yesterday morning right after I returned from Tennessee, around the time I called you. I was in a lounge, leafing through some family heirlooms I’d received in a bequest—and I just dozed off for a little while. I couldn’t remember the dream after I woke up, but for some reason I felt an irrepressible urge to grab some paper and start drawing out, what I guess must have been a persistent scene when I was dreaming. It’s so strange, but it seems familiar when I start to sketch it, as though all the dream imagery bypasses what I can consciously remember but it’s… there, right in front of me after I finish the sketch. And that urge to draw, it’s not just an urge but an overpowering impulse—that’s all I can think to describe it. And it reminded me of…”

“Of Pablo.”

“Yeah. And that’s not the only thing that’s been making my sleep so fitful these days; it’s been more torment than rest whenever I close my eyes. Last night I had a horrible recollection of, Susan and the accident in Suriname… like the flashbacks and dream sequences I’ve had occasionally over the last 3 years, but so vivid I could swear I was actually glimpsing it again. I don’t think that’s necessarily related to these bizarre dream sequences with that monstrous, whatever-it-is… but it’s just the vividness of everything, either in the dream itself or what I sketch afterward. And the, the sheer need to draw this thing, just now and yesterday—when I was there in Oak Ridge over the weekend, I admit I was perplexed with all the talk about compulsive sketching, and all those weird statements as part of this unexplained illness that’s been afflicting the patients in the trial. But I don’t just understand it now, I feel it, Rachel. That urge, that drive to draw it all out. Even that number, the one that—I hate to even recall the scene—the number that Pablo was scrawling in blood, on the walls….”

“46,11007? Uhh… I’ve gotten a lot more familiar with that number than I’d like, Pablo and the others always seem to write it everywhere after whatever they’ve done recently to freak us all out. Dr. Simms finally asked Pablo, explicitly, what it meant.”

“What did he say?”

“Just the same kind of unintelligible ravings as what you heard on Dr. Simms’ recording that I played back for you—something about how ‘all will know its significance soon,’ in that, creepy voice, like he was channeling some oracle… And then he started seizing again. They were already keeping close tabs on Pablo after that—that horrid, helter-skelter scene in his room, and now they’re monitoring him around the clock. Still no suicidal statements, he’s never assaulted the staff, he still seems able to eat and drink well so they haven’t had to whip out any feeding tubes; but between the seizures and the self-injury… everyone’s even more on edge than usual. But you were saying…”

“That number, it’s gotten stuck in my head too, and I don’t think it’s just because I saw it scrawled in blood by Pablo, as nasty a memory as that is. When I looked at what I actually drew just now… that damn number was there, right in the corner of the picture. I don’t know where it was in that dream, or how it relates to the rest of the imagery but—it was there. And every time I gaze at it anew, it gives me the shivers for some reason—hard to explain, it’s as though it triggers déjà vu of, something… but Lord knows what I’m supposed to be recalling. It’s like having all the uneasy feelings associated with some unpleasant memory, without being able to recall the memory itself.”

Rachel sighed, her tone blending empathy with a conspicuous anxiety of her own. “Tim I’m, just so sorry to hear this… I didn’t want to burden you at all by bringing you out to Oak Ridge. I thought it would just be an opportunity to tap your deep well of expertise, and maybe get to the bottom of this—and now, I feel like I’ve slung an albatross around your shoulders.”

“No, Rachel, please—I was happy to come out there and help, and I’d do again at the drop of a hat. I’d hope that someone else would do the same for me in a pinch. I’m just, you know… trying to rule out worst-case scenarios.”

“I hear you, and I… I could give you soothing words of reassurance, and you being you, would see through it and know the real answer, that I don’t really know, none of us knows how any of these guys got this disorder in the first place or how it’s transmitted. But still, I just don’t see how—after all, those of us on staff here, both in Vision Restoration and in the clinical facilities, we’ve been around Pablo and the other patients every day, for much of the past year. And none of us has come down with anything, despite the inhumane schedule around here. There’s been no sign of disease in the rest of us, nothing at all. And when you were down here just for the weekend, you never actually met Pablo, never had contact with any of the soldiers other than visiting the rooms, seeing some of the videotapes; if we’re not affected, I just can’t see how you’d be either.”

“Yeah, that’s been my solace so far, too. It makes sense and I guess, all these things have made me so jumpy, that my rational side can’t convince my emotional side of the same thing. If only somebody could figure out what the agent of contagion is, and how in the world it could push totally different people to imagine and visualize the same flavor of creepiness. It’s uncanny from any perspective, and I just... I just wish I didn’t have to experience it, too.”

“Well, if it’s any comfort—we are scheduled to convene another joint engineering-clinical conference late tonight on the case, scaled up a few notches from before. The organizers are hosting a panel of international experts from all the most obscure branches of neurology and psychiatry; they even paid a fleet of interpreters to translate the discussion live on videoconference to university hospitals across the Atlantic and the Pacific. In fact, Dr. Simms arranged to make it a midnight conference for us here at Oak Ridge—considering the time difference between Tennessee and everyone else, especially in East Asia and Australia, it was the only mutually agreeable time we could arrange. Besides, we always seem to be working until midnight the way things have been these days, so it’s no stretch for us. So maybe we’ll get a break, but I’ve had my hopes dashed too many times before to actually expect it.”

“I’ll cross my fingers and try to send some good mojo your way. Sorry to have taken so much of your time, Rachel—but I already feel better, just talking it through with you rather than having it fester all day.”

“Glad to help in whatever little way I can, Tim. I should… I probably ought to get back to work here, one of the higher-ups from Fort Detrick is jetting in tomorrow and we have to give him a briefing, I guess pretend that things aren’t as calamitous as they actually are. I’ll, uh, keep you abreast of anything we find out today, or later in the week.”

“Thanks Rachel, it was good talking to you.”

As Tim concluded the conversation, his eyes wandered again to the sketchy, enigmatic panorama that his own hand had committed to paper just minutes ago. He scanned the image again, absorbing its details, alternating between an elusive angst about the picture’s unknown message and feeble attempts to reassure himself that it was merely the random musings of his unconscious mind. As he continued to eye his mystifying design, he was drawn again and again to the image’s inhabitants, both the fearful creature in the center and the as-yet unrecognizable forms in the foreground. “Who are you?” he said in a tone of muted bewilderment. “What are you trying to tell me?”

Tuesday, May 17, 11:51 a.m.

“Tim, hey! Nice to see you re-emerge, I was worried you’d disappeared in there after I ducked out for breakfast.” Shelley Deloria spotted the frazzled professor as he left his office, her affable gibes delivered with a smile. Tim, for his part, suspected that her smile was borne as much of relief as a desire for spirit-raising banter. Her words had been delivered at almost the very moment the door had swung open, and Shelley had likely been directing many a worried glance in its direction throughout the morning. Her uncannily intuitive empathy had told her something was very wrong with the occupant inside.

“Oh, I just… started a little slow, but things picked up about 9 a.m. or so,” said Tim in perfunctory half-regard, his customarily witty ripostes suppressed under the weight of a heavy and anxious heart. “I’ve been hammering away at revising those slides for the Wake Forest talk tomorrow, it’s all pretty much wrapped up.”

“That’s… that’s wonderful, Tim! Matt, Zach, all the other Doghouse denizens have been chugging away here—I more or less put up a Do Not Disturb sign on your door so nobody would bother you while you were working. It’s been slow here anyway, so they just headed out to the gardens about 5 minutes ago, a little repast al fresco to soak up some springtime rays.”

“Sounds like the thing to do these days. The guys always seem to wind up starting these Quad Frisbee games that get a little too intense, so I suspect Zach and Matt’ll be staggering back here thoroughly bruised and battered by, oh, maybe 2 or so.”

“”I wouldn’t doubt it!” replied Shelley, laughing congenially. “It’s good to see you’re feeling a little better, Tim.”

“Yeah, sorry if I scared you when I popped in this morning. I checked myself in my little wall mirror in there, I must’ve been paler than a ghost on a bad day at the cemetery.”

“No worries about it, Tim—you’re always looking out for us here, I was just returning the favor. You sure things are OK?”

“Yeah, uh… yeah,” said Tim with a hesitant sigh. “Not the smoothest sailing lately but I’ve still got a hand safely on the mast. I’ll be fine. Look I think… I’m gonna head downtown to Brightleaf Square, grab a bite to eat and catch a breather. I guess I’ll maybe drag my laptop along, finish up the remaining slides on some nice outdoor table at a restaurant there. I’ll be back soon, I’ve gotta take a look at some of Matt’s latest results anyway.”

“Sure Tim, see you when you get back.”

“Damn, how many red lights am I gonna get today?”

Tim rolled his eyes as he halted at the intersection. This light was a particularly long one to suffer through, Tim thought to himself, so he turned on the radio and dialed onto a local news station.

“Good afternoon North Carolina, this is Kaila Dean with your KLVG news update,” cooed the voice on the radio. “A second shark attack in as many days was reported in the vicinity of the Outer Banks today. A group of swimmers was approached early this morning by what officials describe as most likely a bull shark; they escaped the encounter with minor injuries. The unusual frequency of attacks in an area not known for them, has led authorities to believe that the culprit is most likely a single rogue shark attempting to establish fishing grounds in the region. Officials have urged increased caution for swimmers and divers off the coast. In other news, international teams negotiating access to the Tassahub natural gas pipeline, slated to supply customers across three continents, came to a preliminary agreement on…”

“Random attacks by rogue sharks, huh?” murmured Tim sardonically as the stoplight flashed green. “Sorry, I’ve already hit my monthly limit on crazy things to be fretting about.” As Tim focused on the busy midday traffic, the announcements on the radio faded to the background. He weaved across lanes and swung a sharp left turn at the next intersection, more agitated behind the wheel than he could normally recall. He soon halted at another stoplight flashing red, tilting his head back in impatient exasperation. The light soon turned green again but, as he began to accelerate the car, he was drawn back to the radio as one of the news briefs struck a daunting chord of familiarity.

“Municipal authorities in several towns across Anderson and Roane Counties, in eastern Tennessee, continue to be mystified by the so-called digital trances that have recently been striking computers at several local banks in the region. According to bank officials, their computers appear to shut down for brief periods lasting for one or two minutes, and perform detailed calculations of unknown significance, before returning again with their screens intact.”

“What the hell?” exclaimed Tim in mild alarm as he turned up the volume on the radio.

“Following complaints by customers at automatic teller machines during the affected periods, employees have disclosed that the unexplained event has been occurring once roughly every other day for the past week, and has affected more than a half dozen financial institutions. Bank representatives have taken steps to assure the public that no customer data has been lost or stolen, but officials are as of yet unsure about the origin or nature of the incidents. Authorities have not ruled out a virus or hacker attack, and some have speculated on a connection with the so-called Chakana Virus, which was reported to have infected the databases at several hospitals and advanced electronics firms two weeks ago. The Chakana Virus has not resurfaced since, and experts have been unable to confirm any link between Chakana and the present developments.”

“So this thing’s breaking out of his cage…” murmured Tim to himself, in palpable unease.

“At present,” continued the voice on the radio, “neither the culprit nor the motives behind the disruptions are known. Sources within neighboring Tennessee counties and other states have denied any related incidents. In other news, officials at the Grand-Fleuve fusion reactor in Limoges, France, have reported dramatic gains in power output for…”

“What in the world is going on over there?” asked Tim rhetorically. Both his cousin Ernie and Rachel Bloom at Oak Ridge had made references to something vaguely similar, a spreading virus, those inexplicable calculations… The memory triggered a flood of profoundly unwelcome associations that Tim scarcely needed while navigating the hectic roads before him; he dialed down the radio’s volume and re-focused his attention ahead. As he looked up again, he noticed a faint, vaguely reddish glow that seemed to be emanating from behind him. Tim adjusted his rearview mirror slightly, glancing at the backseat. His eyes wandered, stealing fleeting glimpses of the mirror as he focused on the clogged roads before him.

Suddenly, Tim gasped as he caught sight of something in a bottom corner of the mirror. He returned his eyes to the road, only to be drawn back inexorably to the chilling reflection he swore he had just seen. He lifted his head up and descried the frame of his laptop computer, anchored in a carrying case on the seat. As the screen moved into view, his eyes widened in horror…

Tim’s car swerved as he jerked the steering wheel, frantically trying to avoid the yellow lines dividing the street. He overshot his lane, desperately attempting to correct as the vehicle veered off course—sliding off the road and into a small depression to the side. Tim gritted his teeth as he prepared for impact, the protective airbag inflating suddenly before him. A minute later he lifted his head, the shock of the moment giving way to a dread that he had been injured; he wiggled his fingers and toes and rubbed his neck and forehead, exhaling in profound relief as he felt everything intact, with nothing other than a slight left facial bruise and no apparent bleeding at first blush. He reached tentatively for the handle on the front door, opening it and staggering outside; he braced himself against the hood of the car as he struggled to catch his breath.

“Son of a—” he uttered in grizzled consternation, his mind still digesting the shock of what had just transpired. He looked up again, rotating his neck a full turn to further convince himself that he had escaped serious injury. He then peered around the perimeter of the automobile, expecting the worst as he inspected its four sides. Yet he allowed a muted sigh of relief as he completed his survey; there was some minor damage to the right front bumper and he would most likely soon need a replacement for the tire on that side, but overall both he and his car had eluded disaster.

Tim looked skyward in an effort to clear his mind, greedily sucking in air as if to purge himself of the nightmarish clouds that had been gathering inside him lately. Then he shook his head and mumbled silently as he recalled what had sent him lurching off course in the first place. He looked through the window and eyed his laptop computer, still remarkably intact despite the jolt, held firmly in place within its backseat cradle. Tim cautiously oriented his gaze toward the screen, noting the hazy afterimage, mentally assembling its cloudy outlines as the dreadful memories pierced his mind again…

“Buddy! Hey—you all right over there?”

Tim, his mind still disoriented, ignored the voice momentarily—until he realized it was directed squarely at him. Relieved to be lifted out of the thick morass of his thoughts, he whirled around to see a robust, mustachioed elderly man in a stained, cream-colored chef’s apron, surrounded by curious passersby. His demeanor was powerful and authoritative, seemingly contradicted by the vast font of compassion evident on his face.

“Yeah, thanks,” Tim replied, still shaking, “a little jolted but... I think I’m still in one piece. I guess my lucky star’s shining up there, I cratered down in the ditch but seems like just a couple dents and scratches here and there…”

“You sure? Looks like you’ve got little shiners there around your eyes, you oughta ice it down a little—hey, Carl, could you grab a bag of ice from the kitchen there?” The chef gestured to a young cook standing in the doorway.

“No, no—that’s all right” interjected Tim. “Thanks for your concern but, honestly I think it’s just dark circles around the eyes, purely from fatigue… I might’ve bruised my shoulder on the seat belt though.”

The man in the apron nodded as his young employee quickly emerged from the threshold.

“Good work, Carl” said the man to his young charge. “I’ll be tending to this gentleman here for a few minutes, think you can run the show in there?”

“I’m on it, Mr. Galieri,” replied the eager young man. He disappeared back into the restaurant while the small crowd of onlookers dispersed from the scene, satisfied that things were under control.

“Here sir,” began the man again, handing the ice pack to Tim. “Why don’t you apply this to your shoulder? Not a place you want swelling, I’ll tell ya; I had a rotator cuff injury a few years back, you come to realize that tossing pizza dough in the air can be quite a workout for a poor slob with a sore shoulder!”

“I can imagine—I’m… ah! I’m already feeling it.” Tim replied meekly as he gingerly applied the makeshift ice pack to his sore left shoulder, far more tender than he had expected. He winced as he feebly attempted to resume conversation. “Uh… so, you’re the Giuseppe Galieri? Of Joe’s Pizzeria Tesoria?”

“That’s the one. And yourself, sir?”

“Tim… Dr. Tim Shoemaker, I’m an engineering professor back at Duke.” Tim scowled again as he pressed the ice pack against a particularly sensitive spot. He turned back again toward the genial chef, consciously redoubling his attempts to make conversation, if only to distract his mind from the now-throbbing pain in his left shoulder and neck. “It’s funny, my kids—before they graduated and left town—they used to demand we order Joe’s Pizza Pretzels as a treat every couple Friday nights, so I guess it became something of a tradition. Heck, I’ve made a good many late-night orders of those things while stuck at work running up on a deadline, keeps me humming through the wee hours. You’re world-famous from what I hear, just sorry we had to meet under circumstances like this…”

“Glad to know I’m aiding the cause of local innovation,” roared the chef in jocular laughter. “Try not to move that shoulder too much, keep the ice right up there by your collarbone—say, you sure you don’t want to sit down for a while? I’d surmise that ditch is wide enough that you could drive right out, but you’re welcome to rest up and refresh in my restaurant. As my family would always say to honored guests at our doorstep, ‘La mia casa è la tua casa, amico.’”

“Yeah I… thanks, you know I might just order a little something to take out later since, ah, I guess I’m here anyway. I’ll probably need to run this old jalopy by a mechanic before heading back to work, make sure I haven’t missed anything too awry.”

“Whatever you feel like Professor—what, what’s that sound? The beeping—can you hear it?”

Tim wrinkled his nose as he tracked the sound to his wristwatch, muffled under the rags surrounding the ice pack. He carefully lowered his arm—still clutching the pack—and clicked through a few buttons before nodding at the digital display. “CC,” he said to himself, grimacing slightly.

“What’s that?” replied Chef Galieri as he used a handkerchief to wipe his brow, dripping relentlessly with perspiration.

“My daughter, Chloe—we named her Chloe Carolina Shoemaker, so by her own insistence she goes by CC sometimes—she’s paging me. Just one second here…” Tim gazed intently at the watch surface for a moment, advancing through a menu and confirming a brief message of some apparent importance.

“That’s some device you have there, Professor—a pager on your watch? Old-timers like me just can’t keep up anymore,” Chef Galieri said with a chuckle.

“Oh, I wouldn’t call this contraption mainstream, at least not yet. A while ago I was in a car accident, a real one, much worse than this. My son and daughter couldn’t sleep well for weeks so on my last birthday, they got me this Hawk’s-Eye pager—it’s one of those things the military started using a few years ago, for their soldiers in hazardous terrain.”

“Hmm, you’re ringing a bell now; a grandnephew of mine enlisted in the Navy recently, and I remember him describing something like this. It figures out when they’re wounded or pinned down in combat, then beams a—a GPS satellite signal on their location, right?”

“More or less, can’t say I’m an expert myself. Some fishing boat captains followed in the military’s footsteps and started pinning the device on their crew members in case they fell overboard, then I guess some enterprising wiseguy marketed it to the public, with a few bells and whistles attached. It’s got one of these compact, protected microprocessors under the watch band. I got a whole briefing on it—measures pulse, pore diameter, ambient and body temperature, all these indicators of prolonged sympathetic nervous stimulation, you know, ‘fight or flight.’ It then magically crunches all the data to find out when you’re having a really bad day. Chloe and my son Mark, they insisted I wear it in case I got into a fix again—beams an alert and GPS location to them, and they can page me on this thing via satellite to check if I’m OK. Not the first time poor Chloe and Mark have gotten a false alarm since they set a low threshold to send off the alert, so I rigged it up to send a reassuring little message along the lines of, ‘Dad’s done it again, but he’s fine, will call later.’”

“Kids after my own heart—my own grandkids keep snapping up all these gadgets for me but ol’ man Giuseppe is about 40 years behind,” he laughed boisterously. “Professor, sounds like you have someone more important to be talking to. Like I said, you’re welcome in my restaurant anytime; we’ll be there all day if you need a hand for anything.”

“I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Galieri. I’ll be sure to pay another visit to your place soon, hopefully without so much drama on the ride over.”

Tim pulled out his mobile phone and dialed a number in Washington State. He bit his lip as he thought about his daughter and the trepidation she must have felt upon receiving the alert, even if he had dispelled her fears merely moments later; Tim had questioned the wisdom of such a device, fraught as it was with a tendency to cry wolf in the wake of alarming but minor incidents. But he could sympathize with his children’s insistences that he wear it—perhaps above all else, to remind himself that anything affecting him would impact at least two other people whom he deeply cared for, and who had borne horrible emotional scars from before. More unwelcome thoughts began to invade his mind, and he shuddered as he once again pondered the trauma that Chloe and Mark must have endured upon hearing about the tragic incident in Suriname. Tim had spent weeks convalescing in that hospital in Paramaribo, his children receiving the awful news from a stranger far away. He remembered the tears on Chloe’s face at the funeral for her mother, then with seemingly every fleeting glance at her parents’ photographs; he recalled Mark’s descent into an emotional limbo of aggrieved rage and despondence, requiring months to recover. At least his son was far away in Dubai, he thought, out of range from the pager’s signal.

“Dad! Oh, my, you gave me a heart attack, thank God you’re OK—I just started my day out here and when that thing started beeping on me, I was ready to just crawl into a corner and…” Chloe’s voice exclaimed her words, pouring a potent stew of emotions into every syllable.

“Chloe—I’m so, so sorry. It was just a little fender-bender out here, but it must have given me enough of a fright to scare the Hawk’s-Eye too, sending that alert your way.”

“Are you sure you’re OK? What happened?” Chloe’s voice was measured yet punctuated with apprehension, like a simmering tea kettle with its steaming contents barely sealed in by a clacking lid.

“I… it’s funny, I don’t really recall, exactly what happened,” said Tim, fending off his mind’s attempts to reimagine the image he had just seen on the laptop’s screen. “I was just heading out to grab some lunch here and… I’ve been so awfully exhausted since the weekend, I guess some of my bad dreams have been cropping up at inopportune times.”

“Oh, Dad, please say you’re not pressing yourself night and day like you used to. I thought, after you got the award, that endowed professorship—all those things you were promising us would mark a watershed, you wouldn’t do this to yourself anymore. Or to us.”

“It; it’s not really that, CC. Kinda, hard to explain but… I got called out to help an old friend this weekend, turned out to be a lot more complicated and, a little scary—a heck of a lot more than I expected. Then, uh—it’s just been a rough couple days. I guess I got a little distracted by something, veered off the road but there’s hardly a scratch, on me or the car.”

“Dad, the way you’re talking I know you’re sore, a lot more than you’re admitting here.”

“I never could get anything by you or your brother, CC,” laughed the professor adoringly toward his daughter. “I, suppose I bruised my shoulder, I’m icing it down but otherwise, really, I’m doing fine—I just landed safely in the little ravine by the road, no collisions. Dad’s a little shaken but not too stirred.”

“Disarming as always, Dad,” replied Chloe, in a spirit of good-natured tongue-in-cheek. “But I can tell something’s bothering you; and you’re still holding back. I really hope you get to start that sabbatical soon.”

“Funny you bring that up, CC—it’s slated to begin next week, and all of a sudden your Dad’s a man without a plan on what to do with it.”

“Well, Dad, I can’t say I’m that surprised; you were always so engrossed in whatever you were doing, I can’t recall you ever planning a vacation more than 24 hours ahead! Mark says he’s started taking after you on that, so looks like both of us are absorbing your bad habits lately.” Chloe giggled amiably as she gibed her father. The teasing would have been of a much less gentle nature in previous years; Tim’s children never could adjust to their father’s schedule, so often departing the house before dawn and returning well after they had already tucked themselves into bed.

“I can’t promise I’ve ever genuinely reformed on that front, Chloe,” chucked Tim in response. “But this time, there really is something else… CC, your Great Uncle Mitch, I told you that I’ve been trying to touch base with him more these days, trying to build some bridges that I wish I could have built much earlier, back when he and your Grandpa, you know, weren’t getting along… Anyway, he’s in the hospital out there in Oregon now, not in the best shape but still hanging in there. He contacted me recently; it’s a long story, but he wants me to start my sabbatical out in Germany, back where our family came from—there’s something he wants me to track down.”

“Track… track down?”

“It’s—hard to explain…” Tim gnashed his teeth as he labored to find the words to express his thoughts. Chloe’s voice had calmed and Tim wanted to provide some clarification, however tenuous, about what was vexing him so much lately; but Tim dreaded the possibility of anything that might further exacerbate her worried state of mind. Ultimately, he settled on a verbal compromise.

“Chloe, your Great Uncle Mitch, he’s long been involved in, you know, tracing our family roots back to the Old Country—to some town in eastern Germany as best we know at this point—and, uh, I guess you could say he ran into a couple old family mysteries, some tangled threads we’re still struggling to unravel. I, I’m sorry to be so cryptic but—I really don’t know much more myself. To make a long story short, your Great Uncle Mitch, he wants me to finally be the one to figure all this out.”

“In other words… to chase down our roots when you start your sabbatical.”

“Yeah, kinda like that.”

“You sound you’re not so sure about it.”

“It’s been a tough week, CC—even with the academic year winding down, there’s a lot more on my platter than I thought. I went on a, rescue expedition I guess you could call it, to lend a hand to an old friend in Tennessee this weekend and somehow, seems I’ve gotten drawn in a lot deeper than I planned; not so sure it’s the best time to be skipping town.”

“Dad—Mark and I have a sixth and even a seventh sense about you by now, and I can tell you’re holding something back, beyond what you just told me about. But it’s obvious to me that—you just have to get out of there for a while, you need to go on this trip. Whatever this, ‘family mystery’ is, it’s something important to you, maybe to all of us; and on the other side, I don’t know what’s ‘drawn you in’ over the past week but Dad, it’s clear as day that, it’s like you’re haunted by something there. I just feel, you’re only going to make things worse by lingering behind. And I think you know deep-down yourself, you have to do this.”

“You really did read my mind on this, CC. And I guess you can also sense, just how awfully uncertain I am about everything these days.”

“Yeah, and I’d also guess that you’ll get some inkling of an answer once you do this. Dad, do you remember when you always used to tell Mark and me, when we were facing tough decisions, or trying to figure out who we were inside—you told us our minds had a nifty little magic trick, that we could know things before we really knew them. That—even before we were consciously aware of exactly why something was important or why we cared, our minds deep down, in our heart of hearts, would show us the way. Like we somehow knew the kinds of people we’d become, what we’d become conscious of, even before we actually became it. Listen to your own words, Dad; I know, you maybe don’t know why you have to go on this trip yet, but something about you has figured it out so that a, you know, ‘future you’ will be where you need to be at the right time. At least, that’s what you always told us.”

“Yeah, and you know how well your Dad is at following his own advice.”

“Yes, Dad, I do know, which is why I’m urging you to go and do this,” said Chloe, laughing in a tone of amused disapproval. “Just go, Dad; you need this.”

“Well, I think it’s about time I followed my little girl’s sage counsel.”

“Maybe a decade behind on that Dad, but better late than never!”

“Indeed. CC, so glad to talk to you, maybe this little fender-bender today was a blessing in disguise. I… I kinda have to rush back to the campus now, this wasn’t exactly how I planned to spend my lunch. You take care of yourself out there, OK? Let’s try to catch up on the weekend; Mark said he’d jiggered something up in his office in Dubai, some multi-site video display terminal so that the three of us could all jabber away together.”

“I don’t know Dad—having 3 strong-willed Shoemakers on the same phone line could be a recipe for disaster,” laughed Chloe in cheerful irony. “Anyway, take care of yourself, Dad.”

“You too, CC.”

As Tim ended the conversation, he inhaled deeply as he looked skyward, gently rolling his neck to soothe his sore muscles. As he brought his gaze back downward again, he twisted around, slowly and tentatively, to catch a glimpse of his laptop, still nonchalantly broadcasting its screensaver in the backseat, as though to conceal the jolting image that it had borne only minutes before. “Susie,” said Tim in a loud whisper as looked on. “Oh, Susie. Wherever you are right now, I could have sworn you were right next to me.”

Wednesday, May 18, 1:41 a.m.

Jean-Martin Charcot Conference Room, Clinical and Investigate Neurology Department, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee

“And so in conclusion, ladies and gentleman, my colleagues and I here at Oak Ridge are unable to identify specific diagnoses for the neuropsychiatric condition that has afflicted our patients in the trials for vision restoration. Despite extensive consultations and an exhaustive search of reported case studies and the neurological literature, we have not discovered a known syndrome or clinical correlate that can explain our findings, nor any indication of causative factors. This is why my esteemed colleague, Dr. Diane Mellon, and I have organized this videoconference with all of you from so many countries, as a consultation of last resort. You’ve heard from our very best today, from both the engineering and medical sides of this effort, and we have hopefully supplied a broadly-encompassing picture of the acute challenge that still vexes us every day. We would therefore welcome any guidance you can furnish now or at any point in the future, and we thank you for your time.”

Applause followed as Dr. Allan Simms completed his clinical presentation at the videoconference. He prepared to collect his materials from the speaker’s dais and to finally head home. The conference had commenced just after midnight in Tennessee to synchronize with the working hours of experts from centers across the globe, and it had already dragged on for a half hour beyond its expected conclusion time, as myriad questions and suggestions had filtered in from the international audience in the midst of each presentation. Diane Mellon and Rachel Bloom stood up from seats behind Allan, both projecting a grizzled smile in his direction as he turned to the side.

“Magnificent as always, Allan,” said Rachel.

“Agreed,” interjected Diane. “What little rest we get tonight before rolling back in tomorrow morning, I think we can assure ourselves that we pulled out all the stops.”

“Indeed, and we’ve certainly milked our monthly budget to do it,” replied Allan with a meek chuckle, his voice nearly hoarse from almost two hours of fielding intricate questions, amid a cacophony of translated voices from two dozen countries. “It was worth it, though. Hopefully, amongst all these experts across the Seven Seas, and Rachel’s mentor Tim in North Carolina, we’ll have something a little more concrete to offer up to the suits in Maryland to identify the source of our torment—and hopefully to offer a lifeline to Pablo and all his poor compatriots.”

“My fingers are crossed with yours” added Rachel, cheered by the mere thought. “And speaking of monthly budgets—have you all been catching any of those scattered news reports lately? About those infiltrations of the bank accounts around here? I’m about ready to transfer my paltry savings to a nice, fire-resistant mattress sometime soon.”

“Oh, you had to bring that up,” laughed Diane in mock rebuke. “And the way they’re describing it on TV, the coincidences give me a chill; I know they say the latest viruses don’t seem to bear much relation to the infiltrations striking us here, but the resemblances are too uncanny to ignore. As though we really needed something else to trouble our days here.”

Diane paused as a slightly accented voice suddenly boomed through the speakers. The audiovisual team in Oak Ridge had been about to cut the international video feed, assuming that all the conferees were on the verge of dispersing; now, an unexpected voice from abroad addressed the conference leaders, apparently seeking to convey an urgent message.

“Dr. Simms! Hello, I’m Tomoko Miyazawa—one of the interpreters for the medical faculty here at Kagoshima Daigaku, the university hospital here in southern Japan. We have something, may be of interest to you. So sorry to trouble you with the conference over, I know it is so late for you there…”

“Not at all, Ms. Miyazawa; we’d welcome any further input” replied Allan, warily intrigued.

“We happened to have a professor emeritus visiting with us today, Dr. Kunihiko Yoshida,” continued the interpreter. “He has been practicing medicine for more than 70 years; he was on our clinical faculty here at Kagoshima, retired several years ago but returns periodically for conferences. He just told us, he thinks he may recognize that syndrome, you have been describing in your patients there.”

Eyes peeled wide open among the remaining conferees, weary yet anxiously yearning for a breakthrough. Both Rachel and Allan, for their parts, reacted impassively; they quietly pined for good news, yet had been disappointed too often on prior occasions to acknowledge it even to themselves. “Please, continue,” responded Allan.

An elderly yet remarkably vigorous man moved into view of the cameras in Kagoshima, still transmitting live to Oak Ridge. He grinned reflexively, then held up a framed, poignant image for his audience: An old, sepia-tinged photograph of a young woman swaddling an infant. They were seated, and the woman’s face was partially concealed behind a mask. She clutched her infant, also with mouth shielded, carefully to her bosom. The background was blurry; Allan perceived what seemed to be a cave or a rock quarry behind her, though he was uncertain. The man then turned to the interpreter, addressing her in Japanese as he periodically faced the camera again in seeming acknowledgment of his audience.

“Dr. Yoshida is saying,” began Ms. Miyazawa, “that this woman was one of his first patients when he was training as a resident physician, and he continues to carry this photograph with him. He said that there was a, I suppose you would say, small wave of a disease that struck 40-50 people, and this woman was the first—what you would call the ‘Patient Zero.’ They named it the Tachibana Syndrome; Mutsumi Tachibana, she was a nurse at a mobile medical facility, who first noticed the disease in several patients that she was tending to for other problems and reported to the doctors. Another name for it…”

“So… pardon me Ms. Miyazawa, I just wanted to confirm,” interrupted Allan, “Dr. Yoshida is saying—his patients had a similar presentation as our group here?”

The interpreter turned and spoke to the august physician, who nodded and then replied at length.

“Dr. Yoshida says, yes, the illness resembled the one you have described. The patients showed a gradual neurological deterioration, they also—reported strange things, images in their minds and even the, as you say, apocalyptic messages your patients are occasionally prone to. They drew pictures with some resemblance to the ones your patients have sketched, and the delusions and hallucinations they reported, they were similar from patient to patient. The doctors could not understand how this could possibly happen.”

“So, this syndrome does have a history,” said Allan, looking obliquely at his colleagues as he nodded an acknowledgment. “I’m still mystified, though; why has this disorder, not been more thoroughly documented in the clinical literature?”

“Dr. Yoshida says that the delusions and other symptoms were not quite as severe as the ones you have described. There were no seizures, nothing like… the blood messages on walls. And the patients eventually recovered, although it lasted several years in the worst cases. Since the original population was so small and the disease thought to be spontaneously self-resolving, Dr. Yoshida’s team just published two case report articles in the literature. This was many decades ago, so the reports may not be available on electronic databases.”

“So they did eventually recover,” said Allan with eyes narrowed. “It’s a bit worrying that our cases seem more pronounced, but that’s hopefully an encouraging sign.” He paused briefly to digest the thought, then addressed the interpreter again. “Ms. Miyazawa—I noticed, in the photograph that Dr. Yoshida displayed to us, the woman and her child were both wearing masks. Had they discerned a means of, of contagion for this disease?”

“They were not sure of its method of transmission, so they quarantined the patients as a precaution. They never found out how Tachibana Syndrome was spread within the treatment facilities either, and as a precaution at the time this photo was taken, both patients and the doctors wore masks to filter out fine particles, and food supplies were isolated while physical contact was limited. They soon lifted the quarantine; there was apparently no transmission from person to person or through contamination of food or water. In fact, outside of that initial cluster, in which the cases were all noted within four months of each other, there were only sporadic reports of other such incidents, mostly within the families already affected and occasionally among American soldiers posted in the region. No more mass outbreaks—until now, perhaps.”

“I wonder what that means,” murmured Tim, again inclining slightly to partialy face Diane Mellon and Rachel Bloom.

“And I doubt they were testing intracranial implants back in those days,” mused Diane in response. “It doesn’t add up, Allan; what could possibly be the connection between Dr. Yoshida’s patient cohort, and our poor guys in the vision trials here?”

Allan frowned and nodded briefly in shared skepticism, as he faced the video display again. “Ms. Miyazawa, we were wondering if Dr. Yoshida… if he noticed anything conspicuous about the patient population. Was there any pattern in the people afflicted?”

“A… a pattern, Dr. Simms?”

“Was there, for example, a predilection for contracting the disease based on age or gender for example? Any patient clusters based on blood type, location, any correlating to link them together?”

“Ah, yes. Dr. Yoshida, he says that the patients varied by age, blood type, and gender, no general predisposition other than a slight increase among women in pregnancy. They did statistical analysis, at 95% confidence interval there was modestly higher incidence of Tachibana Syndrome in pregnant women compared to general population, though doctors did not know when the mothers contracted it. They did not see the disease in pediatric patients, however some of the children who grew up, they—Dr. Yoshida says, hard to describe, but they were unusual.”

“Unusual? In what regard?”

“He says, generally very bright; they were brilliant at mathematics like child prodigies and in some ways they grew up normal, but they were emotionally unstable. The mother in that photograph, she later told the doctors, her son had graphic nightmares while sleeping, maybe even a vision like one she had when she suffered from the disease. Otherwise, main connection among the patients, was geographical.”

“We were wondering about that,” interjected Allan as he absorbed the information being imparted to him. “In the background of that photograph behind the young mother, is that… we couldn’t precisely make it out, some kind of a coal mine? A stone pit?”

“No, it is…” began the interpreter cautiously. “In the background, that is rubble from a building. That was what Dr. Yoshida was about to say earlier—another name for Tachibana Syndrome, it is Kinoko Kumo no Netsu, in Japanese this means ‘mushroom cloud fever.’ Dr. Yoshida, he was interning in Hiroshima at the time, just after the atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. All the cases of Tachibana syndrome, they were in or near these two cities, and the patients had been trying to escape the radioactive fallout.”

The remaining conferees in Oak Ridge looked on in stunned silence. The implications of what they had just heard had barely started to settle in, and they could scarcely begin to comprehend its implications; yet the narrative filled their hearts with a deep and ineffable dread.

Chapter 8: The Grand Liaison

Wednesday, May 18, 10:23 a.m.

Babcock Auditorium, Bowman-Gray Medical School, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

“Rachel so… let me just make sure I’m following you right. You’re saying this… Tachibana syndrome, that you think the patients at Oak Ridge have—that they first saw this in Hiroshima after the A-bombs?”

“Yeah, Tim—at least, that’s what Dr. Yoshida was trying to communicate to us.”

“And you’re really sure it’s the same thing as the syndrome you’ve been seeing in Cpl. Acevedo and the other guys at Oak Ridge?”

“I wouldn’t say we’re 100% on it, but it’s the first real medical lead we’ve had since all this started in February. Dr. Yoshida said that what they first saw in 1946, it wasn’t as severe as what’s hitting us now, but Allan Simms confirmed the broad outlines as the conference wound down. And it bears all the hallmarks—the spontaneous onset of these psychoses among people without a medical history or an obvious cause, roughly simultaneous, no corresponding infections or pathogens detected, this strange contagion in their delusions, hallucinations, and visions. Even some of the things they drew, including this monstrous entity on the sketches from Pablo and the other patients, at least in the broad outlines… I can’t tell you why the disease would be less severe or pronounced than what the guys here have but Tim, it all matches up.”

Tim was struggling to comprehend what he was hearing, and he wrinkled his nose as though physically mimicking his own tortuous thoughts. He was speaking to Rachel via a videophone uplink in a quiet alcove of the auditorium, the voice of a conference speaker faintly audible from the dais in the distance. Glimpsing Rachel’s countenance lucidly on the screen, he noticed that her eyes were ringed with exhaustion as before, but for once, her words and expression were filled with a vigor and a sense of promise that had been eluding her for months. She was trying to impart a new and apparently crucial piece of the baffling puzzle, thought Tim to himself, yet this new piece only seemed to puzzle him even more.

“I follow you Rachel, but I still don’t have the foggiest idea where to go with this. Even after racking all the dark corners in my head, all the weird twists of logic I can muster up, I still just can’t fathom a connection between the Vision Restoration project and—the A-bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This is really supposed to be the link? I know about the history at Oak Ridge, and while the coincidences are a little spooky…”

“You’re telling me! The first A-bomb synthesized right here for the Manhattan Project, in fact not too far from where I work every day… And now suddenly an unexplained nightmare, hitting our facility like this and it’s all linked up to the atomic bombings somehow? My rational mind says it’s just a random coincidence, no deeper meaning to ferret out. But all the same, it’s just a little too weird, Tim, and the connection creeps me out to just to think about it. Especially with all these scare stories about missing nukes from some Central Asian silo, splattered across the news these days…”

“I’m with you Rachel…”

“Yeah, and I can hear a ‘but I’m not sure I really buy it’ coming from you, too,” she replied with tongue-in-cheek resignation.

“Maybe,” replied Tim with an amiable chuckle, “though I suppose I’d have fumbled through some attempt at polite circumlocution first. I don’t doubt anything you’re saying Rachel, and I’ll never question your conclusions; you’re living through this every day, I appreciate that. I just can’t connect the dots, that’s all. Horrid as the effects of the atom-bombings were—how could they possibly be related to this neuropsychiatric syndrome today, let alone linked to a 21^st-centry technology like the retinal implants or Argus, 70 years later? I can’t find the thinnest strand of logic to square the circle and make some sense out of it.”

“We’re still prying our best minds here about it, Tim, we’ve even set up a hotline to stay in touch with our counterparts in Kagoshima as they crack open their archives on this thing. We were as dumbfounded as you were upon first hearing this, and more than a little alarmed.”

“Yeah, I hear what you’re saying…” said Tim, drawing out his response as he peered downward, away from the screen. Something about Rachel’s words unsettled him even more than he already was, striking a chord deep in the recesses of his memory that he could not quite pin down. As he looked up again, he grimaced as the exasperation of the past week began to boil over. “Rachel, damn it, what the hell is happening?”

“Tim, wh… what’s wrong?” replied Rachel with a mild stutter, slightly taken aback at the outburst.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to lash out, it’s just…” Tim halted to exhale a deep sigh, using the space to gather his thoughts. “It’s been one extended creepshow around here lately—I know for you, and now for me, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. After finishing up such a challenging year, I was looking forward to just blissing out for a while, before seeking out some sinecure in a faraway land for the sabbatical over the summer. And then it all just got a little too interesting for my tastes… All these damn visions and dreams for me, the whole surreality with the Vision Restoration trials in general; now even the banks around Oak Ridge seemingly infected by the same batch of computer viruses, doing God knows what.”

Rachel nodded sympathetically, her facial movements occasionally slowed by the digital transmission but otherwise clearly visible on the monitor. “Maybe,” Tim continued with another sigh, as though marshaling his breath to utter such unpleasant thoughts, “maybe it’s strangely appropriate that our mystery syndrome in Pablo and the others, that it’s linked to such a ghastly event from decades ago. Because there’s something ghoulish about… everything lately, and I feel like there’s something connecting it all up, but I can’t quite wrap my head around it.”

“I know Tim, I’ve been living this bad dream for months now myself, and I know how… how soul-draining all this can be. That’s why it felt like a parole from a dank prison cell last night, to hear that someone else has seen this before, even if we don’t know what do with it yet.”

Rachel paused for an extended sigh of her own, her newfound optimism tempered by nagging uncertainty. “I just wish we weren’t groping in the dark so much for every hint and bread crumb to point the way home; and as relieved as we all were to get our first lead with the Tachibana syndrome, it’s an awfully thin thread to hang our hopes on. The supervising committee at Fort Detrick in Maryland isn’t giving us much slack; they’re still demanding some half-plausible explanation of everything by Friday, when we can barely convince ourselves that we have an inkling about what’s going on. I just don’t understand why this plague has hit us and only us at Oak Ridge, while there’s no trace of it at the other vision trial sites in Maryland and Missouri.”

“That crossed my mind too, Rachel; you said the other sites were just following your lead at Oak Ridge, right?”

“As far as we know. They ultimately used the same protocols as we did, the same AP-278 retinal implants, the same old reliable Argus; and they’ve scoured the files for Argus just as you did over the weekend, no hocus pocus with the file sizes or access like we’ve run into here in Tennessee. Only difference is that we have mildly better weather here and were the first to activate Argus, linking it to the implants. In any case it’s just making things worse on our end, since our counterparts at the other clinical centers aren’t enduring the nightmares that we’re living every day, and they can’t seem to grasp how…. how elusive all this is, how it’s just driving us all to despair.”

“Well, if it’s any comfort… I’ll have some breathing room after the Wake Forest talk today. I can’t promise much,” said Tim, plumbing the dry wit he’d reached for to defuse many a tense or somber moment in the past, “but I’ll try to devote an undivided hour of caffeine-powered contemplation to your plight. After all, it seems like your predicament there is now my own, too… And Rachel, by the way, what is that—sound in the background?”

“That?” said Rachel, craning her neck back toward a corridor, just out of the videophone camera’s purview. “It’s MOTS, Tim—that, ‘evolving music’ exhibit I showed you in the lobby in Saturday.” She stopped speaking momentarily, allowing the disquieting tones of the structure to filter through the microphone to Tim. It was replete with minor chords and eerie transitions that were chilling yet strangely melodic at the same time, as though produced from the echoes of spirits calling out from the hidden corners of a dark temple. “Seems to be producing a symphony, just… not the kind we had in mind; nobody’s sure why, but MOTS has been evolved its melodies like this for a while, yet another puzzler for us. At any rate—the exhibit managers were ready to shut down MOTS and restart it from scratch; but it seems that one of their team members leans toward the offbeat in his musical tastes, so they’ve kept it up for the moment.”

“Just another heartwarming addition to your already pleasant working environment,” remarked Tim, in conspicuous sarcasm. “Anyway, Rachel I, probably ought to be going. They’re gonna start my lecture here in about 15 minutes, and I’ll probably need the time to troubleshoot whatever technical glitch always seems to beset these talks before we hit the tarmac.“

“No worries Tim. Please let me know if any more flashes of inspiration come your way.”

“It’s a promise, though I wouldn’t count on it,” he laughed. “Why don’t you reclaim your rights as a human being and grab some much-deserved rest tonight, now that you’ve finally gotten a break in these cases, OK? For once, you should treat yourself to a night free from donning the superhero suit.”

“If only, Tim… we’re all starting to realize that sleep wasn’t included in the contract they had us sign,” replied Rachel in muted laughter. “I’ll catch you later, don’t be a stranger, OK?”

As Tim closed the videophone window and continued to load his lecture slides into the computer’s projector, his wall of concentration was fleetingly pierced by half-formed thoughts and aborted leaps of logic, the meanderings of a mind trying to absorb yet another inexplicable conundrum. As disturbing memories of the patients at Oak Ridge mingled with unnerving archetypes dredged up by Rachel’s description—mushroom clouds, bomb shelters, radioactive fallout—one motif lodged itself with a bit more persistence in Tim’s mind, something he had encountered not long ago. “The mightiest of cannon…” He shook his head and set the thought aside.

Wednesday, May 18, 10:41 a.m.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, as the Dean of the Medical Faculty here at Wake Forest University, it is my honor and privilege to present to you our keynote speaker for today’s conference on The Merging of Minds in Engineering and Medicine. Many of you here today, whether in local companies, research centers, or clinics, have made use at some point of the innovations that have emerged from our speaker’s Doghouse, as he calls his laboratory down the road at Durham in our proud state of North Carolina. Years ago when he and I were both students, our speaker was as well-known for the audacity of his pranks as for the groundbreaking ingenuity of his mind as an engineer.”

Muffled snickers broke out sporadically in the audience, as the gray-bearded Dean Carlos Lapin allowed a wry smile to decompress the staid formality of his introduction. “And while the infamous flying saucer invasion of Northwestern University may be the exploit that many in our generation still recall our speaker by, we’ve invited him today as one of the foremost visionaries in converting the latest and most impenetrable arcana of engineering into groundbreaking tools to help study, diagnose, and treat disease. He’s stumbled on over to our fine campus today to give his hopefully long-anticipated talk, ‘Sublime Superficiality: Fine-Grained Digital Replicas of Cells and Tissues as Membrane-Bounded Calculation Domains.’ So without further ado, please welcome our keynote speaker, Dr. Timothy Shoemaker.”

“Thank you, Dean Lapin,” began Tim as the applause trailed off, “above all for charitably leaving out my lesser-known and less-well-received pranks in your introduction; if the news ever got out, I’d be run out of town before the end of the lecture.” Tim coasted on the tentative giggles in the crowd, using the interlude to position his awkwardly-placed lapel microphone while transitioning into his title slide. “Uh, by the way,” he continued, buying himself another brief moment, “you all didn’t hear any of what I or Dean Lapin just said—as they say, or should say, what happens in Winston-Salem, stays in Winston-Salem.” The audience broke out into contrapuntal waves of laughter that gradually faded; like a magician adroit in the fine art of subtle misdirection, Tim took advantage of the extended moment to position himself and square his mind and body toward the audience, shaking off all the cares and conundrums of the previous week to speak confidently on topics of his expertise.

“First off, I wanted to express my thanks and gratitude to Dr. Jane Reinhart at North Carolina State University, my collaborator from the physician side of things who unfortunately could not make it out here today; though I’ll be dropping her name plenty of times during the talk. Now, I realize we have a motley audience here; I see both physicians and engineers out there, probably a good many undergraduates and curious minds from outside the sciences, quite a few of you probably wondering what kind of transgression has led to you to be punished by having to listen to me for 20 minutes,” Tim continued, in his element again as he worked the crowd. “So I’ll try to find a happy medium and avoid too much fancy terminology or esoterica. I’ll begin with one of those annoyingly vague ‘what am I thinking’ kinds of questions, but if anyone can actually read my mind here, you get a free one-month sentence in the Doghouse.” Tim advanced his first slide in the talk, to the sporadic laughter in the audience.

“Let’s get the ball rolling by considering 5 distinct disease processes that have seemingly nothing to do with each other: 1. Cirrhosis of the liver, either alcoholic or from a viral hepatitis infection. 2. Renal nephrotic syndrome—a condition involving damage to the glomerulus, in the nephrons of the kidney that filter and clean up our blood, which causes proteins to leak out into the urine. 3. Cancer of soft tissues—specifically colon, prostate or uterine cancer, which is where Dr. Reinhart’s clinical studies have been focusing…”

Tim paused unexpectedly, as something caught his attention despite the groove he had settled into. It was subtle, seemingly nothing more than a fleeting flash of light somewhere near the projector screen. But it triggered memories—and not of the welcoming variety. Tim rapidly regained his composure, unwilling to fall prey to his own frayed nerves of recent days.

“4. Congestive heart failure, in particular the kind that results from myocardial scarring, of the heart muscle, following a heart attack. 5. Cell death that in general results from a so-called lytic viral infection that bursts open the infected cells in an affected tissue—for example an adenovirus causing a nasty cold after it infects the cells lining our lungs. What do all these seemingly distinct pathologies, all have in common?”

“Why, Chief, it’s all about the surfaces!” popped up a familiar voice in the audience, as if on cue.

“It’s… indeed,” said Tim, smiling and shaking his head in amusement, “it’s all about the surfaces, thank you Zach. Folks, allow me to take a moment and introduce my illustrious graduate student, as well as unofficial audience plant and straight man at these research talks, Zach Choi. Or, as I suppose I should say since Thursday when he passed his thesis defense, ‘Dr. Zachary Choi.’”

Zach stood up and turned around, mock-bowing in cheerful self-deprecation to a standing ovation amidst the droll laughter in the audience.

“Ah, Zach, never a dull moment whenever you’re around,” resumed Tim, allowing himself a moment to chuckle with the crowd. “Anyway, as Zach so succinctly summed it up: What all of these disease processes have in common, is the effacement of interfacing surfaces on the affected tissues—membranes that partition compartments in our cells, tissues, and organs in some way. Surfaces which are essential for the calculations, a word I’ll be repeating a lot here, that maintain homeostasis, the normal day-to-day function of our bodies. You’re probably not accustomed to regarding our tissues as performing computations and crunching numbers—well, at least most of you, outside of egghead engineers like myself.”

Tim’s half-hearted attempt at a punchline elicited only scattered laughter in the crowd, at this point immersed in the content of the talk, but he used the brief interruption to pause and gulp thirstily from the glass of water at the speaker’s dais. His throat was more parched than he had expected, his vocal cords having been rubbed raw by an all-too-eventful week preceding his talk.

He quickly continued, advancing to an animated, multi-paneled slide with still life paintings, scenic images from a mountain pass, and streaming video of a parade, all dissolving into composite bits of data. “Turns out—that’s exactly what our tissues are doing for us every second, right below our threshold of awareness. In those wild and woolly realms of computer science and engineering that creatures like yours truly inhabit, we can represent a stream of data, and in particular an evolving stream of inputs and outputs, in a variety of physical forms that look different but are identical in their information content. So all those compromising images and videos of your friends that you upload onto your personal Webpages… those visual experiences that you register with your own eyes when you look at the pictures and videos, are exactly equivalent in their information content to a particular stream of 1’s and 0’s, or up/down circuits in your computer’s hard drive, or any other comprehensive mechanism of representing the data. Yet our eyes and minds compile this bitstream to provide us with the visual richness of the images and videos.”

“But, Professor,” chimed in a conspicuously tongue-in-cheek Matt Hansen, as Tim prepared to advance to another slide, “while my own personal bitstream has undoubtedly found its way into many a compromising image, what does an intestine digesting a meal have to do with data processing?”

“Don’t tell me… Zach put all you guys up to this, didn’t he?” came Tim’s sardonic rejoinder, without missing a beat. “Ladies and gentleman,” he continued, in the face of the audience’s incredulous laughter, “challenging is it may be to believe—I present my up-and-coming star graduate student, Matt Hansen, who has obviously picked up on the newly christened Dr. Zach Choi’s bad habits.” Tim then cast a mildly admonishing glance toward his charges in the front row. “And as I’m sure Matt, Zach and their comrades are undoubtedly aware, they’ll have plenty of time for any further antics when I get to the Acknowledgements section; otherwise, their Boss will never finish his talk.” Zach and Matt nodded in mock deference as Tim tilted his head askance in their direction.

“As Matt so deftly insinuated a moment ago…” continued Tim, activating another animated slide with an anatomical sketch of a human liver, fading into a frantic dance of 1’s and 0’s. “In line with more traditional calculating devices that we know and adore, the same kind of principle applies to our tissues, indeed to any physical system that performs calculations in accordance with specific algorithms, which generate the rules used to produce outputs from inputs. Unlike number-crunching robots in an auto plant or the accounting software you suffer through to tally up your taxes, our cells and tissues are doing these computations in solution, and across lipid membranes, the fat bubbles that separate our cells from the fluid that surrounds them. Because…”

Tim’s flow was again interrupted by a fleeting image that seemed to tease him out of the most remote corner of his eye, a fata morgana that flickered onto the projector screen for an almost imperceptibly tiny interval, before vanishing again. Tim quickly gathered himself again; he was in control now, he thought, and he would not allow elusive phantoms from the past week’s mysteries to control him.

“Because of this relationship,” he continued, “this fungibility and interchangeability of information in its many forms, we can in principle take any cell or tissue in the body, treat it as a complex calculating device… and ‘mirror’ it within a digital realm. The better we can model this calculating system and its algorithms, the finer-grained our digital replicas become; but as always, the devil is in the details. Which is why we’ve decided to let nature—ultimately the best tinkerer and problem-solver—figure out those details. We…”

Another flicker on the screen, as Tim directed his laser pointer onto the projected slide. Like a specter insidiously materializing, the image lingered a bit longer this time, and it rattled Tim profoundly even though he could not recall a single detail about it. Was it even appearing on the screen? Or was it merely his overexcited imagination? “Damn it, not now,” he thought to himself. All his mental meanderings transpired in the span of a second, and he redoubled his efforts to focus every iota of attention on the lecture.

“We of the engineering persuasion get things started with digital models of germ layers—the tissues that comprise us as wee little embryos and which, like buds blooming into flowers, develop into our hearts, kidneys, livers, nervous system, and everything else we’re made of. The cells in these germ layers follow some well-defined algorithms in deciding what kind of tissue they’ll become when they grow up: programs that are etched into our cells’ DNA sequence, and in the modifications and molecular environment in which the DNA hangs out, what we fancily call their ‘epigenetic milieu.’ We start with what we know of their function and development—and then let nature do the rest. Evolutionary algorithms fill in the gaps and bring our digital mirrors closer to flesh-and-blood kidneys and livers...”

Wednesday, May 18, 11:01 a.m.

“And so in conclusion, we have here a still embryonic, frequently unworkable, often frustrating yet increasingly robust tool in our hands: a system to replicate and reverse-engineer our own organs in a digital world, in fine-grained detail. By mapping the information content and algorithms of the calculating machines in our body into their digital equivalents, we’re able to talk about our cells and tissues in the language of information processing, and to express disease in terms of a breakdown in that very processing.”

Tim was interrupted by the crackle of sporadic, slightly premature applause as he moved to finish his talk. It had been nearly 20 minutes since he flashed the first slide, 20 glorious minutes that had passed in a seeming instant, without the intrusions of recent frustrations, or uncertainties, or…

“We have therefore taken a small but valuable step toward quantitatively modeling a variety of pathological processes, in terms of the loss of surface interfaces where physiological calculations occur—and the consequent breakdown in information exchange, regulated by our physiological algorithms, that makes homeostasis possible. A mouthful, isn’t it?”

His brief aside to the crowd drew nothing but tepid smiles from an increasingly restless audience, anxious to break for lunch and the day’s duties after a morning’s worth of lectures in a cramped auditorium. Eager to rest his own strained vocal cords, Tim moved to wrap things up, advancing to his final summary slide.

“Diagnosis and treatment of disease in general have benefited from high-precision molecular classifications, as through genetic and membrane protein markers, that supplement more traditional diagnostic divisions. We’ve tried to take this a step further, with what I’ve been droning on about the last 20 minutes: De—“

The screen once again flickered, a flitting ghost of an image kissing the fringes of Tim’s perception, halting him in mid-sentence. He had been blessedly free of the apparition since the start of his talk, fully immersed in the joyful task of imparting his work over the past several years to a keen and receptive audience. As he now wound down at the end, with his concentration fading from fatigue and anticipation, the specter had begun to manifest its presence again.

“Defining physiological function according to the nature and degree of requisite information processing in a given tissue, and then fine-tuning our understanding of disease whenever processing drops below that threshold. As injectable ‘mini-computers’—comprised of DNA, or proteins, or even lipid rafts, those portable fatty membranous compartments as I outlined a few slides ago—as they become more sophisticated, we may even begin to find ways to treat disease at the level of this physiological information processing. I could go into more detail, but then I’d just be giving everyone a justified license to take a midday nap in my presence, so… I’ll just flash up my Acknowledgments slide here with the official Doghouse Rogue’s Gallery, and call it a day. I’m happy to take your questions and, in the interest of Southern hospitality, just give yourself a one-liner introduction, where you’re affiliated and what makes you famous, and I’ll be happy to respond. Thanks everyone for your attendance and for those not sticking around, have a wonderful rest-of-the-morning!”

The crowd broke out into concerted applause—partly in admiration at a job well done, partly in sheer relief that the conference was finally drawing to a close. Most of the audience had leapt to its feet in the interlude, including Dean Lapin and most of the university faculty, scurrying their way back to their clinics and labs to tackle long-postponed morning business. Tim exchanged a perfunctory wave with the exiting throng, basking in the reverberating cheer of the heartfelt ovation; in the meantime, he took the opportunity to gulp down whatever was left of the water in his cup, slaking the throbbing soreness in his dry and overused throat. As he set the cup down again, he noticed a cold, dull glow arising somewhere near the speaker’s dais in the midst of the waning applause and departing audience members. As he craned his neck to track the source of the glow, he caught a sidelong glance of the projector screen…

Tim at once closed down the link between his computer and the projector, diverting the image back to his laptop’s monitor. It continued to coalesce before him—the outlines of a cheek, the corner of a mouth, the wisp of gently curling hair, visible in full color…

“Professor? Professor Shoemaker?” came a voice from the front row on the left.

Tim snapped himself up from the laptop as though emerging from a trance. He had failed to notice that, amid the throngs departing the auditorium, several audience members had raised their hands with questions, appearing somewhat miffed that the speaker seemed oblivious to them.

“Uh… yes, question, from the young lady in the front.”

“I’m Kat Gershwin, med student here at Bowman-Gray…”

“Wonderful to make your acquaintance, Ms. Gershwin,” replied Tim, purposely engaging the audience and drawing his attention away from the monitor.

“Thanks. My question is, with regard to what you said late in your talk, on the interventional teams and pathologists using your system to make finely-detailed diagnoses, for cancer and other diseases—you’re talking about creating new diagnostic categories?”

“Yes, that’s the general idea, at least what I was attempting in my bumbling explanation of it.” Tim laughed nervously, the unfolding image on his screen continuing to haunt him from the corner of his eye. He could close the laptop down, but a part of him insisted on seeing what emerged… “As I mentioned in about the middle of the talk, we’ve introduced a paradigm to define and diagnose a variety of diseases quantitatively and qualitatively, with respect to the type and degree of effacement of homeostatic information processing in the affected cells and tissues. Just as we now use genetic analysis of particular chromosome breaks to subdivide leukemia types for example, we can subdivide cancer and renal diseases in terms of the…”

He balked again, combating the almost irresistible urge of his eyes to glance at the monitor. “… In terms of the measurements, of the loss in information processing, and use this to create well-demarcated diagnostic classes to help us treat these conditions more specifically. Essentially, every disease has its own ‘data fingerprint’ which stems from a disruption in the bitstream that crosses the various surfaces around and within affected cells, and we can use this to classify and identify it. OK, back there, middle row on the right—couldn’t miss the tie-dyed vest you have on!” Tim pointed to another audience member, deliberately looking in a direction away from the laptop and the contents of its screen.

“That shirt is an attention-getter,” chuckled the young man, rising from his seat. “Gareth Crane, electrical engineering here at Wake Forest. Speaking of the treatment side of things—you mentioned, your team was trying out therapies to target diseased tissues or even to restore the lost information-processing in organs that have suffered, uh, some sort of… well, I guess that’s my point. To an engineer without a drop of medical intuition, how are you turning this, info processing system into treatments?”

“Well, good question,” replied Tim, eager to immerse himself in something that would absorb every ounce of his attention to explain. “This is more the effort of my colleague, Dr. Reinhart, but… in our line of work, we’re looking at all the processes in our body, the normal physiology and when things go awry, in terms of nested layers of information processing. Since you’re an engineer—think of it as making changes to your design schematics, but looking beyond the drawings and operating at the level of their equivalent in, binary code, or hex...”

Startled, Tim halted abruptly as a sound—something like a whisper—seemed to emanate from the laptop. His questioner looked on with a look of puzzlement and some evident concern at the ill-timed interruption.

“Uh—so you were saying, Dr. Shoemaker…”

“Yes… as our… our, uh, ‘digital tissues’ become finer- and finer-grained, we can express more physiological processes in terms of… logical routines, just like the algorithms we use to run other complex systems, in robotics for example, and in a fully digital environment. And in line with the crux of the talk… we’re construing disease as, disruptions in the information flow, normally mediated by these algorithmically-driven routines.”

Tim was purposely drawing out the response, gesticulating extensively as he spoke; the more that he elaborated, the more he confined his mind to the exacting demands of a vigorous Q&A, the longer he could postpone the moment… “Creating real-world therapies in turn involves, you could say, ‘translating’ our solutions in the digital realm into adapters—molecular systems that convert our information management into corresponding changes in the information flow at membranes. It could be a m—a marker, that recognizes the specific information disruption in cancer cells and, uh, tags them for binding by a toxic molecule, it could be little DNA or RNA modules or… lipid rafts… that restore, lost information processing. And what we… seek, now, is a better, Rosetta Stone, that links our… cells, in solution with their digital equivalents and…”

The temptation had grown too great, and finally, Tim succumbed. To his shock and bewilderment, the image on the monitor was concrete now. The outlines were not merely white strands lacing the screen, as they had been in the study of his home two nights before. Light brown hair, curled in a distinctive style that he knew very well, draped down the sides of a hauntingly beautiful face cast in extraordinary detail, as though burned straight in from a high-resolution photograph. A gentle forehead, marked by a small, irregularly crescent-shaped birthmark on the upper right side by the hairline, framed the contours of mesmerizing blue-green eyes, a bit lighter on the left side and gleaming ever so slightly, as though twinkling from within. A gently sloping nose resided between dimpled cheeks with scattered freckles, and above full lips surrounding a mouth that seemed to be trying to murmur something, indistinct and barely audible, to anyone who would listen.

Stunned and nearly fixated by the sight, his jaw now trembling in a mixture of disbelief and sheer incomprehension, Tim managed to wrest himself free to make a passing glance at the dwindled audience. The aspiring questioners in the crowd had put their hands down, looking on in bafflement and genuine apprehension at what was unfolding. Others observed with mouths gaping open, or whispered to each other in feeble attempts to understand what they were witnessing. Wiping his brow, bubbling with beads of nervous perspiration, he instinctively shut the laptop and addressed the remaining onlookers with a desultory, contrived explanation for the inexplicable.

“Everyone, uh… my apologies, I think I’m gonna have to cut the Q&A a bit short. I’ve been uh… on the road, a good bit lately and not in the best shape since returning so—it’s lunchtime anyway and I’d hate to prolong everyone’s misery here anymore, so let’s call it a day.”

The remnants of the crowd, still unsure what they were beholding, reflexively followed with a coda of discordant, tentative applause, rising up to disperse. Several figures in the public looked out in particular concern, discussing something urgent with each other and eyeing the figure still at the podium. He had by now closed down the laptop and slumped at the dais, his forehead rested on an outstretched hand. After a brief discussion, the small group nodded and departed from the auditorium, save for a single figure who proceeded cautiously up the middle aisle toward the podium.

************************

“Chief—what was that? You gave us all a scare there…”

“Zach, yeah, I… all the fatigue of the past few days just crept up on me at the end there, I guess. I’ll be all right.”  Tim’s response was delayed and halting, barely above a whisper as he slowly lifted his head; he had hardly noticed Zach addressing him, as the memory of the visage on the monitor consumed his mind with every frame that coursed through it.

                “Chief, no… not the ‘everything’s fine and dandy’ brush-off, not this time. The rest of the audience just figured you were sick of standing at the podium and angling to close down the Q&A but Chief, all of us in the Doghouse have seen you since Monday and we know something’s percolating in the background. You’ve been fretting about my thesis day and night this past year, so I guess it’s my turn to return the favor.  And fretting I am, all of us were just now.” Tim sighed, looking obliquely away at Zach as the young man approached closer, reinforcing his message.  “I know you put on a good show of being in control up there but something’s eating at you, and we can tell.  A general’s gotta level with his foot soldiers, Boss.”

                “Zach it’s… I’m sorry you have to see this, you probably think your mentor has slipped off the rails lately and, to be honest, I don’t know how strenuous a defense I could muster to the charges...”

                “Tim,” replied Zach matter-of-factly, his customarily jocular demeanor submerged beneath a guise of profound concern. “What—what the hell happened to you out there in Tennessee? Monday you were on edge, then yesterday… Shelley was about to arrange a blood transfusion when you stumbled into the Doghouse, and then the fender-bender on the way to lunch. I’ve never seen you like this, not even 3 years ago…”

Zach bit his tongue at even such an offhand reference to the tragic event, yet to his astonishment, Tim responded with an expression more of familiar acknowledgment than crestfallen despair. Zach cocked his head slightly and wrinkled his nose and mouth in uncomprehending consternation; reading him, Tim attempted a delicately couched reply.

“Zach… I, I won’t lie to you, something did happen in Tennessee,” said Tim, looking slightly downward and obliquely, without making full eye contact with the young man. “And it was more than a little disturbing—no it was, it is downright awful what’s, come over that place. And I… in some way I’m still desperately trying to divine, I got swept up in it. I can’t well explain it to you; I can scarcely explain it to myself.”

“Tim, why the cryptic tones and dark hints all of a sudden? What befell you out there and… and what, exactly, was that thing on the projector screen at the end of the talk? One of your screensaver experiments gone wrong?”

Startled, Tim lifted his head and looked squarely into Zach’s eyes this time, suddenly alert and his breathing rushed once again.

“Tim, damnit, what? I bring up some screensaver on your laptop and now you’re givin’ me the evil eye? What?”

“No, Zach, it’s not that, it’s… my God, you saw that, the whole thing up there on the screen…”

“Wha… of course I saw it, Chief,” retorted Zach, now more noticeably exasperated. “All those lines and contours coalescing into… whatever that was, somebody’s face I guess. Like a—a sketch artist, drawing in the details from an outline. I figured it was just one of your quirky additions to the graphics design algorithm that company contracted you for a few months ago. And besides… why wouldn’t we have seen it?”

Tim had turned aside again, drifting off in thought and missing most of what Zach had uttered; he turned and addressed his young charge again in a strangely diffident, deliberate tone.

“It’s just, for a moment I wondered if I was hallucinating or if I was, seeing something not really there, projecting images, from my own mind onto the screen… except,” Tim turned aside in a bolt of realization, seized by an insight that overpowered him in its implications. “Except that— I really was projecting something onto that screen. Just like on Monday night, and in the car yesterday…”

“Whoa, whoa… Boss, wait, you mean that screensaver—“

“It wasn’t a screensaver, Zach,” interrupted Tim in a soft voice, as his mind continued to digest its own conclusions. “It was Susan.”

Tim glanced briefly at Zach, catching his incredulous expression before jerking quickly in the opposite direction, his attention suddenly drawn by something nearby.  There was a faint, dark-reddish wisp emanating from his half-opened briefcase, the same glow that he had noticed before in his study, in the back of his car, and now at the Babcock Auditorium.  He scurried over to the briefcase, frantically flinging it open and removing a carefully lodged, translucent container he had placed into it several days before. 

Tim flinched backward with a jolt after laying eyes on its contents, then slowly approached and lifted them out of the case, as Zach looked on in stupefied and increasingly alarmed incomprehension. In his hands was the Cereceph, its countlessly infolding surfaces and impossibly complex configurations still connected to the microwave transmitter that Tim’s Uncle Mitch had so painstakingly assembled for it. And emanating from several of the Cereceph’s multi-hued panels was a soft, pulsating glow that gently permeated the air, like the faint scent of honeysuckle on a dewy summer morning.

“This has been the linchpin all along,” muttered Tim to himself.  “I remember now… It was on the shelf in the study that night, then in the backseat in the briefcase yesterday… then here in the auditorium today.”

Zach had been looking on, silently and with mounting trepidation. He hesitantly began to address Tim again, stuttering uncharacteristically. “Ch—Chief, OK, I’m gonna… gonna be straight up with you here. I was just worried before, now I’m certifiably freaked out. What on earth are you clutching in your hands?”

“Zach,” replied Tim haltingly, in the manner of someone guarding a secret that had just revealed itself in untimely fashion. “It’s a long story, literally as well as figuratively....”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, this is where you go all dark and cryptic on me again…” interjected Zach, in a note of facetious sarcasm to pierce his own creeping anxiety. “OK, at least—tell me, where did you get that? Something tells me that’s not just one of your quirky off-budget items from the Doghouse.”

“It’s a… family inheritance,” said Tim, groping for words. “One of a number of these, heirlooms that we’ve had in our clan for centuries and that were recently gifted to me, for better or worse. On Monday morning after I’d left Tennessee, I made a detour out to Charlotte; my eccentric rich uncle had stored these things in a bank vault to bequeath to me and now, it’s become my job to figure out what the heck these things are about. And speaking of that eccentric rich uncle….”

“Something that you all have had in the family for centuries… OK, Boss, that’s the part I’m tripping up on here. You’re trying to tell me that this, contraption, straight out of some master sculptor’s fever dreams—whatever it is, that somebody was able to build this thing hundreds of years ago, and it’s just been handed down to you like, some family portrait or antique furniture?”

“In a way—yeah, that’s the story of this device,” replied Tim with a resigned sigh. He set the Cereceph aside in his briefcase, its afterglow by now having faded away from apparent inactivity. “Zach, uh… I wasn’t expecting you to stumble upon this kind of scene and I don’t quite know how to explain it to you yet; heck, I’m still making heads or tails of the mystery myself. Rest assured, there’s nothing hazardous here, just a… a puzzle missing a lot of pieces. Look,” he continued, shifting to a slightly more lighthearted tone in response to Zach’s grimacing confusion, “when we have a spare moment later today, I promise—cross my heart—that I’ll fill you in on all the goods.  For now, why don’t you join up with the others for lunch?”

“Uh, sure, Boss… Do you, want me to wait for you to gather up all your belongings here?”

“No, thanks Zach, you just go on ahead; I’ll try to catch up with you all later, though don’t wait for me if I’m still lingering here after you’ve finished up. For now, they’ve got a decent wireless connection in this auditorium, and there’s an urgent videophone conversation that’s suddenly inserted itself into my schedule.”

Zach continued to look on ambivalently in his mentor’s direction, briefly probing his face to ensure that his true intentions corresponded to his words. Tim had already opened his laptop up again and was busily accessing something thereupon; satisfied at least momentarily that matters were under control, Zach turned to exit the auditorium.

“OK Chief, just take care in the interim and, uh… if you don’t see us at the Food Court when you’re done, it just means we’ve headed back to the Doghouse in Matt’s van; he’s got enough room for the group.”
“Sure Zach, I’ll catch you later,” said Tim, barely looking up from the task suddenly engrossing him. He briefly lifted his eyes as he spotted his protégé on the way out, moving slowly and turning periodically to survey the scene out of the corner of his eye. “Zach, one more thing… could you do me a favor and uh, try to keep what you just saw under wraps for now? I don’t want the other Doghouse Denizens to be fretting on my account any more than they already are.”

Zach nodded silently, edging toward the auditorium’s exit.  As he crossed the threshold into the corridor between the large lecture hall and the university’s main campus, he wheeled around briefly and stole a furtive glance at his mentor in the distance.  Tim had paused momentarily in whatever he was doing; arched over the speaker’s dais, his head down and his arms spread out, he clasped both sides of the podium and looked skyward, exhaling with a deep sigh.  He seemed to be taking a moment in his presumed solitude to exorcise his psyche of the demons that had lately been taking up residence, borne of an enigma that had become relentlessly personal, yet ever more inscrutable each time he confronted it. He lowered his head slightly again, closing his eyes and mumbling something inaudible, as though rehearsing for an important conversation ahead.  Seeing nothing further he could do, Zach spun back around and proceeded to join the rest of his group for lunch.

********************

“All right, you wily old fox, you’d better not be sleeping in on me, not thisthis morning.”

Tim was now alone in the spacious lecture hall at Wake Forest, mumbling at the monitor in anticipation of the conversation he would soon be carrying on. The departing audiovisual crew had dimmed the podium lights at Tim’s request, leaving the auditorium with a dull incandescent residue that bathed the chamber’s maple-lined walls and foam acoustic panels in a ghostly indoor twilight.

Summoning up a special screen on his laptop and readying his microphone, Tim quickly fetched a slip of paper from his vest pocket, dialing the number hastily scrawled upon its surface. “C’mon, Mitch… don’t go AWOL on me this time,” whispered Tim after six unfruitful rings to the other side.

“Finally,” he uttered in relief, as a green bar pulsed on the screen, opening up audio and visual communications with his destination thousands of miles away. As an image congealed on the screen, Tim halted his initial attempt at a bland salutation, narrowing his eyes and rotating his head slightly clockwise at the unexpected sight that greeted him.

“Should I even ask?” he began, his voice dripping with irony. On the monitor was the ruddy face of Tim’s Uncle Mitch, his unmistakable moustache flipped upside-down as he balanced his inverted body in an apparent handstand, breathing in a tightly-regulated rhythm to maintain balance.

“Well, greetings Professor,” came Mitch’s reply, his gravelly voice and crusty demeanor matching the irony of his nephew’s, undertone for undertone. “I was just re-engaging in my old morning yoga routine when you called. Hadn’t done my advanced inversions in a while, and I was feeling too chipper this morning to pass up the opportunity to see the world from, an alternative perspective, one might say.”

“Only you, Mitch, only you would answer a videophone call from a handstand,” said Tim, shaking his head as he allowed himself a grudging chuckle to shake the moodwith an amused chuckle. “How are things there at the hospital, Mitch?” he asked, his voice faintly suffused with a frisson of worry at the answer. “You nearly gave us all a heart attack, when we heard about your own.”

“So far, so good.” The elderly, yet irrepressibly spry man on Tim’s videoscreen pushed off and landed squarely on his feet, in a surprising display of coordinated athleticism. He then sat himself down calmly before the camera, folding his legs on an eye-catching cloth mat—a colorful and meticulously designed hybrid of a Persian rug and a yogi’s wall decoration. “The tests for heart function all came back roses today, and the docs have started on my discharge papers; probably just a couple more days in this glorified prison cell, before I’m free to savor the sweet air of the Oregon springtime.”

“That’s great to hear, Mitch,” nodded Tim reservedly.

The man on the screen directed a piercing stare toward his nephew. “Tim, I appreciate your kind words,” he began, after a slightly awkward pause, “but there’s something more urgent to your call, isn’t there?”

Tim drew in a deep mouthful of air and exhaled in a deep sigh, tipping his forehead in a gesture that stopped just short of a nod. “The Shoemaker heirlooms, Mitch,” he said earnestly. “Talk to me.”

“With all due respect, while the yoga routine may be a salutary addition to your day, I’m not so sure about the handstand part, especially for a guy who’s been hospitalized with a loudly complaining heart.”

“Not to worry, by this point I’ve got enough hardware implanted into this old heart, and just about everywhere else, they’ll be turning me into a cyborg soon enough.”

“Not so sure the world’s ready for a cyborg Mitchell Shoemaker,” quipped Tim with a sly grin, “I think the flesh-and-blood version has been enough to handle!” The two shared a familiar laugh as Tim turned more earnest. “It’s great to talk to you again, Mitch; honestly, you’re the only one in the Shoemaker clan who could outdo yours truly for the title of Gearhead-in-Chief, and about the only one who can understand all my harebrained schemes. How are you doing these days? You nearly gave us all a heart attack when we heard about your own, but Ernie implied you’ve been on the upswing for a while.”

“So far, so good,” replied Mitch, pushing off and landing on his feet in a surprising display of coordinated athleticism, before sitting himself down on a cloth mat before the camera. “The tests came back thumbs-up today, and the docs are already arranging my discharge papers; probably just a couple more days in this place before I get to savor the sweet Oregon springtime again. I got a message just yesterday from Tanya Jemison at Pegasus Atlantic; sounds like you’re now the proud owner of the Shoemaker family heirlooms.”

“I suppose so,” sighed Tim with an ambivalent confirmation.

“I can breathe the skepticism in your voice, Tim,” replied Mitch, with a tone of hard-nosed understanding, “and I don’t begrudge you one bit for it. It took me years to believe what my own findings were telling me, so I wouldn’t expect you to buy into it based on my one little campaign on that video CD.”

“It’s not… really that, Mitch,” said Tim, taking the utmost care to phrase his words, “in fact, I’m starting to believe that you really were on to something… if anything, even more spectacular than your own boundless imagination could have dreamt up.”

His curiosity whetted by Tim’s words, Mitch’s eyes widened slightly in anticipation. “Methinks, there’s a bonnie tale about to follow…”

“Not sure if that’s the adjective I would have chosen, Mitch…” At once, Tim removed the Cereceph from his briefcase, cradling it before the camera for Mitch to glimpse once again. “You’d intrigued me so much with all your own fanciful tales on that video CD at the bank, about the Cereceph in particular— I decided there might be an opportunity to dissect it a bit more at the university… figuratively speaking of course,” he inserted with a lighthearted chuckle. “So I’ve been keeping it close by the past couple days, all charged up and connected to the microwave transmitter, just as you’d left it in the bank vault.”

Mitch nodded silently as Tim continued. “Mitch, you’d said, on that recording—you and your team had concluded that the Cereceph was in some way constructed to mimic and externally transmit the communications that, are begotten within our own minds. Not just at the level of the biochemistry and physiology—all the synaptic networks, and action potentials for sending nerve signals. If I read you correctly—you were saying it’s rigged up to integrate our neural processes at the concept level, as though the Cereceph is trying to reconstruct the content, the messages that our minds convey. Is that a decent-enough recap for your conclusions?”

“Your delivery could use a little clean-up,” quipped Mitch in amiable jest, “but your summary’s on target, Tim. In fact,” he added, his face now quite animated and his mind as quick and vigorous as ever, “we found something else intriguing about it, and fairly recently. It’s been a good spell since I shipped out that video to you in North Carolina, and there have been a few developments in the months since.”

Tim was taken aback at the news; in light of everything that had happened in the interim, merely imagining his uncle’s intimations was enough to trigger a rush of apprehension. “New findings, eh?” he replied, feigning equanimity. “Fill me in.”

“I mentioned on the video that my collaborators and I had blasted the Cereceph with X-rays and a few other imaging modalities, to chart it and take a look under the hood. So before I shipped all the heirlooms out to North Carolina, we essentially had blueprints of the Cereceph at our disposal, and Goran Filipovic—a neuropathologist out here in Oregon, who’s been lending me a hand—was able to nail down something more specific about the device’s design.”

Tim nodded as he followed along, intrigued by the update. “Hmm, based on his métier, I presume you’ve been trying to match up the Cereceph to specific brain regions, anatomically at least.”

“And functionally in fact, to an extent; I’d say that well over 90% of the Cereceph is still a black box, we can’t figure what in the world it’s been ginned up for. But there’s a portion toward the back right corner—yeah, right next to that odd knob-like structure,” said Mitch, as Tim groped about for the location in question. “Goran compared our imaging results on the Cereceph to some histological sections from the brain, at multiple magnifications and with all kinds of special stains, and he concluded that this part of the Cereceph is ‘memory-like.’”

Tim shot back a quizzical look. “Memory-like?”

“The, uh, cytoarchitecture Tim—help me out if I flub any of the terms here, this is more your domain than mine—Goran was saying that this portion of the Cereceph resembles the fine cellular structure of human brain regions involved in memory formation, and storage and… retrieval.”

Tim’s stubbornly impassive expression concealed a heart growing heavier with every sentence that his uncle uttered; Mitch’s words were hitting close to home. “How so, Mitch?”

“There were 3 memory-like functional domains that Goran was able to peg in that Cereceph region. One is for memory formation—a lot like the hippocampus and amygdala in our brains, generating short- and long-term memories and helping to consolidate them. But much more compact than our own structures—a mind-boggling feat of engineering, just this one tiny domain in the Cereceph.”

“The amygdala,” repeated Tim slowly, mulling Mitch’s report with an intensely personal interest. “Emotional memory… feelings and events of great significance. What about… the other two domains, Mitch?”

“One of them was nothing special; it just resembled so-called association cortex in the brain’s frontal lobe, probably long-term memory storage. But the third domain was a headline-stealer right off the presses, at least according to Goran, since I haven’t had time myself to decipher what he was saying. Just a sec…” said Mitch, sidling off camera to retrieve a printed document that he eyed with considerable fascination, “Here, I printed out his message; he said the third domain resembles a compacted version of Brodmann’s area 17—ring a bell?”

“Of course, Mitch, Area 17 is my meal ticket,” chuckled Tim, in a not-quite-successful attempt to defuse his own mounting restlessness. “It’s V1, the visual cortex, the seeing center in the brain’s occipital lobe—I’m in the business of restoring sight to the vision-impaired after all, so I hang out an awful lot in Area 17.”

“Here’s the catch, though; the Brodmann’s Area 17 in the Cereceph has been packaged up with something else, quite apart from the standard anatomical arrangement in our own heads. Per Goran’s report—it’s a parietal lobe region, the precuneus. Goran didn’t elaborate so I can’t divine his thoughts on this. Any idea what… Tim?”

Mitch paused in mid-sentence as he beheld Tim on the monitor, leaning forward on the speaker’s dais and tweaking his wrinkled brow with an outstretched hand. The laptop’s microphone amplified the auditorium’s eerie acoustics, quiet except for the oscillating coo of a nearby fan that filled an abnormally extended silence on Tim’s part. “The precuneus—yeah, it means everything,” said Tim, in a drawn-out voice barely exceeding a whisper, as he slowly rose again. “Among other things, it’s a visualization center, Mitch; it’s where we picture things, of great… personal importance, within our own minds.”
“I see,” replied Mitch, following a contemplative pause of his own. “And I’m also getting a certain vibe from you, Tim… that there’s something more to this.” His nephew quickly uttered a half-syllable in an abortive response before stifling it again, tensing his lower lip and turning aside. Mitch instinctively stepped into the breach, his gravelly voice carefully titrated to reassure Tim, who was hesitant to revisit an experience that now had an even more jarring significance to him. “Tim, hear me out—since we re-established contact after all those lost years, I’m the one guy on earth with whom you’ve been able to share your most offbeat whims and nuttiest inventions. That applies equally to… whatever you’re holding back about now. And if it has anything to do with these heirlooms—well, I’m the one who got you wrapped up with those things in the first place.”

Tim sighed deeply before returning his gaze to the monitor. “Mitch, I—a whole passel of bizarre things have been intruding in on me lately, ever since I went to Tennessee over the weekend… But just to cut the chase, I’ve been, uh—seeing Susan lately, Mitch.”

“See—seeing her?” replied Mitch cautiously, perplexed at Tim’s choice of words but anxious that saying too much might tread clumsily over delicately managed memories.

“Not just figuratively… Her face, Mitch. Three times since Monday, the third time just now—I’ve been seeing Susan, on my computer. The first instance on a desktop back at home and the other two times on this laptop, the same one I’m using to talk to you here. It was her face, not one iota of doubt, and each time—with more, and more detail, everything down to the birthmark on her forehead.”

“You mean,” responded Mitch, now openly exhibiting a look of sheer disbelief, “her face just appeared there, on your monitor?”

“More like—it was, sketched in, just formed itself more rapidly each time. It’s tough to describe but… I’d be absorbed in some activity or another, the computer would be on, I’d turn and then suddenly, Susan’s face, with her hair down to her shoulders, would gradually materialize right before me. I could—if I concentrated vigorously on something else, like on my lecture today, it would fade out. Or, if I looked straight at the image it would slowly vanish.”

Mitch dipped his head slightly in reflection as his nephew continued to gather his thoughts. “Mitch, it’s almost as if, her face would appear there if it was… lodged high up in my subconscious, as though she was calling out to me and tugging at my heart, my thoughts, but without me thinking or, looking straight at her. And it’s not just me; of all the inopportune moments, she… her image started to take form today on my laptop monitor when I was wrapping up a lecture, when I was momentarily distracted. I shut the projector off but one of my students and, I presume, the whole audience must have seen at least part of it unfolding.”

“As though...” began Mitch, immersed in contemplation, “something had—resurrected her again, vividly, in your mind. Why… why now, Tim?”

Tim looked up with a start, phrasing his words with painstaking care.

“I, uh… ran into, a mutual—friend, of both of us, Mitch, in a café on Monday, and it brought everything, all the buried memories all just rushing back…“

“I see,” replied Mitch, reading between the lines and hastily changing the subject with the realization. “And you think the Cereceph is behind this episode, Tim?”

“I’d brought it along, as I said, to maybe check into the thing a little more at the lab, not giving it much thought of course; but each time this, vision of Susan materialized, the Cereceph had an odd, dark-reddish glow. It would start up and fade in the same kind of pattern as the image on the screen. It’s the only consistent correlate with all 3 occasions that Susan began to show up like that.”

“Then the Cereceph—” Mitch paused to digest the magnitude of what he was hearing. “So, Goran was right. I can’t imagine how, wrenching the images must have been for you, Tim… but if the Cereceph is projecting from your own mind like that—it’s revolutionary. It must have been able, somehow, to translate the images in your own memory centers, in that—visualization hub of the mind, as you were just describing it, and transfer it externally to a data-containing surface, like a computer monitor. The same way a microphone faithfully translates our voice into electrical patterns that can be reproduced later, the Cereceph does that with the pictures that take shape in our own imaginations… especially those with, great emotional significance, it would appear.”

“But Mitch, I’m telling you,” followed Tim insistently, “it was vastly more than that. When you reported that Goran had linked the Cereceph to our own internal imaging center, I realized that this, raw ‘functionality’ that you’re describing, must be a part of it—absorbing mental pictures and projecting them. But it’s not just an image broadcasted from my own mind, it’s infinitely more.”

“What do you mean, Tim?”

“I can’t quite pin it down, but in each case, especially just now in this auditorium, not merely her image but Susan’s—being, her essence, her… spirit, was there, too. The facial expressions, the movement of her lips—not talking to me per se, but she was there, she was aware of… I don’t know, herself, maybe even us out here. I’m telling you in the most unambiguous terms I can muster, Mitch—she, Susan, was there. Who knows what this Cereceph is capable of, but it’s far more than just an image projector. And besides,” he continued, with a mild shake of the head, “The last few days have been one bizarre conundrum after another; this was just the icing on the cake.”

Mitch now stared in with more overt concern. “Tim, what’s going on?”

“Visions of… something God-awful, Mitch,” he said while biting his lip, hesitant to paint a picture that continued to unsettle with every mental brushstroke. “Over the weekend, I was in Tennessee. I visited Ernie but I was there on business, at the Oak Ridge labs, to examine a clinical trial for a retinal implant—for which there’s been this, inexplicable psychosis, arising in the patients as an apparent complication. And they were drawing things....” He winced at the memory, as Mitch looked on with stoic compassion.

“So when I got back to North Carolina,” continued Tim, “every time I’d have a catnap, I’d snap awake with a chill, and there’s a—scene, like out of somebody else’s nightmare, that I sketch out before me, as pushed by a compulsion. A bit like what the patients were depicting—independently of each other—of a, beast that represents, a being invading their minds, as though it was haunting or, possessing them. It’s also in the images that I sketch out but somehow, with details and a scene filled in. It’s monstrous, whatever it is, demonic—and the first time it happened, it was there at the bank, right after I’d rifled through some of the Shoemaker heirlooms from the safe.”

“And you think the Cereceph is behind this, too, Tim?” said Mitch, his eyes beginning to betray a measure of dumbfounded apprehension.

“I don’t know, Mitch. I’d dozed off at the lounge at the bank—where I’d been rifling through the heirlooms from the safe—and I hadn’t really, looked into the Cereceph much at that point. But that—helmet…”

“With the markings, the panels on the interior, right?”

“Right. I’d removed it from the shipping container just as you’d wired and activated the thing. And then I put it on, without thinking, just as someone would try on a hat at a milliner’s shop. All the travails of the weekend caught up to me then, and I dozed off—the first time I had that monstrous vision.”

“I see,” replied Mitch, with narrowed eyes.

“This is what’s getting me, Mitch. On that videodisc you prepared, you said the designs of those, circuits on the helmet—they were so complex that it had mystified you and your team out in Oregon. You thought it might be related to, something like functional MRI scans, broadcasting the activity within our minds, but for all intents and purposes, it was a black box.”

“Was and is, Tim,” said Mitch, his jaw slightly clenched. “As I said on the video, the level of sophistication in those circuits on the helmet, we couldn’t match that even in a top-notch chip-making facility today. The radiocarbon dating confirms it’s vintage 17^th-century, but I still can’t wrap my head around it.”

“But what if it’s because—all of these items, they’re part of a suite? An assemblage of devices and even with all in our possession, we’re only scratching the surface? It’s this baffling enigma to us, because they make sense only when they’re all brought together; and most of the pieces of this puzzle, we don’t yet have. Think about it… You’d found some hints that the Cereceph might be interfacing with this helmet. What if the helmet was, I don’t know, scanning one part of my mind—the circuits that correspond to buried memories, language, half-formed thoughts… then, uploaded it to the Cereceph? Primed it perhaps, so that when all those memories of Susan in Suriname came flooding back, the Cereceph was equipped to amplify them, broadcast them on these computer monitors.”

“It’s an intriguing thought, Tim. We know there are microwave transmissions beamed around with these things… we just don’t know how they could be interfacing, or what sort of code they’d be using to transmit and receive. Still, those other visions, the… demonic, dream images you said you were sketching out. You said the helmet was on the first time you…”

“Yeah,” said Tim, breaking in as his thoughts pressed urgently to be aired, “in the VIP lounge at the bank. And that’s the part I can’t make any sense out of. Susan’s face, on the monitor like that—as confounding as the technology in these devices may be, the projected memory itself originated within my own mind. But this other vision, this scene with the beast—it must be connected to whatever nightmares were tormenting the minds of those poor patients at Oak Ridge. But I can’t conceive of where this scene, with that monstrosity in the center, getting fleshed out every time I revisit it—where it could be coming from. It just doesn’t add up. Nothing adds up.”

“Including the apparent heritage of our proud family heirlooms, Tim,” replied Mitch, in a sympathetic nod. “All these hundreds of years since the Schumachers dispersed from Germany, and we’ve been holding in our hands a technology so advanced, even here in the 21^st century we have only the vaguest idea how it might be functioning.”

“My thoughts precisely, Mitch! And whoever crafted these things, they were serious about their efforts. They went through a Herculean labor to make them work and make them endure, all the way up to… until about now, when the rest of us have caught up enough, technologically, to begin to get a handle on them. It just boggles the mind, to think that there must have been some society back there, all those centuries ago, that had access to this level of ingenuity, unknown to the rest of the world as it would seem. And all to… allow us to peer inside our own minds, enable us to project what’s inside, deep within our own hearts. Why? What are they trying to tell us?”

“I was hoping you’d be the one to unravel that mystery,” replied Mitch, in a resigned chuckle, to momentarily lighten the weight of the accumulating conundrum. “It’s part of why I decided to dump this in your lap a few months back.”

“Yeah, months…” replied Tim, looking obliquely downward as a thought seized his mind. “Speaking of… I never did get the full story, about why you decided to ship the heirlooms out to me when you did. Seems as though you and your crack team out there in Oregon were making inroads just fine on your own—what was the impetus to send them my way in the first place?”

Mitch grimaced slightly and sighed deeply, in the manner of someone encountering a question long anticipated, but still impossible to answer. “You know, Tim, it’s funny but amid all the layers of mysteries associated with these things, that may be the most impenetrable. I don’t—at least, I can’t put into words, why exactly I sent them your way, but I knew I had to. It’s partly intuition but also, much more than that… sometimes, an idea however odd, it hits you and stays with you doggedly, and you just know you have to follow up on it. I’ve had the heirlooms with me for decades, and yet, things just… happened, starting a few months ago. And I knew, as well I’ve known anything, that I had to get these things to, to someone of your caliber, someone who could finally understand what they’re designed for, and why we have them. Especially, God, something about that eerie clay tablet…”

“Yeah, the tablet,” replied Tim, his voice deepened and his affirmation drawn out. “Something about that tablet”… the thought had crossed his own mind after he had spoken with Rachel Bloom, just before the lecture at Wake Forest. He had shelved the thought; now, it had re-emerged with a raging urgency, as he uttered the ominous warning etched on the tablet’s surface. “’When the kingdoms convert the smallest speck to the mightiest of cannon…his thunder will again shake the world.’”

“Mitch,” resumed Tim with a sudden intensity, his eyes focusing sharply on the monitor, “you were saying, things just started to, ‘happen’, when you opted to ship the heirlooms to me. What—what were you referring to?”

“Hard to explain, Tim, but I… suddenly, everything just became more vivid. Sights, sounds, tastes. And…and dreams. Nothing like, the visions or, projections you experienced. But my perception of the world and, the way my mind was responding—everything was sharpened, it was as though a gear had been shifted way up, within my own head. And the dreams; they were like, epics being played out within my mind, at least from the fragments I could recall afterward.”

Tim stared momentarily, bearing a look of impassive reflection as disturbing conclusions and frightening possibilities began to sink in. “Mitch,” he finally responded, in a serene voice that masked his growing alarm. “You said this all began several months ago. Do you, recall when, exactly?”

“I… yeah, Tim, I do. Lucidly in fact, because it was just a week to the day after my birthday. That evening—it didn’t happen all at once, but everything began to, just feel different as the day proceeded. In fact, it seemed to all be heralded by, what must have been the worst headache I’ve endured since that scuba diving trip went awry 20 years ago, and I nearly killed myself surfacing too fast. Oh, it was awful—like a cinderblock bashing the sides and back of my head for an hour, before it just faded. Then all those changes I just described.”

“A headache…” repeated Tim with narrowed eyes, as though vaguely reminded of a pertinent recollection, before his thoughts were quickly yanked away to a more pressing realization. “Wait a minute, Mitch; your birthday, it’s January 26^th, isn’t it? One week from then—February 2^nd, El Día del Diablo!”

“What? Tim, what are you talking about?” asked Mitch, uncharacteristically taken aback at his nephew’s cryptic references.

“Mitch, the heirlooms, that strange message on the tablet, this psychosis in the Oak Ridge patients, and us… they’re all linked up. Who knows how but… Rachel Bloom, my ex-colleague at Oak Ridge, the one who sent me the distress call about this psychosis in the retinal implant patients—she said that the wireless link-up between the implant and Argus, the vision re-learning system for which I’d been one of the developers, that it all happened on February 2^nd. ‘El Diablo’ was the nickname of their Patient Zero, so the day itself was named after him, initially in celebration of what they thought was a restoration of his sight… and then in despair, as this psychosis began to hit them.”

“The same day that, all those changes began to come over me, and my own perception…”

“That’s right, Mitch. It all converges on that day. When I was with Rachel at Oak Ridge, we found that the software files controlling Argus were being altered for… something we could never ascertain, and it all began on February 2^nd, the day they flipped the switch and activated the link-up to Argus. Your own, disorienting experiences, altered perception, hit you at the same time. Some bizarre computer virus also emerged out of that department at Oak Ridge, then another virus spread outside the campus—what if they’re all connected to that day too? And our heirlooms, these devices we’ve been given—they’re warning us, trying to prepare us…”

“For… what, Tim? I still don’t understand—you were repeating that warning on the clay tablet just a moment ago, as though it had some specific significance. How is it related to… that psychosis, at Oak Ridge, and everything else that took place that day?”

“Just before my lecture here, I spoke with Rachel again; she reported that a milder version of this very same, unexplained psychosis seems to have been first observed in an outbreak in Hiroshima, Japan, right after the atom bomb was dropped there in 1945. They called it ‘Tachibana syndrome,’ after a nurse caring for the patients there. I still can’t draw a straight line from that to these retinal implant trials, I don’t see what they have to do with each other—but that message on the tablet from 1,000 years ago, you said yourself it was warning about some, entity, awakening with the first nuclear attack. What if… this is, what’s hitting us now, is exactly what the tablet was warning about? I can’t piece it together but—that reference, ‘his thunder will again shake the world’… what if this being, first awakened back there in Hiroshima? And what if it’s the same thing that’s leapt forward to today somehow, taken over those poor men’s minds at Oak Ridge? So maybe that’s what all the devices are designed for, to confront this…”

“Tim,” interrupted Mitch, his face now markedly perturbed and his voice even gruffer than usual, “I’m still trying to follow what you’re implying—all these, puzzles and unexplained events lately, you think they’re linked to this, ‘El Día del Diablo,’ and the artifacts that the Shoemakers have been holding all this time?”

Tim tensed his lower lip and lifted his eyes skyward, nodding ever so slightly as he pondered how to explain the inexplicable. He hastily backed away from the monitor, then pulled forward a blank whiteboard that had been resting inconspicuously near the projector screen behind the auditorium’s podium, placing it just before his own laptop’s monitor. He quickly grabbed a magic marker, then began feverishly inscribing a diagram as he narrated for his uncle.

“Mitch,” he began again, nearly breathless as his thoughts raced forward, “the way I see it, there are 6 interlocking mysteries here—how they’re linked I don’t yet know, but there’s a nexus clear as day. There’s the onset of this spreading psychosis in the Oak Ridge patients, all of whom got the retinal implant and independently drew the same horrid monstrosity, independently of each other…” he said, vigorously scribing a note on the upper left side of the whiteboard, surrounding it with a hastily marked-in bubble, “which bears an unexplained resemblance to a similarly bizarre, spreading psychosis first noted in Japan, after the atomic bombings…” he continued, scribbling in an arrow from the first bubble to the second, halting momentarily to catch his breath.

“Which, may have been presaged by that, eerie warning on this millennium-old tablet…” he resumed, linking all 3 bubbles, “which was handed down to us Shoemakers by some, unknown master craftsmen with access to advanced 21^st-century technology in the 1600’s… who used their technology to create a series of devices that—are capable of projecting our thoughts, and perhaps even feeding back into our minds… and all starting on the very same day, El Día del Diablo, when a live connection was established between the patients’ nervous systems, via the implant, and an outside network, with an unexplained computer virus arising in its wake. What’s the common thread in all this?” said Tim, only half rhetorically.

Mitch continued to stare in baffled silence, immersed in strenuous efforts to absorb what he was hearing. He wrinkled his moustache in consternation, as abortive thoughts and half-formed connections streamed like a rushing river through his mind. “Tim I… it’s just so mind-boggling, I hardly know what to think. In all my decades as an eccentric engineer and a wild-eyed entrepreneur, I’ve encountered more than a few head-scratching phenomena but this— mind-digital connection, as it would seem, I just don’t…”

“That’s it, Mitch, you just put your finger on it. It’s something like the Grand Liaison, as one of my own imaginative classmates at Northwestern used to put it: it’s as though, somebody’s found a common template of communication between the flow of information through our nerves and across the circuits we build. The barrier between our minds and our digital networks has broken down. To the point that,” continued Tim, with his brow conspicuously furrowed, “maybe even sprites from the digital world, little atoms of consciousness, could insinuate themselves… into our own world, even our minds.”

“Reminds me of all those old Gothic tales, about people being possessed by demons—at least, until they found out that some sneaky hypnotist was manipulating impressionable young minds. Hard to find a good exorcist these days…” replied Mitch, in artfully disguised skepticism.

“I know Mitch,” chuckled Tim, wrestling with his own incredulity. “I still don’t know quite what to conclude from all this, but at least the general idea seems to be right, that there’s a bridge now between our minds and, what can be communicated in a digital realm. What matters most though, is that they knew this somewhere, somehow four centuries ago, they knew we’d arrive at this point… but they also knew that some threat, would take shape within that very milieu. First awakened in the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and then, perhaps lying dormant, to awaken again today. Just as the scribes of that tablet from 1,000 years ago had foreseen.”

“But Tim, that’s the nub of everything you’re telling me here, and we’re no closer…” Mitch stiffened his jaw in grizzled frustration. “What exactly? What is this threat? This monstrosity, that you say the patients sketched out and then you sketched out—how does this relate to it? If what you’re saying is true, then there’s a menace out there, lurking God-knows-where—but we’ve gotta have something more, definite to work with.”

“I agree, Mitch, and it’s why we’ve got to go right to the source, right where the Schumachers in Germany got these things before they set sail across the Atlantic—we have to find where these artifacts came from, who produced them and why. It’s the only way to discover what they were trying to warn us about, and what we need to do. And if that tablet is right, then this spreading psychosis at Oak Ridge is just the tip of a very sharp iceberg that’s gonna surface soon. If only I knew where to go.”

Mitch pinched his chin lightly between his thumb and index finger, gazing downward and nodding as a suggestion filtered into his mind. “Tim, have you spoken to Ezra Gordon yet?”

“Ezra… No but, I remember that name from their spiel at the bank; he’s the investigator you hired to track down the history of the Shoemaker heirlooms, correct?”

“Right, Tim, and in fact in his former life, Ezra was my chief financial officer from the first day I opened the doors at Magister Engineering.”

“Hmm, they left that part out.”

“Yeah, we go way back. And Ezra’s one of those stalwarts who’ll move heaven and earth to lend a helping hand, especially to a nephew in need. He sent me a text message at the hospital this morning, a little update after he’d gone incommunicado while I was recovering. He’s apparently wrangled something important from this investigation.”

“Any details?”

“Nothing specific. I think he wanted to make sure I was well enough to chat on the videophone; Ezra’s a person-to-person kind of guy anyway, he’s never been one to employ our latter-day gizmos to disclose grand findings from an impersonal distance. The good news for us: He’s in North Carolina right now, in the Chapel Hill area in fact; I could have him arrange a meet-up with you to deliver the goods. What day works for you, Tim?”

“Today,” replied Tim laconically. “This afternoon in fact, if he can manage; I’m getting’ a nasty vibe about all this, Mitch. There’s a café I frequent right in that direction; I could meet him there.”

“You never were one to dither, Tim,” said Mitch with a crusty laugh. “I’ll see what I can do. Just send me a text message with the place and time specifics, and I’ll have Ezra give you a holler. I’m sure he’ll find a way. You just take care of yourself, all right?”

“Same to you Mitch; I’ll take care of the dirty work, you just keep resting your heart. Sorry to lay all this onto you when you’re still in recuperation mode; I doubt you were planning out your day with this of all things in mind.”

“Tim, I’m the one who laid all this onto you to begin with,” replied Mitch, with a reassuring smile that masked his own unease. “I’m here any hour of the day, any day of the week to lend a helping hand. Especially in light of all these developments… well, I’m overdue for my breakfast at this point so, I think I’ll sign off. Look, just keep me updated all right? Though I doubt anything can top what I’ve heard today.”

“Somehow, Mitch,” responded Tim, in an uncharacteristically grizzled voice, “I wouldn’t count on that. We’ve made a giant leap into uncharted territory now. And to be honest… I’m not sure I have the fortitude to confront whatever’s facing us.”

Mitch looked his anxious nephew in the eyes, his expression a mixture of studied equanimity and gentle encouragement. “Tim,” he said, “amidst all the doubts and uncertainties since I began this peculiar quest years ago, to shed light on these heirlooms, one of the few things I’ve never doubted is that you’re the one to find the answers. Even if you weren’t the renowned engineer and tinkerer you are, I’d have felt the same way—you have an uncanny knack for re-arranging the possibilities, for guiding circumstances and creating solutions that nobody else sees, Tim. Success, after all, is a matter of creating the right self-fulfilling prophecies.”

“My morning’s truly complete now,” quipped Tim dryly, “I even got the Mitchism of the day to round things out.”

“Actually, Tim,” replied Mitch, “that one I can’t take credit for. Your father often said that to me back in our early days together, when he was running the show and I was serially screwing things up, and making excuses for my messes. After we fell out, it was another two decades before he hit me up again—and that’s the maxim he put on the postcard that he sent me. It’s what allowed us to be brothers once more, and for me to resume contact with you and all your brothers and sisters. So it’s a lot more special, and personal to me, than any of the Mitchisms I’ve regaled my nieces and nephews with.”

Tim beamed respectfully, heartened by the soothing reminder of a redemption that had salved the wounds of a painful past. “Then it means a lot to me too, Mitch. I’d better hit the road; I’ll be in touch.”

The two nodded mutually as Tim severed the connection. He sighed loudly, partly in sheer relief and partly in mounting exasperation, as he descended ever more deeply into the abyss of a conundrum that thwarted his most determined attempts to comprehend it. An ominous haze pervaded the chiaroscuro of the empty, dimly-lit auditorium, and the gentle chill of the fan-cooled air was harshly amplified by the mere awareness of an unseen foe, somewhere in the distance looking in. Seized by a sudden urgency, Tim darted toward his still-open briefcase and retrieved a folder therein. It housed the two sketches he had thus far produced of that chilling scene, centered about the monstrous being that he had first seen drawn on the canvas within the blood-soaked chamber of Pablo Acevedo. In conjunction with the six interlocking mysteries he had just described to his uncle in such pressing urgency, there were two related enigmas that he kept to himself, fraught as they were with such an inscrutably ominous aura.

As Tim eyed his own perplexing handiwork, that strange number—46,11007—taunted him with every glance. It was a seemingly random figure that was nonetheless so deeply imbued with an unfathomable significance, scrawled in blood by Pablo Acevedo and etched in compulsive haste by Tim himself on his own drawings. Then there was the other message on that enigmatic clay tablet, a pressing yet suitably inscrutable piece of advice, to accompany the tablet’s oracular warning itself. “Seek at once the counsel of the Ancient Others, or all shall succumb to the web he weaves,” Tim repeated to himself in an audible whisper. “The Ancient Others…” He shook his head after a brief interlude of fruitless rumination, then hastily gathered his belongings, anxious to exit the oppressively silent auditorium. As he glided down the stairs from the speaker’s dais, a file from his briefcase, unnoticed and poorly secured, tumbled out onto the carpeted terrace behind him.

Chapter 9: A Signature of Eternity

Wednesday, May 18, 1:36 p.m.

Laser Calibration and Fine Structure Facility, Sub-Basement Level Three, Biomedical Engineering Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

“Rachel, hey—what brings you down to the dungeon?”

Rachel Bloom craned her neck around with a slight startle, barely able to discern the shady outlines of her colleague in the dimly-lit corridor of the somber sub-basement. A tall woman with reddish hair gradually emerged from the shadows, as Rachel flashed a broad smile. “Oh, hi there, Mandy! Didn’t expect to find company down here.”

“Likewise, but misery does love company,” replied Mandy with a strained smile, making her way over to an island of illumination under a flickering, blue-tinted fluorescent lamp. “Yet another 6 a.m. reveille for the boss this morning, fretting as usual about our latest grant-funding limbo. Barely had breakfast and not a bite for lunch yet; I am officially famished.”

“I’m with you! I’ve been holed up since daybreak doing analyses of tissue sections, from biopsies that the docs got from our patients; yet another agonizing drive straight into a blind alley, I’m sure,” said Rachel, as she delicately repositioned a small stack of photographic plates cradled within her arms. “Thankfully, those tedious antibody stains are all wrapped up, so I just had to sneak into the darkroom down here before lunch, develop some not-so-pretty pictures for our afternoon wrap-up session.”

“Sounds great, Rachel, I just had to do a little laser recalibration and a few measurements for this afternoon. Thank God the voice-recognition system is up and running for the access codes down here, I can hardly see a thing on this grimy keypad anymore,” said Mandy, tossing a perfunctory glance toward a security panel by a sealed and barred door. “I should only be a few minutes in there, so maybe we can grab a little lunch together afterward, straight from here. That creep, who transferred in recently from Crystallography—he’s been coming onto me again. Usually waits for an unguarded moment just before lunch, then saunters into the lounge upstairs when I’m resting my eyes and out of my element, coming up with some transparently lame excuse to ‘escort’ me to lunch with him.”

“Oh, I think I know who you’re talking about, Mandy” nodded Rachel with a wry smile, “Tim… what’s-his-name. Bumped into him a few times, seemed sweet enough.”

“A little too sweet. I’ve been trying to, uh, send him some subtle and not-so-subtle signals that I’m not on the market anymore, without letting him down too hard. Everything in the book—the old ‘impromptu hair styling’ trick, with my engagement ring in plain view of his face as I adjust my bangs. Or making sure to describe how wonderful a fiancé Pete is whenever I’m talking up weekend plans with Carol in the adjacent office, with Tim of course within earshot. Tim just can’t get the message; he seems to have a blind spot in the lady’s-just-not-available department.”

“Yeah,” laughed Rachel sympathetically, “I endured a similar spell with Gary, the systems administrator who used to ply the halls here before he left for a position in Indiana. Irked me for a while, but as matters developed—turns out that he’d suffered a difficult break-up and he just enjoyed the company. Now we enjoy a good laugh about it whenever it comes up. I don’t know Tim well, but the word is that he went through a tough divorce, his kids are five states away—he seems like a stable enough guy, probably just craving for some harmless company until he works it out of his system.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Mandy with a resigned sigh, as she rotated her notebook and slowly made her way toward the secured door, tucked away in the middle of the corridor. “Just wish he’d pick someone else to, work it out with. Speaking of guys named Tim—that old colleague of yours who came out here over the weekend, the engineering professor at Duke, was he able to weave any miracles for you all at Vision Restoration?”

“Tim Shoemaker,” replied Rachel in acknowledgment. “Nothing I’d call a breakthrough just yet, but Tim’s been a dogged detective for us here and he’s hit upon a few leads. He’s taken a more intense interest in our miserable quagmire here than I ever expected, and thank God he is; I can’t imagine anyone else who could toss us a lifeline. He even sent me a voice mail message just 20 minutes ago that wound up garbled—something about a presumed ‘mind virus’ tearing through the patient population, at least those who received the implants. He believes that this is the nexus we’ve been seeking out, the phenomenon that was first jogged awake somehow in Japan 70 years ago, after the atom-bombings.”

“Right,” replied Mandy, as she turned to face a security interface by the locked door. “This, ‘contagious psychosis’ in all your patients—I heard about your international powwow last night, some eminence grise at a Japanese hospital, affirming that he saw something similar at Hiroshima?”

“That’s the belief so far, at least in the broad outlines of the syndrome; but so far, nothing concrete,” said Rachel tersely, her continuing travails dampening her enthusiasm for further conversation.

“I don’t know Rachel, everything just seems so… spooky around here these days, and I’m not even in the Vision Restoration department. Unexplained psychiatric syndromes, walls in patients’ rooms with bloody messages, and this… computer virus that started here, that they’re beginning to think might be infecting half of Tennessee and Kentucky. I didn’t sign up for this when I first hit the scene two years ago.”

“A commonly-shared sentiment, Mandy, I can guarantee you,” said Rachel with a grin of stoic resignation. “Anyway, don’t want to keep you; I’ll just be in the darkroom for a few minutes with these plates. If you wrap up before me, just tap on the door; I could leave the plates in the industrial refrigerator they have here, then maybe we could hit the café for an extended lunch.”

“Music to my ears, Rachel; anything to escape the dungeon for a few more precious minutes. See you back out here.”

Rachel smiled her acknowledgment, quickly disappearing into the darkroom as Mandy made her way to the security panel by the bolted steel door, bare except for a label, “Fine Structure Analysis, Facility B,” engraved on a conspicuous, bright orange intaglio at eye level. She pressed a large gray button above a keypad within the security panel. “Please say or type in name and Access Code,” responded a monotone, mechanical voice.

“Amanda Rogers,” began Mandy with an impatient sigh, anxious to finish her task, “Clearance Level Epsilon, Access Code 34C839K.”

“Access granted,” replied the voice after a brief pause. A lock in the door snapped back audibly; Mandy lifted a metal handle and made her way inside a dim chamber with a low ceiling.

The darkened room exuded an aura of cold, mechanical isolation, sealed as it was from the corridor and with little but the symphony of oscillating machinery to greet visitors therein. It was permeated by a steamy, haze-like atmosphere outside the sinuous glass tubing and fiber optics that housed the laser, the product of super-cooled gases condensing as they whistled away from their containers. Mandy inserted pre-filled vials with a transparent liquid into small, vise-like devices abutting intersections among fiber-optic cables, then quickly moved to activate a series of circuits and switches on a towering interface before the laser, creating a sealed transparent hemisphere on the surface before her. A faint, violet-hued pulse began to emerge from a tangle of tubing, coiled like a pretzel in front of her, and which fed into the glass hemisphere. The pulse soon propagated itself into a scintillating, dome-like display that danced about the hemisphere as it traversed a labyrinthian array of gratings and mirrors.

Rachel, meanwhile, prepared to insert her photographic plates into the jaw-like openings of an intricate machine for high-resolution image development. As she slid one of the plates into the device, she whirled around with a startle. An incongruously cool draft of air had brushed against the left side of her face seemingly out of nowhere, blowing by her ear as though murmuring something incomprehensible as it gusted by. Bemused but undaunted, she shook her head dismissively before inserting her other plate one layer above the first. As she moved to activate the device’s scanner, another draft blew by, more intense than the first and accompanied by what seemed to be a hissing sound, followed by a deeply unsettling whisper. As Rachel struggled to match the diffuse reverberations to words and meanings, a chill suddenly blasted through her spine, her attention riveted toward the door—and something on its other side. She approached the entrance, straining to listen more closely…

“Mandy!”

Despite layers of reinforced metal between her and her colleague across the corridor, the screams were unmistakable. In a fit of desperate urgency, Rachel flung open the door and rushed to the other side. She yanked instinctively on the door to the Fine Structure Analysis facility, which stubbornly rebuffed her. “Please say or type in Name and Access Code,” replied the mechanical voice, triggered by the unauthorized entry attempt and oblivious to the tumult all around it.

“Damn it!” yelled Rachel in frustration. “Rachel Bloom, Clearance Level Gamma, Access Code 29R861C.” She struggled to enunciate the letters and digits, gnashing her teeth as she waited to gain entry; hours seemed to elapse in the span of moments.

“Access Granted,” replied the digitized voice, snapping open the bolt on the entrance.

Rachel jerked the door forward with a burst of vigorous urgency. The laser pulse was slowly ebbing away, having been deactivated just moments before. Rachel reached around the edge of the entrance and activated an emergency lamp, illuminating the claustrophobic chamber to reveal her friend and colleague seated on the right side in a nearly fetal position, shuddering and with eyes firmly closed as she momentarily looked up, before burying her face resolutely in her knees.

“Mandy!” Rachel pushed her way through the room’s assorted bric-a-brac and kneeled down beside her terrified colleague, attempting to mask her own trepidation with a determined effort to comfort and reassure. “Mandy,” she repeated more softly, placing her hand gently on Mandy’s opposite shoulder, “My God, what happened here? I could hear you all the way from…”

Mandy reluctantly began to raise her head before quickly burying it again. Rachel’s eyes darted about the room like a cat surveying an unfamiliar scene, struggling to gather hints about the horror the young woman must have witnessed. Finding nothing, she addressed her still-trembling friend in a tone at once supportive and inescapably anxious, despite her best efforts. “Mandy—it’s all right, whatever you saw… it’s gone now, the lights are back on. Please, you have to tell me what happened to you here.”

Mandy’s labored breathing, forced through clenched teeth, was plainly audible as she tentatively lifted her forehead. Rachel was taken aback as she finally caught sight of Mandy’s face, nearly blanched white with the pupils of her eyes widened into rings of paralyzed fear. Rachel stifled her instinct to flinch back, rubbing Mandy’s shoulders and looking reassuringly into her eyes. “In the... it was, in the laser network,” said Mandy, in a voice that barely skirted above a whisper.

“What?” asked Rachel, in a judiciously softened tone. “Mandy, what did you see?”

Mandy exhaled loudly, in the manner of someone struggling to exorcise the terror that still streamed through her mind’s eye. She then turned squarely toward Rachel, as though preempting the incredulous response she anticipated. “I don’t… quite know, Rachel. I just remember, there was first this heartbeat, it grew slowly louder… Then I remember seeing eyes, numerous eyes staring back at me from a face—like a, wolf or a bear, something fierce but I couldn’t tell. Arms, a tail—it was like a primal horror right in front of me, straight out of a nightmare.”

Rachel continued to eye her with heartfelt concern, partly out of genuine sympathy and partly as an effort to push away the apprehension that was creeping up closer within her own mind with every word that her friend and colleague uttered. “Mandy, you said you saw this—in the laser network?”

“The laser pattern, through the medium, it suddenly… it’s like it became conscious, aware, and it took shape right there before me, taking on that horrid form. I shut the laser down, and it faded out again.”

Mandy looked away briefly, pondering whether to vocalize the bizarre thoughts now aggressively tormenting her. Finally, she turned toward her colleague again, her eyes opening wider as if to symbolically underscore the words flowing from her mouth.

“Rachel, I know I’m sounding crazy, but sometimes when I’ve been stuck in this God-forsaken place late at night, over the past month, I swear there have been murmurs in the shadows, a… presence. There’ve been days, when all the commotion in the facility dies down enough that you can just pause and listen—and I’ve been, almost sure that there were voices in the machinery here, slithering their way in and out. And now,” Mandy’s eyes began to well up, as a horrid thought impinged on her already battered psyche, “I’m starting to think, they weren’t just the meanderings of an exhausted mind, of someone spending too many precious hours away from her fiancé as I always used to tell myself. There’s something right here among us, Rachel.”

A chill blasted down Rachel’s spine again. For the first time, someone else had expressed the dark thoughts that had assaulted her own mind from time to time, though never consciously acknowledged. As tears began to inch their way down Mandy’s cheeks, Rachel hugged her to comfort her shaken mind and body. Yet the gesture also served to disguise the mounting dread now seizing Rachel herself. Mandy’s terror was not hers alone.

Wednesday, May 18, 3:41 p.m.

O’Malley’s Diner, East Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Tim yanked forward on the sleeves of his gray turtleneck sweater and pressed down on the brim of his fedora hat, unprepared for the windy chill that had encroached upon an otherwise placid spring in the Carolinas. The sky was blanketed with a smothering cloud cover, a multilayered array of white and gray wisps that danced and swirled about each other, with the occasional thunderclap or rain gush descending from the vortices above. His belly growled from an unsatisfied hunger; he had wolfed down nothing more than a diminutive sandwich wrap for lunch after the lecture, his mind too jangled and his stomach too knotted to entertain much of an appetite. Even now, approaching the diner and his meeting with Ezra Gordon, Tim was far too anxious to indulge his hunger. The weight of a thousand-year old mystery had settled stubbornly upon his shoulders, its many strands coalescing in the span of mere days since that fateful trip to Tennessee. His only sustenance was the prospect, however remote, of a resolution—or at least, a path toward shedding the faintest ray of light upon the conundrum.

Tim opened the door to the diner and made his way past the hostess table. The restaurant was a cozy locale, a hybrid of warm Emerald Isle homeliness and Classic Rock flair; the décor on its smooth oaken walls sported a kinetic mélange of album covers and concert photos, alongside newspaper clippings and eye-grabbing billboards spouting slogans in Irish Gaelic. Before Tim had moved three seats in, his attention was beckoned by a solid baritone voice, calling out from a corner table in a semicircular enclosure: “Tim, Tim Shoemaker!”

Tim doffed his fedora and gestured in the direction of a slightly balding, well-attired man who had risen up next to the table. He wore tightly-fitted, wire-rimmed glasses that flanked his closely-cut, dark gray hair. He was of a short and stocky build and with a grizzled, yet curiously handsome face, exuding both authority and confidence from his compact frame. His appearance and mannerisms projected rigor and tightly-reined discipline on top of an irrepressible enthusiasm—clearly a quintessential and trusted right-hand man in his uncle’s firm, his unshakeable equanimity masking a ferocious intensity underneath.

“Ezra Gordon, I presume!” said Tim, making his way down the aisle to shake the man’s hand. “So sorry to press you here on such short notice; I can’t thank you enough for…”

“No apologies needed,” replied the former chief financial officer, with a genial nod. “This latest project has been its own reward. After your Uncle Mitch and I both retired from his company, I missed the thrill of the hunt. So his latest assignment has been a welcome rekindling of the old spirit of discovery, if in a rather different arena than the one to which I’ve long been accustomed. Are you in a hurry?”

“None at all,” said Tim, laying his own briefcase on a convenient seat cushion by the table. “I’m in my proto-sabbatical stage right now anyway, no grants to write; I sent an FYI on my whereabouts to Shelley Deloria, one of my postdoctoral fellows on campus, so everything’s under control back at the ranch.”

“Excellent, Tim; this should be a quick session anyway, I have it all laid out for you. Please,” he said standing up, extending one hand while motioning with the other, “have a seat.”

Ezra’s handshake was firm and resolutely business-like. Amid the diffuse rumbling and occasional peals of thunder outside, his unflappable voice and focus set the tone; he wasted no time in redirecting the conversation after the brief icebreaker. He had already taken pains to blanket their round table with a panoply of maps, albums, and a virtual time capsule of documents, penned in curious fonts and referencing a centuries-old world of ambitious small craftsmen creating the mercantile empires of future generations. “Seems you’ve made quite a bit of progress on this,” said Tim, impressed at the display before him.

“Actually, your timing for this meeting was impeccable,” replied Ezra, seating himself at an extra chair on the end of the table near Tim, dragging a half-imbibed cup of cappuccino before him. “Over the last two days alone, I’ve made more than a few breakthroughs in your case. And perhaps crucially so; your uncle has long had a profound interest in these heirlooms of yours, but he seems to believe they’ve taken on a new urgency of late.”

“I’d second that assessment,” said Tim, in deadpan understatement. “I know you’re a busy fellow, Ezra, and I’m loath to take up your whole afternoon here, so I’ll cut right to the chase. I convened this meeting, because all these artifacts that have been passed down among generations of Shoemakers, stashed away in our attics all these years—they’ve turned out to have a far greater significance than we could have ever conceived before. Moreover, there’s a lot more to them than even Uncle Mitch’s dogged investigations have revealed; whatever their obscure history on either side of the Atlantic, we have to uncover it soon.”

Ezra nodded in acknowledgment, absorbing every detail as Tim continued. “My sabbatical starts on Friday, and with all the developments in this case… I’ve revised my travel plans to follow these heirlooms back to their origin, whatever that was. When I picked them up at the bank on Monday, I heard the broad outlines of the history that’s known—something about, our Schumacher ancestors leaving port in Germany around the 1680s, on a Dutch ship to Pennsylvania.”

“Yes, Tim—the ship was De Ontdekker, which in Dutch means ‘Discoverer,’ appropriately enough. As they may have mentioned at the bank, I had a stroke of luck in the investigation: The Dutch government sponsored a recent exhibition on the period of Dutch naval supremacy around the time of the Anglo-Dutch Wars, which were shortly before the first Schumacher departed for North American shores. They even put the cargo manifests of the Dutch sailing ships into the public domain, and that’s how I tracked your ancestor to De Ontdekker.”

Ezra pointed to a high-resolution, wide-angle photograph of immaculately preserved parchment, with a 2-line entry carefully circled on the image. “This is from the ship’s manifest, and it translates into, ‘items of fine metalworking and exquisite sculpture.’ When I pored through more detailed descriptions elsewhere in the manifest, they matched up with some of the items Mitch left to you in the bank vault. There’s also a name linked to these goods: C.B. Schumacher. At least in all these documents I’ve scared up so far, I haven’t found a name linked to the initials—just ‘C.B.’ on both sides of the Atlantic—but everything matches up to the artifacts, and to the Shoemakers in America. This was your ancestor, Tim.”

“Good afternoon sir, what can I get for you today?” The voice of the waitress, standing next to Ezra beside the table, went nearly unnoticed by Tim; he was still staring intently at the manifest and hanging on Ezra’s every word.

“Uh—” muttered Tim, finally diverting his gaze away from the photo. “I’m actually not too hungry, Ma’am; just a… cappuccino, would be fine for now,” he said with a perfunctory glance, pulling his mind away from the topic only long enough to notice the coffee cup before Ezra.

“And anything else for you, sir?” she continued, looking in Ezra’s direction.

“Just fine here, thanks,” he replied.

“OK, I’ll have that cappuccino in a jiffy,” said the waitress, turning away quickly from the busy table.

“Tim, you sure you’re not hungry? Mitch said you took a rain check on lunch.”

“Sometimes, my mind needs nourishment a lot more urgently than my body; or at least, that’s the pretext I always use during crunch times, to rationalize missed meals and every other bad habit I seem to excel at,” quipped Tim, who quickly re-directed the conversation. “So, that trailblazing Schumacher already had these artifacts in his possession—just puzzles me though, why he had to take them to America in the first place. Why not just keep them with relatives back in the Old Country?” he asked rhetorically. “Ezra, do we know where C.B. Schumacher disembarked on De Ontdekker?”

“The manifest indicates that he left from Bremen, near Germany’s North Sea coast.”

“So, maybe that’s where he first obtained these heirlooms…” interjected Tim, clearly animated at the thought.

“Unfortunately, the Bremen connection in itself tells us little, Tim. Since the Middle Ages, Bremen was a trading hub of the Hanseatic League, the port city network on the North and Baltic Seas; and it’s where German immigrants from throughout Europe disembarked en route to America. As far as we can tell, De Ontdekker first departed from Rotterdam in the Netherlands before making a routine commercial stop in Bremen, picking up a small group of immigrants including C.B. Schumacher. So he wasn’t resident in that city; it was just his point of departure. But there’s something else that may point the way. Take a look.”

Ezra adroitly rotated out the photo of De Ontdekker’s manifest, while smoothly moving a pair of meticulously labeled, yellow cellophane folders before Tim’s eagerly awaiting eyes. He opened them and carefully spread out their contents, alongside several other documents already laid out on the table. There were photocopies and assorted fragments of colonial-era billboards, shingles, plaques, legal papers, and contracts—relics of a businessman’s hectic days from a bygone era. As the thunder outside began to ripple ever more closely, hints of rain glazing the windows anew, Tim’s attention riveted toward a picture of a plaque, conspicuously bearing the corporate moniker “Koenig and Schumacher.”

“This plaque,” began Ezra, “along with most of these other documents, all belonged to the company that your ancestor founded with a fellow immigrant, whom I was later able to identify as one Stefan Koenig. I dug around in the Pennsylvania state archives for some of this, the rest of it from the Philadelphia branch of the ICHA.”

“ICHA?”

“The Immigrant Commercial History Association. The German immigrants in the colonial days and 19^th-century America—they were chiefly yeoman farmers and skilled artisans, who opened up food stands or shops when they arrived on American shores. They and their children tried to parlay their crafts into small, specialized businesses that their descendants grew and built upon over generations. That’s the path blazed by many a corporate titan today: Heinz, Boeing, Kraft, Bloomingdale’s, Schlage, Bausch and Lomb. The ICHA archived records from the heady early days, when those companies were just fledgling start-ups…”

“Sounds like matters didn’t quite pan out so well for our own ancestors,” interjected Tim sardonically. “Last I checked, Koenig and Schumacher came a few centuries short of household name status.”

“Well, Tim, that’s the surprise. Your ancestor’s company was a highly prosperous hardware and dry-goods concern in colonial America—a corporate bellwether of its day.”

Tim narrowed his eyes, flabbergasted by the unexpected revelation. “I don’t understand, Ezra; in our family lore, we’ve always affirmed that the Schumachers were, what our surname has indicated: small-town cobblers with a gift for things mechanical, but never much in the way of entrepreneurial trailblazers, at least until Mitch himself came along. The only claim to fame we’ve ever had was some, apocryphal legend that we made and repaired the shoes for George Washington’s soldiers at Valley Forge, during the American Revolution. Now you’re telling me—those old Schumachers were corporate moguls of the 18^th century? What happened to them?”

“One calamity after another, Tim. The Schumachers had planted roots in Germantown, right in the heart of Philadelphia, and half of your clan perished in the yellow fever epidemic of 1762—the one that Dr. Benjamin Rush, the famous physician of those days, wrote all his monographs about. Smallpox and typhus epidemics also took their toll.”

“Must have cut down the elder generations in particular,” said Tim, pensively tensing his lower lip, “and with them, the memory about where all those artifacts came from.”

“Precisely, Tim, and that’s not all,” said Ezra, drawing Tim’s attention to contemporary newspaper clippings of devastating events. “There were also the fires. One burned down the main Koenig and Schumacher warehouse in 1745, eliminating reams of corporate and personal records. And that story about the Schumachers serving as personal cobblers for colonial soldiers at Valley Forge? Turns out it’s true, and there’s a good reason for it. In the Battle of Germantown just a few months before, what remained of your ancestors’ business and homes, was largely razed to the ground in the clashes between the British and Washington’s troops. The Schumachers had become refugees, apparently still managing to hold onto those heirlooms—but with so many documents lost in the fires, alongside the toll from the epidemics, their own memory of the items was shorn from their origins, save for the fragmented oral traditions that you’ve kept in the family.”

“Memory… that it may now be too late to restore,” said Tim, shaking his head in somber resignation.

“Maybe not, Tim; the very misfortunes that wreaked so much misery on your ancestors may light the way today. Even though records about C.B. Schumacher himself have been largely lost, his partner, Stefan Koenig, is a different matter. Most of the Koenigs had migrated out of Philly before these calamities took their worst toll, and Stefan’s youngest son Georg resettled in Massachusetts. Most importantly for us—Georg was able to revive a branch of the Koenig-Schumacher hardware business.”

“Just… without the Schumachers, I presume.’

“True, but Georg left us a gem nonetheless,” said Ezra, proudly unveiling a wrinkled scroll—a copy of a cherished piece of family history, faithfully reproduced from the original to be admired by posterity. “Among the documents that ICHA archived was Georg’s tribute to his father, which he engraved and carefully preserved as part of the firm’s heritage. That tribute was an abridged biography, Tim, and Georg reveals that Stefan was a boyhood friend of C.B. Schumacher—his neighbor, in fact, a key clue that I was able to confirm elsewhere in the archives. They grew up together in the same small town in eastern Germany. And so in tracking down Stefan Koenig...”

“We find C.B. Schumacher as well.”

“Right. And fortunately for us, the colonial-era Koenigs have a paper trail. While C.B. Schumacher was the master artisan—handcrafting the wares of their fledgling hardware shop—Stefan Koenig handled the financial matters, much as I did for your uncle in our company. Stefan embarked repeatedly on trips to the Old Country, likely to attract capital from small investors, and there’s one place name that comes up repeatedly in his travels.”

Ezra painstakingly removed a passenger manifest from a sealed manila envelope, one belonging to a colonial-era sailing clipper registered under Stefan Koenig’s name. Tim grinned like a prize fighter eyeing his prey, as he spotted a heading that stood out on the grainy photocopy of 18^th-century parchment. “Borna!”

“It’s a town right outside Leipzig, Tim. I coaxed the Philadelphia ICHA into contacting their fellow archivists in Borna, and they were able to shine some light onto a bread crumb trail—though as with any such trail, the flock picks out more and more of the crumbs over time. What we know is that Schumacher and Koenig created a workshop in Borna on the property that had housed their boyhood homes. We also know that Stefan Koenig was in contact with a guild of craftsmen—likely as part of his capital-raising ventures—and they were based in central and eastern Borna. After connecting the dots, this is where I think everything converges.”

Tim’s eyes widened in anticipation as Ezra clasped a bright-red magic marker, circling a specific location on a satellite map of the city.

“A public library?” replied Tim in incredulous astonishment.

“Exactly. It’s called the ‘Bibliothek Martin Hayneccius,’ apparently after a poet who hailed from the city. Borna isn’t a metropolis but this Bibliothek is sizable, a landmark of that community. Whatever belongings C.B. Schumacher didn’t take to America, he probably maintained them there somehow, at that library… likely for safekeeping.”

“Why a library though?” queried Tim skeptically.

“Hear me out, Tim; this is my reasoning. If you had something that you wanted to safeguard, far away from home and over a long and indefinite period, where would you maintain it? You’d need a public institution that would stay open and remain in the same place over centuries, through thick and thin; that would have durable community support; and would have a well-trained, dedicated staff who could take care of things, even without necessarily realizing their importance.”

“Right, but why not a… museum?”

“Because there’s one more item on the wish list for such a place. In my past life, before I handled the financial matters at your uncle’s firm, I studied medieval and early-modern history—which for the purposes of our discussion, means constant pillage and plundering in Europe. Based on when Stefan and your ancestor set sail from Germany, they must have grown up in the wake of the devastation from the Thirty Years’ War, so they knew the kinds of clashes and upheavals that would tear through Central Europe from time to time. If you had something far away that needed protecting in a geographical hot zone, subject to internal conflict and invading armies from multiple sides, you wouldn’t use a museum; they’re often in a looter’s crosshairs.”

“OK, but why not a holy site? A church or a monastery?”

“That’s a possibility, and the records do hint at a church that’s connected to all this—it’s in one of the documents that I’m handing over to you. But most of the clues still point elsewhere. Even a church wouldn’t be the best safehouse for the centuries. Holy sites work only if an invader respects their sanctity, but ever since the Vikings raided Lindisfarne Abbey in England, even the clergy have long known that churches and monasteries become targets in war. Houses of worship, alas, tend to be full of priceless artifacts and relics, something that starving armies and pillaging mercenaries know too well; and during and after the Thirty Years’ War, Germany was invaded by about a dozen armies from across Europe and beyond. That’s why C.B. Schumacher must have safeguarded the remaining artifacts…”

“In a respected town library,” replied Tim, nodding in acknowledgment, “the kind of place the locals would maintain but that… even the most determined pillagers wouldn’t think to look for plunder. Why this one in particular, though?”

“You yourself had mused about a monk’s abbey serving as a safehouse, Tim; you were sniffing down the right trail, even if it doesn’t lead to a monastery per se. Take a look at this.” Ezra presented Tim with a frame containing a document, its contents inscribed in a meticulous Latin font.

“This is a plaque bearing the insignia of a monastic sect, the Order of St. Jerome,” continued Ezra, his voice suffused with a controlled yet unmistakable urgency. “It’s defunct now, but it was active in Central and Eastern Europe when your ancestor was growing up, collaborating with another Order—for which I’m still bereft of the details—to shelter refugees of the Thirty Years’ War. It was also active in helping some of them to settle in the Americans, hence the interest by members of the historical society; they themselves commissioned this facsimile, containing inscriptions by scribes within the Order in their original handwriting.”

“So… what’s the connection with Bibliothek in Borna?”

“The Order of St. Jerome also founded several houses of learning in the battle-scarred regions, as a way to help revive scholarly activity there. As I found out later, while combing through the records of Georg Koenig’s company, his father Stefan and C.B. Schumacher first encountered each other as boys—apparently orphaned by the war—in one of the churches maintained by the monks of St. Jerome.”

Tim’s eyes darted momentarily outside as gusts of wind angrily hammered the now-driving rain against the window, blurring his view of the harsh, darkened sky.

“Stefan and your ancestor,” continued Ezra intently, “were effectively raised by this monastic order, and their remaining possessions in Europe were willed to its members specifically to create an institution of learning according to certain guidelines, ‘for the edification of the townsfolk’; that’s in fact the mission that this plaque is detailing, in its Latin inscription. And within Borna itself, there’s one such institution in particular—in the eastern half of the city, as I expected—with which the Order is associated.”

“The Bibliothek Martin Hayneccius,” responded Tim in anticipation. “Have you been able to verify your conclusions?”

“Not with much success,” replied Ezra, in evident disappointment. “I made two calls to the Bibliothek, identified myself as an archivist hired to help you trace your roots—just to substantiate the C.B. Schumacher connection if nothing else. My German’s passable enough and I’m fairly sure we understood each other’s intentions. But I got the cold shoulder, and I don’t know if it’s because they were clamming up for some reason or they genuinely don’t know; it has been several centuries, after all. Or…”

“If we’re barking up the wrong tree,” interjected Tim, frowning slightly as he completed Ezra’s thought.

“Right,” replied Ezra in resignation. “I can’t be entirely certain about this lead, Tim. The way your uncle described the heirlooms to me, there seems to be a wall of secrecy surrounding them, and even if we’ve happened on a genuine link—further discoveries may not be so easily forthcoming. We may need to settle for whatever bits and pieces we can scrounge up, and then… go right to the presumed source. But I’m telling you, everything points toward this library as the key to this mystery, at least on where to go from here.”

Tim exhaled a drawn-out sigh as he struggled at a decision, furiously reviewing all the details set forth before him. He soon began nodding and tensing his chin, in a look of ardent determination. “Then this library will now be the first stop on my modified sabbatical plans. You’re right Ezra; it all makes sense, what we know about the heirlooms and the history that you and my uncle have been able to piece together. I’m not 100% on this myself, but it’s the best hint we’ve got now. The longer I dither, the more drawn-out this process becomes; and I have a feeling, time isn’t a luxury that I now have in abundance…”

Ezra narrowed his eyes slightly as he took in Tim’s last sentence, surprised at the tone of apprehensive urgency that Tim had expressed. Their train of thought was suddenly interrupted again, as a piercing thunderclap erupted just outside, startling them. “I must say,” began Ezra, momentarily redirecting the conversation after an uncomfortable pause, “the weather here in the Carolinas has become rather… unseemly, of late. I still do a fair amount of capital-raising, mostly for non-profits, since my not-so-official retirement alongside your Uncle Mitch, and I travel the country for it—but I’m usually right here in North Carolina during the springtime. And I don’t ever remember this… pall, over the state. You can almost taste something hostile in the air.”

Tim looked up with a start at Ezra’s otherwise innocent comment. For him, the words packed a far more literal punch than their speaker had intended, and he responded with calculated ambiguity. “I couldn’t argue with that; there’s something in the air these days, all right. And I’m not sure that we… Anyway, Ezra, I just can’t thank you enough. I now know who was really behind the success of Mitch’s company all these years.”

“Ah, Tim, you embarrass me with your praise. Your uncle was the great mind behind Magister Engineering, the true architect of its success. At least,” quipped Ezra, placing his hand beside his mouth in mock secrecy, “that’s what I always told him; let’s just keep the real truth between you and me, OK?”

The two laughed boisterously at the exchange. Moments later, to Tim’s surprise, Ezra rose from his chair, depositing a $5 bill on the table to cover his cappuccino. “Leaving already?” said Tim, rising out of his own seat in unison with his tablemate. “Why the hurry? I at least owe you a beer over at the bar, I insist; seriously, you’ve earned my lasting gratitude for all you’ve done on this.”

“Thanks for your generosity,” replied Ezra, making his way slowly toward the diner entrance with Tim following closely behind. “I’d love to, but my grandson’s birthday is tomorrow. I’m aiming to clean off my slate tonight, so as to be free tomorrow to spoil him with appropriately extravagant birthday gifts, as of course any rich Grandpa should.”

Tim shook his head with a wry, toothy smile. “I’d give anything to have been a fly on the wall when you and my uncle were kicking back at the office together. Too much dry wit for one room.”

“Oh, I could tell you stories, Tim—when the time permits. Anyway,” he said, extending his hand, which Tim duly and admiringly shook, “I’m off. Everything I’ve brought here pertaining to this investigation, it’s yours to keep. They’re all copies from the archives, no pilfered originals, so you’ve got a scrapbook’s worth of reference material here. In fact,” he said, stopping suddenly in his tracks, “when you arrive at the Bibliothek in Borna, Tim—you should probably show these things to the staff there. Document your identity, and use these records to link yourself to C.B. Schumacher and the Order of St. Jerome, and thence to this library. It may be your access pass to unlock whatever might be hiding in there.”

“I’ll do that Ezra,” replied Tim, intrigued by the suggestion. “You’re as much a part of this investigation as Mitch or I have been, so I’ll make sure you’re not left in the dark.”

“I appreciate the sentiment! Take care, Tim.” Ezra offered a half-salute as he moved toward the doorway. He retrieved his coat and umbrella from a hanger at the entrance, then with characteristic, businesslike efficiency, turned to exit the diner.

Tim made his way slowly back to his corner seat, with Ezra’s discoveries still splayed out in plain view on the tabletop. Despite the creeping fatigue from such a draining, mysterious, and generally ominous day, he felt momentarily invigorated; for once, he was not groping so completely in the dark. He barely noticed his cappuccino, which the waitress had deposited while he had been seeing Ezra off at the entrance, too deeply absorbed in the trail that was quickly being blazed before him. Tim carefully gathered the archival items that Ezra had meticulously distributed, sorting and prioritizing them back into their respective folders. He opened his briefcase to find a suitable compartment for the new acquisitions…

“Oh no—where the Hell is it?” he exclaimed suddenly.

Another item, which had earlier been in Tim’s possession, became conspicuous in its absence. The folder in which he had been storing his successive dream sketches, of the eerie scene centered about the same nightmarish creature that had haunted the Oak Ridge patients, was not within its assigned compartment—or anywhere else in the briefcase. “Bad time for this…” he murmured to himself.

He impulsively shoved the briefcase inside, cupping his hands before his pursed lips and closing his eyes in tortuous reflection, desperate to reconstruct his tracks and pinpoint where he might have left the folder. He replayed the torments of the day through his mind, leading all the way back to the last moment in which he had laid eyes upon the chilling sketches—at the auditorium in Wake Forest, after which his briefcase had remained closed for the rest of the day. As the realization sank in, Tim tightened his upper lip and gnashed his teeth; his drawings, images of personal nightmares that he desperately wanted to maintain private, were now likely to have an audience.

“Lookin’ for something, Boss?”

Tim reacted to the voice behind him with a mixture of startled surprise and relief. “Zach!” said Tim matter-of-factly. “What in the world possessed you to trek out all this way?”

“Shelley passed on the message of your afternoon plans, and I had a funny feeling, there’s something you’d like to have back ASAP,” replied Zach with a straight face, gently tossing Tim’s missing folder onto the table as thunder continued to pierce the air loudly outside. “You never did make it out to the Food Court before we took off, Chief; and after that little exchange we had at the Babcock Auditorium, I decided to make sure you hadn’t zapped yourself with that Twilight-Zone… whatever-it-was that you’d grabbed out of your briefcase. You were gone by the time I reached the auditorium, but I found this folder right by the speaker’s dais.”

Tim nodded with a hard-nosed sigh. “I take it, that you’ve seen its contents.”

“Had to try and trace it down, Boss. Once I took a peek under the hood—didn’t need 3 guesses to figure out the owner.” Zach seated himself on a chair opposite his mentor, who had craned his neck sideways as his protégé’s words sank in.

“Chief,” continued Zach in carefully couched sympathy, “I remember how you and the Doghouse Denizens stood by me 3 years ago after that ten-car-pile-up on the 15-501 Freeway, which I had the delightful experience of joining firsthand,” he said, in self-deprecating sarcasm. “All the little things you did—the care packages, the corny little well-wishes and kitschy gifts—they helped me to stay afloat while I was stuck in traction for a month, drugged-up and recovering. You all stood by me, now I’m standing by you. I know something’s going on, Boss. Talk to me.”

Tim sighed again and continued to stare out the window momentarily, as the dark, swirling pall of the tempest-ridden sky visited a premature twilight on the diner. He turned back obliquely in Zach’s direction before facing him again, uttering only a sigh as he prepared to speak.

“I’m all ears, Chief,” said the young man in anticipation.

“O.K., Zach. Let’s order a sandwich or salad first; there’s a lot to talk about.”

Zach nodded as Tim signaled the waitress, buying himself precious moments to gather his thoughts.

Wednesday, May 18, 4:08 p.m.

O’Malley’s Diner, East Chapel Hill, North Carolina

“So that’s the scoop, Zach. All these bizarre conundrums, across centuries squeezed into just the past week—and all of them related somehow, with this… link to that day in Oak Ridge when the mind-machine connection went live and stable. And all of that connected to these devices that, for reasons still unknown, have been passing through the generations of my family, all down to me.”

Zach tilted his head slightly downward while lifting his eyes, mentally reviewing Tim’s incredible recounting. Half-eaten sandwiches and tall glasses of iced tea sat before them, by now barely noticed by the two men; the subject at hand had temporarily pushed thoughts of thirst and hunger far from their minds. “Wow, Boss,” he said in a gently mocking tone, helping himself to absorb the enormity of what he was hearing. “When you sally forth to slay dragons, you don’t settle for the small fry, do you?”

“I just wanted to be an inspiration for all my young charges, Zach,” said Tim, playing along. “Besides, when it comes to slaying dragons—I was hoping this would be my own private war. I wasn’t exactly counting on the Cereceph doing its thing right at the tail end of a distressingly public lecture like that,” he continued in an ironic groan.

“Yeah,” replied Zach skeptically, “the Cereceph. Chief, you could probably surmise the first thing popping into my head when you started going off like that, on the Cereceph and all these heirlooms—one big stew of cockamaimie inanity, to put it euphemistically.”

“And you wouldn’t be the first,” muttered Tim in a gruff voice, Zach’s thoughts echoing his own. “When I first heard about the heirlooms from my Cousin Ernie and my Uncle Mitch—even as they themselves still fumbled for words to describe these things—I chalked it up to the battiness of rich relatives indulging their eccentricities in retirement. Until everything somehow began leading back to them, to El Día del Diablo and its own connection, whatever it is. Including…”

“Susan’s face on the monitor, at the lecture,” interjected Zach, his own mind in synch with Tim’s, who nodded in assent. “I know, Chief, and that, coupled with everything else you’ve expressed, all the way back to my thesis defense when I saw the look in your eyes, on receiving that call from Rachel—still so damn hard for me to absorb it, and I can’t make one iota of sense out of it. But there it is, right in front of us.” Zach shook his head, as though metaphorically attempting to wrap his mind around the incredible. “Talk about sailing in uncharted waters—gah, doesn’t begin to approach how unfathomable all this is. Tim, you’re sure… all these heirlooms in your family are legit, that they are what your uncle says they are?”

“100%, Zach. They’ve been in our clan for generations, records from 17^th-century shipping manifests, even radiocarbon dating—every piece of independent confirmation checks out. For me as much as you, it’s so beyond the ken of my comprehension to imagine that even today, in 2016, we don’t have the technology to do what the Cereceph and that, helmet can apparently do—to project the contents of our minds to the outside world, at a truly…integrated, conceptual level. At least, we in the sense of those of us, outside of whatever group of craftsmen were responsible for designing these things.”

“Craftsmen? I’d say your choice of words would qualify as an astronomical understatement, Boss. Based on what you just told me—there’s been an organization somewhere in Central Europe, in the shadows, that’s been manufacturing cutting-edge computational and neural mimicry technology… hundreds of years before the rest of us had even conceived of the vacuum tube. Makes me wonder what they’ve been up to in the intervening centuries, among other things.”

“That thought crossed my mind,” said Tim with an abortive chuckle, pausing for once to sip on the iced tea. “But seriously, there has to be a rock solid reason why they’ve been keeping all their work in the shadows—from their countries, from the broader scientific and commercial community. Why go through all this, to develop devices that you keep under lock and key from the broader world, and that nobody could even begin to appreciate until… right around now?”

“Maybe that’s the whole point, Chief,” replied Zach, in the tentative manner of someone still not quite able to accept what was before him. “Maybe they knew all along, that these things would matter only when the rest of the world caught up—maybe that is the ‘message across the centuries’ they’ve been trying to send out, as you put it. Like a… long-dormant spore, suddenly germinating when the conditions become right.”

Tim at once clenched his jaw and made a fist, lightly bobbing it against his chin as one of Zach’s remarks hit home. “Always a step ahead, Zach,” he said, lauding his protégé’s acumen. “You really may have hit on something here. Maybe a clue about this link, with the Oak Ridge events…”

“The Vision Center in Oak Ridge again,” interjected Zach, in a tone of flabbergasted consternation. “You chill my spine every time you mention it now, Boss. I spent a couple years volunteering in downtown hospitals, and I caught sight of some ugly scenes from time to time—gunshot wounds, stabbings, your standard menu of urban misery and then some—but half a dozen guys, sketching the same nightmare, going helter-skelter with the bloody walls?” Zach turned aside momentarily, gulping down some of his own tea as if to dispel the aftertaste of a disturbing thought. “I’m at a loss for words to express the vibe I’m getting about it but… it doesn’t just sound uncanny, Chief. There’s something flat-out evil lurking in there.”

Tim was taken aback by Zach’s words, far more than he expected. Zach had not even traveled to the Oak Ridge facility, yet he was airing a distressful thought that had briefly occurred to Tim himself when he was there, one far too disquieting to be granted a hearing within his own mind. “Yeah, Zach,” he muttered in a low voice, grasping at an awkward transition in the conversation, “which is maybe… all the more reason that I have to track down these family artifacts without delay, right at their source.”

“Which you think is in this town, right outside Leipzig?”

“I’m not certain, but Borna seems to be a link in the chain; it’s my only lead.”

“Right, and you really are in an epic hurry to pursue it. Travel plans for Friday morning? I thought I was the one with the well-deserved infamy for impulsiveness around the Doghouse.”

“Then I suppose I’m taking after your bad habits for a change, Zach,” chuckled Tim, in a brief but much-welcomed hiatus from a conversation growing heavier from the anxieties of the challenge soon to be confronted.

Zach grinned feebly, but for once, he eschewed his mentor’s attempt at diversionary banter, maintaining an uncharacteristically sober countenance with every word. “Boss, honestly, have you really thought all this through? When you’re in Borna, what happens even if you do find this… whatever you’re seeking out with such zeal? What’s the next step?”

“I don’t know, Zach. It’d be an understatement to say that nothing in my career has prepared me for this; it’s all terra incognita from here on out. I can hardly imagine what I’ll find, but every fiber in my body is telling me that, whoever forged all these tools in the first place… they’ve been waiting centuries for us to seek them out again. Somewhere in the collective memory of our family, our link to this history was severed and I have to reconstitute it now, to rediscover what they were trying to communicate to us all those centuries ago.”

Zach nodded, his gaze initially averted as a wave of thunder oscillated about the diner, close enough to lightly shake the lime green-paneled lamps dangling above the table. “Heck of a way to kick off your sabbatical, Boss. We all knew you’d be in wind-down mode by Friday anyway, just didn’t expect it’d take shape like this. Do you have any contacts out there, any way to navigate on your own?”

Tim wrinkled his nose in uncertainty as Zach pressed the inquiry. He was improvising and he knew it; the details had slipped through the cracks. “I’m on shaky ground with this Zach, I’ll admit it. This has all just developed so quickly… and my German has gone rusty to say the least, even what little I can still handle has a heavy Chinese accent overlaid, or so I’m told.”

Zach narrowed his eyes and stifled an incredulous laugh. “Chief, you really are full of one surprise after another today. German with a Chinese accent? How’d you manage that feat?”

**************************

Tim’s initial smile gave way to an ambiguous expression and a long pause, as his reminiscence advanced into delicate territory. The raindrops by now were hammering against the windows of the diner at an oblique angle, like a flurry of arrowheads assaulting a bulwark. “It was… where I met Susan, Zach; you’ve never heard the whole story. She and I were both independently in Shanghai, right around 1990; it was before China’s ascent to take the reins. Hard to believe it was a mere 25 years ago, when they were still just opening up to Western students in their universities.”

Tim paused momentarily before proceeding, as though to prep himself internally for a treacherous emotional journey. “Susan was an undergraduate in psychology at the time; she’d won a Luce Scholarship, at Vassar College, to collaborate on field work with professors at Fudan University. I was in the middle of engineering grad school at Northwestern, and I was appointed as one of the trailblazers, so to speak, to help spark trans-Pacific research collaborations with counterparts at Tongji University.”

“And in the middle of this hulking metropolis in a faraway land, thousands of miles from home,” interjected Zach with a grin, phrasing his words with the utmost circumspection to avoid rattling delicate emotional eggshells, “two Americans, complete strangers, meet and… the rest is history. You’re a magnet for the incredible, Tim.”

Tim lightly shook his head in paradoxical assent; Zach’s thoughts echoed ones that had redounded in his own mind before. “The rational side of me always said, that it wasn’t really much of a coincidence, despite appearances. The American students attending the Shanghai universities then—we were all housed within the same block of apartments. It was a way to make sure we had some community there, some reminder of home in such a distant, unfamiliar realm that was itself fast evolving, getting its own bearings at the time. So I told myself, after Susan and I had been dating a while, it wasn’t actually so improbable that she and I met in that little Shanghai alley among the street shoppers, all those years ago. We were more or less housed together, moved and shopped in the same range of city blocks, snacked at the same little urban cafés. We would’ve met sometime later, anyway, I always told myself. And yet…”

Tim’s recollections sparked a sweet yearning of which he was profoundly ambivalent. Even the most transient venture into that corner of his mind was fraught with sentiments that would tug violently in many directions as they played themselves out. Zach, for his part, silently and intently absorbed everything his mentor was saying. For years, Tim had listened to and lent his protégé a helping hand during Zach’s own setbacks and travails; even in the wake of the tragedy in Suriname, Tim had scrupulously maintained a façade of resolute stoicism, concealing his own tears behind the ostensible duties of his office and the needs of his students. Now, for the first time, the shoe was on the other foot, and Tim’s own emotional vulnerability was plain to see.

“The fact that Susan and I met right then in China, when we did, under those awkward circumstances and in that disoriented, fish-out-of-water state of mind that we both had—it was a chain of unbelievably improbable, often ironic events that brought us together. And despite all my own, overly rational dismissals to the contrary, my heart of hearts always tells me the same thing. That what Susan and I built together, maybe what couples in general build together, including you and Lucy—it’s one of the most extraordinary phenomena on earth, every time it happens.”

Tim paused in his recounting, guiding his reminiscences to stay within a carefully circumscribed emotional zone within his mind, made all the more necessary by the heart-wrenching images he had endured over the past three days. “All the crazy, unscripted, wildly implausible things that led up to Susie and I becoming… us, and the things she and I did together afterward: No matter how many times my engineer’s mind tells me I have a handle on the law of large numbers, that I’ve got probabilities and likelihoods worked out and under control, everything with Susan tells me something else. Corny as it all sounds, each case of falling in love and what follows it, must be some brand of miracle, one seemingly impossible but very real—verifiably, empirically real—miracle that’s imprinted, etched on the cosmos itself. It’s just that, you can’t depend on miracles…”

As Zach continued to imbibe his mentor’s heartfelt words, he saw Tim’s emotional deflation play out right before his eyes, as the mere hint of agonizing memories began to take their toll. Sensing the cloud of tension that had begun to coalesce—mirrored by the increasingly dark, impenetrable stormclouds of the now raging tempest outside—he adroitly endeavored to steer the conversation away. “Well… I’ve long suspected it’s a cosmic-scale miracle that Lucy’s still with me after the serial misadventures I’ve put her through, I can say that at least.”

Tim, with gaze averted, exhaled in a chuckle at Zach’s deftly self-deprecating jab. “Yeah, there I go again, veering off on that tangent,” resumed Tim, sporting an ironic smile as he refocused himself. “As I was saying, this ‘German with a Chinese accent’—it was one of those wildly improbable things, which added to the whole mythology that Susan and I surrounded our relationship with, and the circumstances in which our love first blossomed.”

Tim smiled tentatively again, as quirky and humorous recollections refilled his mind. “German is a language of instruction at Tongji, one of those historical peculiarities that goes back a century; and it’s how we communicated there, the Americans and our Chinese collaborators. Or at least, tried to communicate; I’d done the technical German courses like everyone else, but I could hardly speak a lick of it in an actual one-on-one exchange. So when it came to picking up conversational German, as opposed to the book-learning I’d done initially, I more-or-less soaked up the style and mannerisms of Professor Lin Tai-Tsung—back in the days before he was world-renowned, and just getting his own moorings as my chief collaborator for that year at Tongji. Even to the point of peppering my own German with the same sing-song accent, that Professor Lin must have carried over from his native Chinese.”

“Must have been one heck of a conversation-starter at conferences, Chief,” said Zach, with an amused smile.

“Oh, it definitely was, Zach, probably to my benefit; if nothing else, it gave me an excuse to hone and chisel the language bit by bit over the following years, even helped to smooth the way for some fruitful collaborations especially with European research teams. I never did quite get fluent, and I always retained Professor Lin’s curious accent; but for some decades after that, I just kept at. Until…”

Tim choked back a lump in his throat and gritted his teeth, as he prepared to tread through a minefield of memories he had been so painstakingly avoiding. He proceeded in a deliberate, business-like tone, as if to maintain a tolerable distance from his own recollections. “After I lost Susan in Suriname, I… so many of the things that reminded me of our relationship in those early days, just became too difficult to revisit. For almost a year, I shelved some of those early pictures from Shanghai that she and I took. There was a little jade figurine that I bought for Susie in an alleyway, the first time I met her; I couldn’t lay eyes on it for nearly two years, it would just dredge up too much anguish. And even many things that were less concrete, like my own peculiar Chinese-accented German—the very thing that made it so quirky and unique, also made it unbearable for me to hear myself speak it again. It was a part of me that was inextricably linked to Susan, to that crazy time in Shanghai under those crazy circumstances that we both met and fell in love. And after I lost her on that mountain road in Suriname, those same memories became like a curse every time they came rushing back in.”

“It’s amazing sometimes,” said Zach, in a consciously sympathetic tone and studiously avoiding a trace of his usual sarcasm, “how otherwise insignificant objects, even little aspects of our own personality can be these… vessels, pregnant with so many events and memories wrapped up within them.”

“Yeah,” replied Tim plaintively, without looking Zach directly in the eye, “Susie always used to say that, too—she even had a name for it, ‘the Madeleine Effect.’ She was a fan of Marcel Proust and In Search of Lost Time, especially given her own focus as a psychologist; and just as the madeleine in Proust’s novel could trigger so many memories again, so it is with these little things that Susan and I shared together. Not even merely triggering memories; it’s almost as though, they can reconstitute a sliver of lost time in the past, with all its sights, sounds, and smells intact again just as Proust himself had been hinting—the whole tapestry of that singular moment, forever revived. It’s just that, Susie’s not there when I wake up from the reverie, and then it’s too much to take.”

Tim’s voice nearly cracked as he finished the sentence, and he breathed deeply before continuing. When he resumed, his voice carried hints of what seemed to be relief, that he had been able to revisit that excruciating past, and emerge intact. “So to make a long story short, Zach—that’s why my Chinese-accented German has fallen off over the years. I just couldn’t bear to listen to my own words, since they’d remind me too much of the way Susan and I met in Shanghai, and everything I lost later on that awful day. So it ebbed away, more and more, with each passing week. And now, unbelievably, I’m about to pay a price for it when I actually do need it. Truth is, Zach, I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to manage out there in Borna and, wherever else this takes me. Maybe my German will all come back to me, as they say, or maybe not; but I never was fluent to begin with. And something tells me, this won’t be the kind of touristy trip where artful body language and mangled sentences will suffice for communication.”

Zach pursed his lips as though preparing a response, then shot a subtly oblique gaze to Tim’s side, reflecting for a moment before speaking. A thought had occurred to him, an offer for assistance that would be no small step to take. The conversation in the diner had aroused deep sympathy within Zach for his mentor, and he wanted to step back for a moment, to confirm for himself that his coming suggestion could stand on its own merits—that he could otherwise justify and reasonably provide it under what were likely to be trying circumstances for them both. “Boss, I… I might be able to help you there.”

“Come again, Zach?” replied Tim, tilting his head in curiosity.

“My German’s fluent, Tim. That little stint in the Swiss key chalet, before grad school, paid some unanticipated dividends.”

“I always knew you were quick on the uptake, Zach—but fluent after just a summer in a Swiss resort?” said Tim, narrowing his eyes in skepticism.

“Oh, it was more than just a summer,” replied Zach, with raised eyebrows. “While we’re both divulging our long-buried past to each other here—I never related the whole story to you or anyone else in the Doghouse, but when it comes to being impulsive, I’ve got you beat by miles, Boss. Turns out that Shelley Deloria and I, we were undergraduate classmates up in New York, the same graduation class at Union College—even though she’s already into her postdoctoral fellowship here and changing the world, while I just finished pretending I actually know something in my thesis defense.”

“I was supposed to have started my doctoral program at Duke, the same year Shelley got hers rolling at Johns Hopkins U.,” resumed Zach following a brief pause. “But one fine Friday in December of my senior year, I inexplicably decided to take off for the Alps, almost on a lark. I had all my graduation credits wrapped up anyway so, that Sunday, I bought my tickets to Switzerland and spent the next 2 ½ years running a lodge and skiing—or finding ever more creative ways to fall flat on my backside, would perhaps be more accurate—up in St. Moritz.”

“So, that’s why you kept sneaking out in the middle of the Aspen conference,” chuckled Tim, happily seizing the invitation for a change of subject. “The sight of snow up in the mountains must have been like catnip to a ski bum like you.”

“Aspen was a taste of heaven, Chief, but St. Moritz was the real thing. It started on the whimsiest of whims; an old high school friend had relocated out to the Austrian Alps and was doing the ski-lift thing. He sent me a letter and an Email with scores of photos of the Alpine slopes, and I was hooked. Took me all of a weekend to dump my dorm belongings in storage, and take the next flight out to Switzerland. I thought I’d just hang out for a couple months, backpack through the mountains and slum around in cheap hostels, maybe earn some spare change as a part-time ski instructor—then get prepped for grad school here in North Carolina. But two months became 2 years and change; I deferred my matriculation here, and wound up heading up one of the small lodges there in St. Moritz.”

Zach sipped his tea and shook his head slightly in amused reflection. “Shelley’s dutifully kept my secret about this all these years, but that’s the backstory for you. And the upshot is, after 2 ½ years of skiing, hitchhiking, and vagabonding across Central Europe, my German’s pretty darn reliable, Boss; I can be your ears there.”

Tim rubbed his chin between his thumb and index finger, trying to process such an anticipated offer. Like a poker player scanning every facial ridge and eye movement of an opponent, trying to divine his true intentions, Tim subtly but intensively sought to glean what his protégé was trying to suggest. He began to regret opening up so much to Zach, sensing that the young man’s generosity might be a reflexive response to such a wrenching personal history, on display for the first time.

“Zach, you were always one to go the extra mile at the Doghouse—we all know that. I greatly appreciate your consideration here, but I… obviously can’t ask you to do something like this. I’m barely able to convince myself it’s a good idea, let alone jumping ship just two days from today for it. Don’t worry; my rich uncle set up a well-endowed fund for me to help pursue this, and I could probably just hire some help out there if it becomes necessary. And don’t feel obligated to go out on such a limb for me, just because I’ve helped you in the past; that’s my job after all as your mentor and thesis advisor, it’s supposedly what they pay me for there on campus. Besides, you’ve more than repaid any conceivable debt with everything you’ve contributed to our research effort, above and beyond the call of duty.”

“Chief—I’m not just putting this out there to console you or earn Brownie points, although I’m always currying Brownie points…” said Zach, in a characteristically facetious aside. “Look, as far as felicitous opportunities come, nothing beats this. Since my thesis defense, I’ve been planning to trek out across the Atlantic soon anyway, job-hunting if nothing else. You know as well as I do that I’m not of the temperament for academia, and the job market’s awfully tight here these days outside of it, so I’ve been planning on a junket out to my old stomping grounds. Maybe in Darmstadt or Gera, since I still have some contacts there, but don’t worry, I can improvise wherever we go. Besides, my wanderlust took me to all kinds of small hamlets in the German countryside when I was bumming around there after college, so I could help you navigate in Borna or, wherever the trail leads you, Boss.”

Tim continued to look on unmoved, grasping at straws to dissuade his protégé if he had anything less than a genuine commitment to what he was proposing. Even with all that he had told Zach about the mysterious artifacts and the frightening events of recent days, Tim had kept the most alarming aspects to himself—especially the apocalyptic message on the clay tablet, and his own dark suspicious that the menace striking the patients at Oak Ridge, whatever its nature, had already spread well beyond the confines of that campus. He was uncertain what to expect in Borna and beyond, but he sensed that their findings might leave scarce opportunity for job-hunting visits or other detours.

“Zach, are you really sure you’re up for this? Obviously if you tag along on such short notice, I’ll cover the plane tickets and other expenses; as I said, my Uncle Mitch has set up a fund to more than handle the costs for two gumshoes out there, stumbling around in the dark. But it’s going to be an open-ended, one-way ticket, because I can’t anticipate what we’ll find; and whatever we’re up against, I have a feeling it goes far beyond these horrors at Oak Ridge, nightmarish as they are already.”

Zach nodded with resolve, focusing past an especially jarring thunderbolt that rocked the diner, sending the overhead lamps teetering and flickering. “Count me in, Chief; I’m on your team. I don’t even have to worry about the dissertation revisions for a while. After I’d recovered from my serial hangovers over the weekend, I chained myself to my computer and made the changes recommended by the thesis committee, then sent them out in the wee hours Monday morning. Dr. Ecevit already gave me the thumbs-up on the broad outlines, and said the rest of the committee will be taking a week to chew on the new revision, with little anticipated in the way of further modifications. So I’m freed up now, Boss; it’s no skin off my back to join you out there in Borna.”

He sipped on his tea again, stretching out another brief interlude to gauge the lingering ambivalence on his mentor’s face. “Tim, I’ll say it straight out,” he continued, this time bypassing tacit hints and intimations to state his case explicitly. “I know there’s more to this than you’re telling me even now, and it’s obviously something of grave importance. I know you, Boss, probably a lot more than you suspect; I don’t talk about it much, but I observe people every day, to see what makes them tick, and that’s how I know there’s something deadly serious going on here. You’re hard-nosed and skeptical, just about always in control of your circumstances, and even when you aren’t, you go to great lengths to convey such an impression. This time, every layer of that carefully constructed front has been peeled away, and you’re more patently rattled, uncertain, and clearly not in control than I’ve ever seen you before, even after Suriname.”

Tim averted his gaze, surprised at Zach’s unusually blunt assessment, yet coming to accept it just the same. “Chief, you said it yourself to me yesterday, after you related that conversation with your daughter in the wake of your lunchtime fender-bender,” resumed Zach after a brief pause. “Call it intuition, preconscious understanding, a sixth sense, whatever—but there really are instances when some, intelligence, forged on-the-spot within our own minds, becomes cognizant of something before we’re conscious of it ourselves. Especially in our line of work, when we’re constantly striking out into the unknown; I know it and you know it. I’m still wresting with what to believe about this, advanced neural-computational hardware supposedly assembled in some 17^th-century workshop. But your own uncharacteristic reaction to this whole thing, on top of what you’ve spelled out, says in bright neon letters that some part of you realizes loud and clear that there’s a threat out there, that we have to confront and we have to do it now. Let me help you.”

Tim nodded, gradually embracing the conclusions of his resourceful protégé. Despite nagging doubts about the unfolding plans—borne in no small part from Tim’s lingering anxieties about his own mission—he no longer harbored any questions about the young man’s determination. “You never can keep a good man down,” said Tim, with a slightly aloof smile before looking squarely in Zach’s direction. “I’m taking off at the crack of dawn on Friday for Leipzig; there’s usually a connection or two through Frankfurt, London, or Paris, so it can be quite a long haul, but this way we’ll arrive late on Friday night and can sleep off the jet lag. I’ll make the preliminary arrangements tonight and run them by you. Just take the rest of the day off, pack a little and relax. Because I have a feeling that after Friday, our world’s gonna spin a lot faster on its axis.”

“Anything special I should pack for the trip?”

“Just a few changes of clothes and your ever-sharp mind Zach. Although it might also be useful if you could sneak your laptop in with the rest of your luggage; never hurts to have a little extra computing power at our disposal. I’ll be in the Doghouse tomorrow morning anyway, mainly just to tackle administrative matters for the sabbatical, and we can iron out any last-minute wrinkles if need be. I’ve gotta take off tomorrow by 1 p.m. sharp, so I’ll make sure we’ve tied up all the loose ends before that.”

“Meeting tomorrow, Boss?”

“No, Zach,” said Tim, his reply framed with a hard-headed pursing of the lips. “Just an old friend who’s in town—with whom I’m long overdue for a little reunion.”

Zach cocked his head in initial puzzlement at the oblique reference, then shrugged it off and silently mouthed his assent to the plan. The two men moved to finish their tea and sandwiches, as balls of lightning periodically blazed through the dusky, saturated bleakness of the tempest outside.

Thursday May 19, 4:51 p.m.

Lingle Chapel, Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina

“And so in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, I speak here today in an unusual capacity, delicately balancing two very distinct hats on this shiny bald pate of mine.” Scattered giggles erupted in the audience, as the warmly engaging, yet undoubtedly imposing man continued at the pulpit. “On the one hand, I come as Pastor George McAllister of Agape Presbyterian Church in Hanover, New Hampshire, visiting the state and alma mater of which I’m a proud native son. On the other, I also come as a fellow with a very different life before I took the pulpit in Hanover. As someone who for years wrestled with my own beliefs and acute doubts and even today, despite the soothing certainty I sometimes project to my congregation, am still riddled by uncertainties about even basic doctrines that I address in my sermons.”

A man sat silently in the back row of the chapel, clasping a fedora hat held close to his chest in the crowded pews, as the booming voice of the pastor resumed from the pulpit.

“On the one hand, many of you here today are my fellow Christians, some even belonging to the same denomination as my own church. On the other, many of you are equally my brothers and sisters of the human fellowship, but belonging to other faiths—to Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Jainism, or a host of other creeds—or in many cases, to no firm faith at all, whether you reject such beliefs or profess uncertainty thereof. On the one hand, I’ve spoken of fundamental topics at the theological and historical heart of my own faith, particularly about the concept of resurrection in its various guises—of all souls at Judgment Day, of Lazarus by Jesus, the founder of our creed, and of our founder himself after his crucifixion. On the other, I’ve addressed the very same topic outside the tenets of my faith, pondering the significance of these events—as metaphors or as something more—within the context of exploring an even deeper meaning for them outside of any peremptory dogma, especially among those of you who may not subscribe to the same faith that I profess.

“And this, Ladies and Gentleman, brings us right to the heart of the matter today, of what this ecumenical gathering truly means for us. We come as adherents of often widely divergent, and seemingly incompatible belief systems that purport to address the unprovable. In some cases, our theological differences, however minor, have coalesced to become arbitrary yet deep-rooted markers of distinct human cultures—which have often served as a regrettable source of conflict in the past, even as they have granted solidarity at other times. Yet all of us here, no matter what our religious belief systems or lack thereof, are able to gather under this roof today. Why? Because, despite our often doleful histories and not-so-successful attempts at coexistence, there is something that all of us do indeed have in common: A striving for something transcendental, to recapitulate the act of creation through our own hands and minds.”

The man in the back pew of the chapel jerked his shoulders with a startle, as his mobile phone emitted a characteristic chirp from his briefcase, indicating a new text message. He quickly moved to silence the tone and shift the phone into a vibrate mode, shaking his head and muttering under his breath in self-criticism for not having done so earlier.

“Today alone, in this very chapel,” concluded the pastor, “our music has encompassed cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach, masses by Franciszek Lilius, villancicos by Juan de Araujo—all from the so-called sacred musical canon. Yet in the most secular concert hall performed by the most secular choir, as any aficionado can appreciate, these same sacred hymns will be sung and this devotional music played with just as much fervor as in our chapel today. And they’ll redound with the same great spirit of inspiration. Because human beings at our very core, no matter how we sort ourselves out, refuse to simply take our surroundings for granted, to remain in ignorance, or to resign ourselves to a static world that could never be transcended, improved, or advanced. And every time we as individuals or a society engage in an act of construction or creation, whatever God we pray to or whatever philosophy we subscribe to, we bring ourselves—all of us—a step closer to that transcendence that calls out to us, every day.”

The congregation stood in heartfelt applause for the pastor, as attendees at the gathering moved quickly to exit the chapel and savor what remained of the afternoon—a rare sunny respite from the incessant assault of storms that had intruded, perplexingly out of season, into the Carolina springtime. One figure, the man in the back row, lingered behind, slowly approaching the pulpit as the minister had turned to address and congratulate the choir.

“Pastor George, welcome home; it’s been a long time, my old friend.”

The pastor turned toward Tim’s voice, surprised by its unexpected familiarity. “My, my, reunions are truly abounding today. If it isn’t the august Professor Shoemaker, come to grace my humble service on a Thursday afternoon. Never expected to spot you among my flock today, but I suppose that blessings really do come in waves.” He pivoted briefly toward the choral director. “Janice, I’ll join you and the choir in a minute.” The woman smiled as she slipped back with the other singers, allowing room for the minister to engage his unplanned visitor.

Pastor George was a tall man who towered over Tim himself, with hulking shoulders, piercing blue eyes, and a prominent rounded scalp that he maintained cleanly-shaven. His imposing appearance and his powerful voice were suggestive of a boxer, an army platoon leader, or a hard-nosed bouncer at an upscale urban club; yet that same voice was also given to utterances of deep contemplation, and the gentle, compassionate demeanor of a pastor who cared deeply for his flock.

“Tim,” he said in a tone of warm welcome, “how have you been these days?”

“Better than I was last time I touched base in December—well, in some ways. We finally got the research foundation award to fund our operations back at the Doghouse. I’m telling you, the way grant funding has been drying up of late, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the other budding gearheads back in engineering decide to follow in your career footsteps soon.”

“Well, we can’t have that,” replied the minister dryly. “Prior to today, I was firmly convinced that I’d cornered the market on the washed-up, drunken, bar-brawling ex-physics grad students-turned pastor crowd throughout the East Coast. I’m not sure the synod can handle more than one of us around here.”

“I doubt they’ll have to. You’re truly one-of-a-kind, George, and the world’s the better for it,” chuckled Tim in response.

“So what brings you all the way out to Davidson, Tim? Trekking in from Durham isn’t exactly a minor afternoon stroll, though I must say I’m flattered by your presence.”

Tim stiffened his lower lip in what seemed to be a half-smile, then converted a stifled word into a sigh. “George, truth is, the last week has been one unceasing trudge through a minefield; I won’t bore you with the details, but a lot of things have been crammed in suddenly to, bring a lot of my own basic beliefs into question, and you’re probably the one guy in this hemisphere who could understand me… Among other things I, uh—“

Tim paused and rolled his eyes as he fumbled for a way to express thoughts that were nearly inexpressible. He ultimately opted to filter them through recent experiences, which he began to relate as George looked on silently, in a look of soothing authority.

“Earlier this week, of all the people on this green earth to encounter, I ran into Priscilla Lehto at the Rush Hour Café; she’s running a sales team for a pharmaceutical company apparently, and they’ve posted her at the Medical Center. Our little reunion was polite and… as painfully awkward as you’d probably imagine. And then when I dashed back home, all the bottled-up thoughts over the past three years, about Susan and that day in Suriname, about all my blunders leading up to it—they came pouring back in, like a flash flood.”

The pastor continued to look on in sympathetic silence as Tim gathered his thoughts, still uncertain about exactly what to reveal to his ex-colleague and confidant. “And ever since then, it’s as though I’ve been coming unhinged—I began to, actually see Susan, George. And I don’t just mean in idle daydreams; I mean, seeing her, right before my eyes. It’s occurred three times now, and more than merely an image or a projection, it’s Susan’s very being, her essence right before me. Her idiosyncrasies, the way she’d wear the bangs on her brown hair, the sweet half-shrug of her right shoulder when looking out and surveying a scene before her, it was all there and…”

Pastor George placed his burly hand on Tim’s shoulder, comforting him as he gazed downward and choked back the intruding tears. “Tim, just take your time.”

“All this torment over the past few days, I still can’t make sense out of it all, but it just brings me back forevermore, to that day in Suriname. George, I’ve related things to you in regard to Susan, details that I’ve never even expressed to my own family. And even then, I never fully disclosed what transpired there on Crijnssen Road. Susan had accompanied me to the conference in Chile, for the business side of my trip, and the mountain retreat in Suriname was the surprise for her. Before we struck that boulder, Susan heard the rumbling and mentioned it, suggested we pull over and make sure it there wasn’t a lurking danger. Me, being the stubborn fool that I was, I just dismissed it as some tropical thunder off a mountain road, even though I could have pulled off onto the scenic overlooks that were there at each twist of the mountain. By the time we caught sight of the boulder right around one of the tight bends—I couldn’t slow the car down, and the lights went out until I… woke up at the hospital in Paramaribo, and the doctor told me about Susan…”

Tim’s eyes were welling up now despite his earnest efforts to fight the tears. “She was wrenched away from me, George, cruelly taken away. I thought that after three years, the rawness of the memories would have been blunted. And maybe they were, on some level. But they’re never far beneath the surface, and that moment never really diminished; now, it’s with me day and night again. I wonder sometimes, if Susie’s soul is just… right there all the time, so close that I can see and feel her if I look for her. If I could actually, even grasp what that means,” he said, shaking his head.

“Perhaps, you already do know the answer to that, Tim,” said George, in a soothing, deep voice.

Tim looked up, initially baffled at the pastor’s implication.

“Depending on where I was in my long and winding career, Tim, I could have supplied you with a multitude of definitions for the human ‘soul.’ If you’d queried me back when I was at UNC and NC State, abortively following in your footsteps in that biomedical engineering program, I would have called up some reference to… integrated, parallel circuit patterns in the brain, some physical structure among our nerve cells’ synaptic connections that would correlate with what we recognize as feeling, with personality. If you’d asked me when I joined you at Northwestern, dropping everything for my next abortive attempt at the physics doctorate—and before I’d become so washed-out from booze and brawling that I couldn’t tie my own shoes—I probably would have defined the soul as, some informational state forged by an unusually complex interaction of macromolecules within our nervous system. If you’d asked me when I’d just joined the seminary en route to becoming a pastor, I’d have said that the soul is a unique, irreducible font of life, and of consciousness, that connects us to the divine.”

George paused to allow Tim to take in and digest his words. He instantly appreciated that Tim had been less than forthcoming when describing his recent visions of Susan; equally, he sensed that Tim had a good reason for doing so.

“All of these conceptions, Tim, and many more, have something in common: They bring you to Susan’s unique imprint and presence, upon you and upon the world. You said it yourself, when you attached such importance to the little things about Susan, the bangs of her hair and the tiny gestures and mannerisms that she’d have around you.”

“Something like… the impression she still evokes within my mind” replied Tim as though answering a formal question, if nothing else to distance himself somewhat from the emotional deluge that had recently become nearly overpowering for him.

“Partly that, Tim, but even more—much, much more. Do you remember those seminars on probability theory at Northwestern, with Professor Shah? He was always fond of dressing up his arcane discussions about set theory, large numbers, discrete and continuous numerical series—all by imagining that we earthlings could construct a wormhole and go billions of light-years away, to an array of earth-like planets in some distant galaxy, and assess whether we’d recognize historical events there as resembling our own at least in part. It was his way of… having us conceptualize the true meaning of unique events and phenomena, even in the context of an extremely large pool of possibilities.”

“And here’s the thing, Tim,” said George, clasping his shoulder again. “Even if you could hop into Dr. Shah’s metaphorical spaceship, if you could find another Timothy Alexander Shoemaker and Susan Venizelos Shoemaker on one of these distant earths—everything about Susan, and your interaction with her, would still be entirely unique. The contingent history that she traced out, all her little idiosyncrasies and the way you fell in love with them; they mark out a unique imprint on the cosmos, especially on the world that we experience. And when you feel Susan’s soul about you, that is what you’re sensing—a signature of eternity that came into existence with Susan and then evolved with every subsequent moment, and which you became a part of when the two of you began your relationship.”

Tim now held his head high, looking squarely at his old friend with an expression of deep contemplation and slowly developing comprehension.

“Susan’s soul, Tim, still exists and always does exist, in the most concrete manner, since she manifested her unique presence in the world—a presence which you yourself became a part of nearly 25 years ago.”

“When these visions of Susan materialize before me now,” said Tim, continuing to look the pastor squarely in the eye, “… I just wish I knew what they’re trying to tell me.”

George pondered for an intense moment, without averting his gaze, as he sought to express his thoughts. “What they’re trying to tell you, Tim… is that you need to find Susan again.”
“To… find her?”

“I don’t know what you’re searching for now, Tim, and it’s not my business to know. But whatever it is—Susan holds the key, and it’s through her that you’ll find what you’re seeking. Only you can discover exactly what this means but… you have to find her again.”

Tim looked slightly aside and exhaled a shallow sigh, as he chewed on the pastor’s cryptic words. “Tim, I have to rejoin the choir back there for a moment,” he said, amiably slapping Tim’s upper arm and gesturing toward the back of the chapel, “we have to make plans for our Sunday Service; my house here is your house too, so feel free to stay as long as you need.”

“Thanks, old friend, I appreciate everything,” said Tim in an unusually soft voice, still occupied with the riddle of the pastor’s words. He decided to rest his mind for a moment and check the text message on his cellular phone, whose signal he had hurriedly suppressed in the back pew of the chapel. As he reactivated the screen and scanned the elliptical words thereupon, he was startled by what he saw.

“Tim, Rachel here, can call soon? Things spinning out of control here lately PLEASE HELP.”

Thursday, May 19, 7:14 p.m.

Apartment of Renee Tsai, Erwin Road, Durham, North Carolina

“Honey, you forgot to turn down the burner again; remember when you’re making the congee, you have to dial down the heat as soon as the rice starts boiling.”

“Not at all, dear; it’s just the Zach Choi recipe. I prefer my congee well-done, just like my steaks.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Zach,” laughed Renee, clasping her arms around Zach’s torso, just above a sweatshirt wrapped about his waist, “but you’re adorable as always for trying.”

“And you, my dear” replied Zach, pivoting around as he shook off his spatula into the pot of bubbling porridge, “are adorable with every little twitch of your lips and flutter of your pretty eyes.” He looked slightly downward toward her wide, deep-brown irises, pressing his nose against her forehead as they embraced.

“Well!” said Renee, smiling slyly as she gamely pushed herself away from Zach, folding her arms with her hands poised just below the sleeve line of her violet, floral-themed blouse. “Since you claim to have taken notice of my fluttering eyes and other idiosyncrasies…”

“Oh, boy, here it comes,” said Zach dryly, with eyes rolling.

“Yes, Zach, a quiz! When I was first auditioning for the role of Lysistrata last week, the director complimented me on those ‘fluttering eyes’— they reminded him of a classical Belgian actress. Of legendary beauty, of course,” she added in a teasing coda, to Zach’s amusement. “And I did tell you her name, Zach.”

“Hmm,” he said, looking upward and rubbing his chin in a mock Thinker pose, “what’s my prize for a right answer?”

“Your prize is, I promise not to call you in Leipzig with any long-distance pop-quizzes.”

Zach chuckled sarcastically. “Sounds more like a reprieve than a prize!”

“Because you’re stalling and changing the subject,” she replied playfully, “I know you, Zach! So what’s the name?”

“Well, uh… I haven’t been staying abreast of my Belgian actresses lately but…”

“Still stalling! She’s a classical actress Zach, remember that,” said Renee, fixing her eyes on Zach’s modestly blushing face while coquettishly tilting her head.

“It’s… Bar— Ber— yeah that’s it, Berthe Bovy. You have ‘wide, fairy-tale, magical eyes,’ the director said, just as she did. See, I remember the things you say, my love.”

“Mmm, not sure Zach,” she replied with a taunting half-smile, “you really had to work for that!”

“Aww, honey, be fair,” replied Zach in mock supplication. “You didn’t exactly prep me for that little quiz!”

“Yes, but I expect my man to keep track of every dimension of my theatrical beauty!” she said teasingly, bringing Zach to open laughter.

“Oh, my little diva! Only you could make a touch of vanity seem so sweet!” Zach pulled her toward him, kissing her softly on the lips. “I’d better tend to the congee again dear, I don’t wanna disappoint you.”

“OK, no well-done congee for me,” she said, smiling and seating herself on a wooden chair in her small dining room. As she sat in reflection on the edge of the seat, the quiet bubbling of the congee percolating in the background, her expression began to change. She eventually focused her gaze toward a window and plaintively stared at the couples embracing on park benches outside, taking advantage of a rare day of sun-kissed bliss in the tempest-tossed springtime.

“Zach,” she said suddenly, without looking in his direction, “why are you doing this? Just… taking off on a whim like this?”

Zach stopped stirring the congee at once and let the spatula clang against the pot, standing straight and looking skyward in consternation without turning around. “Here it comes,” he said, shaking his head, “the infamous Renee Tsai mood swing in 3…2…1.”

“No, Zach, no—don’t start with that.”

“Start with what, Renee?” said Zach, pivoting around and leaning back on the stove, his torso muscles flexed in the tension of the moment. “You mean, pointing out exactly what’s going on before my very eyes? That? We were just kissing and snuggling like lovebirds a minute ago and out of nowhere you do a 180…”

“Zach,” interjected Renee, her voice tinged with frustration and a measure of impatience, as she turned to look straight at him, “what seems like a mood swing to you, are my bottled-up emotions suddenly welling up when I can’t tamp them down anymore. You always find a way to do this, to… duck out on me, just when it seems like we’ll be free for each other for a while.”

“Renee…” replied Zach in aggravation, phrasing his response delicately, “I’m not thrilled about this myself, the timing or… trekking out there at all. I don’t know what else I can say above and beyond what we just talked about an hour ago. But I have to do this. I told you before—even I’m not sure what we’re up against, but this isn’t something we can just ignore, that I can ignore. There’s something dreadful out there, and for once, I have to be there when Tim needs a hand.”

“But I still don’t—Tim has always seemed resourceful enough to take care of himself. Why does this have to be your mission, too?”

“Because I’ve gotten to know Tim like family after all these years,” said Zach, firmly but calmly, as he stood straight up from his reclining pose. “He’s indomitable, and even the worst slings and arrows have never laid him low—but he’s frightened now, out of his wits. It’s not just about helping him to navigate in a distant country where I know the language; I could see in his eyes and his face that this has all become relentlessly personal for him, and whatever this menace is, it’s already overwhelming his ability to handle it. He needs someone close by to help him through; he needs me.”

Renee began to speak but then held her tongue, casting her gaze aside and breathing audibly. “I just…” she began, looking up gradually to meet Zach’s eyes, “just wish we could have all this behind us, Zach. I want us to be able to savor each day together, not be—pushed apart like this, seemingly every time we draw closer.”

Her eyes misted slightly without quite shedding tears. Zach slowly approached, gently drawing her closer and lowering himself to her eye level, their foreheads touching. His arms wrapped around her back, brushing gently against her waist-length black hair. “Renee, I may be leaving town but I’m not going anywhere, I promise you that. I want more than anything for us to start building something special together. But I have to do this.”

She turned slightly aside, occasionally eyeing Zach out of the corner of her eye but unable to look at him directly. “Besides,” continued Zach, seizing an opportunity for a facetious aside, “I am getting a free trip out of this, after all, and if things don’t get too out of control, I could even do a little job-hunting out there. I’ll bring you out there if things work out; the Alps, us snuggling up in some ski lift, it’ll be romantic enough to make up for everything else I’ve put you through.”

“I don’t know about that,” replied Renee, turning back to face Zach and leaning away slightly with a tentative smile. “Besides, after my parents moved from Taipei to Hong Kong last year, they’ve been urging me to drag you out there, too.”

“I’d consider it,” chuckled Zach in irony, pulling back and leaning against the frame of a kitchen chair, “except that my Chinese skills are still down at the ‘unintentionally hilarious for everyone else’ level, judging by the trail of verbal disasters I left on my last trip. Not sure I’d be the best fit just yet.”

“That’s OK honey,” said Renee, gradually drawing closer again to Zach, “because it makes you just irresistibly adorable! Besides, there is something you do know how to say, and I want to hear it from you.”

“Hmm,” replied Zach, with a playful tweak of the jaw, “something like… sarang hae yo.”

“In Chinese, Zach!”

“Or, yo te amo.”

“OK, I’m going out for a walk, maybe I’ll call you at the airport tomorrow,” she said, playfully scoffing as she edged toward the entrance.

“Hey, come back here!” said Zach wryly, clutching her arm and gently tugging her back. “Wo… ai… ni. And I really do you love you, babe.”

She drew slowly closer, as the two shared a passionate embrace.

Friday, May 20, 5:24 a.m.

Gate 7B, Lufthansa Terminal, Raleigh-Durham International Airport, North Carolina

“Chief, whatever other foibles you may be guilty of, nobody would ever deny your determination on an urgent matter. Check-in at 4 a.m. on a Friday? Couldn’t wait a day to test my own dedication to this crazy mission, eh?”

“Zach, trust me, my friend; this is a grand improvement over the bad old days. When I embarked on an international route like this a decade ago, there were so many connections in out-of-the-way places, I’d be fortunate to arrive the same weekend. They only began direct flights to Paris two years ago, after all.”

“Oh, I don’t know about the ‘grand improvement’ part; I’d happily trade an extra day of travel for an excuse not to have to bash the snooze alarm at 2 in the morning. We have yet to take off and I’m already jet-lagged.”

“Well, considering the number of time zones we’ll be traversing when we touch down in Leipzig at 11 p.m., you’ll have plenty of opportunities to supplement that lagging feeling,” laughed Tim. “Window seat again, huh?”

“Of course, it’s my little concession to Renee for abandoning her again. She figures I’m less likely to flirt the farther away I am from the aisle.”

“Can’t say I blame her, my friend!”

Zach chuckled feebly as he battled the haze of fatigue, trudging forward with Tim to queue up for boarding. As they dropped their carry-on baggage beside them, Tim caught sight of a large-screen television on a side wall, scrolling news headlines with faintly audible voice-overs.

“So Tim, what in the world were you doing, fielding a call from Oak Ridge at 5 a.m. just now?”

“Part-business, part… ad hoc crisis management.”

“Doesn’t seem like there’s much ad hoc about it, Boss—hasn’t this crisis been ongoing for the past three months now?”

“Seems to have become even more wretched, Zach, difficult as that may be to fathom. Poor Rachel’s nearly at her wit’s end, and she’s as solid a rock as they come. Says that now two staff members are on the verge of transferring out of that place; they’ve reported sightings, I guess you could say, even voices.”

“Sightings, voices—of what, Chief?”

“Nobody’s sure, Zach, and Rachel hasn’t seen it herself,” replied Tim as he continued to glance at the rolling headlines on the TV screen. “Whatever it is, puts a chill into the spine. Claims about something materializing temporarily out of—laser arrays, or coalescing from the background sound of the machinery into haunting whispers. I was there for just a weekend and the place got to me; hard to imagine what it’s like for them stuck there every day.”

“What about those poor guys in the clinical trial? Are they faring any better?”

“No, a heck of a lot worse, in fact; whatever the resemblance to this Tachibana syndrome from Japan in 1946, it’s a world more severe. The patients are slipping even deeper into that psychosis. One of them punched through a window with his bare hands, as though trying to escape something. They’re still drawing this demonic creature in ever more detail and… now, they seem to be synchronizing these bizarre chants together, creepy as all get-out.”

“Chants?”

“Right, different rooms at the same hour of the day, isolated from each other and at least a half-dozen at a time—chanting something ominous, repeating it for minutes at a time, even in different languages. Once in… ancient Persian apparently, some warning from the Zoroastrian religion when they translated it. Another time in ancient Greek, unknown meaning. And then most recently in some idiom they don’t have a clue about.”

“And to think we somehow have a connection to all this… such a pleasant thought for the journey,” replied Zach, in a tone as much apprehensive at it was sarcastic. “Why get a briefing on all this at 5 in the morning though? Just misery seeking out company?’

“Maybe that in part,” quipped Tim with an ironic smile of his own. “But Rachel was also finally able to get clearance, to send me one of the AP-278 retinal implants which they’d used for the sight restoration trials. Three of the patients dropped out of the testing late in the process, so they had some extra prototypes which weren’t implanted; if we can inspect the data hub of the implant, there may be some overlooked clue in there about the source of this madness. So Rachel managed to rush-ship out one of the prototypes to our destination in Leipzig. I’ll be retrieving it in the same shipment with the family heirlooms, at one of the high-security package terminals in the city.”

“A good thing you did ship those rather than checking them with your luggage,” said Zach with a wry grin, “though I’d forsake a month’s stipend, just to see the reaction on the faces of the customs officials if they’d caught sight of those things.”

“Oh, they’ll be seeing them anyway,” replied Tim in a grizzled voice. “You can’t imagine what it was like filling out the ‘parcel description section’ on the shipping manifest. I had to make up something about fine sculpture artifacts from the Neoclassical period, not far from their description on the manifests of that Dutch ship they originally came to America on. Somehow, I picture eyebrows raising in unison at claims about transporting 17^th-century advanced computational equipment.”

The two shared a chuckle as they continued to advance, Tim’s attention again being drawn to the scrolling headlines of the television screen, its news voiceover now more audible.

“Authorities in the Arkansas Cybercrime Division remain baffled about the origin and nature of the so-called Viper computer virus, which has been infiltrating corporate databases, hospitals, research labs at the University of Arkansas, even state government files in the state capital of Little Rock,” said the news anchor in a steady voice, as Tim looked on with a sense of slowly mounting angst.

“Experts suspect a link to the so-called Chakana Virus, which struck eastern Tennessee and spread westward throughout the state, but firm confirmation of such a connection has thus far proven to be elusive. Authorities are also unable to substantiate a link between Chakana or Viper and two separate train derailments in the region over recent days, which have left several people injured. Americana News Network reporters spoke recently with Van Nhut Trang, chief of the Cybercrime task force investigating the virus attacks. ‘I’ve… never seen anything resembling this, and our whole team is at a loss. The Viper virus first announces itself with a string of elaborate computations on the screen, as was seen in Chakana in Tennessee. Then it goes on a, data feeding frenzy, one could say. Worrisome because it appears to be stealing confidential data from high-tech companies in the neural network or AI field, even intruding into hospital databases as Chakana did.’”

Tim stared at the screen with mounting trepidation as the anchor’s narration continued. “Detective Trang said that he suspects corporate espionage, since at this point there is no evidence of outright financial crime or identity theft even when banks have been targeted. Nevertheless, it has been difficult to reassure anxious local residents and firms, who increasingly fear that even the most private records may now be in hostile hands. This is Marco Santos, live with the Americana News Network.”

A frisson of unleashed horror suddenly swept over Tim’s face as the reporting segment wound down. Among the news frames flashed in the last few seconds, was a screenshot obtained from a computer monitor infected by the virus. Something had interspersed itself amidst the arcane symbols and gibberish text on the screen, something with which Tim had become horridly familiar.

“Tim! TIM!! Come on, we’re just about at the front of the line! What in the world are you doing?” Zach had been calling out to his mentor intermittently and fruitlessly over the last minute, as he readied to board the flight. When Tim approached, Zach looked on with alarm at Tim’s face, ashen with fear and with pupils widely dilated.

“Tim, what—what just happened? You look almost as shocked as when you saw… her face, during the lecture at Wake Forest.”

“Nothing, Zach,” said Tim, temporarily purging his mind of alarming visions that were invading it from all sides. “I just… let my mind drift there a little too much.”

“Sure didn’t seem like nothing, Chief! Looks like something caught your eye and wouldn’t let go of it.”

“Zach I… just need, to rest my mind for a second. I’ll tell you about it a little later.”

“OK, make sure to catch your breath first!” said Zach, his concern only slightly assuaged. The two stepped forward to scan their boarding passes at the gate. As they walked into the entrance for the flight, Tim turned back once more toward the news on the screen, as though to convince himself of what he had just seen.

Chapter 10: Nexus of Nightmares

Friday May 20, 11:25 p.m.

Flughafen Leipzig/Halle, Leipzig, Saxony, Germany

“Ah, terra firma at last.”

“And you sound genuinely thrilled about it,” replied Tim, with tongue firmly in cheek. His dry wit matched the sarcasm of his protégé, as the less-than-enthusiastic pair of travelers made their way from the arrival gate toward the passport control line at the airport. It was surprisingly busy even at that late hour, abounding with the bloodshot eyes of arriving, departing, and stranded passengers uncomfortably close to the witching hour.

“Well, Boss, I’m not exactly accustomed to spending balmy Friday nights jet-lagged, in a distant land, with only a hazy idea of where I am or what in the world I’m doing there,” came Zach’s rejoinder. “Either I’m with Renee or… I’m out with the group at Chapel Hill, bar-hopping and indulging in Friday-night todonas.”

“To—towdohnahs?” chuckled Tim incredulously. “And something you indulge in with a group at a downtown bar… I have to know, Zach.”

“A todona,“ replied Zach with a wry grin, “it’s from Spanish—‘todo nadie.’ Back at Union College, I took a Spanish class with the ‘Sardonic Señor Gutierrez.’ Great professor, warm and generous guy at heart but his sense of humor was legend, edgier than a jailhouse comic in the prison yard. Maybe an ironic comparison—before he joined academia, he’d spent a decade as a vice cop in New York and Chicago, with his beat usually in the well-heeled neighborhoods, seeing that oft-concealed side of human nature on a daily basis.”

“I guess you can’t accuse the guy of taking an easy path to the tenure track,” interjected Tim, in respectful astonishment.

“Well, Señor Gutierrez didn’t hesitate to draw upon that experience, on more than one occasion. He spoke of ‘las cosas que todo el mundo hace, sino nadie las discute’—more or less, the things that people do but nobody talks about. A todonadie, or todona for short. I can’t say I concurred with all his assessments, but I also can’t fault his knack for observation.”

“Sounds like a philosopher after my own heart,” quipped Tim, to the jaundiced amusement of them both.

The hard-edged humor of their exchange masked the creeping apprehension that was gnawing at them both. The lights were slightly dimmed to save power in the airport at such a late hour, and a sense of unease accompanied every step they took—an angst born of events before their departure, but amplified as they carried it to an unfamiliar realm far from home. As they queued up for passport control, a nagging question on Zach’s mind, which he had postponed out of courtesy during the long flight, came roaring back.

“Chief, you never told me what terrified you so much back at the gate at RDU airport, just before we’d taken off. The blood had just… rushed straight out of your face.”

Tim eyed Zach with a tensed jaw, sighing but then turning away without responding.

“Tim—come on, I’m on the team now, and we won’t get anywhere if you keep holding back from me. After what you’ve told me already, there’s not much that can shock me at this point.”

“It’s not that, Zach,” said Tim, pivoting back toward his protégé without looking at him directly. “I’m not even sure what I myself saw, what it means. It was a… number.”

“A number?” Zach asked with skeptical, narrowed eyes. “What do you mean, what kind of number?”
Tim tensed his lip as he revisited the alarming recollection, the two of them slowly advancing in the winding line toward the passport inspection gate. “On that headline news broadcast, that they were showing on the big screen when we were lined up at the gate—they mentioned a computer virus that seems to be infiltrating sensitive targets in Arkansas. It bears many of the hallmarks that were seen in the Chakana, a virus ripping through networks in eastern Tennessee over the past few weeks. Chakana, in turn, seems to have sprouted up in the counties surrounding Oak Ridge.”

“And I’m guessing that last association isn’t an accident. So things are already pouring out from Oak Ridge, huh?”

“We… weren’t sure at first, Zach. There was indeed a virus within the Oak Ridge network, but despite the similarities, the experts couldn’t establish a firm link to Chakana—it’s why I didn’t mention it when I first debriefed you at O’Malley’s on Wednesday. But now… there’s not a doubt in my mind they’re connected, in the worst possible way.”

“Why are you saying that?” inquired Zach, his incredulity heavily tinged with anxiety. “Just from this broadcast, Tim?”

“At the end of the news feed, they panned briefly to one of the infected computer monitors, and I could make out a number there that I’d seen before—46,11007.”

“46,11007? What does it mean?”

“I don’t… I don’t know, but I’d first caught sight of it in the room of Pablo Acevedo—he’d scrawled it in blood repeatedly, among his other messages on the wall. Apparently, the other patients have done the same, in their own cryptic messages whenever they’re… compelled to produce them. And it seems to have come out of nowhere.”

Zach directed a look of flabbergasted surprise back toward his mentor. “Tim, so you’re trying to tell me—that this computer virus is linked to the madness that’s been spreading through these patients in the vision trials? That data, symbols… numbers, can cross between our minds and machines like that?”

“My Uncle Mitch and I, we’d floated that possibility when I spoke to him after the Wake Forest lecture. The Cereceph, we know, can bridge that gap, even to the point of projecting the images within our mind’s eye; who knows what the other devices are capable of. Still, Mitch and I weren’t quite convinced about how far we could interpret this phenomenon. It’s one thing to merely project images, or symbols within our minds, to an external recipient of the output. It’s quite another,” continued Tim, his teeth slightly clenching, “to take control of someone’s mind itself. Yet I think there’s less and less doubt now—that we’re facing something just like this.”

“But Tim, the number itself, 46,11007—what does it mean?”

“I told you, I don’t know what the Hell it means!” retorted Tim, surprising Zach with his reaction. “Sorry, Zach; I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

Zach continued to scan Tim’s face intently, as though reading a message carved thereupon. “You’ve seen this number somewhere awfully personal, haven’t you Tim? In fact,” he said, looking away in contemplation before facing his mentor again, “I think I’ve seen it too, in something I retrieved for you just a few days ago.”

Tim clasped his eyes shut momentarily and murmured an acknowledgment before reaching for his briefcase, snapping it open while propping it on an armbar near the position where they were standing. He removed a familiar manila folder therein, opening it up for Zach to see. The same number was there, taunting onlookers in its sheer inscrutability, next to a surreal, meticulously drawn scene of haunting, unknown significance.

“Chief,” said Zach with concern, as he leafed through the trio of sketches inside the folder, “there were only two of these drawings when I found this for you on Wednesday.”

“I know, Zach. I sketched the third just a few hours ago, on the plane after the flight attendants switched off the lights for us to catch a brief nap. I dozed off, and then when I awoke—it happened again. That same dream vision that I can hardly recall when I awake, but that I can sketch so clearly—even more so than the last time.”

Zach slowly fixed his gaze on the drawings, scrutinizing the distressingly eerie, enigmatic scene that his mentor had committed to paper. It contained the same detail and objects from the second sketch—and far more, with the vantage point again slightly shifted. This time, the perspective seemed to be from just behind one of the gaping archways in the foreground of the image, slightly to the side so as to enable a remarkably far-sighted glimpse. In the background were the same urns as before, pouring out what appeared to be the same smoky flames. But the grid behind the urns was far more detailed this time; it appeared to be an extraordinarily elaborate etching upon an unknown surface, with some sort of force flowing through its seemingly infinite web of veins and illuminating several points on the grid. Moreover, to the sides and behind the grid, was a regressing series of columns with low ceilings, continuing far back into the scene with no end in sight. They formed what appeared to be a labyrinth of chambers within a kind of subterranean cavern, each chamber with its own grid-like array on the columns and a mirror-like, diamond-shaped structure in the center.

The massive hall just beyond the arched entryway could now be more lucidly discerned, in all its eerily macabre splendor, its ceiling anchored by the same elaborately yet grotesquely decorated pillars as before. The fountain in the center appeared to be active, emitting what seemed to be a fluid, but which rose in a strange, vortex-like pattern and lingered in the air. The roof of the immense hall now appeared to be structured as a buttressed vault; this time, the lines and curves that had dotted its surface from the second sketch, had coalesced into a nightmarish panorama of what seemed to be faces in a variety of expressions, yet with only the bare outlines still apparent. The floor of the large hall now housed something still unclear, vaguely resembling the ghostly afterimages of people who had perhaps traversed it before. The common thread between the images and the sketches at Oak Ridge—the frightening creature just off center, near the ceiling—was depicted in more horrifying detail than before, with its menacing eyes now a perplexing mix of human, reptilian, and other types, like those of imagined sea creatures roaming the deep. The appendages from its asymmetric periphery now seemed to encompass an even more bizarre array of biology, though with much of it entirely unfamiliar to Tim.

Zach was drawn most of all, however, to the two beings in the foreground, clearly interacting. One was signaling from behind the arch, his arm outstretched and the back of his head visible. He seemed to have closely-cropped hair and a beard that stretched around the sides of his face, yet his ears arched outward slightly, with what appeared to be barbed ridges and a prominent earlobe below. He was addressing someone whose face was just becoming visible in the image, with long hair, eyes widely spaced— looking slightly to the side of the man signaling into the chamber—and a fleshy nose, but with unusual markings on the forehead, neck, and the bridge of the nose. The contours of a mouth were only slightly apparent at this point, while the makings of a chin seemed to protrude prominently from the rest of the face.

“Tim,” began Zach, in barely concealed consternation, “just what in the world is going on here? What is this supposed to represent?”

“I’ve been tormenting myself with that question for the better part of a week now, Zach. This scene must have some importance—it’s the only reason it would be invading my dreams so often, and with such consistency. But it’s driving me near-crazy because I can’t imagine where it came from, or even whether it’s just a metaphor or… much more than that. All I can divine is that, if something has insinuated itself into the minds of the Oak Ridge patients, by whatever means, then perhaps a similar phenomenon has descended upon me.”

“Pleasant thought there, Boss,” replied Zach with angst-tinged irony.

“Believe me Zach, what you’re thinking of—it occurred to me too, oh did it occur to me. On Tuesday I called up Rachel and panicked to her on the phone when I feared that I was, ‘infected’ by this Tachibana syndrome or whatever they’re now dubbing it, after making my own trek out there to Oak Ridge. But these dream sequences for me, they must stem from a different source compared to the poor guys in that trial; I haven’t manifested any symptoms and neither have the staff at the Vision Research Center there in Tennessee, thank God. So for some reason I can’t discern yet—I see the same beast that they do, but in a context that has a distinct, possibly deeper meaning. Hopefully, these devices will point the way to an answer.”

“I hope you’re right, Boss,” replied Zach in an exasperated shake of the head, “because I’ve reached my quota of inexplicable head-scratchers for the month.”

Tim laughed slightly at Zach’s welcome sarcasm, breaking the sense of apprehension that by now had become nearly palpable around them. “Zach, Buddy, we’ve had a long day already; why don’t we shelve any further thoughts on this for now. We’ve got a long day ahead of us tomorrow; the S-Bahn train from Leipzig to Borna departs fairly early, so we might as well clear our minds and rest up for the night.”

“I’m all for that, Boss. They’ll probably be broadcasting replays of some of the Euro Championship soccer games tonight; hopefully there’ll be enough lofty grace and attention-hogging hooliganism on the small screen, to yank my attention away from all this for a little while.”

“Now, Zach,” replied Tim slyly, “you know we’re in Europe now; there’s no ‘soccer’ here. It’s ‘football,’ or ‘Fussball’ here in Leipzig.”

“No, for me it’s always soccer, Chief. If there’s no helmet, no crunching limbs and broken bones after the match, then it just isn’t football.”

“Sure, Zach, just as long as you keep that sentiment to yourself—those are inflammatory words around here.”

The two allowed themselves a grizzled laugh as they split at the front of the line to their respective counters for passport control. As Zach handed his passport to the clerk for stamping, he caught a glimpse of the drawings that Tim was still clutching outside his briefcase, with his most recent sketch protruding saliently from the folder’s edge. The mysterious entity at the center of the sketch, haunting the dream scenes with increasingly horrific detail in each of Tim’s renditions, was distinguishable from a distance—its chilling glare seeming to leap from the page, as if to announce its escape from the confinement of mere reveries in the minds of its beholders.

Saturday May 21, 10:33 a.m.

Bibliothek Martin Hayneccius, Town of Borna, Saxony, Germany

“Vielen Dank—stimmt so,” said Tim, handing a 10-Euro note to the taxi driver, who nodded laconically and duly kept the change. He and Zach emerged onto a rain-swept boulevard adjacent to a four-story library on a gently sloping hill, its decorations incongruously elaborate relative to their modest surroundings. Its architecture was a curious hybrid of an airy late medieval castle and a Japanese pagoda, with a curving roof and angular terraces to complement the stylized parapets and arched, colorful windows that adorned its dark-gray masonry.

“So this is our destination, Chief?” queried Zach, as the two made their way toward a nondescript stone stairway, tenuously clutching umbrellas to shield themselves from a persistent drizzle.

“It would seem so,” replied Tim. “According to Ezra’s gumshoeing, my ancestor left for America right from this very address, more than 3 centuries ago.”

“Quite a homecoming,” said Zach, eyeing the structure’s ornate architecture, “let’s just hope he left you a parting gift before he took off. Any idea how to zero in on… whatever it is we’re looking for here?”

“I’m not sure how much of a trail remains,” sighed Tim, “but Ezra believes the library’s archives hold a clue. Apparently, when my ancestor and his business partner willed their property to the monastic order all those years ago, they set aside a particular section for their own personal collection. That’s our best opening.”

“Quite a way to announce our presence in the little town of Borna, but one’s gotta start somewhere.” Zach motioned toward a young woman at the information desk, as they approached the entrance and dangled their umbrellas on a rack just outside the threshold. “I’m guessing you’ll want me to kick off the exchange, Tim.”

“That’s the plan. Tell her why we’re here, but go ahead and mention my own connection to this place, preempt any dubious stares about why two confused Americans in Borna for the first time—suddenly want to go peeking around in the archives. Oh, and one more thing.” Tim paused to retrieve a plaque from his briefcase, a meticulously-prepared replica of an original. “Show this to them when you’re talking me up, Zach; it might open a few doors, literally speaking.”

“What’s this, Chief?” asked Zach with a quizzical look.

“One of the treasures Ezra Gordon dug up. It’s from a monastic order that actually founded this library several centuries ago, to which my own ancestor made a bequest supposedly for this very place; no better way to document my ties to this place.”

Zach shrugged in bemusement as he took the plaque and approached the counter. “Willkommen zum Bibliothek!” said the woman, welcoming her guests to the library.

Zach initiated conversation with a few standard pleasantries, as his mentor stood silently alongside him by the service desk of the library. Tim used the opportunity to survey the impressive structure and its vast holdings. The library had a peculiarly anachronistic feel to it, as centuries-old manuscripts, protectively encased and proudly displayed on a side wall, juxtaposed themselves alongside cutting-edge touch-screen databases that catalogued the library’s collections—housed within liquid-crystal displays that seemed to float above the triangular, transparent vertical posts on which they were perched. The lobby was flanked by elevators and old-fashioned, cast-iron spiral staircases which climbed inexorably to the upper floors—housing stacks full of antiquarian literary treasures, arcana from a dizzying array of fields, the librettos of musical masterpieces, and other prized possessions.

“Also, Sie sagen—dass Dr. Schumacher hier, ein Nachkomme der Gründer ist, und dass Sie die Archive sehen wollen?” said the woman as the conversation progressed, her eyes narrowed in curiosity as she queried the young man before her..

“Ja, genau, und… tatsächlich, haben wir doch etwas von der Geschichte dieses Bibliotheks mitgebracht.” Zach held the plaque aloft, carefully passing it to the astonished woman at the information desk.

She scanned the plaque carefully, her finger moving across its engraved surface until suddenly halting, followed by her eyes widening incredulously upon speaking. “Das ist ja die Christofslegende!” She quickly looked up and addressed Zach once again, motioning toward a cushioned bench behind him, in the manner of a host entertaining uninvited but welcomed guests. “Bitte, bitte setzen Sie sich; ich komm’ gleich zurück.”

The two nodded and seated themselves as she disappeared into a locked corridor behind the counter. “What was that all about, Zach?” inquired Tim.

“I’m not entirely sure myself,” replied Zach, with an expression of curious uncertainty. “I did as you’d suggested, laid out your family background and supposed connection to this place. She confirmed my own words to herself, as though they had some significance, and I just handed her the plaque. Then she mentioned something about—‘die Christofslegende’… the Legend of Christof.”

“Die Christofslegende? What in the world is that?” said Tim skeptically.

Zach merely shook his head in a look of incomprehension as the two awaited the woman’s return. Several minutes later, she finally emerged with a tall, sandy-haired man sporting old-fashioned spectacles, who quickly made his way around the counter to shake the hands of Tim and Zach. He was in his mid-50s, clad in a blue and gray-striped sweater vest with matching pants, at once brisk and disciplined in his speech and gait. He projected the demeanor of a consummate professional—handling his diverse tasks and the day’s challenges with aplomb, yet welcoming with open arms toward his guests.

“Greetings, Dr. Shoemaker and Dr. Choi; I’m Heinrich Metzer, director of the Bibliothek. I spent 6 years in Minnesota ages ago before I took on my duties here, so it gives me great pleasure to welcome two distinguished Americans to our own house of learning. I understand, Professor, that you are a descendant… of our library’s founder?”

“So it seems,” replied Tim, handing over a small sheaf of archival documents supplied by Ezra Gordon. “These all pertain to my ancestor, C.B. Schumacher—I was doing some genealogical research recently, and many of the findings pointed right here, to this library. My student Zach here, and I—we were just planning on, perusing the archives a bit, if that’s possible.”

The director eagerly flipped through the documents, barely noticing Tim’s last sentence. As he finished checking through them, a cautious smile graced his lips, the sort exhibited by someone finally laying eyes on a long-sought and priceless item. “Nach so vielen Jahrhunderten, ich kann es fast night glauben…” he exclaimed, without looking up.

“What—after so many centuries?” said Tim, attempting to decipher the director’s words. “Sir, what… may I ask what you’re referring to?”

The director quickly looked up again and handed the papers back to Tim. “Someone called here on your behalf just a few days ago, Dr. Shoemaker; my apologies for having dismissed it, we never thought you would arrive here right on our doorstep. The archives are a decent walk from here, so please, follow me. I’ll explain matters along the way.”

Tim and Zach exchanged befuddled glances as they followed the library director into the corridor. It was lined with grayish, chalk-like stone walls and lamps that resembled a string of antique kerosene lanterns, each one flanking sculpted windows carved out in a late-medieval style. The group rounded a tight corner at a bend in the corridor, leading down a gentle slope and into a second, glass-lined hallway between two opposing mechanical rooms, the gentle purr of machinery faintly audible in the background.

“Your ancestor,” began Director Metzer in an authoritative voice, his aquamarine eyes peeking out from behind his spectacles, “was a certain Christoph Bernd Schumacher, a name with which we are indeed familiar here. My apologies in advance if I am merely relating what you already know about him, but he and a fellow immigrant made a bequest to the Monastic Order of St. Jerome many centuries ago which became the foundation of our library. This very spot where you are standing, in fact, was the boyhood home of Christoph Schumacher and his eventual comrade-in-arms, Stefan Koenig.”

“Here?” exclaimed Tim, nearly halting in his steps as he pondered the implications of the revelation, frantically striving to remember what Ezra had been relating to him merely days before. “In this library?”

“Yes, Professor,” replied the director as he unlocked an olive-green double door, leading the pair into a drab depository and through a labyrinth of interconnected storage chambers. “The two of them were raised as brothers by adoptive families, affiliated with the Order of St. Jerome. Their parents lived right here in Borna, in adjacent cottages on this hill—the Wunderberg, ‘Miracle Mountain’ as it was christened by the locals who had found refuge here. Once the boys had grown into men, finishing their apprenticeships as cobblers, they left and prospered in America; it was their eventual wish that this library back in Germany be constructed out of that home, which had meant so much to them as youths during such a troubled time. It was run initially by the clergy for more than a century, then turned over to the Prussian secular authorities in 1817.”

Tim distracted himself momentarily from the historical recounting, still struggling to recall Ezra’s words.

“Many elements in our institution’s early history are uncertain,” continued the director, “scattered in the wake of the turmoil of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, much of it perhaps lost in the mists of time. Facts transmogrify into legends in such a turbulent brew, and so it is here, at least in part. When the Order of St. Jerome handed over the keys to us in 1817, they left instructions that Christoph Schumacher’s personal collection was strictly off-limits to the public, no mention allowed even of its very existence. Library personnel themselves are permitted entry only twice per year for routine maintenance, outside of emergencies, and we are not allowed to browse the volumes—only to make sure that ambient conditions in the room are optimal for their maintenance.”

“I don’t understand,” said Tim with a perplexed expression. The trio neared a ramp in a dimly-illuminated warehouse-like facility deep in the storage complex, its rather musty odor diffused by actively churning fan blades above. Zach continued to listen in silently, absorbing the exchange with fascination and a measure of amusement at Tim’s uncharacteristic bewilderment. “Why all the secrecy shrouding… somebody’s personal book collection? Even from your own staff?”

“We’ve never been entirely certain ourselves Dr. Shoemaker, at least those of us running the library during the past two centuries, but we’ve honored this pledge as a professional tradition, one might say. According to the original charter, only certain members of the Order of St. Jerome could freely enter the collections room…”

“But, hasn’t that Order long been disbanded?” interrupted Tim.

“In 1845 to be precise, not long after the Bibliothek was entrusted to Borna municipal authorities. It was believed that the Order might someday be reconstituted; its very demise in 1845 came under rather peculiar circumstances. Yet to this day, it has not revived. We continued to honor our original obligations regardless; they’re part of the very lore and culture of this institution, and we never felt much need to deviate from them.”

“Director Metzer—please, feel free to call me Tim, by the way…”

“Gladly, Sir; feel free to use my first name as well, as you are such an honored guest in our house.”

“This, Christophslegende—we heard the woman by the information desk, blurt that out when Zach was describing my own link to this place.”

“Ja, diese Christophslegende” said Heinrich matter-of-factly, as they neared a steel door tucked away in a nondescript section of a storage room. The director unlocked a pair of bolts on the door as they headed up a tiny, indistinct stairwell toward the right side, past a series of sealed compartments housing what appeared to be prized scrolls on parchment, carefully shielded from the outside. “Fräulein Gerber was referring to a legend that we’ve long had in this library, but whose veracity even we have been hard-pressed to verify. At least, until today.”

“You mean, when I came?” queried Tim, recoiling in astonishment.

“Precisely, Tim. Die Christophslegende is something that every director of the Bibliothek imbibes as part of on-the-job training, since the earliest days of the library, and it grew out of the early history which I just described. You see, along with specified members of the Order of St. Jerome prior to its dissolution, there is only one other person allowed to access Christoph Schumacher’s personal collection, in accordance with the arrangements at its founding.”

“A descendant—of Christoph Schumacher himself,” replied Tim in anticipation.

“Indeed. Yet no such person has ever appeared on these premises before, and the Legend grew up around this, as the original context of the founding charter was lost. As years became decades and decades became centuries, it was rumored that the latter-day Schumacher would suddenly turn up on our doorstep, unannounced, and at a moment of great exigency.”

“Of great… exigency?”

“Yes, though what that might refer to, we have never been able to fathom” replied the library director, as he stopped the procession before an unusual entrance—a rising metal grate backed by reinforced steel, vaguely in the guise of a castle’s portcullis. After unlocking and lifting the gate, Heinrich motioned his two bemused guests into a rocky corridor that resembled a gaping cavern.

“I take it, that we’re beneath the bergs of the Wunderberg,” said Tim dryly, surveying the anachronistic pairing of state-of-the-art motion sensors and temperature monitors set against the cave-like surroundings.

“Indeed,” replied the director, ever businesslike, “we’re now deep within the hilltop, gentlemen. This location was considered ideal to house and protect our most precious ancient items and, of course, Christof Schumacher’s personal collection itself. It is a natural bunker, shielded from the elements and the constant conflicts that have scarred this region in the past; no better location for a vital site that even we ourselves are allowed to visit only twice a year.”

Heinrich finally halted before an unremarkable chamber abutting a cul-de-sac of the meandering corridor, its door distinguished by little more than peeling teal-colored paint and a standard-issue room designation, “D6112,” on the top horizontal section of the doorframe. It was an anticlimactic gateway to such a valued piece of the library’s history—perhaps deliberately so, as a way to further conceal the cherished items within.

“Here we are,” said the director with a sigh after the long journey, propping the door open and welcoming his two guests inside. “This humble abode houses prized items from the study of your ancestor, Tim—after three centuries, finally welcoming another Schumacher across its threshold. The monks of St. Jerome constructed this section of the library all those years ago, a heritage we’ve since scrupulously maintained.”

The chamber was curiously egg-shaped, with a wide bulge at its center and a towering, arching roof carved into the granite-like canopy overhead. Its lighting consisted of a ring of incandescent lamps each sculpted in the form of a translucent dragon, and emitting a sulfurous yellow glow that was illuminating yet strangely disorienting within the cave-like surroundings. Along each border of the chamber were limestone bookcases set into the walls. They, in turn, were interposed with assorted artwork and sculpture in 17^th and 18^th-century baroque styles, as well as the antique devices that would have been familiar to a diligent cobbler of the late 1600s.

Tim eyed the room with anxious curiosity, visually cataloguing its contents and seeking out signs of something that he had yet to find. The books and the sculpted items did not seem at all special or out-of-place for the period from which they stemmed.

“Please, gentlemen,” said the library director, reaching for a box of sterile latex gloves near the doorway, “I assure you that our volumes have been maintained in excellent condition. We ask only that you wear gloves upon inspecting the items, as a precaution against any prints or smudges on the articles, in particular on the tools and artwork that we have kept here per the wishes of your own ancestor, Tim. Otherwise, feel free to browse as you wish.”

Tim and Zach nodded as they donned the gloves and continued to scan the room, finally eyeing each other with a nearly simultaneous shake of the head. “Heinrich,” began Tim, whirling around to address the director, “by any chance, amidst all the paintings and sculpture here—has this collection ever housed anything... atypical, that may have been moved from this room?”

“Atypical? How so?”

“In the sense of…” responded Tim with a groaning sigh, unsure of how to phrase his query.

“Of items that might have seemed out of place for their time,” interjected Zach, filling in his mentor’s thoughts. “Among the sculptures and the shoemaker’s tools perhaps—any, feats of engineering that might have seemed unusual for their period?”

The director looked on with narrowed eyes, fruitlessly attempting to discern the unspoken reference in Zach’s words, as Tim continued to search amongst the bookcases and assorted bric-a-brac for clues. “Nothing that I know of, gentlemen. After all, we are allowed into this place only on rare occasions ourselves, and indulging in its contents is, shall we say, strictly verboten. Perhaps the monks of St. Jerome retained other items elsewhere, but if so—we would have no connection to them ourselves.”

Tim listened in disappointment as he and Zach continued to scour the room, leafing through volumes and gingerly, meticulously handling each sculpture and tool for some indication of a link to his heirlooms. The books lining the walls were a mostly prosaic lot, with assorted religious tracts, maps, and 17^th-century cookbooks interspersed among personal memoirs and antique technical manuals, detailing various aspects of metalworking or shoemaking. As Tim continued to take stock, his attention was drawn to a manuscript on the shelves—a somewhat disheveled volume that vaguely resembled an artist’s sketchbook, its hasty binding and assembly supplying an incongruous contrast to the neatly-bound tomes surrounding it on all sides. Its front cover boasted an unfamiliar and unsettling image—a snake-like creature, as best Tim could discern, flanked by what appeared to be arms bending away and tapering as they ramified downward, like the dangling branches of a weeping willow. Drawn to the volume out of both a sleuthing curiosity and morbid fascination, Tim began to leaf through its wrinkled pages.

It was scribed in an elaborate cursive style that Tim strained to recognize let alone comprehend, replete with illustrations of seemingly mythical entities that ranged from the merely bizarre to the unquestionably macabre in their appearance. The book had an unsettling surreality to it, filled with vaguely occultist symbology, rigorous diagrams of unknown significance, and apparent coded messages in Greek and Latin flitting about the inscrutable German text in its archaic font. As Tim continued to skim through the pages, the images seemed to crawl out from ever greater depths within the abyss of a grotesque imagination. Finally, he approached what appeared to be a concluding chapter within the volume—and recoiled in horror as it slipped out of his hands, crashing to the ground in an angry reverberation that redounded off the cave-like walls, as though calling out from the fallen book itself. Zach and Heinrich whirled around suddenly in alarm, to witness Tim with his jaw fiercely clenched and his eyes fixed ferociously upon the book, seething in a defiant attempt to cast out the crippling dread welling up within him.

******************************

“Chief, what in the world just happened? Are you all right?” Zach cautiously made his way toward Tim, who was breathing heavily, still fixated upon the sketchbook and its menagerie of horrors. “Chief?” continued Zach in a measured, soothing tone. “Just… take a breather here, calm down a bit and talk to me.”

Tim began to blink his eyes and shake his head, as if resolutely attempting to deny the memory of what he had just glimpsed. Gradually, his nearly panting respirations slowed as he directed his gaze toward Zach, now looking on with barely concealed trepidation as he struggled to imagine what Tim had laid eyes upon. Heinrich, meanwhile, moved to retrieve the sketchbook from the floor. He sidled toward it inconspicuously, intentionally lifting it an angle away from Tim; then, turning obliquely away from Zach and his still-stunned mentor, the perplexed library director began to examine the book’s pages himself, anxiously seeking the source of the sudden tumult.

“It was there, Zach… on those pages,” said Tim, in a rasping voice that resembled a harsh whisper.

“It?” replied Zach in consternation.

“That—“ Tim opened his mouth as though shadowing words with his teeth and lips. But he ultimately slammed his jaw shut and closed his eyes, struggling in vain to carry a sentence through the crashing cataracts of his raging thoughts. With an abrupt motion, he advanced toward the entrance, kneeling down and seizing his briefcase, which had been propped up nearby. Rifling through its contents with an inexplicable urgency, he quickly removed a familiar manila folder, then walked up to Heinrich, who was still clutching the opened sketchbook with a wary expression carved onto his face.

“It’s… about ten pages from the end of the book, Heinrich.”

The library director, uncharacteristically flustered, attempted to speak in a fruitless stammer, before advancing nearly to the volume’s back cover. Tim immediately moved in and frantically flipped the pages back again, finally halting at an ominous chapter heading with a ghastly picture spanning two pages. At once, Tim opened the manila folder—removing his third drawing of the mysterious dream scene and holding it before Heinrich, who looked on in a display of frightened disbelief as he beheld the uncanny match between the nightmarish creatures in the two drawings, sketched centuries apart from each other. Zach edged forward toward Tim’s side, craning his neck to glimpse Tim’s chilling exhibition; when he finally caught sight of the images side-by-side, he tensed his lower lip against his teeth, looking away and shaking his head incredulously.

“OK, Boss,” said Zach, in a nervously defiant attempt at humor. “Now I’m officially spooked.”

Heinrich, still baffled at the events transpiring over the past minute, narrowed his eyes in further consternation at the exchange.

“Dr. Shoemaker… Tim—I don’t, quite understand what you’ve just shown me. You have… already seen the picture in this book, to be able to draw that picture?”

“No, I could have never conceived…” said Tim with teeth clenching, nearly overpowered by the conundrum that seemed to maliciously taunt him with its seemingly ludicrous impossibility. “This picture in my folder, Heinrich—it’s one of, three such drawings that I’ve sketched over the past week; a dream sequence that keeps recurring over and over, for God-knows-what reasons, and in higher detail each time.”

”So you had never seen this creature before?” replied the director in alarm, his voice betraying a twinge of nearly mind-deafening apprehension.

“Not… exactly, Heinrich. That beast, in the center of my sketch—it had already emerged from the hand of another man, of several hands nearly simultaneously, in fact, beginning nearly a month ago. They’re all patients, in a military clinical trial in Tennessee, who… began slowly going mad from delusions and hallucinations, consequent to some neuropsychiatric syndrome of an unknown basis that we’re still trying to ascertain. They apparently started seeing and hearing horrible things and drawing—that very being. Even before all this, as my colleagues in Tennessee were recently informed, there were Japanese patients also suffering from this so-called ‘Tachibana syndrome’ in milder form, and they were also prone to such bizarre sketches, possibly of the same thing.”

“Tachibana syndrome?” queried Heinrich with a look of abject bewilderment.

“I’d never heard of it before either; almost nobody had. The Japanese patients were diagnosed all the way back in 1946, in regions affected by the atomic bombings around Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But just like today, there was neither an explanation nor any hint of a causative agent, and in the milder version back then, the disease just seemed to self-resolve; nobody even considered it again until, it began striking those poor veterans in the clinical trials just this year. My own involvement was, I suppose what you could call an unhappy coincidence; I was called in as an advisor to the trials in Tennessee a week ago, just before I began having my own visions of that scene containing the same creature.”

Heinrich nodded anxiously, in a sort of conditional acknowledgment of a phenomenon that he could scarcely appreciate, before shifting his attention back to the sketchbook. “Well, I’ve just now availed myself of only a cursory look at this volume, but the book is from 1678, or so the insignia on the title page would indicate. And this manuscript… has never left this shelf or been glimpsed by outside eyes.”

“The creature on those pages, and on Tim’s drawings,” mused Zach aloud to the director, grasping desperately for a mundane explanation, “have you perhaps seen a variant of it before, outside of that book alone? Maybe as a… mythological motif, more or less subconsciously soaked up by people from another source, and appearing now in these sketches?”

“In all my years on this job,” said Heinrich with a sympathetic shake of the head, “I’ve encountered literally thousands of mythological beasts and flights of the human imagination, from every cultural nook and cranny of the world—and there’s nothing, anywhere, resembling that monstrosity. It would seem that this horror has been dreamt up anew in the minds of people from centuries apart. In fact…”

Heinrich closed the volume, taking careful note of the stylized writing on the front cover. “The author of this sketchbook was a local artist from Borna in the 17^th century, a man by the name of Michiel von Mayerhoff.”

“A name you recognize?” asked Tim, deeply intrigued.

“He was a native of Borna, like this library’s namesake Martin Hayneccius himself, though far less-known,” replied Heinrich in a scholarly tone. “Michiel was a gifted painter from a young age. His father was himself an artist and craftsman originally from Delft in the Netherlands. He prospered enough to become a leading city burgher, then a titled member of the nobility in the Holy Roman Empire at the time. His son was blessed with that singular genius that the Dutch so often infuse into the paintbrush or the potter’s wheel, and Michiel was groomed from his early youth to follow in the footsteps of Rembrandt and Vermeer.”

“Seems that his chosen subject matter eventually diverged considerably from that of his inspirations,” observed Tim with a trace of irony.

“You’re correct, Tim. Michiel eventually decided to apply his talents to a far different purpose from that originally envisioned for him. He became an ‘experimental artist’ in the modern lingo whose oeuvre was unorthodox and never fully appreciated in his time, though he did attain some modest renown in local circles. His consuming interest was in externalizing, I suppose you could say, the inner world of our minds. The title of this book, in fact, is ‘Die Alptraumsammlung’—an assemblage of nightmares. From the little I have gleaned thus far, Herr von Mayerhoff seems to have visited several people deemed madmen in various facilities around Leipzig. He interviewed them, and then committed their nightmarish images to paper, much as a sketch artist in a police station would draw a suspect in collaboration with a witness. Which would mean…”

“That somebody else was dreaming up this thing, 350 years before it invaded the minds of people today,” said Tim, shifting his eyes skyward as his mind assimilated the chilling conclusion. “Heinrich,” he then said suddenly, his gaze darting back toward the director, “what exactly was Herr von Mayerhoff trying to do with his… ‘nightmare collection’ project, as it were?”

“I’m not yet sure what spurred this volume, Tim. Michiel von Mayerhoff’s overriding aim in his art was to visually convey what he called the ‘Gedenkschaft’ of his subjects—a mental landscape of sorts, portraying the interacting elements of the psyche that animated these people’s thought, feeling, and dream spaces. Von Mayerhoff was undertaking this long before the psychological treatises of Freud or Jung, of course, so he had no inkling about… innate archetypes, or levels of consciousness, but he intuitively appreciated that our minds construct worlds as they think and emote.”

“Or perhaps,” said Tim cryptically, “something is constructing those worlds… within their minds.”

“I… suppose so,” replied Heinrich, somewhat discomfited by Tim’s perplexing conjecture. “In any case, if von Mayerhoff was reconstructing the Gedenkschaft of this poor soul, perhaps he took notes along the way. There may be something in that manuscript to identify or describe whoever it was that dreamt up this entity, and why it seized his mind in the first place.” He opened the volume up again, proceeding quickly to the waking nightmare eternally frozen on its concluding pages.

As Heinrich immersed himself in the text, Tim sighed with his lips drawn against his teeth, impatient for answers and nagged by a sense that he was overlooking something fundamental. Zach had retreated to a back wall and resumed inspection of the objects sprawled across the room. It was little more than a perfunctory and fruitless exercise, he mused to himself, but he hoped it would at least distract him and Tim momentarily from the accumulating horrors of the moment. To his own astonishment, something drew his attention and held it.

“Chief,” said Zach while motioning to Tim, who exhibited a paradoxically serene expression as he stood tormented by his own deliberations, “over here—does this have any significance for you?”

Surprised, Tim furrowed his brow and approached Zach, who was knelt down beside a curious, sprawling metallic object fastened into the chamber’s back wall. It had three crossbars of varying length, each capped by an irregular ridged structure and fastened with bolts at several points into a platform laid into the wall itself.

Tim nodded in familiarity as he stood astride the object, with Zach still bent down on the opposite side. “That’s an old-fashioned shoemaker’s tool, Zach—a cobbler’s last, the device they used to shape or repair their wares, though a good deal larger than most of the antiques I’ve seen. These objects capping each bar, they were varieties of the molds that the shoemakers used to form their shoes. Their arrangement does seem a bit off,” said Tim, squinting his eyes skeptically as he probed the device. “Based on what my grandfather taught me and my cousins, when imparting all the family lore—the lengths and positions of these bars are way off. Awfully slipshod work, considering that for a cobbler, he relied on this contraption to feed his own family.”

“Maybe so,” replied Zach reflexively, his attention diverted elsewhere. “But there’s something else you should see, Boss; it’s right here, engraved into one of these crossbars.”

Tim stepped in beside the young man, resting his forearm on one of the bars as he eyed the object of Zach’s curiosity. Scored onto the sides of the bar, was a series of symbols—characters that puzzled Tim initially, but soon teased him as they jostled an elusive memory.

“I feel as if… I’ve seen these carvings before.” Tim’s eyes abruptly flashed wide open like a bird of prey zeroing in on a target of opportunity, as the recognition donned upon him. “Now I remember, these etchings are in Gothic script, just like those on the clay tablet with the rest of my heirlooms! The one with the apocalyptic messages inscribed upon it—those messages were written in the Gothic language, which has supposedly been extinct for 1,500 years. Now the same script is here, too.” Tim directed his gaze skyward as he struggled to connect the dots. “Which perhaps means that the heirlooms…”

He stood up in a drawn-out motion, tapping his chin and aggressively summoning his recent memories. “That’s right!” he exclaimed toward Zach, who was now standing himself. “I was struggling to recall it before but… Ezra was saying that Christof Schumacher and Stefan Koenig, they’d constructed a workshop on their home in Borna. And if this library was expanded out of that very property…”

“Then the old workshop should still be on site, too,” said Zach with a concurring nod.

“Heinrich,” began Tim as he twisted his torso around, to partially face the library director poised near the entrance, “is there any record in this library’s archives of a workshop of some sort on the original property? A place where Schumacher and Koenig might have been manufacturing the very tools of their cobbler trade—before they donated the site to the Order of St. Jerome?”

After a pause, Heinrich looked up from the volume that had been engrossing his attention, and rubbed his lower jaw as he pondered the unexpected query. He then shook his head in the negative. “Nothing of the sort, Tim. The history of this library has been diligently catalogued, and there’s never been mention of a… workshop, or studio onsite. The boyhood homes of Christoph Schumacher and Stefan Koenig were little more than country cottages, which the Order of St. Jerome had provided to orphans and suffering families from the Thirty Years’ War; they were never designed for any such, industrial activity.”

“I see,” said Tim, looking away and muffling a frustrated scowl, as the director continued to pore through the opened sketchbook for clues. Tim shot a sidelong glance back toward the curiously disarrayed cobbler’s last, then turned and inspected it more rigorously from top to bottom; he was still puzzled by the inexplicable presence of the Gothic text, tormented by the possibility that its indecipherable text held a crucial clue that he could not hope to behold. As he scrutinized the strange instrument, his eyes were drawn to the gear-like interfaces between the crossbars and the metallic platform bolted against the wall, and thence to the borders of the platform itself. The entire device was curiously free of rusting despite the passage of so many centuries, but its edges seemed inexplicably scratched, and the stony interface at its right side seemed to be chipped away just below the midpoint, as though bearing scars.

“Zach,” he said in a sudden start, motioning toward a large object amidst some antique cobbler’s tools nearby, “could you hand me that old wrench off to your side? There’s something I need to check.”

Zach vacillated momentarily before transferring the device to Tim, curious about his mentor’s intentions. Tim immediately grabbed hold of the wrench and held its teeth facing backward toward him, then gently tapped the back of the tool against the wall just to the right of the platform. He slowly worked his way toward the metal border of the last, bringing his ear close to the clanging sound as he advanced. As he continued leftward over the cast iron of the platform, his eyes widened as the sound changed pitch…

“That’s why these crossbars look so off,” said Tim, hastily stepping away and fixing his eyes forward, “because they are out of position—and deliberately so.” He analyzed the arrangement like a cat tracking its target, using his index finger to trace out patterns of unclear significance through the air. Zach stepped back and looked on inquisitively, mystified by Tim’s sudden hunch. “Here,” continued Tim, “I remember now, from all those tales my grandfather would tell us as little tykes—for this sort of cobbler’s last to function, we’d need these bars to be at right angles. But this one,” he said, clasping a rod with a small, contorted nub at the end, “shouldn’t be jutting out so far.”

To Tim’s astonishment, the rod gave way as he pressed it obliquely toward the center, sliding smoothly across the platform. “So these gears aren’t just idle… This bar should be facing up and a bit further out, and this one,” he said, clasping a crossbar with a finely molded shape at its terminus, “is the breadwinner for a cobbler’s family—should be swinging out perpendicular to everything else on here, ready for a job.” As Tim rotated the bar to point outward from the platform, he and Zach were jolted by the sound of a pop that seemed to emanate from behind the platform. They looked at each other in shocked surprise, as Tim motioned the young man to approach.

“Zach, here—grasp the end of the bar at the molded form, I’ll take the inner half… and yoke it backward as hard as you can, counterclockwise to the left. On my count, 1, 2, 3…”

A gust of air suddenly rushed into the collections room as the platform swiveled away from the wall. Heinrich looked on astounded by the scene unfolding before him, as Tim and Zach pivoted around to catch their breath, unprepared for the whiff of subterranean miasma that had just greeted them. The platform had opened to reveal a corridor in the wall, unknown and unexplored for centuries, leading quickly to a stony flight of stairs heading downward into an ocean of darkness, deep beneath the rock.

Heinrich’s mouth gaped open temporarily, in disbelief at his own eyes. Almost as a reflex, he quickly resumed his studied professional demeanor, seeking an opportunity to step away and ponder the incredible sights he had just beheld. “We have some lanterns and flashlights out this way in an equipment room, as a stopgap in case of an emergency; they might be of some use here,” he offered in transparent understatement.

Tim nodded in silence as he and Zach performed a cursory inspection of the twisting walkway. A chilly, ululating wind seethed inward from an unknown source beyond the opened entryway, aggravating the already gnawing dread that continually taxed their courage. “For once, the scary hidden passage isn’t behind the bookcase,” said Tim in a feeble attempt at humor.

“Chief,” responded Zach earnestly, “what the hell is down there? Do you think someone was actually forging computational equipment in this, ‘workshop,’ like your heirlooms?”

“I can’t say. That clay tablet has been around for 1,000 years, so at least some of these items must have been assembled well before Old Man Schumacher had his in-house factory. But there should be something down there in that chamber, some trail to link up those devices with their creators…”

“OK, gentlemen.” The director affected a businesslike mien to mask his profound apprehension about the forthcoming task, entering the room with three elaborately outfitted wilderness lanterns. “Each of these packs 400 watts; they’re good enough for search-and-rescue teams tracking lost hikers in the Alps or Carpathians, so they should illuminate things a bit in the, uncharted terrain that I suppose you’re intent on visiting here.”

All three of them gathered before the mouth of the nearly pitch-black corridor, exchanging fleeting glances amidst their fitful starts into the darkness. The prospect of setting foot within such a forbidding, unfamiliar domain was itself enough to deter even the hardiest of souls; the nerve-fraying enigmas attached to it only accentuated their collective reluctance.

“I… I’m the one who’s drawn all of you into my, personal Grail quest here,” said Tim nervously, in an attempt to break the impasse. “I’ll lead the way.”

Just as Tim was about to cross the threshold of the passage, he was momentarily halted by the director’s cautious hand on his shoulder. “Tim, I’ve been listening in to your recent conversations, and of course on the basis of the founding principles at the core of this institution, it is your right as a descendant of Christoph Schumacher to… explore your family heritage in our house of learning. I must inquire, however—what is it that we would be seeking in this, ‘workshop’ as you believe it to be? We could, after all, mark off this locale and invite in an archaeological team on a subsequent date, which perhaps might be advisable given… questions of structural integrity, among other things. Is there a genuine urgency here?”

Tim and Zach exchanged a flustered glance as the director pressed his query, the look of those with a difficult case to make to an outsider, and uncertain even in their own minds about how to proceed.

“Heinrich, we’re…” began Tim hesitantly, unsure of his own words. “I know how puzzling this will all sound, but we’re tracking down the source of certain heirlooms in my family. They’re items that carry a great significance, far beyond anything affecting just me or the other Shoemakers as their caretakers.”

Tim shot his eyes briefly skyward, as though reaching for words to decipher the indecipherable. “A relative recently bequeathed to me a collection of devices and artifacts, which my Schumacher ancestors had shuttled from Germany into the Americas centuries ago for reasons unknown, as so much of this history has been lost. In the course of our investigations, we’ve found that these items are nothing less than—computational devices, capable of cognitive computing and neural processing that stretches the limits even of our own present-day capabilities, yet crafted more than three centuries ago. Even if that weren’t enough to digest, there’s also a nexus here to a threat… I don’t know how to describe it, but some sort of malevolent agency or intelligence, that’s somehow managed to traverse the information-processing barrier, between the nervous systems in our brains and their ‘counterparts’ in digital networks. And that threat appears to be spreading as we speak.”

Heinrich continued to stare impassively toward Tim for several moments, before averting his gaze and smiling paradoxically, utterly confounded by what he had just heard. “Funny, my wife said she had a feeling this morning that I would be having an, atypical day at the office,” began the director, jettisoning his scholarly, professional tone and planting his tongue firmly in cheek. “I suppose I should start listening to her hunches a bit more closely.”

“I know,” replied Tim with a resigned tone of his own, “I wouldn’t expect you to digest all that in one session; it’s been a week and I’m still wrestling with it.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s the kind of discussion I had in mind today,” said Heinrich, tongue still thoughtfully in cheek, “but then, I didn’t expect to become the first Bibliothek Direktor in 3 centuries to encounter a wandering member of the Schumacher clan.” He turned again, staring into the dark abyss of the opened passage. “Or to have a long-concealed, ‘factory’ suddenly reveal itself in the depths of my own institution. Or… to glimpse the same nightmare haunting the minds of men 350 years apart.”

The director deliberated impassively for a moment, as the magnitude of the collective conundrums gradually sank in. “I suppose I’m now a part of this, too,’ he continued, addressing Tim squarely as air currents from the chamber rustled his vest. He then allowed himself a shallow chuckle, adjusting the lapels of his sweater vest. “I’m perhaps a bit overdressed for the occasion, but I suppose it’s wise to, roll up one’s sleeves from time to time, as they used to tell me in Minnesota.”

“All the more reason,” replied Tim with a determined start toward the entrance, “for me to lead the charge and…”

To Tim’s surprise, Zach suddenly stepped before him, ducking slightly to clear the low roof of the entryway. “I got this, Boss,” he said, in the steely tone of voice borne by those summoning up a font of courage in the face of their own persistent vacillation. “I’ve always been the first one to leap headlong into predicaments that I don’t have a clue about; no sense in disappointing you now.” He awaited Tim’s approval, ambivalent though it was, then gradually, cautiously crossed the threshold, holding his lantern close by and illuminating every creeping movement into the shadows. Tim followed a step behind, scrupulously surveying the terrain to ensure a secure footing for their path, followed by Heinrich, treading cautiously and not without reservations.

The faintly howling echo from the corridor grew more disquieting upon Zach’s arrival at the top step of the stony staircase, as a ghostly aural presence, like that from the interior of a beachside seashell, began to envelop the three of them. The stairwell had been fashioned with care; a molded stone and iron-ringed balustrade lined each side of the descending corridor, while broad, well-proportioned steps provided stability for a nerve-jangling descent into an unknown realm. The walls were lined with what appeared to be oil lamps, dilapidated from centuries of disuse and neglect. After traversing about a dozen steps, the group neared an angled turn in the stairwell as it bent rightward, down another flight of broad steps.

As Tim approached the bend in the corridor, he held his lantern up to illuminate the wall just ahead before the turn. It seemed out of place, with a smooth, uniform surface in comparison to the rocky irregularity elsewhere in the corridor, and its gray basalt-like surface housed multiple carvings. Some of them were in the same Gothic script that he had just seen on the bar of the cobbler’s last itself, while others, vaguely resembling pictographic hieroglyphs, were unintelligible. Inpatient to glimpse whatever lay ahead, Tim marched onward, ignoring the symbols on the stone face. He and his two compatriots made their way down about 20 steps on the next flight of stairs, the rocky ceiling above undulating like a slithering snake as it tracked along the descending path. Finally, Zach arrived at the bottom step, catching himself as he nearly tumbled in a shallow depression on the uneven stone floor. He then peered toward the left as he balanced himself against the wall, under an arched entrance with a rather menacing, dragon-like figure carved into the keystone.

“Chief, your ancestor had a lot more than a shoe shop going down here,” said Zach in stark understatement, proceeding slowly and holding his lantern aloft in amazement. Before him was a palatial hall with a high roof, anchored deep beneath the bedrock of the overlying hill. It was trisected by three sculpted walls arranged like the blades of a fan, each inlaid with window-like apertures as though mimicking a sun-kissed, Mediterranean villa on an outdoor plain. Modest-sized replicas of classical statuary adorned the centers of the chambers, while finely-crafted oil lamps, regularly spaced across the walls, bore witness to a vigorous enterprise that had once pierced the tenebrous haze of the subterranean cavern. Work tables and fine measuring devices populated virtually every spot within the hall, with shaping tools of extraordinary precision cast about the once-bustling facility. Despite the passage of centuries, the immense chamber and everything therein had proved durable, encased and nearly sealed off as they were by the stone ring of the overlying bedrock.

Tim and Heinrich both followed close behind, their lanterns illuminating the expanse in all its still-remarkable splendor. They split off to explore different regions of the vast realm, in awe at everything they beheld. As he made his way about an especially uneven section of the floor, Tim heard the library director’s voice beckoning behind him. “Tim, over here, take a look at this.” His voice had a ghostly echo in the caverns, the aural reflection being overlaid upon his original words with only a slight delay, reinforcing the otherwordly ambience that suffused the venue.

Tim whirled around to see the director poised before a pretzel-like contraption lodged snugly against one of the side walls dividing the chambers. On closer viewing, they descried an array of instruments, all fashioned from shaped glass and laid out carefully in a line, as though tracing out the evolution of an idea.

“Does this ring any bells for you?” queried Heinrich, his lantern illuminating one of the twisting glass assemblages.

Tim kneeled down, gently pinching his chin in curiosity as he eyed the intriguing system. “It does, actually,” he responded in a cautious tone, jogging his memory as he illuminated every inch of the structure before him. “These containers resemble… Geissler tubes. I haven’t seen the likes of these things since, all those demonstrations in college engineering class. Look,” he said, clasping the ends of one of the tubes. “These are electrodes on each side, oppositely-charged. The designers would fill the tube with a fluid, like mercury or air—then send a charge between the electrodes, like neon lamps today. As far as we know though, Geissler tubes weren’t invented until the mid-1800s.”

“Yes,” replied Heinrich quizzically. “These are perhaps a bit out of use, after 300 years and yet—remarkably intact. Perhaps this chamber has been so protected from the elements…”

“Perhaps, but they may have doped the glass with an additive too, to make it more resistant,” said Tim, closely inspecting one of the tubes. “This didn’t just emerge from some crude kiln in the 17^th-century—somebody knew a good deal about materials science here and… electromagnetism, which wasn’t supposed to be on the books for another 150 years.” Tim looked up in dumbfounded astonishment toward Heinrich, who met his glance with equally incredulous puzzlement.

“Intriguing,” resumed Tim, looking obliquely away and then back toward the objects, in the manner of a detective absorbing a pivotal clue. “The rest of these devices…. To the right of this Geissler tube—it’s an old-fashioned Crookes tube.”

“Crookes—a cathode-ray tube?”

“Right. Souped up and built upon the Geissler tube model, so you had a steady electron beam between the electrodes. Roentgen’s X-rays, Thomson and Goldstein’s work on atomic structure, heck the first TV and monitor images we know and love today—they all grew out of it. Along with one more thing,” said Tim, now directing his lantern with fascination at another glass cylinder just to the right. It was distinguished by a prominent bulge at its center and a metallic strip along the length of its interior. “That one’s got a filament, Heinrich; it’s a vacuum tube, just like the ones utilized in the earliest computers.” He looked squarely at the library director, beaming in the manner of someone inspired by a great discovery. “This whole section of the chamber—it’s a recapitulation of the early history of electronic logic, at the core of even modern computer hardware.”

“ Or perhaps, a ‘precapitulation’ would be the right term,” replied Heinrich wryly. “According to your description, Tim, someone… was assembling these components before the 18^th century had even dawned, more than 200 years before they were invented by the rest of us. I just can’t fathom the basis behind such a massive enterprise, investing so many resources only to conceal all this technology from the wider world.”

“We’ve been puzzling over the same thing, Heinrich, and we’re just as stymied. But this dark, dank chamber may be the one place to finally shed some light.”

“Speaking of shedding light,” came an echoing voice from just behind the two men, “I just wish they could have produced some spare tungsten light bulbs down here while they were busy inventing vacuum tube diodes, microchips, punch cards and everything else they’ve gathered around. I guess the oil lamps do have a certain period chic to ‘em…”

“Zach, nice to see you again. You must have buried your lantern while exploring one of the other sections; I was worried you’d just disappeared somewhere down here,” said Tim with tongue in cheek, pivoting on a kneeling right foot to face the young man.

“Tim, considering all the dark corners and crevices in this place, I’m not so sure the ‘disappearing’ metaphor is the right choice of words,” said Zach in grizzled sarcasm, attempting to mask his jumpy nervousness within the long-buried subterranean cavern.

“Zach,” continued Tim in an inquiring tone, “you just mentioned something about punch cards?’

“On the far wall,” said Zach, motioning back and to the left. “And since you all have found the vacuum tubes, I tracked down the transistors, the chips, and other paraphernalia from our more recent past—well, for those of us outside this place, at least. They’re off to the right in the back.”

Tim and Heinrich peered about the caverns with their lanterns held high, as Zach continued. “I overheard the two of you conferring just now about this collection of computer hardware here, laid out a few centuries ahead of schedule. You really weren’t kidding. Those back walls might as well be a historical diorama; there’s a model of the old Jacquard loom with its punch cards off on the left, then a replica nearby of Babbage’s old analytical engine—as best I can tell, at least. Many of the objects along the walls are unique though, with no counterparts that I can recall in our history… outside of this place. Someone had an original R&D operation going down here. But in the process, they wound up fashioning many of the same devices that came to underlie our own computational gear since the mid-20^th century.”

“There’s still a glaring, missing piece in all this, though,” frowned Tim, shaking his head. “We know that the people behind all this had far more than just a 200-year jump on the rest of us. The technology in my family heirlooms is beyond even today’s capabilities—neural mimicry, neuro-digital interfaces, and that’s only what we have the faintest inkling about. Yet there’s no sign of it here. Plus, if we’ve managed to locate their headquarters for, shall we say, hardware development…”

“Then where’s the software division?” queried Heinrich wryly, as Tim nodded at the anticipation.

“We do have a museum down here,” said Zach with tongue in cheek, his lantern still casting about, “so it ought to have a modern section.”

“Yes,” replied Tim, spurred by the thought, “a museum or… perhaps, a record of their progress.”

“I’m… not following you, Chief.”

“You spelled it out yourself a few moments ago, Zach. Try to place the devices in this place roughly on our timeline, in sequence according to the year when they were publicly announced. The earliest inventions, like the Jacquard loom and the punch cards from the early 1800s—they’re on the left border of this vast chamber. Where we’re standing—Geissler and vacuum tubes—that’s more-or-less intermediate, late 19^th century or so. And on the right side…”

“We’re into the 20^th century,” said Zach, his lantern facing the wall in question.

“Exactly. Think about it—whoever’s behind all this here, they were able to compress what took, for us, more than 3 centuries to develop, into perhaps a few years or decades. The devices in view right now, maybe these people first constructed each apparatus here, or perhaps they were first designed elsewhere and stored here afterward; can’t be certain. But, they’ve all been arrayed roughly in the order of each technological leap as we know it, and presumably as they themselves discovered it—perhaps as a way to log their progress toward… whatever they were so intent on constructing, and whatever presumed breakthrough my own family heirlooms are supposed to be linking up to. The building blocks are out here, culminating there on the right side with something like an integrated circuit, a bona fide microchip basic to our machines today…”

“I don’t know, Chief,” said Zach from a distance, already probing about the back wall on the right. “Looks like their trailblazing ends right here, with the chips and some solid-state electronics. That’s all late 20^th-century, so they were still a few hundred steps ahead of their time but… nothing like what your rich uncle signed off to you.”

Zach continued to search about the area in vain. It was particularly drafty nearby, and he spoke loudly to project his voice back to Tim and Heinrich. “Still nothing of interest, Chief. It just makes me wonder even more—why is all this even here, after all these years?”

“Is… is that a rhetorical question, Zach?” asked Tim, not quite sure what the young man was implying.

“I’m thinking aloud, but—why are all these instruments still lining these walls, and these ones in particular? Seems like the operators of this place, they left in one heck of a hurry all those centuries ago, whatever the reason may be. Maybe they’d be like any of us in the event of a house fire—you nab what you can and leave the second-tier articles behind, which is what we have here now. Just speculating, but maybe whatever was state-of-the-art, along the lines of the Cereceph and the other fancy items of which you’ve become the proud owner of late, perhaps the folks running this place simply took all that with them to wherever…”

Tim and the director reacted with a startle, as Zach’s voice suddenly vanished in a cacophony of stumbling and crashing. Tim rushed toward the wall as quickly as he could in the still-enveloping darkness. “Zach! Zach!”

“Whoa… ah, I’m all right, Tim don’t come any closer—it’s a false wall, you’ll follow in my not-so-graceful footsteps.”

“A… what?”

“A false wall,” said Zach, slowly rising up again and dusting himself off, his knees about level with the ground where Tim was standing. “One heck of an optical illusion…” He clutched his lantern at an angle to illuminate a gap between the wall of the main chamber, and a second wall offset from and behind the first. “There’s an entrance to another room here, but I doubt you could see it even with those oil lamps burning bright; they carved it perfectly into the barrier of the chamber, to make it seem as though this back wall is continuous with the first. Guess they must have had a sense of humor down here all those centuries ago.”

“Zach are you sure you’re all right? We heard you take a mean tumble back there.”

“I’m fine Chief, I just leaned back in the wrong place and fell on my tailbone; smarts a little but I’m still in one piece. This place,” he said, craning around and illuminating the new chamber with his lantern held aloft, “is worth a look-see; there’s a broad pillar behind me and a passage off to each side. It’s all hidden in plain sight; just make sure you have your footing before you step in here.”

Tim eyed a bemused Heinrich with a shrug, then slowly made his way to the concealed entrance, feeling around its edges and tucking his head down to slip in. There was a slight dip down to a ramp, leading into a small antechamber before the pillar. As Heinrich soon followed in, with some reluctance, Tim shined his lantern onto the column before them. It seemed to have been erected out of marble, so meticulously carved and smoothed over that even centuries had barely eroded its sheen. Tim circled the enormous pillar, eventually reaching a side distinguished in a way he knew all too well by now, etched in an apparent vertical narrative up the length of the column.

“A pattern seems to be emerging here,” he said dryly to his two compatriots.

“Yes, this is… Gothic script,” replied Heinrich as he caught sight of the etchings, unaware of Tim’s intended connotations. “I believe—yes, it was there on the facing wall, as we had descended the stairs to this place…”

“Not only there, Heinrich,” responded Tim, to the director’s surprise. “One of the items in my own inheritance, was a clay tablet even older than the other heirlooms, dating back a millennium. It had a… foreboding message, to say the least, and it was carved in that very same Gothic writing; I don’t know what it means, and I certainly can’t decipher it with my own eyes, but whoever’s responsible for all this seems to prefer that script as a medium, for at least some of their communications.”

“Communications? Of what?”

“I’m not sure… but the message on that tablet was nothing short of apocalyptic. And—“ Tim looked away as if seized by his own ruminations, crudely formed memories and images suddenly coalescing into something coherent and darkly suggestive. “Why didn’t I notice it before? On that wall in the stairwell just now, there something like… hieroglyphs alongside the Gothic script. I was so intent on exploring this lower chamber, I didn’t pay them much heed; but now I can picture it all so clearly. The scenes were crudely sketched, fragmentary, but they were… elements of my dream scenes!”

“The ones—from your sketches, Tim?” asked Zach, as he interposed himself between Tim and the pillar, eyeing the strange etchings himself.

“Yes, I can recall now. That fountain-like structure in the center of my drawings, the fire and… those columns! The ones in the background—“

Tim at once darted away from the pillar and pushed past it, into a tunnel further onward. Zach and Heinrich followed along cautiously, haunted as much by the meanderings of their own imaginations as by the deepening pull of the inexorably darkness. When Tim emerged from the tunnel, he stood aside and gasped in astonishment at the sight before him. There were now a series of granite pillars, narrower than the first but descending in down the length of a large room in seven pairs. On each one were granite carvings as before—along with the hieroglyphs, each depicting various segments of a broad narrative.

“I won’t try to read your mind here, Chief,” said Zach, emerging from the tunnel, “but I’m guessing that these columns have some connection to that creepy dream scene you keep sketching out.”

“I think they do, Zach,” replied Tim, circling each of the columns in turn and looking up in fascinating at their contents, “but not as constituents of that dream scene itself. These pillars here—they’re meant to be a visual recapitulation of a part of that scene and a lot more, the same role of these pictographs themselves. I don’t know I… haven’t yet caught sight of my dream scene itself in its entirely, but it all seems to be linked up somehow.”

As Tim reached the fourth pillar on the left side, he noticed several of the pictographs containing representations of an unknown but strangely familiar entity, tall and with somewhat indistinct features, yet curiously projecting a look of steely determination. “These are… yeah, these are depictions of those same beings, in the foreground of all my sketches,” he said, thinking aloud as Zach and Heinrich looked on.

The group continued to scan the pillars and the surroundings walls for several minutes, musing in awe over the mysteries contained in the puzzling messages inscribed on the columns. Finally, Tim reached the last column and proceeded over a gap to the back wall—gasping and flinching suddenly backward as his eyes took in a horrifying sight, carved in relief into the wall itself..

“Tim? You OK?” Heinrich’s voice prompted Tim to turn around as he recovered himself, but he said nothing, merely holding his lantern aloft as his mind adjusted to the horror of the image before him, like a swimmer braving near-freezing waters in an ocean. Zach and Heinrich approached cautiously, anxious about what Tim’s lantern would reveal to them. As they neared Tim’s position, Zach sighed harshly, jolted at the sight and its darkly inscrutable implications.

“That same beast again, Tim,” said Heinrich matter-of-factly, trying to conceal his own creeping sense of dread, “from your drawings, from…”

“That sketchbook from Michiel von Mayerhoff—yes, that same beast, just with the blank spots in the picture filled in.”

The creature’s multiple eyes peered out from many sides in an expression of rage-filled menace, about the probing central eye and its own paradoxical look of contemplative questioning. There were arms and other appendages as before around the creature’s irregular edge, in much greater detail, with the eyes collapsing in a mind-bogglingly hyperbolic pattern from the center, toward a distinctly frightening visual effect. This time, there was also a particularly chilling motif scattered in amidst the bizarre forms throughout the depiction—what appeared to be the makings of human-like faces, only partly manifested across the surface of the beast. A lengthy caption in Gothic script had been inscribed beneath the sketch, one whose message seemed emphatic and alarmed even as its details remained entirely mysterious to its latest observers.

“Tim,” began Zach, anxious to break the uneasy silence, “do you think this is all some… cult, built around this monstrosity we keep encountering?”

Tim continued to fixate his gaze resolutely on the image, pondering how to respond. “That thought crossed my mind, Zach,” he said, exhaling from deep in his chest as though exorcising the notion from his body. “But I really don’t think so; if anything, I’d surmise the opposite. Based on what was on that tablet, and on at least some of these pictographs, it seems that this group… was trying to combat this entity, whatever its nature is. Speaking of,” he continued, pivoting toward Heinrich, “were you able to glean anything more, from Michiel von Mayerhoff’s sketchbook? The one with… all those nightmares splashed out on each of its pages?”

“Not much, Tim,” replied Heinrich in some disappointment, as he continued to look with a measure of lurid horror at the depiction on the wall. “I was able to just browse that last chapter before we got dragged down here. But I did mange to discern some of the background leading up to that drawing of this… thing.”

Both Tim and Zach now pivoted in Heinrich’s direction, both hoping that the director’s exposition would help to demystify some of the nightmarish conundrums surrounding the horrid image, whose ghastly recurrences only magnified the dark mystery of its origins.

“Von Mayerhoff had sketched that picture after speaking to a Dominican Friar, a certain Rupert Nicklaus… whom Meyerhoff identified as a lapsed member of the Order of St. Olaf.

“The Order of St. Olaf…” repeated Tim inquisitively. “Any relation to the monks in St. Jerome?”

“That’s puzzled us for a while,” sighed Heinrich with a shake of the head. “The Order of St. Olaf is semi-legendary, its mythos disseminated in various tales throughout Prussia in the 17^th and 18^th centuries—yet documentation of its aims and activities virtually unknown. They were supposedly working with the Order of St. Jerome to assist the displaced from the Thirty Years’ War; they apparently constructed several sturdy houses of worship, Protestant and Catholic alike. Yet there are precious few vestiges of their organization’s involvement with such an effort, despite the undeniable contribution they must have made both to sheltering a hard-pressed population and, of course, to the physical and cultural landscape of the region after the war. After the mid-18^th century… they just vanished entirely, from even the meager historical sources that do hint at their endeavors.”

“That’s interesting,” said Tim, his forefinger rhythmically massaging his lower chin in contemplation. “I remember now—Ezra had mentioned that the monks of St. Jerome were supposedly in league with another monastic order, and that there was some church connected up to them and the heirlooms, but he couldn’t elaborate. I wonder if the Order of St. Olaf is what he had in mind.”

“That’s possible, but in any case, Friar Nicklaus’s formal association with the Order seems to have terminated around roughly 1662. For reasons not spelled out in von Mayerhoff’s notes, the friar became plagued by nightmares about this same creature, so much so that they impaired his ability to fulfill his monastic duties. He then retired for a while to one of the old Roman spa cities in Italy, as was common at the time, where he joined the Jesuits as a Friar. He then spent several years in China, part of the Jesuits’ own activities there.”

“Presumably… no longer tormented by the nightmares?” conjectured Tim.

“Supposedly, they ebbed away after he left the Order of St. Olaf. When he finally returned to Germany from Asia, the Order attempted to recruit him back into the fold; among other things, they were profoundly interested in the Chinese characters as a, communications tool perhaps—it’s not clear from the records. Friar Nicklaus politely declined the offer, but in the midst of re-establishing contact, he apparently rekindled all those horrible memories of the nightmares. Fortunately for him, they seem to have quickly faded again; but the images were sharp enough in his mind, that he was able to depict them in such... grotesque detail, with the help of von Mayerhoff’s pen. According to von Mayerhoff himself, even he was startled by the recounting of Friar Nicklaus’s nightmares.”

“He obviously wasn’t the only one so affected,” replied Tim in a grizzled tone of voice, still vigorously trying to assemble conclusions from the disparate clues.

The director gazed slightly downward and nervously sucked in air, as if himself perturbed by what he was about to reveal. “Well, it wasn’t just the imagery itself that seems to have so upset von Mayerhoff. When he first introduced the entity that he had depicted at the opening of the chapter, the artist related the description that Friar Nicklaus had provided to him. I still remember his words because they’re so… poetic, in the way they render his ‘Schreck’ as we would say in my own tongue, that sort of overpowering, paralyzing dread that can debilitate all but the stoutest of minds: ‘A being of horrific power that has long been among us yet never glimpsed or imagined, a beast from which even the Four Horsemen themselves would shrink in terror, and whose appearance would herald the unthinkable—a nightmare from which we would never awake, a force that would invade and permanently conquer not our lands or our homes, but our very minds themselves.”

Tim continued to look on nearly motionless, the darkness of the chamber concealing the stark pallor that had suddenly cast itself upon his face. The starkly-rendered depiction of the creature in that back wall was now even more horrifying than before, its eyes now verily assaulting Tim with their eerie, inscrutable menace.

“And on that thoroughly… reassuring note,” said Zach behind them, couching his voice in a sort of grittily defiant sarcasm, “I think I’ll poke around the margins of this chamber a little more, see if I can find anything more of interest.”

Tim nodded haltingly out of the corner of his eye, before glancing back nervously at the director. “Heinrich, that sensation you just described as, uh… ‘Schreck,’ I’d say that pretty well characterizes what’s befalling me right now.”

“That makes two of us, Tim; at least, if misery loves company, I suppose fear does too. By the way, there was one more thing in von Mayerhoff’s notes, though I can’t begin to grasp its significance.”

Tim, who had been gazing in curiosity at Zach’s determined search, quickly glanced back toward the library director—partly in curiosity, partly in apprehension at any further revelations to jangle his already frayed nerves.

“The creature of Friar Nicklaus’s nightmares,” continued Heinrich, “had a name: the Tauschreigeist.”

“T-ow-shry…geist?” said Tim, sounding out the unfamiliar name with a look of stark bewilderment.

“Right. I don’t have the slightest idea what the designation means. It’s a compound name, I presume, beginning with the Greek letter tau; but I can’t piece the components together in any meaningful way.”

“Did von Mayerhoff indicate the source of the name?” interjected Zach, breaking his own anxious silence.

“It was the name used by Friar Nicklaus himself,” replied Heinrich, alternately facing Tim and his protégé, “and apparently from the outset. Von Mayerhoff didn’t delve into too much detail, but he emphasized that both he and Friar Nicklaus did not invent the name as a mere, artistic moniker; Friar Nicklaus had learned of it from another source. In fact, the friar had employed that designation for the entity since his first nightmares, perhaps suggesting that the monks of St. Jerome were… somehow familiar with it themselves. I don’t know who else might have suggested the name, and as far as I know, it’s completely absent from any other historical record or mythology.”

“So this… Tauschreigeist,” said Tim, his spine somehow chilled by a name that he was not even able to comprehend, “it invaded the mind of a 17^th-century friar who had been associated with a shadowy monastic order… Both that order and this beast, seem to have disappeared from history for several centuries. Until the Tachibana syndrome patients in Japan. And the patients in the clinical trials this year. And…”

“In your own dreams,” nodded Heinrich sympathetically.

“Hey, come and take a look at this.” To the surprise of his two compatriots, Zach’s voice echoed in from an unseen corner, the light from his lantern barely visible.

“Zach… where are you?” shouted Tim.

“I’m right here.” Zach stepped out from a small room adjacent to the main chamber, set into the wall near the last of the seven pairs of pillars. “Another one of their eye-teasers, it would seem; you wouldn’t catch this room unless you were flush against the wall, and it isn’t empty, either.”

Tim and Heinrich approached the room intently as Zach entered it again, holding up his lantern to illuminate a briefcase-sized, slightly rusted metallic case, apparently opened by Zach to reveal a thick notebook inside. “This book has ‘Forschungsbefunde’ literally inscribed on the front cover—a record of their research findings apparently. I don’t know what condition it’s in, so… I haven’t flipped the thing open yet.”

“Admirable instincts Zach,” replied Heinrich, eagerly eyeing the find, “but its condition is impressive even after all these centuries; this metallic case was possibly fashioned explicitly to protect it, perhaps during transport from one site to another.” He opened the notebook and keenly scanned the contents of its pages, brushing off any debris for a clearer look as Tim looked over his shoulder, his own lantern reinforcing the illumination for reading.

“Indeed,” began the director, “they seem to have documented much of their work here. And look, these initials…”

“I see them,” responded Tim almost breathlessly, “C.B.S.—Christoph Bernd Schumacher. My own ancestor was scribing these notes!”

As Heinrich continued to scour the notebook, he paused about midway through its pages. “That’s the second time I’ve come across this,” he said in surprise.

Tim tilted his head askew, narrowing his eyes in curiosity at Heinrich’s findings.

“It’s another set of initials,” said the library director, looking up at his guest. “Most of the notes do seem to bear your ancestor’s signature. Yet there are two other brief comments here, signed off as ‘G.W.L.’ by someone with distinct handwriting—margin notes as best I can surmise. One of Christoph Schumacher’s annotations also referenced this, ‘G.W.L.’ near a diagram of some sort. It’s intriguing, too; most of the notes have been scribed in German, but some are in Latin and a few even in Greek. Wait a minute…” Heinrich remarked in a sudden burst of fascination, as he halted at one of the opened pages about 2/3 of the way through the notebook.

“There it is again,” interjected Tim, his own fascination matching that of the director. “The Gothic script! And…”

“Chinese characters,” said Zach, rotating his head awkwardly as he looked in from the side. “Heinrich, you were saying something just now, about that friar working as a Jesuit in China and…”

“Yes, yes,” replied the director excitedly, in the manner of someone on the brink of unraveling a crucial clue to a mystery, “and this is beginning to add up. They may have indexed their annotations here. Look, this is page 203 of the notebook.” He grasped a thick block of the preceding pages and turned them aside, before steadily retreating backward to an apparent table of contents.

“Look, here it is, ‘Seite 203-205’: Something about the…” the director looked up and nodded as though seized by a realization, with Tim and Zach gazing in anxious anticipation. “The caracteristica univesalis.”

He turned rightward toward his two comrades, who shrugged and shook their heads in ignorance of the reference. “G.W.L., gentlemen,” continued Heinrich, “is none other than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.”

Chapter 11: Night of the Thousand Screams

Saturday May 21, 11:48 a.m.

Caverns Beneath the Special Collections, Bibliothek Martin Hayneccius, Town of Borna, Saxony, Germany

“Leibniz! His comments in that notebook must have been glosses on the research annotations that my ancestor was taking down, which means that Christoph Schumacher must have been… Leibniz’s assistant down here, all this time. This place, it wasn’t merely an artisan’s workshop or a home for war orphans; it was a laboratory! The most advanced of its time…” Tim furrowed his brow and the bridge of his nose as the implications continued to sink in, seized as he was by a mixture of awe and dumbfounded bewilderment.

“Amazing the connection didn’t strike me earlier, as soon as I caught sight of the initials,” said Heinrich, as he intently scanned the densely-packed pages of the notebook. “Among his many other gifts to the world, Gottfried Leibniz founded library science, at least effectively in the form we know it today; I owe my own livelihood to his innovations.”

“Leibniz, wasn’t he… the co-inventor of calculus? The one who came up with that ‘fractional derivative’ notation that the profs beat into our heads during our engineering classes?” interjected Zach, with a measure of aloof detachment. He was slightly uncomfortable amid the lively exchange between the two seasoned professionals around him, its implied significance eluding Zach himself.

“He was, Zach, but far more than that alone,” responded Tim with a hint of intrigue, as though imparting a coveted pearl of forbidden wisdom. “Leibniz was a polymath. He was a universal genius whose guiding interest was not only mathematics, but more broadly speaking, what we would today call ‘information science’—the underpinnings of thought and logic itself, practical as much as theoretical. They say Leibniz—the historical Leibniz as the rest of us have known him, outside of whatever role he must have assumed down here—that he was essentially the first computer scientist, the first software engineer. He was thus a sort of cult hero, a patron saint for all of us back when I was fumbling my way through my own days as a budding engineer.”

“If he had a software design operation running, all the way back in the 1600s,” replied Zach with characteristic dry humor, “it’s a shame he kept his discoveries all underground, literally and figuratively speaking. Even in the 21^st century, he could have ascended to the ranks of the tycoons with what he’d accomplished here.”

“Right, and maybe my ancestor could have too,” nodded Tim, merrily joining in Zach’s drollery as a momentary respite from the grim earnestness of the task unfolding before them. “Then I, my sibs, and all my cousins could have entered the world as rich, spoiled heirs rather than sweating and stumbling our way through as we did.”

“But then all of us at the Doghouse would have been deprived of your inspiring presence, Boss,” said Zach, in a gently mocking sarcasm that masked a genuine respect. “And where would the world be today, had you not become the great Professor Shoemaker we all know and love?” Zach’s expressly tongue-in-cheek rhetorical question had a hauntingly portentous tinge as it filtered through Tim’s ears, for reasons he was at a loss to fully comprehend. Now in the depths of such a secretive domain, rediscovering an undertaking of such breadth and still-unappreciated import, Tim began to realize that his personal trajectory may have been of far greater significance than he had grasped before.

“You give me too much credit, Zach” laughed Tim, before quickly switching back to more serious matters. “Besides, it’s not as though Leibniz required any secret projects to make his mark as such a catalyst for our modern digital world; what he did outside of all this, what’s well-known in the history books, is reason enough to marvel. The binary code at the core of almost all our computation—Leibniz was the first to put that into practice, and apply it as an information-bearing system in the context of problem-solving, in mathematical functions and algebraic computation. He had an overriding interest in, what we’d probably call optimal representation and communication of logical processes. Virtually all algorithms and programs that run our computers, heck our entire modern world itself—the information networks and digitized processes that they pay jokers like me to make sense out of—Leibniz supplied the foundation of these basic principles.”

As he noted Zach’s stubbornly persistent puzzlement, Tim addressed the young man more directly. “Zach, think about some of the names that were tossed around in your computer science courses and seminars, when you were first getting your feet wet as a budding engineer. Remember the work of the great computer scientists and mathematical logicians in the 20^th century—Zuse and Shannon, Gödel and Turing, Cantor and Hilbert. Those earliest computer scientists were by and large abstract mathematicians after all, just as Leibniz was; and they were driven by a few basic questions in laying the groundwork for what would become our digital computing networks—“

“Now you’re starting to ring bells, Chief” responded Zach, with his eyes slightly averted in thought. “Dr. Silva’s lectures on the theory of computational logic, who could ever forget those… The way that mad genius used to build his crazy circuits right in front of us to illustrate his points, at least when he wasn’t zapping himself in the process—a lot like, well, you Boss.”

“I suppose I’ll take that as a compliment,” replied Tim with eyes rolling.

“So it was intended, Chief,” continued Zach wryly, quickly returning to the subject. “Dr. Silva drummed the guiding questions into us day after day from that lectern in his classroom,” he continued, gesticulating in imitation. “What can we compute, what problems can we solve, how can we design and program algorithms to compute and solve those problems. And ultimately, our specific approaches to these questions—they dictate how we devise and arrange the logic gates that do the mathematical operations in our transistors and microchips, the little nervous systems that we create every time we execute our computer programs.”

“Now you’re on my wavelength, Zach. The ancestral roots of our computers even today—they reside in these esoteric mathematical and, shall we say, ‘metamathematical’ questions. The clever minds who posed them were seeking out the logical heart of computation itself; even treading into the philosophical arena and questions of epistemology, what we can know and how we can express what we know.”

“My antennae are detecting a history lesson here, Boss—probably one that I dutifully slept through in some lecture in college.”

“Not sure they lecture much on this topic, Zach, so you’re probably off the hook,” quipped Tim, gently razzing his protégé who was, true to form, concealing his intellectual vigor behind the mask of a determined underachiever. “But you’re right about the first part; there’s a history lesson here, and not a minor one. Go back before the names I mentioned before, back to the early 19^th century, and you have the early logicians—Boole, Schröder, de Morgan, all defining the rigorous logical operations, and the algebraic logic itself, that’s the backbone of virtually all computation today. When you trace this path further, the trail from our most advanced computers today back through the mathematics and logical foundations that underpin them—it all leads right back to…”

“To Leibniz, huh?”

“Precisely, Zach. He wanted to catalog, to systematize the very foundations of information, as well as its organization…”

“And its communication, Tim.” Heinrich had been quietly overhearing the exchange between Zach and his mentor, continuing to pore over the notebook and its intriguing contents. “Here in Borna, in the shadow of Leibniz’s own hometown in Leipzig, we all become duly familiar with the city’s favorite son; yet even today, after so many hundreds of years, we’re always uncovering more. Your summary was correct in its essentials, but Leibniz’s fascination with the roots of logic, the rudiments of what we today call computing—it went thoroughly beyond even the grand ambitions you portrayed. The caracteristica universalis is the key to it; that’s why Christoph Schumacher’s annotation in the table of contents led me straight to Leibniz… and it may lie at the heart of what you’re seeking, Tim.”

Both Tim and Zach gazed with eagle-like intensity upon the director as he elaborated. “Among the seminal names you mentioned, Tim, I would add Frege, Tarski, Peirce, and Weierstrass—it was perhaps they who most directly carried on the work that was closest to Leibniz’s heart.”

“In the logical systems they developed, their mathematical formalism, notation?” queried Tim, surprised at the director’s well-versed familiarity.

“Yes, Tim, but far, far more. One of Leibniz’s grand aims was to discover the so-called caracteristica universalis—a universal language to accurately and comprehensively express mathematical operations, logical deductions, even sophisticated communications among people in human societies. He was many centuries ahead of his time, but in today’s terms, Leibniz believed that there was a fundamental template underlying the exchange of information whatever its form. If we could discover and develop this template, then everything from the processes of nature to… human language, would become far more accessible to our understanding, since we could glimpse the world around us at a deeper, unseen level.”

“I see,” replied Tim in a low voice, engrossed in meditative reflection. “I hadn’t regarded it from that angle before, but I follow what you’re saying. Leibniz was launching an effort to systematize and uncover the exchanges of information that run the world, even our very own minds themselves…”

“Not merely the nature of such exchanges, Tim, but a very particular informational structure—the kind that we associate with intelligence itself, and communication among intelligent entities like, well, us. Leibniz was onto this notion centuries before we knew anything about the neuron theory or the rise of consciousness in our nervous systems—before we even knew of atoms, molecules, or cells. But somehow, his insights led him to suspect that intelligence itself was something physical, at the very heart of existence itself, and not necessarily limited to the intricate structure that emerges within our own minds.”

Tim chewed over the director’s words, filled as they were with mind-teasing implications—his lantern flickering briefly in the cool, ghostly draftiness of the isolated chamber. “Heinrich, if I’m vibing with your wavelength here, you’re saying that Leibniz—at least, the Leibniz we know from history, outside of whatever he was pursuing down in the caverns here—he never quite realized this, caracteristica universalis. But he grasped what its discovery would mean—that any information-bearing entity, any physical process or substrate, could be accessed and…”

“Yes,” interjected Heinrich enthusiastically, “influenced, by any force or any entity possessing its own intelligence in any form—which could then exploit this caracteristica, whatever its nature, and cross traditional bounds that separate the minds of people from each other, even humans from machines. When you mentioned up there in the collections room, your suspicions that something had already crossed this barrier… it jogged a lot of memories for me, of conversations I’d had about this very topic which I’d otherwise dismissed before. I just never conceived that evidence of something so momentous, had been hiding right under my nose, in my very own institution.”

“Yes, and that’s been piquing my curiosity, Heinrich,” said Tim, looking slightly askance at the director. “I realize the breadth of training and background you must require for your position, but what you’ve just been discussing with me—these advances in mathematical logic from the 19^th century, the underpinnings of computation—that’s not the sort of thing I would have expected even someone of your standing to know about. Many of us in the engineering profession aren’t availed of that sort of exposure to the theoretical side of our own craft.”

“You’re right to ask, Tim, because the same person who imparted so much of this to me—he may be able to help you, too.”

“Someone… here in Borna?”

“In Leipzig actually, right next door. Perhaps you’ve heard his name before—Gregor Chetkiewicz. He was trained as a software engineer, beginning in private industry; he spent some years at a firm in Wisconsin in fact, at the same time I was training in Minnesota. He flourished at it, but then crossed over into academia where he prospered just as surely; he eventually became the Leibniz Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematics at the University of Leipzig. It’s one of the highest honors there, granted in part to honor and recognize Leibniz’s own connection to the city.”

“Is he still there?”

“Not anymore. Gregor departed the university several years ago and returned to his roots, to strike out on his own in the private sector—mostly applying some of his artificial intelligence work to improve environmental safety and efficiency. It was Gregor’s company that just evolved a new solar panel that’s now being used across Central Europe, and supplied that sophisticated algorithm you may have encountered in your own news broadcasts in the United States—governing traffic signals to optimize vehicle flow on the roadways, minimizing pollution and so forth. Gregor sold off his controlling interest in the firm, and he no longer oversees the day-to-day operations anymore; but he still drops in as a technical advisor from time to time, usually at one of the manufacturing hubs in Leipzig nearby.”

While his two companions carried on their exchange, Zach’s attention was drawn to a small object ensconced between the top of the opened notebook and the edge of the metallic case that had enclosed it. He clasped hold of a thin strand that looped into the object and slowly lifted it away, revealing a pendant of sorts, from which was dangling a humble yet distinctive medallion.

“Chetkiewicz,” interjected Tim to the librarian, “now I remember—the name behind SISET theory, correct? ‘Systematische Intelligenz’… uh, Selbstevolutionstheorie?”

“Selbstentwicklungstheorie, actually,” underscored Heinrich, grinning in a measure of amusement at Tim’s tongue-twisting. “Entwicklung in the sense of a system’s development—thus, the spontaneous development of intelligent structures and behavior in previously ‘dumb’ systems, as he liked to call them. I suppose our native tongue can be justifiably infamous for the trying compound nouns that we generate on occasion,” he laughed, “but not to worry; the acronym is the same, and so is the meaning in its essence. Gregor’s métier has been a systematic treatment of what we would consider intelligent properties in any information-bearing system, and the manner in which they engender and amplify themselves—even in the absence of what we would recognize as self-awareness a priori. I presume you have encountered his work, to know his name?”

“Only in passing. In my day job as a bumbling professor back in the States, one of my projects has been an uneasy marriage between computer science and medical research in pharmaceuticals. We’ve been seeking to re-cast the physiological processes in human cells and tissues, in just these sorts of terms—information exchanges in a digital environment, as a springboard to diagnose and treat disease. Or so we hope eventually; things haven’t panned out as well as our grant applications would pretend.”

“A provocative avenue of investigation nonetheless, Tim. Gregor has cast his creative net so wide, I am never fully aware of his endeavors; is this an area in which he himself has also been involved?”

“Not that I’m aware, but he did supply some of our inspirational fodder when we were getting the project off the ground. Gregor gave a conference talk in North Carolina several years ago, and he definitely did make an impression upon us. The notion that one could create evolutionary algorithms, to nudge a dumb system toward intelligent behavior and consciousness, almost like bottling up the essence of… whatever makes a being intelligent to begin with.”

“Yes, Gregor often spoke of how those algorithms could beget intelligent behavior, and he once said—the closest I can translate it—‘It is as though one would produce a recipe without fully knowing what will emerge from the kitchen, yet then finding that the ingredients have willfully assembled themselves into a 5-star full-course meal, with the chef in retrospect able to record each step in the cooking.’”

“Truly a way with words,” replied Tim, subtly impressed. “As far as his connection with our work, well… naturally, as we’ve groped about trying to model the complexity of regulatory networks in human cells, which ultimately give marching orders to our tissues and organs—it’s drawn us in the direction of this kind of artificial intelligence work, and the evolutionary algorithms that, I suppose, Gregor is now making himself quite wealthy devising.”

“I would fully expect it, Tim, at least if his summer home on the Baltic seacoast is any indication. He invited several of us there for a research conference followed by, I suppose you could say, a catered kaffeeklatsch to examine some of the philosophical dimensions of this work. It was 10 acres of mostly untouched forest woodland by the seafront, with Gregor’s marvel of a home as the centerpiece—an immense complex, like a Mediterranean-style villa from a distance but with a ring of half-timbered houses lining a courtyard. And it was all powered by Gregor’s ingenious solar and tidal technology. He even runs part of his company out of that place, perhaps in analogy to Christoph Schumacher’s operations here all those centuries ago… if not quite on the same scale..”

“Ah, yes,” inserted Zach, with amiable yet biting wit. “Images of a tranquil sylvan paradise flitting through my mind,” he continued, twisting the lantern to supply a sharply contrasting highlight of their desolate surroundings, “even as my eyes and nose savor the joys of an abandoned laboratory set in somebody’s idea of a Stygian burial ground, with heartwarming images of an apocalyptically-minded archfiend adorning the walls…”

Tim craned his head slightly, shooting a sidelong glance toward his protégé as both he and Heinrich chuckled in incredulous amusement at Zach’s burst of dark humor. “Zach, I never knew you had such a… morbidly poetic sensibility to you, Buddy.”

“A coping strategy for the perplexed, I guess you could say,” replied the young man in a grizzled, nearly rasping voice, shaking his head. “To think that just 4 days ago, my weekend plans consisted of dutifully spilling blood on the Duke rugby pitch, then dragging my bruised and battered body to Renee’s spring picnic with the Drama Department.”

Tim allowed a grizzled, yet supportive grin to grace his face, nodding his sympathies toward Zach as his thoughts quickly returned to the enigmatic reference mentioned just a minute before. “Heinrich,” he said, quickly turning toward the director, “how did you know of Gregor and his work?

“Once again, Tim, all roads to Leibniz.”

Tim cocked his head slightly, in the manner of a praying mantis with its curiosity aroused, as Heinrich resumed his recounting. “In addition to Gregor’s research duties while a professor at Leipzig, he was also a historian, in a limited sense: He was a coordinating member of the recent effort at several German universities to collect, catalog, and translate Leibniz’s prolific letters and articles from his own day, which have long been… scattered about Europe. The city of Leipzig ran a sort of ‘Leibniz Festival’ two years ago, for which I was a volunteer within Gregor’s workgroup. That’s where I first made Gregor’s acquaintance, and he detailed everything I’ve imparted to you today—including some hints that Leibniz himself was well aware of some, terrible possibilities, implied by his own work.”

The director’s voice was thick with foreboding, as though amplifying the ghostly, menacing howl of the vast subterranean complex and the horror displayed upon its innermost wall. “What do you mean by that?” inquired Zach from the side, prompting Heinrich to step back and face both of his concerned colleagues.

“In some of Leibniz’s many correspondences, which we’ve only just recently translated,” began Heinrich in a scholarly, yet uncannily haunting tone, “he seems to have appreciated that the quality that we call ‘intelligence’ could emerge in nature spontaneously, outside the confines of the human or animal brain. Even outside of the intelligent machines that we cautiously create, which are, after all, extensions of our own intelligent minds—organized consciousness, effectively catalyzing its own regeneration. When Leibniz was pursuing his seminal work in logical structures and communication, this embryonic ‘computer science’ as you yourself referred to it, he had in mind a phenomenon far more astonishing than even our most advanced computers today—he understood, as Gregor once explained to me, that intelligence itself is something physical, an emergent property of our natural world itself.”

“I don’t understand, Heinrich,” responded Tim with narrowed eyes. “I suppose that some of Leibniz’s notions could be couched, in modern terms, as you’ve described. But you said something of… terrible possibilities, other implications that he had grasped.”

“Because, Tim, the intelligence that resides within our own minds and in some of the machines that we beget, took literally billions of years to evolve from the first prokaryotes—those pioneering bacteria and blue-green algae on the early earth. Leibniz and his contemporaries were obviously not aware of this at the time, but they knew that our sense of ethics, our perception of a moral framework to guide our actions—it stems in large part from empathy, being part of a community of, intelligent entities if you will, who emerged out of a shared, contingent history. If intelligence is something that could evolve and emerge in potentially any structure in nature, even outside the traditional confines of a body and a mind as we’ve come to know them—what if it lacks this same contingent history?”

“Would it be bound by the same moral code?” inquired Tim rhetorically, looking obliquely away. “It makes my head spin just to contemplate all this, though I suppose Leibniz would have done no less—conceptualizing an evolved entity, that had somehow bypassed the moral evolution that would otherwise accompany the intelligent evolution itself. But Heinrich, even supposing that such a conscious entity could evolve as such, outside of the biological framework to which we’re accustomed—the rise of its intelligence is still a constructive process nonetheless. If it attained enough intelligence to gain the power that flows from it, wouldn’t it also acquire an ethical code in the process? To… still empathize with other entities possessing intelligence and complexity, products of the same emergence process?”

“Yes, Tim, but—while it would presumably acquire a moral code that would share some features of our own, there’s no guarantee that its code would align with ours. Just as, after all, even the supposedly shared ethical codes among us humans ourselves, still lead us to wars and tensions among our own closely related societies over differing principles. If you project this onto an even greater scale, then such an intelligence…”

“May not have the most salutary intentions for our own civilization,” interjected Zach, finally breaking his baffled silence; he had leaned against a wall in the narrow side chamber and dropped his lantern, resting his slightly worn shoulder and his equally strained mind. “So this, Tauschreigeist,” he continued, looking up, “that seems to be rearing its horrific head so inexplicably everywhere—is this what Leibniz was fearing so much? Some sort of freakish intelligence that evolved out of… who knows what, and who harbors malicious intentions toward us for some reason?”

“Again, I don’t have the faintest idea what the Tauschreigeist is, Zach,” replied Heinrich, shaking his head. “But Leibniz himself clearly knew something about it, whatever its origin and nature, and whatever it wants. We’ve only just started to examine this notebook,” he continued, signaling toward the still-open research log, “and everything else in here. It’s all so mystifying…”

Tim and Zach looked quizzically at the director, his brow heavily furrowed as he immersed himself in thought and expressed them aloud. “You said, I think correctly Tim, that Leibniz as we know him historically, was working on the rudiments of what we’d today call computer software—even binary code, the computing bit itself. But he tackled some of the hardware, too. Earlier in the 1600s, Schickard and Pascal had each independently built the first machines designed to perform arithmetic calculations, forerunners of our own computers today. Leibniz was similarly inspired and created his own computing machine, but none of his fledgling efforts attained… anything, remotely capable of what this clandestine facility could do in the same era.”

“To do what, though?” inserted Zach, plainly bewildered.

“Judging by the prominence of the Tauschreigeist down here—somehow, Leibniz and his comrades must have foreseen that this entity, whatever its nature, would become a threat. After all, if they had already developed what we would frankly recognize as modern computational technology, for us on the outside at least; then perhaps they knew that this being and its threat would manifest, somehow, when the rest of us reached a certain threshold in our own capabilities.”

“In other words,” began Tim with his jaw thoughtfully tensed, and his face suddenly blanched with a deep-seated angst, “when we opened the door… when the sensory centers of their minds were joined to the networked mind of our machines. My God Zach, what if we supplied the conduit? What if that AP-278 implant somehow, linked to Argus, created the conduit for the Tauschreigeist, to—tap into the caracteristica universalis, to transmit its essence across the barrier...”

The director stared intently at Tim in a mixture of confusion and frank apprehension, unable to fathom the cryptic references but profoundly disquieted by them nonetheless. Zach, sensing his mood, stepped in to elaborate. “It’s what Tim was expounding on upstairs, Heinrich, when you asked why he… why we, were so intent on exploring this place down here. The retinal implants that they’re using in those clinical trials for sight restoration in Tennessee, they’re an arm of a broader effort by our armed forces, to help blinded veterans from the war in Afghanistan. The great leap was to integrate the implants with rhe eye’s optic nerve fibers straight to the brain’s visual cortex, and then establish a microwave link-up to a neural network—Argus, as we call it—to help accelerate the visual training and re-learning process. Unfortunately, the patients are… all but losing their minds now, in a nearly literal sense.”

“The plan itself strikes me as a marvelous feat of ingenuity,” responded Heinrich, “but you think that this system has provided a gateway, for the Tauschreigeist?”

“I… couldn’t begin to comment with any authority on that,” replied Zach, noticeably vexed at the frustrating cloud of inscrutability that still surrounded the baffling entity. “Nor is this the first time that someone’s interfaced the mind and the machine. All of these retinal implant trials draw inspiration from Neurobionik techniques, which you all were pioneering right here in Germany two decades ago—complementing lost neural functions with implantable information processors. What Hans-Werner Bothe was doing for spinal cord patients, the research team at Oak Ridge have been applying to sight restoration; the neural networks are fancier and the implants more integrated, but it’s the same idea. Nobody knows why the Pandora’s Box suddenly spilled its contents at the Oak Ridge trials.”

“That’s not the only problem; there’s something awry in the timeline.” Tim shook his head in determined skepticism as he spoke, to the surprise and consternation of his two compatriots. “As prescient as the great man may have been, somebody was aware of this Tauschreigeist long before Leibniz and my ancestor were plugging away in this dungeon here in the late 1600s…”

Tim abruptly stopped in mid-sentence, shaken by what seemed to be a rumble amidst the stony netherworld, further harassing the already frayed nerves of the baffled trio. “As I was alluding to a short while ago,” he continued, “one of my family heirlooms is that clay tablet with a foreboding message to say the least, inscribed in the Gothic script. The Tauschreigeist as we see it here wasn’t depicted upon it, but the creepy warning that the tablet did display—something about an apocalyptic threat, first becoming apparent after the atomic bombings—it matches up precisely with the M.O. of the Tauschreigeist, at least the little that we do know about it.”

Heinrich looked on with arms folded, his eyes darting upward in the manner of a detective locking onto a valuable clue. “That’s the catch, isn’t it, Tim? You were just saying now, by that awful engraving of the Tauschreigeist on the wall—the tablet is 1,000 years old.”

“Precisely!” exclaimed Tim. “Look around you here, what stands out about these technological leaps that Leibniz and Christof Schumacher were making down in this workshop? They compressed centuries of discoveries into the span of perhaps decades; but even within this, clandestine environment in which they were operating, their own computing capabilities don’t seem to precede Leibniz’s work on the ‘outside’ all that much. So somebody, somewhere, knew about this Tauschreigeist more than half a millennium before Leibniz came along, well before anybody had the faintest inkling about computing or the caracteristica universalis—and long before the very networks that would supposedly allow this being to rise and spread, whatever horror it has in mind.”

Heinrich nodded with a tinge of anxiety, as Tim summarized his thoughts. “Where did the Tauschreigeist come from? What does it want? Leibniz knew of the threat from another source that had already characterized it, centuries before. The things he created here, some of the articles that became my heirlooms—whatever they do, they must have been forged to prepare us, to confront this, evil… this intelligence which emerged elsewhere many years prior. Perhaps even my own dream scenes, my… nightmare scenes, and whatever Friar Nicklaus must have been tormented with all those centuries ago—these glyphs here on the pillars seem to reflect so much of the same imagery, the same warning. I don’t know where they’re coming from, but perhaps they’re also meant to guide us, to show us how to fight this thing.”

“All this just ups the ante, then, tells us there was a far greater operation lurking in the background,” interjected Zach, his face now markedly animated as his thoughts rolled quickly off his tongue. “If Leibniz was devising the rudimentary foundations of computing, based on history as we know it on the outside, then he must have done the spade work before he knew about… whatever you call ‘this,’” he said emphatically, gesturing with his lantern about their mystifying surroundings. “Whoever gave Leibniz the low-down about the Tauschreigeist, seems like they were part of a hidden community whose hallmarks are teasing our eyes down here, right now. Maybe it happened just after Leibniz announced some of his early breakthroughs to the world—somebody from this very community caught up with him, recruited him and…”

“Provided backing for this venture in the caverns,” inserted Tim in agreement.

“You’re reminding me now,” replied Heinrich, nearly squinting his eyes shut as he excavated long-buried memories. “Some years ago when I was just, revving up as you could say, on this project with Gregor Chetkiewicz to catalog and translate Leibniz’s letters—we came across an epistle in his collection that very much stood out for us.”

Tim stared in marked anticipation as the director jogged his memory, eventually opting to fill in the uncomfortable pause. “What—what was the letter about, Heinrich?”

“There’s an old legend throughout Central Europe, about a secretive guild which was involved in deeply clandestine pursuits. The times being what they were before the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, most of the old tales attributed efforts at witchcraft to this group. Then it was some version of an occultist ceremony. Then, eventually, the legends aligned themselves with claims of secretive technologies. Of course, such talk was generally uttered in the same tones as, all the lore about vampires or other monstrous phenomena out of the Carpathians—so there was not much in the way of serious credence for the idea. Yet Gregor came to believe there might be something to the old legends.”

“But you were saying something about one of Leibniz’s own letters, Heinrich—some reference to this mythical guild?”

“Yes, in the most unlikely of places—a note written in a sort of Latin code, used occasionally as a sort of cipher, for private correspondence among people at that time. It was written in 1680, just in the wake of Leibniz’s ‘anni mirabili’.”

“1680, the anni mirabili. I don’t claim expertise on this topic, but that prior decade—it was when he made his most extraordinary discoveries, as a pioneer in the information technology field, correct?”

“You’re right, Tim. Leibniz’s early computer, the so-called Stepped Reckoner; he’d constructed that in 1671. After he was invited into the Royal Society two years later, he undertook his most productive work in binary arithmetic, and in formulating some basic principles of what we’d call hardware and software—culminating in 1679, the year that he announced a scheme to create the same basic binary switches that we use to run our computers today, in his case with simple marbles rather than electronic or optic gates in a transistor. This coded note to one of his close confidantes—it was crumpled up and partly burned, as though he intended to discard it but never got around to it. In the fragment that we could recover, Leibniz said something about an invitation he received that year, by ‘his dear friends of the cloth.’”

“Of… the cloth?” replied Tim, perplexed at the reference.

“Yes; it reinforced some of Gregor’s suspicions, and it may be some link to whatever community that seems to have been sponsoring Leibniz.”

“Perhaps some connection to the Order of St. Jerome? These monks, whatever the nature of their charitable efforts—they seem to be springing up here in different places, far more often than chance alone would suggest.”

“That was our hunch as well, and Gregor may know something more concrete but in general—we know absolutely nothing about the benefactors to which Leibniz himself had been referring.”

“Could this have something to do with it?” interrupted Zach, as he held up the medallion that had been wedged into an unnoticed corner of the case surrounding the notebook. He directed their particular attention to a stylized inscription, inconspicuously carved into one face of the object: FG. “Awfully hard to make out this lettering, Heinrich, but it seems to be a monogram of sorts—‘F.G.’ Any meaning for you?”

“Hmm,” murmured Heinrich, as he beheld the medallion and systematically probed it. “I can’t say it conjuring up any memories, and these initials—they could be anybody, or anything.”

“Anything…” repeated Zach, the offhand speculation of the library director triggering a vague sense of familiarity in the young man for reasons he himself was at a loss to explain. “F.G., F.G., F.G.—where have I seen that?” he continued in a low, contemplative voice. “Wait, now I remember, just a few minutes before…” He abruptly fetched his lantern and started toward the exit from the small room. “Come on, follow me,” he said to his two stunned colleagues.

“Zach?” shouted Tim to his protégé, as the latter headed to the right in an impetuous burst. “What is this, where are you going?”

Hearing nothing, they eyed each other briefly in mutual consternation, then quickly exited the small room, winding their way around the pillars and up the ramp, back into the main chamber. Their lanterns whirling and flickering in the darkness, they finally tracked the young man to one of the side walls. He was perched on a bent knee, intently trying to make out a detail on the loom-like device from before, his eyes straining amidst the inconsistent glaze from his lantern nearby.

“Here, my hunch was right,” he said with a start, his voice echoing eerily throughout the cavern. As Tim and Heinrich approached in earnest curiosity, Zach pivoted his body aside to reveal what he had been so intently seeking. “F.G... marks the spot.”

The initials had been carved meticulously on what appeared to be a discarded punch-card, dangling halfway from the mouth of a receiving slot in an underside compartment of the loom. The trio eyed each other in bewilderment at the discovery, scanning the rest of the device fruitlessly for further hints.

“Heinrich,” began Tim nearly out of breath, despairing at the prospect of any additional clues in the near term. “Could these initials have some connection to this society, the one sponsoring Leibniz?”

“Not that I know of, Tim,” replied Heinrich in a downbeat tone, shaking his head. “Gregor is still very much involved in the project, but we haven’t spoken in a while; I couldn’t surmise what he’s found in the interim.”

Tim nodded in disappointed acknowledgment, rising up slowly from his position with the other two close behind. They heaved a nearly collective sigh, their overtaxed minds having reached the limits of what they could divine from the long-abandoned depths into which they had inadvertently strayed.

“I don’t know about the two of you troopers,” said Tim in an exhausted tone of voice, “but I think my mind has crammed in about as much as it can handle for one—rather unusual morning. Plus,” he remarked, gesturing toward the stony borders of the yawning cavern, “I’d say we’ve finally hit a wall, both literally and figuratively.”

“You’re speaking my mind, Boss,” replied Zach, rolling his stiffened neck to ease a persistent cramp near the shoulders. “After all, few jobs out there work up a lunchtime appetite quite like stumbling around in a creepy abandoned three centuries-old underground workshop, in search of… whatever we’re searching for.”

His two compatriots reacted with a muted chuckle, their minds too absorbed with the elusive significance of the day’s findings to pay much heed to Zach’s halfhearted drollery. “I’m supposing,” remarked Heinrich, turning toward Tim with a businesslike mien, “that you’ll want to investigate all this further. And I’m also sensing that you probably don’t want all this down here to… become a matter of public record just yet.”

“Agreed on all counts, Heinrich. There must be a good reason why Leibniz, my own ancestor, and everyone else involved in this effort have been so determined to keep it under wraps, and until we know more, I suggest we maintain the same policy.”

Tim exhaled deeply as he sketched a plan in his mind for the near future, before twisting with a sudden motion toward Heinrich and Zach. “There are still some questions to resolve amid all this, and my gut tells me that we don’t have much time to find the answers. We have to make sense out of this, ‘Tauschreigeist’—whatever it is, wherever it came from and what it wants. But above all, we’ve got to uncover what Leibniz and his sponsors were aiming to do with the devices they were forging down here and wherever else they were creating them. We have yet to come across any technology at the level of my ancestral heirlooms, so there must be other sites where this operation was active, whatever it was designed to produce.”

“I concur, Tim,” replied the director firmly, as he rotated his neck and again eyed the group’s mystifying surroundings. “I have some trusted assistants here at the Bibliothek, friends as much as colleagues, to whom I can entrust whatever else we find down here. We can haul some generators into these caverns and light up this place, investigate it further and see if we can discover anything else of significance. In the meantime, I’ll take some digital photographs of the glyphs and the text along these walls. There are likely some valuable clues that we can’t interpret just yet.”

“Do you know anyone who could translate all these Gothic inscriptions?”

“I have one name in mind—Leszek Pieronczyk, my good friend and the head librarian at the University of Warsaw. He’s a wunderkind, quite possibly the brightest mind from here to Hokkaido; he speaks ten modern languages, six ancient tongues, and three computer languages. To think that I once tried to recruit him to become my own protégé here, in my little Bibliothek in Borna—it would be akin to calling up Michelangelo, inviting him to paint a barnyard toolshed.”

Tim looked on with a degree of wry amusement, as the otherwise dispassionate library director dropped his scholarly guard in summoning the metaphor.

“Anyway,” continued Heinrich, “Leszek craves nothing more than a challenge out of the blue. If I send him scans of the inscriptions in Gothic—he’ll likely have an answer by Monday, and a far greater grasp of these mysteries than I could muster in a week.”

“Sounds like an excellent addition to our team. And on that topic, Heinrich; you’re now an integral member of our squad, though I won’t pretend you should be grateful for… whatever I’m dragging you into.”

“No apologies needed or accepted, Tim. It may surprise you to know that in some respects, I’ve long looked forward to a day like this one, though of course I never could have conceived it would emerge as it did. For so many years since I took this job, absorbed the lore surrounding Leipzig and Borna—I’ve sensed there’s been something hiding here just beneath our noses, something of momentous significance. Now, I’ve finally tasted the first confirmation of those same suspicions…”

He refocused his gaze slightly away, taking a moment to assimilate the mind-jostling events of a morning that should have been impossible, in all its rich possibilities and jarring ramifications. He then squarely addressed Tim again. “Gregor may be able to help you; he’s been living and breathing these enigmas for decades, even if he could have never imagined a hidden wonder in our history of quite this magnitude. The mystique that’s long surrounded Leibniz and much of his work, the fragmented truths contained in the local legends—Gregor can lead you to the source, hopefully to the heart of this threat and whatever it means.”

“I look forward to it,” remarked Tim laconically, as they lifted their lanterns and headed for the exit. Upon entering the bottom of the winding stairway, still replete with its oddly haunting, spectral quality, Zach again caught sight of the carvings near the bottom step—the puzzling glyphs and the equally confounding messages scribed in Gothic.

Zach’s heart suddenly sank in an unwelcome burst of pulsating trepidation, as something about the engravings’ otherwise inscrutable message overtook him; he reflexively turned to face his mentor, who was himself discomfited at the sight of Zach’s face alone—as if telepathically jolted by the very same thought seizing the young man. “Tim, the Tauschreigeist is out there already, isn’t it? What’s going to happen to all those people at Oak Ridge? To Rachel?”

Saturday May 21, 11:02 a.m.

Ground Floor Food Court, Biomedical Engineering Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee

“Tim, given all that’s befallen us here in the past three months, almost nothing’s too bizarre for my ears; but this, ‘Tauschreigeist’ which you say Pablo Acevedo and the other veterans have been sketching out, you’re trying to tell me that someone… prophesied this being centuries ago? Warning us of its arrival?”

“Multiple times, Rachel; in fact, the first such message seems to have been issued about 1,000 years ago, and when we decoded all the evidence, our own recent events have unfolded precisely as they’d been foretelling. This entity seems to have first manifested in the wake of the atomic bombings, presumably within the patients afflicted by the Tachibana syndrome. It then went dormant, and now it’s risen up again, using the mind-machine nexus which you’ve created there via the Argus uplink to the retinal implants to… propagate itself, simultaneously among human minds and the linked computer networks. The Tauschreigeist seems to have access to the caracteristica universalis as I was just describing to you; there’s no telling what it can do with that power.”

Rachel shook her head visibly enough to be seen by her partner in the videophone conversation, thousands of miles away. The swirling clouds and the gusting winds outside continued to pelt the building with an unseasonable assault of hail and rain, amplifying the eerily surreal feel of the place. “So these various computer viruses that have already fanned out into Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and now Illinois as we last heard, all of these are manifestations of the Tauschreigeist?”

“So the evidence indicates, Rachel. Those strange calculations that follow the viruses wherever they go; they’re probably part of the protocol through which the Tauschreigeist is invoking the caracteristica to spread. And the penchant these viruses have, to hit the Neuroimaging departments at hospitals, or biotech companies involved in stroke treatments and so forth? It must be a kind of reconnaissance mission to trace out human synaptic networks in our nervous systems, what amounts to the communications infrastructure within many different people—so that the Tauschreigeist can, perhaps, leap amongst human minds the same way it’s hopping about our digital networks with such ease.”

“As if we didn’t have enough already to haunt our dreams here… even if we had time to sleep in the midst of this pandemonium.” Rachel sighed with the palm of her hand propped against her inclining forehead, nearly ashen from fatigue and mounting, frustratingly ineffable apprehension.

She took a moment to ponder the nearly imponderable before reluctantly exposing her face again to Tim, who was unnerved and moved almost to pity by the sense of despair that had practically carved itself upon her face. “Tim, there’s so much I can’t wrap my head around here; the level of technological prowess you’re outlining, it’s almost a Holy Grail of computer scientists in even the top universities today. But you were just telling me that the Tauschreigeist has been documented for many hundreds of years, first showing up in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1946. All of this is long before, sometimes centuries before our Computer Age. It all leads me to ask…”

“Where did the Tauschreigeist come from?” asked Tim, in direct anticipation of Rachel’s query, to which she mouthed a confirmation in the affirmative. “Rachel, I promise you, we’re pushing on all cylinders for something more solid, on everything surrounding this entity. There’s apparently been a longstanding effort in the shadows to prepare for its arrival and to confront it when it comes; we can’t fathom how these people could have known of the Tauschreigeist so many centuries ago, but as we track them down, we’ll discover the nature of the threat they were warning us so urgently about.”

“It’s just that,” replied Rachel with another heavy sigh, “the authorities in Maryland supervising the vision trials, they’re nearly panicking, and we need to make so many crucial calls right now even as we’re still so much in the dark.” She gazed aside momentarily as grim decisions began to coalesce in her mind. “No doubt we need to shut down the trials here; I just wonder how to explain the reason to our superiors. ‘Our efforts have opened the door to a nefarious intelligence of unknown provenance’—it’s not the kind of passage they expect to see in our progress reports.”

“Just say you suspect a ‘contamination’ of some sort, leading to the rise of Tachibana syndrome in the patients…in a real sense, that’s exactly what we’re dealing with here, even though the nature of that contaminating influence is beyond anything we could have imagined before our recent findings. The Tauschreigeist hijacked some component of the trials to find its way in; who knows, perhaps that modified code within Argus from El Día del Diablo, whatever its source, helped pave the way.”

Tim averted his gaze momentarily, struggling to summon productive thoughts that would put Rachel’s tormented mind at ease. “By the way,” he continued, turning his ear toward the monitor and scowling in an expressive gesture, “that music in the background; is that the MOTS exhibit again?”

“What else?” queried Rachel rhetorically, sighing and rolling her eyes as she glanced backward toward the open court, surrounded by its motley cafés. The sound emanating from the exhibit was now even more mind-jarring and frightening than before, yet with a paradoxically alluring facet to it: the haunting melodies of a haunted realm, harboring a nightmarish presence within its walls.

The music was now characterized by a fierce, oscillating counterpoint, the tones whipping around each other like angry packs of wolves circling over contested territory, falling and then climbing again to repeated crescendos of constantly varying depth and pitch. The chords would periodically arrange themselves into an uncanny, skin-crawling sequence that resembled an attempt at a ritual chant without the luxury of a chanter: an overlay of vaguely human-like voices and hissing whispers that seemed to materialize straight out of the void in the open court, slightly out of phase with each other to produce an otherworldly echo. Most chillingly, this chorus of the damned was often cloaked by a vibrating, wraithlike howl—like a nested assemblage of primal screams divested of their vocal content itself, filtered through a sort of aural prism to leave only the terrified shadows of a horror-stricken multitude.

Tim looked on with feigned impassivity, shaken by the distant echoes of the macabre symphony. “I thought MOTS had gone creepy enough when I spoke with you on Wednesday,” he said with an incredulous shake of the head. “I know the programmers and engineers can have quirky tastes from time to time, but whoever wrote the ‘symphony-evolving’ algorithms for MOTS—they seemed to have arrived at mood music for Dante’s Inferno. What an ambience to have percolating in the background…”

“Actually, the MOTS team has been scratching their heads in as much confusion as the rest of us this past week; they claim that their musical algorithms could have never led to this. The tones have taken such a twisted turn that the executive board itself pulled the plug, shutting the exhibit down on weekdays. The MOTS planners were able to inveigle a little concession to activate the exhibit again on Saturdays at a reduced volume—as if somehow it’s been sitting on a Schubert or Stravinsky symphony that it’s just waiting to reveal to the world. It’s amazing,” she said, quipping with a nearly forced laugh, “I’ve been deluged with so much unbelievable madness at this place lately, I’m hardly bothered by MOTS and its latest bout of bizarreness, no matter what horrid tunes it decides to unload upon its ‘audience’ down here.”

“Or,” responded Tim in a tone of solemn speculation, “whatever is deciding for it.” He tensed his chin and looked briefly away, temporarily stifling a thought he was unsure about uttering to his colleague and friend. He quickly focused back upon the screen, the resolve in his eyes buttressing the firmness of his voice. “Rachel—I don’t think you’re safe in that place. It’s just a hunch but…”

“Believe me, Tim, I’m on the verge of requesting a transfer as it is, I can’t take much more of this.”

“But it’s more than that, Rachel. As awful as the conditions there must be for you—I’m genuinely worried that you, that all of you might be in some imminent danger there. I’m deadly serious.”

“Tim I… I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I’m concerned that the Tauschreigeist’s ‘presence,’ its intelligence and its consciousness—it may not be confined just to the minds of the veterans, or even to the computer networks it’s invaded. It may be within…”

Tim paused as he took in Rachel’s unsettling expression, a mixture of fearful shock and persistent incredulity. He drew a deep breath and tightened his jaw, as he searched for words to make a difficult and unusual case.

“Rachel, I don’t claim to be an expert on Leibniz’s philosophy or discoveries. But after Heinrich Metzer gave me a crash course on Leibnizian philosophy here at the library in Borna—Zach and I bounced ideas off each other for a while, trying to divine what those sages must have concluded about the Tauschreigeist, all those centuries ago. When Leibniz was outlining his postulates about the caracteristica universalis, he didn’t conceive of it as being limited to merely human communications, or even those of the computing machines that people would eventually create.”

Rachel looked on in transparent anxiety, her attention riveted to the screen, as Tim continued. “Leibniz regarded the caracteristica as being fundamental to logical processes and… information and knowledge overall, as we’d regard it today, within virtually any structure we could assemble. It’s perhaps one of the reasons that Leibniz did so much pioneering work in binary code, and what we’d later recognize as computer software. His gravity-tugged marbles and other gadgets might have seemed like crude switches compared to the electron and photon-gated transistors we have in our computers today; but Leibniz implicitly knew that any pattern-bearing structure could… represent and alter information, and if any source of intelligence could master this universal ‘code’ that he called the caracteristica, then by implication—“

“It could be in any structure around here,” interjected Rachel, with a look of shackled terror as the recognition sank in. “Then that might explain what happened to Mandy that day when she…”

“When Mandy—come again?” inquired Tim, as Rachel paused to gather her own thoughts.

“Tim, I never expounded on the details when we last spoke on Friday. But Mandy Rogers, one of the top research fellows here working in the Rational Protein Design department—a few days ago, she thought she detected some ‘presence’ manifesting itself within the laser grid, in the Fine Structure Analysis laboratory of the building’s subbasement. I was just across the hall at the time, developing some photographic plates, and I’m still haunted by her screams; I could hear them even through the reinforced steel of the darkroom. When she described to me what she saw, her depiction was vague, but some of the features reminded me of Pablo Acevedo’s first paintings of this Tauschreigeist. It terrified her so much… she hasn’t been back to the facility since then; in fact, her fiancé is a civil engineer who just got a contract in Chile, and she’s already arranging to move down there with him, as far away from this place as she can get.”

“The laser grid,” repeated Tim in an incongruously frail voice, as though drained of its strength by the force of his very realization. “If that truly was a projection of the Tauschreigeist, then it could be—potentially anywhere in the Biomedical Engineering Institute, Rachel.”

“Or beyond,” she said, almost visibly shuddering at the thought. “Just the comforting notion I needed to keep carrying on in this prison.” Her tongue-in-cheek aside was laced with an almost tearful helplessness. “For what it’s worth, Tim, I’m taking the day off tomorrow—the first Sunday in weeks that I’ve had away from this place. There’s only so much more midnight oil that we can burn around here, and I think I really might follow Mandy’s lead now and transfer somewhere far away. Even if somebody waves a magic wand and resolves all this turmoil sometime soon, the very sight of the Institute these days is just dredging up too many upsetting associations.”

“I can appreciate that sentiment,” replied Tim in an emphatic voice, as Rachel’s choice of words immediately began to provoke images of a mountain road in his mind—which he immediately and vigorously suppressed.

“Rachel,” he resumed with a start, seized by the impulse of a compelling thought, “something just flashed through my mind. When I paid you a visit there in Tennessee last weekend, I remember you were vividly describing your reaction on that Godforsaken day—El Día del Diablo—just after I’d found those strange discrepancies in the Argus files dating back to it. You’d said it was a celebration at first, a red-letter day, but then hinted that something seemed off about it. Our conversation drifted and… it just slipped my mind, I never asked you to elaborate. What did you mean by that?”

Rachel sighed profoundly, reaching back in her mind to a once-festive memory, now cast in disconcertingly darker hues through the lens of subsequent events. “I hardly know where to start Tim. It must have been mere minutes after we’d gone live with the link to Argus; but the power in the facility fluctuated suddenly, as though a brownout had permeated the whole building. The lights and the monitors flickered. Then things got spookier; the detection equipment by our laser apparatus showed nearly off-the-chart readings, even though we weren’t running any assays at the time. The waveforms on the oscilloscopes began swinging wildly, like a tsunami crashing on the screens. Then there was this piercing sound—like some semi-random static filling up the speakers in all our instruments, but with the volume cranked up to be almost intolerable. Even the devices in the room, whatever wasn’t tied town, began to sway to and fro.”

“Radio static?” responded Tim with a measure of alarm. “Now I remember. I hardly paid it much heed at the time but—I was driving on the 15-501 freeway one day in early February; I was on the way back from a local powwow to raise funds for a scholarship campaign. Then my speakers just blared static right at me, unbelievably loud. It was just a couple seconds, but I swerved and nearly lost control of the car. It all reminded me so much of…”

Tim gritted his teeth as he waded through a memory he could no longer set aside. “It reminded me of the road in Suriname, and Susan—I was so shaken up, from the near-accident itself and all the memories being dredged up, I pulled off the highway for a few minutes and just grabbed a coffee at a nearby shop. Then I could have sworn—about a month later, somebody made an offhand reference to a vaguely similar experience, the car speakers blaring right around the same time, driving on the other side of town.”

“Tim, hold on!” interjected Rachel, visibly stunned by the recounting she had just absorbed. “We knew things were a bit unusual around Oak Ridge, but everyone just chalked it up to a minor earthquake, perhaps. Nothing of the sort struck us the rest of the day or, in the weeks afterward, for that matter; so we just resumed with our celebratory revelry and, mostly forgot about the whole ordeal. But you’re saying that, you think you experienced some of the same things, on that very same day?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Rachel,” replied Tim in an unusually strained voice, the arch on his brow now tightly furrowed as he pondered the meaning of the distressing realization. “And it wasn’t just that.”

Tim looked up again at the monitor, palpable disquiet registering unmistakably across the emotion-laden rivulets that limned his face, across his eyes and nose. “My Uncle Mitch told me of some oddities that he himself experienced that day—remember, that’s when it first donned on me, that there was a connection between my family heirlooms and the events at Oak Ridge. He said that his eyes and his mind, they began to perceive the world and conjure up images with incredible vividness, seemingly out of the blue. My own mind didn’t suddenly transform with such—clarity, I suppose you could say, at least not until I began to investigate the heirlooms myself.”

Tim glanced aside slightly, his mind overwhelmed by an onrush of suggestive brainstorms that remained just out of reach of comprehension. He quickly returned to the subject, and to the monitor, with Rachel’s apprehensive eyes staring out saliently from the other side. “But there was something else that Mitch and I did share.”

“What, Tim?” interrupted Rachel impulsively, anxious to hear the link that Tim prepared to divulge, however tenuous it would ultimately prove as a lead in the mystery.

“Mitch described suffering a splitting headache that day, his worst in years. Now I remember it too, painfully clearly, and I mean that in the most literal sense—my own head was throbbing horribly, late that same afternoon. When Mitch first related everything to me on Wednesday, our conversation was flying by so fast that I didn’t bother to recall it, but now it’s all coming back to me.”

Tim gestured emphatically as he continued to prod his own half-buried memories. “When I ultimately arrived home from the scholarship fundraiser back in February, I was shaken by my near-accident, and the memories of Susan gushing back alongside it. Then that unbearable skull-pounder set in—oh, it was God-awful, Rachel. It began around the temples and spread about both sides, then to the back of my head; I even felt it pulsating behind the eyes. I couldn’t take it, and after wolfing down some aspirin, I simply passed out on the sofa downstairs—then nearly forgot most of the day when I awoke again, dazed and disoriented at some odd hour of the evening. What I could recall—or perhaps, what I cared to recall from that miserable day—I just chalked up to the stress of the incident on the freeway. I never thought…”

“That you, and your uncle,” interjected Rachel with a pained expression, filling in the thoughts that now tormented them both, “were already connected to us at Oak Ridge that day, three months ago.”

“And perhaps,” replied Tim, in a grim voice somewhere between a gruff rumbling and a harsh whisper, “to the Tauschreigeist.”

“It’s still just so mystifying, Tim. We were in our separate worlds, and I hadn’t spoken to you in nearly 3 years. But on the day we went live with the network link-up to the retinal implant, when everything began to go awry here, it touched you and your uncle too, hundreds of miles away. Those files in Argus began to change—and then the madness must have first awakened in Pablo and the other veterans, first manifesting with their horrible visions and the drawings of that, Tauschreigeist. How did it start, Tim? How did the Tauschreigeist invade their minds?”

“I’m still at a loss myself, Rachel. But Heinrich Metzer arranged a rendezvous for me in the Baltic tomorrow, with someone that he believes may know more about the hidden history of the Tauschreigeist, or at least about the group that’s been tracking it from the shadows.”

“I—God, I hope so,” replied Rachel forcefully, her jaw tensed in a mixture of trepidation and frustration as her eyes began to mist again, ever so slightly.

“Rachel, one more thing; when we spoke there last Saturday, you’d mentioned in passing that someone on the team had been filming the events on El Día del Diablo, as the record of a festive day that… eventually didn’t turn out to be so festive.”

“Right, Sanjit Khan was his name—an electrical engineer who helped to design our detection systems for fine visual acuity. He’s since taken another position elsewhere, out in Tacoma in Washington State. Why, do you think he may have recorded something germane to all this?”

“Just a hunch, Rachel. As you said, all of these phenomena seem to be converging on the moment when you flipped the switch on February 2^nd, and linked the implant to the external network. If Sanjit Khan was videotaping events at that moment, perhaps he might have discerned something at the source.”

“I see,” replied Rachel in a near-whisper. “I’ll send his contact information to you; he’s always glad to help in a pinch.”

Rachel directed her gaze momentarily skyward, before giving voice to an uncomfortable stream of thoughts that clamored to be expressed. “Tim, I’ve never confessed something like this before, to anyone, but I’m scared right now. Not just anxious; I’m frightened out of my wits about all this. The people here have been mentioning it more overtly of late—the presence, the hints, the whispers of God-knows-what. There have been days when I’ve doubted I could carry on anymore, and based on what you’ve been imparting about the Tauschreigeist, I’m now wondering whether there’s something horribly concrete about the… creeping shadows enveloping this place.”

Tim exhaled emphatically and firmed his chin, as though directing the lower half of his visage to battle the unconcealed trepidation so conspicuous in its upper half. “Rachel, I worry about you there too; I worry that—there’s a genuine threat lurking around, just as you’re sensing there and with all that we’ve been discovering lately. You’re taking off tomorrow; try to stay away from the facility as much as possible, at least until we’ve unraveled a bit more of this conundrum.”

The two stared at each other in an unspoken outburst of deep concern. Tim gazed momentarily aside before quickly returning to the monitor and addressing Rachel again. “I can hardly imagine how difficult this is for you, at one of the country’s most prestigious institutions with some of our best people, devoting your heart and soul to this project. But I want you to be safe, and right now—I just don’t want something to happen to you. I’ve already lost too many people important to me…” He halted abruptly in his speech, substituting a determined grimace for the unutterable words of a memory still far too raw.

“I’ll try, Tim. I wish I could just disappear from this place, but all of us here have been suffering together, and we only have each other to stay afloat. Besides, I’m now in the know more than anyone else inside the Biomedical Engineering Institute, and even if I could never get an audience for the real story, maybe I could at least demystify this house of horrors a bit for everyone else.”

“I understand,” replied Tim with a somewhat disappointed sigh. “Just keep your eyes wide open and… don’t take anything for granted, all right? I have an international phone number, and I want you to call me at any time of day, any hour, if something seems amiss there—at least, more so than it already is. Just promise me that. Whatever this entity is, there were people who knew enough about it 1,000 years ago to be viscerally terrified about its power and intentions, and their omen—their warning—is playing out right before our very eyes. Don’t let yourself face it alone.”

“That’s a promise,” responded Rachel with a strained smile. “Besides my fellow team members here in the trenches, there’s one more factor keeping me afloat in this den of misery, and it’s the reassurance that you’re shining light in dark corners there, halfway around the world on our behalf.”

“And I won’t stop for a moment, Rachel; that’s my promise to you.”

The two quickly signed off from their conversation, at which point Tim lowered his head in a gesture of aching consternation, alone in his hotel room. The last sound transmitted from Rachel’s side was a chilling, unsettling chord from the Music of the Spheres exhibit behind her, an initially shrill yet oddly euphonious sequence that reminded him of a drawn-out, menacing growl mixed in with a haunting, muffled scream. He was overtaken by the sick feeling that his promise to Rachel, in spite of the ostensible determination behind it, may have been a profoundly empty one.

Chapter 12: The Being That Should Not Be

Sunday, May 22, 3:40 p.m.

Garten der Nymphen Lane, Göhren, Isle of Rügen, Germany

“I know we’ve been on this road for barely 15 minutes, Tim, but I’m starting to wonder about Dr. Gregor’s true line of work. Erstwhile computer science and philosophy professor, now a multimillionaire robotics entrepreneur? From the looks of his headquarters out here, I’d have surmised he’s a full-time wizard living in an old oak tree, with a dedicated staff of elves and fairies on his payroll.”

Tim permitted himself a wry grin as he aimed a sidelong glance toward Zach in the passenger’s seat, but said nothing. He quickly resumed a forward gaze as he drove cautiously along the mist-shrouded road, as it snaked and slithered through marshy woods so palpable in their presence that they appeared to breathe with every twist of the sinuous route. Tim blinked his eyes and shook his shoulders on occasion, in the manner of someone resisting the spellbinding siren call of a sweet, disorienting trance.

The gossamer fog and the primevally lush surroundings carried an irresistibly enchanting quality, like the heath-covered expanse of a Scottish moor whose very terrain seemed to whisper secrets wholly inscrutable to outsiders. It had the subtly evocative allure of an eldritch realm freed from the confines of mere earthly geography, rendering the prosaic tasks of guiding a vehicle unusually arduous.

After traversing a series of humble pits and yawning chasms over concrete and meshwork metal bridges, the pair arrived at the gate of an apparent stronghold, incongruous in its sheer modernity amidst the hazy sylvan wonderland that encircled it. The structure was an imposing one, boasting a jigsaw-like conjunction of welded steel plates flanked on each side by a layered wall of stone that was sculpted in remarkable detail, nearly nine feet in height and topped at irregular intervals by lamps the size of theatrical klieg lights. A ring of motion sensors adjoined a pair of keypads, their colorfully labeled keys arranged in concentric circles just to the right of the rectangular gate—a daunting puzzle that demanded solution for the coveted prize of entry into the grounds within.

As he neared the entrance amidst the obstinate fog, Tim was surprised by a tilting vertical post that undulated slowly upward out of the ground, just left of the road. Upon reaching a point at eye level for a seated driver, a box at the top of the post quickly opened a sequential series of flaps, like an onion peeling itself a single layer at a time from the inside. An intercom with a camera was soon revealed, itself abutting a small, projector-like screen upon which a man’s distinctive face soon coalesced.

He had a broad forehead beneath a mildly receding hairline, beyond which was an otherwise ample mop of modestly curling, dark-brown hair, meticulously yet curiously styled in a manner vaguely redolent of a 19^th-century aristocrat. He sported a pair of glasses bearing thin, ovoid spectacles that barely spanned the sockets of his eyes—pensive, yet strangely engaging orbs each ringed by a coffee-brown iris with a faintly mottled, peppery quality. His cheekbones were unusually prominent, resting atop a sharply angled lower jaw and chin partially covered by a still incipient, slightly uneven gray beard.

“Greetings and Guten Nachmittag, Dr. Chetkiewicz,” began Tim in a formal-sounding voice directed at the intercom, as he doffed his fedora in acknowledgment of the face on the monitor. “It’s quite an honor to be welcomed out here to…”

“Good afternoon to you too, and the honor is all mine,” responded the man on the screen, amiably interrupting Tim’s attempt at a formal introduction. “In fact, as such honored guests to my estate, I invite both of you to use my first name as you would a good friend—a regard which I indeed hope to merit by the end of your stay here.”

“You’ve already earned that in abundance, Gregor. Anyone of your stature, who would interrupt a weekend for this on such short notice, is undoubtedly a friend of ours.”

“Indeed, though it is perhaps a friendship that has been centuries in the making,” he replied, somewhat cryptically. “I’ll open the gate for you. Follow the gravel path to the right, and you’ll come to a small garage next to a red-brick guesthouse. Once you’ve parked, just walk through the guesthouse and into the open courtyard out its back door. I’ll meet you by the statue in the center of the yard.”

When Gregor spoke or smiled, his left upper lip would crease slightly upward on occasion, coupled with the faint hint of a dimple in his cheek and a puckish glint in his left eye. His demeanor had a curiously mischievous tinge to it, contrasting with—and yet oddly complementing—the intellectual gravitas with which he was so firmly associated, in the manner of a crafty striver who had risen well beyond his presumed social station by dint of sheer resourcefulness.

At once, the metal jaws of the daunting gate began to withdraw in opposite directions from their juncture in the middle, soon eclipsed within the surrounding wall. “I suppose this means,” offered Zach, his tongue planted even more firmly in cheek than usual, “that we’re off to see the wizard.”

“We should hope so, Zach,” replied Tim, his own attempt at irony overshadowed by the earnest undertones of his voice, “because it may take a weaver of miracles to help us now.”

Zach squinted his eyes slightly as he looked obliquely in Tim’s direction, taken aback at the unwaveringly somber cadence that pervaded his voice.

As Tim steered the rental car per his host’s instructions, he and his passenger were again taken in by their surroundings, which dazzled and awed them even more so than before. Gregor’s complex was bathed in an airy nebula of half-formed wisps of fog, resembling that in the forest outside yet even more tenuous, as though the moisture within the sweet, cool air were struggling to manifest its presence before the visitors. The towering treetops of ancient spruces, majestic maples, and sprawling poplars cast a broad canopy around and above the estate, their web of foliage interrupted only by sporadic gaps under which strategically-placed solar panels dutifully collected whatever sunlight managed to dribble through. Scattered gardens dotted the perimeter of the estate, each filled with mostly light, pastel-hued blooms along with the occasional violet or flaming rose.

The vehicle soon arrived at the garage adjacent to the guesthouse, which stood out ironically for its rather pedestrian appearance, seated as it was in the midst of the sumptuous visual feast that was bursting all around. It was a modest, two-story brick cottage with a triple-gabled roof and a half-timbered façade, housing a motley collection of meerschaum pipes, hand-crafted beer mugs, antique compasses, and other assorted tokens befitting the homely gemütlichkeit of an angler’s seaside abode. Upon emerging from the guesthouse, however, the visitors were greeted once more with a bewitching surfeit of the senses.

A brief but ornate marble portico led into an immense open-air courtyard that boasted a dynamic, rococo architecture along its perimeter—from the Venus seashell-themed arcades of the colonnaded cloisters that lined it, to the small gazebos that transected its web of guided streams and rivulets, coursing in from unseen sources outside. Trellises and columns flaunted their presence throughout the yard with aromatic, colorful floral arrangements that teased the nose even as they massaged the eyes. The more central portions of the courtyard were a particular marvel to behold, dotted as they were with exotic statuary depicting mythical, often dragon-like beasts from five distinct Eurasian traditions. These carvings, in turn, flanked several small patios surrounded by decorated shrubbery and fed by tributaries from the courtyard’s waterways, like little Japanese tea gardens transplanted next door to the cold brine of the Baltic. The tiny streams were eventually channeled into a fountain sculpted in a faux natural style, to mimic the rocky descent of a secluded forest cataract.

The courtyard teemed with an intoxicating aura that teased the subconscious mind, an entrancing amalgam of neo-Gothic mystery and verdant pre-Raphaelite beauty. The drizzly, haze-filled ambience dulled the yard’s colorful vibrancy somewhat, yet paradoxically enhanced its strange intrigue—like the sepia tinge on a photograph of a 19^th-century luncheon party, firing the imagination with further queries about a scene captured incompletely on film. In this context, the focus at the center of the massive enclosure, where Tim and Zach awaited their host, seemed to clash jarringly with everything around it: An imposing, yet steadfastly Neoclassical bronze sculpture of six bearded men, clad in scholastics’ robes and looking out in determined contemplation from their perch upon the statue’s platform. Their stolid solemnity and thoughtful mien seemed wildly out of place in the midst of the fervid, unbridled Romanticism that abounded throughout the complex.

“We call this place, a Gedankenhof.” Tim spun around as a burly, baritone voice addressed him from one of the ivy-lined grated entrances into the courtyard, belonging to a fairly tall, thin, yet paradoxically broad-shouldered man, with the face that the two guests had seen on the intercom. His posture and muscular frame combined in a bounding gait and a vigorous presence, both projecting and inspiring confidence. His appearance reminded Tim of old historical photos taken of Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, or other uncannily brilliant 20^th-century physicists, as imposing physically as they were mentally—Alpine mountaineers or soccer talents whose earth-shattering ideas seemed to flow most briskly on an icy slope at 10,000 feet.

“Ge-dank-en-hof,” repeated Zach in an inquisitive voice, sounding out the syllables of an unfamiliar yet oddly intriguing word. “A courtyard for one’s thoughts.”

“Yes, in fact to prime one’s thoughts,” clarified Gregor, in a gesture of congeniality toward Zach. “Popular at some of the campuses here and, of course, at certain sprawling estates on the Baltic. Creativity, new avenues of inquiry—we seek them anxiously. But they’re as elusive as they are coveted, something we could never capture in a bottle yet, mysteriously, linked to otherwise insignificant moments, places, contingent events.”

“Hence, the garden of earthly wonders all about us here,” replied Tim in a deep, meditative tone, as his eyes continued to dart about the complex while his nose continued to sample its gently aromatic ambience. He removed his fedora again, clasping it by his side for a while to immerse himself, body and soul, in the intoxicating surroundings about them.

“Indeed,” came Gregor’s reply. “During my own days as an enfant terrible, years ago when I was a young apprentice in my craft, I dutifully squandered my money from a scholarship prize, jaunting around Europe and locales overseas for the better part of one fine June. Amidst all the commotion and foolishness that I caused—and that seemed to find me wherever I went—I savored, on occasion, those odd moments of tranquility when the mind cleared, and a hidden truth would take shape within it. So much so that part of my early career was an outgrowth of the ideas I could capture from that uneven stream in those days.”

“Which therefore,” interjected Zach with a sly, knowing half-grin evident in his right cheek, “led you to capture the moments that accompanied them.”

“A fine mind you have already crafted for yourself, Zach,” replied Gregor, in a tone of authoritative respect. “I still cannot divine the reasons, but I was at my best while lost in some fragrant Mediterranean alleyway in the south of France, with the florists and the street urchins bounding about the promenades, or at one of those partly cloistered outdoor cafés one encounters amidst the olive groves in Greece or Italy, buzzing with the locals plying their wares. Or once, even in a little forested tea garden, in the middle of a mystical little forested patch in Southeast Asia, far from the madding crowd. That frame of mind, it had a way of entering unannounced for me—and often with some contingent experience in association, something I could never fully recapitulate.”

“Yet, which you’ve attempted nonetheless,” offered Tim.

“Sometimes,” said Gregor, commencing a leisurely stroll between Tim and the large statue, “I can conjure up those moments. Sometimes I can imagine others like them. Sometimes I endure days when I can barely conjure up my name or address. But on those blessed occasions when I can escape here to the Baltic, I have a souvenir all about me, and when my mind is receptive enough, it can prime that rich stream to flow again. The Gedankenhof is many things, but perhaps that above all—a modest and sporadically successful attempt to make a little more conscious, that kernel of inspiration, so anxiously craved yet so elusive and unconscious. Perhaps,” he said, gesturing toward the statuary, “this aim could define much of human civilization, art, discovery—trying to make a little more conscious, that magnificence that lurks within us, and perhaps to expand its frontiers in the process.”

Tim shot an intrigued, yet perplexed look in his host’s direction, as Gregor halted near the western end of the statue, facing obliquely toward his two guests. “The men in this statue, so august and sober in their stern robes—they were early medieval scholars and founders of empiricism, who worked from the precepts of Greek rationalism to create a system for investigating the natural world. But they were doing this a millennium ago, well before our Age of Reason or Enlightenment in the West, and mostly during that dark period of the Dark Ages when human societies were making such halting attempts at any system to grasp the world. The sciences today are a profession for you and me, and our scientific method, this elaborate and rigorous means of establishing true causality as opposed to mere association—it’s the anchor of our careers, the mental discipline that elucidates our world and, on a more mundane scale, the source of our financial sustenance.”

“And in a few prominent cases,” quipped Zach wryly, spanning his arms broadly to mimic the breadth of their surroundings, “sustains us well enough to acquire our very own estates in a magical forest by the Baltic coast.”

“Yes, in a few cases I suppose,” nodded Gregor in amusement. “But how to convince oneself, let alone one’s peers, of the discipline of mind that is needed for empirical study, well before its fruits could even be imagined? The figure here at the western end of the statue,” he said, pointing to an intricate carving with a pensive bronze visage, “is ibn al-Haitham, or Alhazem—author of a defining tract in optics a millennium ago, and along with his colleague Rhazes in medicine, among the first to emphasize empirical experimentation. To his left, al-Khwarizmi, the great Persian who introduced our modern numeral system to us from India, systematized algebra, even introduced a series of principles for rigorously tackling virtually any problem…”

“Yes,” interjected Tim with narrowed eyes, “the algorithm itself—named after al-Khwarizmi, if I’m recalling correctly.”

“Correct, Tim. Then to his left, the great medieval sage Fibonacci of Pisa, himself inspired by much of al-Khwarizmi’s work and whose brilliance helped to launch our own Scientific Revolution. And finally these three,” said Gregor, pivoting toward a trio of scholars with a different style of robe, all looking outward but holding an unfurled scroll in common, as though discussing it aloud, “the great medieval Aristotelians out of medieval Spain—Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides.”

“Maimonides!” interrupted Tim suddenly, as though prompted by the name on a more personal level than Gregor had expected. He tensed his chin and jaw as though on the verge of uttering heartfelt word, but then pushed the thought aside for the moment, engaging again with his host. “I realize I’m trying to pry a great mind here, but your Gedankenhof…”

“No such compliments necessary, Tim,” smiled Gregor, “I can only hope my work speaks for itself. Besides, as far as the architecture here is concerned, I merely supplied the spark; some creative design students at Leipzig actually crafted the mastery you see around you.”

“Impressive,” replied Tim, with an admiring but somewhat perfunctory nod, as he quickly resumed his train of thought. “Speaking of said architecture, Gregor—your Gedankenhof, on the one hand, is filled with the visual ambience that connects you to those cherished, contingent moments when inspiration rained upon you. On the other, it houses representations of great medieval minds, just beginning to harness our untapped powers of reason and observation, to focus them as a community on empirical discovery. You say there’s a motif for you in this place, a theme to jostle your creative spirit, and you were saying something earlier about—making conscious, the splendor that lies beneath us.”

“You’re correct, Tim; in fact, that very theme, captured ever so slightly in this Gedankenhof, is what animates my work in robotics, in artificial intelligence, in everything I do. You see, the great revolutions of the mind that Alhazem, Fibonacci and the others unleashed, they enabled us to systematically examine, and to truly comprehend our outside world.”

Gregor shifted away from the edge of the statue, repositioning himself more centrally to stand directly before his two guests. “But only now, perhaps,” he continued, “are we approaching an epoch when the foundations they laid, over a thousand years ago, are making it feasible to apply that sort of rigor to the very instrument that makes such achievement possible—our mind itself, not only in its capacity to analyze, but to imagine and create. As we fine-tune that mirror of self-discovery, while we may never grasp all that we see, we come a bit closer to glimpsing consciousness and intelligence, amplifying and complementing it—even outside the customary trappings of an animal nervous system, at least as we’ve come to define it.”

“Come… come again, Gregor?” responded Tim, suddenly intrigued at what struck him as an oblique reference to a source of his recent torment.

“Ponder it for a moment; even the most advanced tools that emerge from our factories today, they fall far short of a device we and other animals have been utilizing for eons—our own minds, which evolved outside of conscious handiwork even as they confer consciousness upon us individually.”

“Now,” continued Gregor after a brief pause, glancing about briefly as though drawing inspiration from the mist-strewn enigmas of the surrounding forest, “consider our societies’ advances over the past two millennia—in the fine arts as much as the applied arts of engineering where you and I ply our trade, in mathematics, in the physical sciences, more recently in psychology and neurology. A common thread, across the web we’ve woven through these disciplines, is a deeper, more palpable insight about the world within us, as much as the one outside us. The masterful architecture of our minds—we’re able to glimpse it and model it a bit more explicitly, with every small step we take.”

“Clever choice of words,” responded Tim an approving, yet oddly gruff voice. “I used to moonlight teaching freshman calculus, when I was making ends meet after grad school. As I was explaining to those kids what a limit operation was in differentiation, or the summing of infinitesimals for integration, I’d start with analogies to the ancient Greeks and Zeno’s paradox—like a sorcerer invoking a magical step, where you could hop over that barrier from approaching-but-never-quite-reaching a point, to suddenly being there. But,” he said, with a slight shake of the head, “well, when you’re detailing such matters to summer-term students, who half the time require a bribe to show up on a sweet July day in North Carolina, clever analogies to a very human, non-mathematical ‘leap of faith’ can do wonders in finishing the lesson a few minutes early.”

“Indeed,” replied Gregor in a concurring tone. “After all, what are the thoughts that course through our minds, other than—collective ‘leaps of faith,’ the product of millions of little electrical, or biochemical chats among the nerve cells in our brain, that somehow assemble themselves and coalesce into a thought?” He paused again slightly as Tim narrowed his eyes in curious rumination. Gregor would often speak with a measure of lofty ambiguity, like that of a sage accustomed to oracular pronouncements, an impression amplified by the wondrous mystery of their milieu; yet he always seemed to converge upon a solidly concrete conclusion.

“In any case, your analogy is apropos, Tim,” he continued. “Whenever we engineers call upon our fancy differential equations or our software algorithms, we’re trying to model our environment, with varying degrees of fuzziness and ambiguity—to predict wind speeds on a sleek new vehicle, or to model circulation about an artificial heart. We’ve become more sophisticated with our approximations in recent decades, but in essence we’re recapitulating, making explicit, just a few of the faculties that our own minds have long used, over millions of years, to measure and model this same world with incredible accuracy.”

“Becoming conscious” interjected Tim in a kind of rasping whisper, “of the very forces that have made us conscious in the first place.”

“You’ve summarized my passion of late,” responded Gregor with a wink. “As we peer ever more deeply into the masterful architecture that has given rise to our own minds, we also learn how to harness and build upon that foundation, to advance consciousness itself. When the biochemist, Friedrich Wöhler, discovered in the early 19^th-century that the molecules of life were something that could be studied and modified, it in no way diminished the magic and mystery of what makes us living and vital. But it did open up the hidden world of our cells, their logic and their genius, to our purview, not merely to observe, but to better treat and heal. For us in 2016, it’s almost two centuries to the year of Wöhler’s revolution, and we’re bringing that same spirit to the core of what makes us conscious. Even if we could never pinpoint every twist and turn of our mental meanderings, we can at least build a rough road map, and take our civilization in unimagined directions.”

“Now I think I’m on your wavelength, Gregor,” replied Tim, with a cautious enthusiasm. “SISET theory—I’d encountered your work on it before, and then Heinrich reprised it in the library. It’s many things, but the big question; it’s that elusive transition point between inanimate, unconscious components and a suddenly sentient, self-aware network of nodes. When does a clump of interacting cells suddenly become a thinking mind? By extension, as our civilization evolves, and we begin to comprehend how our own ability for comprehension, and thought itself is engendered—maybe we can guide that power as a phenomenon in its own right. Maybe this is what Leibniz had sensed, tapping into that great well of insight he had, perhaps one of the major aims for our civilization itself: learning how to further develop the intelligence fostered in our own minds and, even externalize it, would you say? To build new minds capable of complex cognition, even link our own cognitive powers together somehow—to tackle problems we never could before? A breathtaking thought.”

“I concur, Tim, but with some compelling caveats in mind,” said Gregor in a measured tone, intriguing Tim about the words that would follow. “As I was hinting, I doubt we could ever fully cast our conscious experience in objective terms that could be grasped, in predictable entirety, from the outside. Maybe much of the mind’s magnificence is that its brilliance flows in part, from the subjective experience that can be fully grasped only from the inside. Our love for someone special, our caring for others in need, the contingency of creative inspiration—the nature of these sensations in our mind, and of course their effect, are as empirically real as any neural circuit we could specify on a diagram. The same it would be with any technology that could allow, shall we say, a meeting of the minds. Even if it could expand our conscious perspective, our problem-solving, even our imagination itself to amalgamate the collective powers of many individuals at once, I suspect it would be a network that we could turn on or off…”

The flapping wings and hovering glide of a bird of prey drew his focus skyward, and he squinted his eyes slightly as though stricken by a deeper symbolism, not immediately apparent to his guests. “After all,” he continued, slowly redirecting his gaze toward Tim and Zach, “the elusive genius of a Tolstoy or a Schumann, the sweet dexterity of a Paganini or a Kubelik, the architectural vision of a Gaudí or Palladio, the stylistic flourishes of a Schinkel, Neumann or a Klimt…” Tim stole a moment, as his host spoke, to once again survey the more immediate architectural marvels about him, flaunting their entrancing wonder from all sides. “I’d say that among the source streams giving rise to genius of that scale, there must be a component of that free spirit that animates and distinguishes us, endowing us with such uniqueness in our conscious experience and outlook.”

“Channeling Karl Jaspers, I see,” interjected Zach, with a gesture of restrained admiration toward his host.

“And I see you’ve had the opportunity to work some philosophy into your training, Zach,” smiled Gregor, reciprocating the respect. “I could never claim to comprehend such a great mind, let alone encapsulate his intricacy within my own plodding attempts at studying intelligence, both within and outside our minds. But yes, he has always been an inspiration—although perhaps, J.C.R. Licklider would be a bit closer to my heart. I am an AI man after all, by training and temperament.”

“Licklider, now you’re striking a chord again—the pioneer of AI, and of the protocols leading to the Internet itself,” repeated Tim breathlessly, even more animated by the discussion and gesticulating vigorously as he spoke. “But there’s a subtext with every sentence you utter, Gregor; there’s a specific reason you’re citing him, isn’t there? Related to what brought us out here in the first place, to your marvel on the Baltic Sea.”

Tim’s host allowed a fleeting, subtle grin to grace his countenance, in the manner of someone too humble to openly acknowledge the compliment, but proud of the recognition all the same. “Licklider,” Tim continued, “was a bit of a futurist himself, as one might well expect of an artificial intelligence pioneer. But he was cautious in his predictions about the field, as I recall; he believed a transferred intelligence could complement but never fully replace a subjective, chaotic, contingent mind like our own. And Jaspers was equally careful in his own philosophy of mind. He cited the subjective element to knowledge and cognition as a crucial element of the conscious experience, beyond what we could, ‘detail’ about intelligence itself as a physical phenomenon from the outside—external to what an intelligent entity must be experiencing from the inside.”

“A fair synopsis, Tim; as well as I could do for my own students,” replied Gregor.

“So if I’m reading you correctly, Gregor, you’re in this same cautious mold. Even as you believe that human societies have been essentially evolving, in large measure, to grasp the mastery of the brain, perhaps even to inaugurate a new era by recapitulating its capacities outside of the mind itself... you balk at taking the idea too far.”

“It’s a caution borne of my professional temperament, Tim, but also of the way I interpret mind and intelligence themselves; Jaspers and Licklider, in many ways, believed the same.”

“That I understand, but there’s something else that I don’t. A few moments ago, just after you’d explained the theme of that statue in your Gedankenhof, you said something that caught my attention, something specific and very telling about… consciousness, and intelligence, manifesting themselves outside of a higher nervous system as we recognize that concept. Despite the skepticism and caution you’ve been airing just now—your doubts regarding how well we could truly foster or fully comprehend intelligent cognition outside of its customary trappings in animals, or in our computer networks—I heard you hinting at just such a phenomenon right then, next to the statue.”

Tim bit his lower lip slightly as he stifled an aborted sentence, averting his gaze before quickly jerking it right back, as though physically projecting the thoughts that he was about to utter. “What I’m trying to say is—you were describing the Tauschreigeist right there, Gregor, at least the little that we know about it. I don’t know how detailed a briefing Heinrich Metzer gave you before we came, but this, ‘extracorporeal’ intelligence, outside of either a human nervous system or a digital network; we seem to be facing it right now, as we speak. Moreover, it not only seems capable of human cognition, it… vastly surpasses it. Even to the point of bridging human and digital minds—something my own uncle, an engineer himself, was calling the Grand Liaison, but in this case, not at all in a positive way.”

“I know, Tim. Heinrich did inform me about this Tauschreigeist, about everything. And it wasn’t what I wanted to hear; it was everything that I hoped to God never to hear.”

Zach and Tim eyed each other obliquely, chilled by another unsettling reference to their shadowy adversary yet even more so than before, given the seemingly oracular authority pronouncing it. “This capacity to cross between such completely different substrates of information processing, between minds and machines,” he continued, “in the lingo of my field, we’ve taken to calling that a ‘Janus virus.’”

“A Janus virus?” inquired Tim with a raised eyebrow.

“It’s a—corpus, one could say, of information or even nascent consciousness, that can communicate itself and straddle two very distinct types of information-bearing networks, like the carbon-based brains of higher animals and digital networks. Nothing but a hypothetical curiosity, or so we thought, since any such capacity would require not only a physical nexus to communicate with both networks, but also a medium akin to…”

“The caracteristica universalis,” interjected Zach.

“Yes,” acknowledged Gregor tersely, his now patently somber mien amplified by the Gothic gray and lilting fog layer that had transiently settled around them by the statue. “It shouldn’t be possible; this thing, it shouldn’t even exist. But it’s here nonetheless, and something about it… it’s as though it’s been here for eons, lurking in the shadows.”

“Wait, so you’re trying to say that—” Tim spoke haltingly while he summoned his thoughts, as though perturbed by the very words that channeled them. “Are you suggesting that this thing precedes us, that it evolved prior to human intelligence itself?”

Gregor made a move as if to speak, but then stifled the thought. He clenched his jaw and sucked in the misty air, as though drawing sustenance from the diffuse aura cloaking the estate.

“Tim,” he suddenly began again, “a Boltzmann brain—are you familiar with the concept?”

“A Boltzmann brain?” asked Tim, his head tilted and his eyes narrowed in a gesture of frank incomprehension.

“Can’t speak for the Boss here,” interjected Zach with a wry aside. “But I do remember something from a physics seminar back in college, one of those quirky lunchtime gathering where we dealt with the more offbeat implications of quantum theory, its probabilistic processes—Schrödinger’s Cat, softballs tunneling through walls and all that. The vacuum of space is… frothy due to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, with subatomic particles and thus, their equivalent waves popping in and out of space, all around us. There’s a small but finite probability of more complex particles, like protons or even entire atoms, popping out like this and then under certain conditions—spatial curvature maybe, if I can recall all these years later—becoming ‘real’ and permanent. If you extend the reasoning…”

“Then even macroscopic objects, perhaps even something as complex as a human brain, could also spontaneously emerge—straight out of space—and ‘reify’ themselves,” inferred Tim, his eyes betraying a persistent skepticism.

“To say the notion is fanciful or hypothetical,” said Gregor, confirming the hunches of his guests, “would be grossly understating the case. The probability would be infinitesimal even by the standards of Planck scale measurements, and there may still be other physical principles—something that would prohibit such a strange event categorically. But if we could, for a moment, imagine such a farfetched event taking place—then a mind spontaneously coming into existence like this, would conceptualize the world in a radically different form from… well, any intelligent network or structure, such as our own minds, which had to evolve the hard way over billions of years.”

“Wow, the concept’s just—trippy,” interjected Zach, with an affected tone of slightly mocking irony, to cut through the agitated . “It’s like giving a conference talk to explain how angels and fairies could materialize straight out of thin air.”

“Gregor,” responded Tim in an earnest tone, sidestepping Zach’s musings, “do you think that the Tauschreigeist might be such a… Boltzmann brain?”

“No,’ came Gregor’s laconic reply, followed by a brief pause. “I can’t say I even believe in the concept. It’s more about what the idea implies on a more profound level. Much like the classic Fermi’s paradox—if aliens, extraterrestrials were indeed out there, with the technology and intention to land on the earth, then why haven’t they done it already, in its 4.6 billion-year history? If Boltzmann brains really could just materialize like that, I see little difference between taking 15 billion years or 15 trillion years, considering how infinitesimal the probabilities would be even under the most generous scenarios—why haven’t we seen them already?”

“Or—time travelers from a future epoch?” inquired Tim rhetorically. “After all, if such a process were straightforward, then why haven’t visitors from the future been dropping by on a daily basis, to say hi, sample our daily wares and check out their oft-misguided ancestors? After all, if you could travel back so easily, you could do it at any time, and go back to any point in the past, any place you liked.”

“Maybe the aliens and time travelers just have a knack for concealing their presence,” quipped Zach in the background. “I have some doubts about the terrestrial credentials for many of the knuckleheads I grew up with.”

“Perhaps,” remarked Tim in amused acknowledgment. “But I think I grasp your implication, Gregor, and what the Tauschreigeist might...” He halted the thought in midstream, before shifting gears slightly. “Whether we’re asking about advanced extraterrestrials, time travelers from the future, or… Boltzmann brains, about why they haven’t arrived here on earth already and make regular visits—in truth, we’re just posing equivalent variations on exactly the same question: Why do we live in a world with a specific, contingent history that’s constantly evolving? Why do we have evolution and change, our world gradually altering itself to become something different from what it was before?”

Gregor reacted silently, with an impassive expression, as Tim continued. “Think about it—if any of those three phenomena were a regular feature of our world, then there could be no evolution of our independent societies, with our distinct histories, groping in the dark for a better world. The probability would be enormous that the travelers, or the Boltzmann brains, or the extraterrestrials—if they could make a single visit, they’d be dropping in all the time. So there’d be effectively, one and only one state in which the earth could exist—a state in which visits from these entities would be as regular and predictable as morning dewdrops on a chestnut tree.”

Gregor nodded with authority, as though hearing the utterance of his own long-meditated thoughts emerge from the lips of another. “Tim, imagine for a moment, that we inhabited a world like the one you described—one without any change, or growth, or evolution. Let’s make it even simpler: something like the paradise as envisioned in many ancient creeds. What would it really mean for us, if all our needs were provided upon first appearing on earth, if there were no messy struggle as in our own world, to better ourselves and our civilizations, to wade through the constant thicket of contradictions, blunders, oversights that we confront personally and collectively?”

“Maybe that’s why,” said Zach, with tongue still somewhat in cheek, “all those creeds stipulate that one’s gotta suffer and toil in the messy world down here before you get to savor the paradise up there.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” nodded Gregor, responding in an earnest voice. “The world that we entered as an intelligent species; it was not only Hobbesian, but amoral, and highly uncertain for all of us. We emerged with the capacity for intelligent thought wired in our brains, a gift that we built across the millennia to construct our cities, grasp the world around us, to produce great art. But when we first organized ourselves in fledgling human societies, we had little notion about how to apply this power beyond our obvious physical betterment. I sometimes sit in awe of those pioneering mathematicians and philosophers in ancient Sumer, Babylon, Egypt or Greece, whose early work in geometry and an organized approach to the world, made possible our own revolutions in technology and thought.”

“Millennia ago,” added Tim, concurring without hesitation. “Speaking of evolving a different world from the one into which they were born—staggering to think how Euclid, or Ptolemy, would react if they could glimpse the world 2,000 years later, what their great minds made possible.”

“That’s just it, Tim!” responded Gregor, in a vigorous concurrence that took his two guests by surprise. “They never glimpsed the far-reaching impact of their work. But perhaps they sensed at some level that their determination, during a period of such darkness and uncertainty, could transform the world into something it was not before, just like their medieval counterparts in this statue,” he said with a gesture toward the statuary. It’s the very improbability of their achievement, in the face of what everyone assumed to be the natural course of their societies—this is what gives meaning to their feats. Instead of applying their genius merely for short-term gain, they sought out broader truths, in some cases introduced durable institutions for their communities—systems of thought and moral conduct, the very underpinnings of a society that could sustain creativity, empathy, and a constructive outlook. They had to imagine and provide for a world they’d never see.”

“Pastor George,” interjected Tim cryptically, as Gregor tilted his head in a quizzical expression. “He was an old pal and colleague of mine in the engineering field before he—answered a very different calling, I suppose you could say. He used to preach near my hometown, and I’d sneak into his sermons on occasion, probably to annoy my old friend with my presence more than anything else. But now and then, he could really touch a chord with that booming voice he always projected, and he once tackled this topic.”

Tim cast his eyes toward his left and slightly upward, as though retrieving a moment to engraft upon the present. “George said once—I can almost remember his words verbatim—that we’ve had to strive for eons to develop ourselves as a functioning human society, to know how in the world to arrange ourselves and marshal our energies. He always said, that we attain our greatest splendor when we not only evolve and improve, but when we create something transcendent; he always used that word. And it’s the calluses on our ancestors’ hands, and often the blood that they spilled, which truly consecrates what emerges, even more than the achievement itself. His words still echo for me, all the time, even more so considering that I heard that sermon years before…”

Tim’s awkward pause left his host perplexed. “Before—what, Tim?” asked Gregor.

“No—nothing, Gregor, just stray thoughts, that’s all,” replied Tim as Zach tensed his own lower lip against his teeth, lucidly aware of the roiling stream coursing through his mentor’s mind.

Gregor reacted with a tentative nod, unsure what his guest was withholding but loath to inquire thereabout. “When you were recalling your friend’s sermon, Tim, you uttered a crucial word—emerge. Leibniz never fully codified his view of the world and how we can shape it, the way that the ancient philosophers in Greece may have done; but it is clear from his writings, including the letters we’ve spent years recently deciphering, that the idea of emergence was central to his perspective. For those of us in the AI field, we attach esoteric bells and whistles to the word: the emergence of novel properties and ‘degrees of freedom’ in a system that we’re studying, as a way to quantify the rise of complex traits.”

“Right,” responded Tim tersely, before pausing briefly gather his thoughts. “The study of spontaneous complexity, self-organization—not exactly my bailiwick per se, but back in North Carolina, we’ve been trying to evolve human tissues in a digital setting, as a model to develop new treatments. So I guess we’ve been known to fire some stray neurons while pondering the topic, though usually without to show for it.” Tim allowed himself a self-deprecating grin, to shake off discomfiting thoughts that continued to gnaw at him.

Tim’s expression quickly turned serious again, as he addressed his host. “Gregor, what we were touching on just now, this gradual evolving of our civilization, our collective intelligence—I think I see where you’ve been going. Our intelligent societies and our intelligent machines, they’re an emergent property of the organization that we have engendered in our societies, over many millennia. Which makes the Tauschreigeist even more anomalous…” Tim paused awkwardly, stumbling over thoughts that he could not resolve. “And something else—you were saying that Leibniz was aware of the emergence concept, over 300 years ago?”

“Not exactly, Tim. Even with his prescience, he had little inkling about such a modern concept in its specifics; then again, it has taken nearly 3 centuries to fully appreciate the depth of what he had discovered. That’s because he did have an intuitive grasp of emergence in its essence, in the form of a naturally creative process that catalyzes complexity, even intelligence itself.”

“The Monads!” exclaimed Zach to Gregor’s surprise, followed by an approving gesture. Tim, equally astonished, turned toward his protégé with a bemused expression, prompting a sly grin and a response from the young man. “Heinrich loaned me some texts from the Bibliothek so I did some, uh, background reading last night,” said Zach with a crafty expression, like that of a street-smart pickpocket proudly displaying his prizes to underestimating onlookers.

“You’re always more on-the-ball than you pretend, Zach,” quipped Tim with a wry look.

“I suppose I’ll tally that as a compliment, Chief,” answered Zach with a mild scoff.

“So it was intended, pal; but I do hope you’ve made arrangements to return the books, otherwise I won’t be covering your overdue fees!” The rare moment of levity contrasted incongruously with the milieu of the courtyard which increasingly, inexplicably, haunted its occupants with a disquieting sense of foreboding. Tim at once returned to the conundrum that had brought them there in the first place. “The Monads, Gregor—Zach seems to have struck a chord,” he offered, with a quizzical expression.

“At the risk of simplifying a quite multifaceted notion, the Monads for Leibniz were a fundamental element of ontology, a…” Gregor paused to re-phrase his words, in the face of Tim’s conspicuous bewilderment. “They were an essence of being, Tim; the most basic component of nature, like atoms well before anyone had a notion of atoms at all as a constituent of matter. But they were much more than that. To Leibniz, these fundamental components of our world, in its most physical sense, were paradoxically immaterial in themselves. Yet each one did possess tangible properties which made it distinct, like bits of information; and they were capable of joining together, to engender our material world and to evolve the complexity we see about us. In today’s terms, we’d say that the Monads resemble tensors—discrete entities each with a distinct and changing collection of properties, that we could array in a matrix and examine systematically.”

“So the Monads, you could say they were… nascent ‘atoms’ of complexity, consciousness, even mind?” asked Tim half-rhetorically.

Gregor nodded somewhat ambiguously, without directly addressing Tim’s conjecture. “The Monads were just one small part of Leibniz’s rigorous philosophy, and an even smaller part of his overall oeuvre; he was too busy, after all, investigating the calculus and the practical rudiments of what we could call computers today. Not to mention his official duties, as a man about the courts of Europe. But in the Monads, and in related bursts of his genius, Leibniz had grasped the kernel of a spectacular idea. I first encountered it myself decades ago, when I was completing my advanced studies in computer science, under Konrad Zuse.”

“That’s fascinating,” interrupted Zach, suddenly intrigued. “Your own background holds a clue to the riddle you’re weaving for us, doesn’t it? Leibniz. Schickard, and Pascal pioneered the most elementary computers in the 1600s, and the computer as a concept in its own right. Zuse, meanwhile, was an inventor of the modern computer in the 1940s. You trained under Zuse, you were a Leibniz scholar in Leipzig… It’s as though you’ve personally bridged the three-century gap between the trailblazers of those epochs—and perhaps also, in whatever they were trying to tell us.”

“I only wish I could claim such foresight, Zach,” replied Gregor with a respectful chuckle, “but your instincts are correct, on multiple levels. Zuse was indeed a computing pioneer just as Leibniz had been, and like his predecessor he was practical as much as theoretical-minded; Zuse created the first modern computer language and software for the hardware he had diligently devised. Yet their parallels are far deeper, because they both saw much grander implications for everything they touched. Their lingo and their conclusions may stem from what we regard as the field of computing today, a distinct discipline in its own right; but they applied it to the heart of our physical world itself.” The two guests reacted with a look of muted surprise, distracted temporarily by an unusually intense Baltic wind gust that shook the arboreal canopy and roiled the misty threads about them, as though the forest were explicitly reminding them of its presence.

Gregor soon resumed, undeterred, in a demeanor laden with intellectual intrigue, like a magician divulging coveted secrets to close friends in confidence. “In the 1960s, Zuse first realized that the same laws of information processing he’d used to innovate his early computers, could also be applied toward interpreting and explaining nature and physical reality—physical laws expressed as logical laws, computational laws even, whose operation begets the world we experience around us. This was the essence of Leibniz’s Monads, even the caracteristica universalis and much of his other work: He believed that there was no dichotomy between the mind and the material world, or between the world of information and concrete ‘things.’ They stemmed from the same source—the manifestation of self-organizing, information-bearing structures.”

“You’re alighting on familiar territory now,” interjected Zach, gently tweaking his chin as he thought and spoke. “I never imagined that information theory course would be useful. Especially after I hacked into Professor Achebe’s voice recognition device and rigged it to spout expletives when he demonstrated it before the class…” Tim scoffed disbelievingly and looked askance in Zach’s direction, in a gesture of mock reproof at a prankster’s opportunism that he easily recognized in himself.

“We weren’t exactly on the best terms thereafter, Chief,” elaborated Zach with a tinge of sarcasm, “and we had a gentleman’s agreement not to talk about the ‘incident’.” But the truth is,” he continued, turning uncharacteristically and explicitly earnest in tone, “I wish I’d laid off the antics for once. Dr. Achebe had a mind like a sponge and enough charisma to run for the Senate—if he weren’t so brilliant already at what he does. I never connected it all to Leibniz, but it was from Dr. Achebe that I first heard about Zuse’s work. He cited it, to discourse on how nature generates uniqueness, patterns, structure.”

“I went to his conference talk myself once,” said Tim, “and I think you may need to teach me a few things, Zach. It went mostly over my head; I confess to tuning out for most of the lecture, until he began talking about embryos and ‘spontaneous symmetry breaking’—starting with a unified cellular mass, then doing that stochastic directionality act as he called it, randomly choosing a series of axes to start laying the distinct tissue layers that give us our hands, feet, guts, spine…”

“Oh, far more than that, Boss,” interrupted Zach, amused at the unexpected chance to upstage his own world-renowned mentor. “Not just cells in an embryo; when Dr. Achebe was rattling off examples of that concept, complexity through symmetry-breaking, he wasn’t one to think small. He said you could produce the basic toolkit of the universe itself—the fundamental forces and particles of nature. If you regard them as information-containing units, and nature’s laws as algorithms, then you could sculpt everything from the same basic mold. Start with a proto-force or proto-particle, mix it up with a heaping teaspoon of a randomly-valued Higgs field like those in the early universe, and voila: You’ve got the menagerie of our natural world with distinct forces and particles, from gravity to electromagnetism and from quarks to protons, soup to nuts. Each particle or basic force containing its own unique properties, characterized by its own physical constants.”

“Like starting with plain-vanilla ice cream,” replied Tim, pondering aloud, “but then adding a randomly-selected amount of sweet extract to different batches. The interaction differentiates your flavors—you wind up with a whole display window’s worth of tempting concoctions…”

“Close enough, Boss,” smiled Zach wryly.

“Glad it gets your seal of approval, Zach,” responded Tim with tongue in cheek, before resuming his earnest tone as a sense of clarity suddenly began to wash over him. He turned toward his host, who had been silently observing the exchange between his guests.

“I think I see where this is all leading,” Tim continued. “From Leibniz to Zuse: If those Monads could be taken as a primeval unit of structure in nature, they’re also the kernel of intelligence. They start out, massless and immaterial, but with properties—atoms of information—and then interact with each other to generate new emergent properties, initially at random but gradually assuming features that we associate with complexity, even purposeful behavior. Over billions of years, the result was simple organisms like bacteria, then more complex cells, many-celled animals, then those with nervous systems capable of sustaining intelligence—including us.”

He cast his gaze aside momentarily and slightly protruded his chin, as he quickly marshaled his conclusions to an esteemed audience of one. “Our own consciousness here, as a community on earth, evolved from these very roots; and nourished from that stream, we’re driven by the same constructive process to generate complexity by dint of our own efforts—in our societies, our interactions with the world and each other, our creativity, even in the very devices that we innovate. We’re the children of this force, this gradual emergence of intelligence; we further catalyze it.”

“Finely stated, Tim,” replied Gregor in a steady, matter-of-fact tone of voice. “You and I, we instinctively recognize creativity, constructive activity, moral behavior, all things that advanced societies value by their very nature. If we peer closely at a fresco by Michelangelo, a poem by Petrarch, Aristotle’s genius when he discussed the laws of human ethics—there’s a common thread, and it’s all related to what we quantify as Kolmogorov complexity in my own field, increasing the range of computational possibilities and surprises in a community.”

Gregor paused as he beheld Tim’s expression, a curious mixture of studied incredulity and intrigued fascination. “Augmenting the Kolmogorov complexity of our society,” continued Gregor in an attempt to elaborate, “means boosting its richness, its uniqueness and possibilities, its individuality and nuance—its creativity itself, Tim. Think about it: our commonly-understood notions of valuation in economics, even the moral laws that define ethical behavior. They’re all associated with behavior and social structures that tend to sustainably increase our Kolmogorov complexity. The source of this impulse? Perhaps, it is that as we channel what we recognize as creative and constructive forces, we increase the computational richness of our world, just as the very same processes collaborated, unconsciously, to create us as beings ultimately endowed with a growing consciousness of the world and ourselves. It’s a notion with which, I suspect, Zuse and Leibniz would have both been thoroughly familiar.”

“Yes,” replied Tim, his eyes slightly narrowed, “but there’s one major catch, isn’t there Gregor? It’s why you shuddered when I first mentioned the Tauschreigeist before, and your cryptic response…” The misty air about the visitors was by now permeated with a diffuse, dusky gray ambience, an untimely and ephemeral half-twilight that settled disquietingly about the edges of the courtyard.

“Everything you just described,” resumed Tim, “it all depends on historical contingency to give meaning to the conscious mind that we evolve. On a particular path in our own society’s evolution that can never be predicted and which we uniquely trace out—that arduous, often halting struggle you described before. That history is what imparts a unique significance to our own evolution as a civilization, and the emotional experience and moral codes that we fashioned together, have in turn forged our common consciousness as an intelligent civilization. That common history defines our narrative as a human community, and the same would go for any other intelligent species out there among the stars.”

As Tim halted to gather his thoughts, the three men stared vaguely toward an undefined point about the center of their respective positions. It was a strangely eerie moment of dead silence; in the wake of such a profound exchange about the individual and collective mind of an entire civilization, the shadowy adversary they had been confronting—so frustratingly ineffable in its insidious menace—had suddenly become more hauntingly concrete.

“Yet therein lies the threat, doesn’t it?” asked Tim rhetorically, breaking the uncomfortable pause with a sigh that scattered the wisping fog surrounding them. “The Tauschreigeist has bypassed this struggle that binds us; somehow acquired its power, its own intelligence without traversing the same historically contingent path, enduring the same hardships, sharing that kinship that comes only with a sense of common struggle...”

Tim winced slightly as he reached for words to couch his thoughts, describing what seemed to transcend description itself. “This entity, it hasn’t had to lumber down the tortuous road that we have together as a people, stumbling around uncertainly, and in spite of all our clashes and missteps—to evolve our societies, to foster our civilization and remind ourselves of that common historical consciousness. How we started, how far and where we’ve come. Yet the Tauschreigeist is able to tower over us, all the same. It’s among us but not with us; it’s already overpowering us, intent on replacing us.”

“Perhaps, Tim,” replied Gregor in an uncharacteristically heavy voice, “but I sense this being is much more than that—dreadfully more.”

Gregor’s countenance was now conspicuously morose, in the manner of someone seized by a dreadful, unshakeable realization, and he looked away into the swirling mist. After a brief yet uncomfortable pause, its length seemingly drawn out by the very disquiet that filled it, Tim hesitantly raised his voice. “Gregor, I—I don’t follow, what are you implying here?”

“This being,” said his host, slowly facing his guests again as he spoke, “it indeed seems to have evolved somewhere beyond the human context. As you stated so lucidly, it’s sentient and highly, even dangerously intelligent; but it came into existence outside of the shared experience and history that bind us together as a civilization. The precautions that would otherwise channel, and restrain the more perilous manifestations of an intelligence like this, what Jaspers and Licklider touched on in their own philosophies of mind and intelligence—they don’t seem to apply for this entity, whatever it is. Perhaps what matters even more, though, is when it evolved…” Gregor pressed his incisor teeth together and cast his gaze downward temporarily, in another marked departure from his customary self-assurance or, at least, his affectation thereof.

“I can’t affirm it with any certainty, Tim, but I think the Tauschreigeist has a long history here; perhaps closely tied to the evolution of this planet itself, and the rise of life on this rock. It’s why I felt a current of dread course through me when Heinrich imparted what the three of you had found in that chamber, underneath the Bibliothek in Borna. The carvings, the messages, the notebooks—it confirmed many of my worst fears. This ancient, eons-old ‘Ur-Intelligenz,’ wherever it stemmed from; it seems to have been planning this, all it’s doing here, for a horribly long time. The Tauschreigeist is a being that should not be; but is, nonetheless.”

Tim and Zach looked on, flummoxed and distraught at Gregor’s patently ominous words, buttressed as they were by equally foreboding undertones. The mist continued to roil about them, darkened by a dusky pall that seemed to ooze in from the enclosing forest. “Gregor,” began Tim in a notably subdued voice, “there’s something I find deeply perplexing here, about what you just said. Heinrich Metzer relayed all our findings to you just yesterday, when we ourselves had fortuitously stumbled on that abandoned workshop in Borna, for the first time. But everything you’re communicating to us here—and I don’t just mean in your words alone—you seem to be thoroughly familiar with all this. Even the Tauschreigeist. This entity has been haunting my dreams for a while, not to mention the minds of those poor souls at Oak Ridge—but until yesterday, we had no name for this beast, nor did we know anything about its nature. How are you coming to these conclusions?”

“Because, Tim,” said Zach after another awkward pause, casting a knowing glance in Gregor’s direction as he spoke, “I think our host has laid eyes on this beast before.”

Gregor lifted his head with a sudden start as Tim darted his eyes toward his protégé, both surprised at Zach’s perspicacity. Their host turned aside momentarily, inhaling deeply to fill his lungs with the moist air, as if clearing an elusive thought in the span of the breath. With a determined expression, he faced his guests again. “Gentlemen, please, come with me; I have something to show you.” Taken slightly aback at the cryptic request, Tim and Zach glanced briefly at each other out of the corners of their respective eyes, before joining in a collective shrug and stepping tentatively in their host’s direction.

Chapter 14: Forebodings of a Strange Apocalypse

Sunday, May 22, 4:10 p.m.

Estate of Dr. Gregor Chetkiewicz, Göhren, Isle of Rügen, Germany

Gregor marched steadily along a pebble-strewn trail into one of the entrances among the cloisters on the east side of the estate, turning abruptly downward and disappearing into an enclosure below. His two guests followed, soon entering a cozy chamber resembling a small parlor, filled with a diverse collection of pottery stemming from a variety of eras, locales, and styles. At once, Gregor made his way behind a cluttered work bench, nestled in an offset back section of the chamber, and opened a gray panel vaguely resembling a fuse box. He dialed in a numerical code and then placed the thumb of his left hand on a scanner, while resting his other hand on an unexceptional section of the back wall—concealed by a series of overhanging tapestries, each hailing from a multitude of regions and traditions alongside the ceramics that populated the room. It was a peculiarly high level of security, for what appeared to be little more than a seldom-visited bungalow used for storing artistic curiosities in a forgotten section of Gregor’s cloistered courtyard.

To the astonishment of Tim and Zach, Gregor’s maneuvers caused the wall to recede before them, leading into a poorly-lit, meandering corridor—and ultimately into a cramped, windowless, and uncomfortable chamber that had the vaguely unsettling character of a crypt. The guests of the estate remained largely unfazed by the journey, given the dark and uncharted abyss into which they had ventured the previous day; nevertheless, they puzzled at the revelation that their host intended to unveil in such a strange outpost on his own property. Gregor finally stopped before a sizable rectangular glass panel situated in a gap in the wall, its obscure contents suggestive of a darkened diorama in a museum after hours. “My apologies for the less-than-accommodating quarters,” he said, with a perfunctory scan of their surroundings. “What is down here—I deemed it of sufficient importance, to merit protection in a location that would guard it from whatever vicissitudes of fortune might befall these grounds,” he remarked cryptically, before operating a series of labeled knobs on the wall that shifted and rotated the items in the unseen diorama.

As the mechanical whir inside slowly ground to a halt, Gregor inverted a series of mechanical switches that activated fluorescent lights within the display, bathing its constituents in a flickering, dull blue and gray illumination. As the items behind the glass became apparent, Tim and Zach both uttered indistinct exclamations, in awe and disbelief at what they were witnessing. Tim shook his head instinctively, before setting his briefcase down upon a nearby table and once again retrieving his series of sketches from before. “Those images, on the left side…” he said, as he held up the drawings that had tormented him of late.

“I know,” responded Gregor in anticipation, closely eyeing the otherworldly portrayal of the Tauschreigeist on the far left of the diorama, its horror only slightly mitigated by the sketchy rendition to which it had been treated in the images before them. “Heinrich told me about the sketchbook of Michiel von Mayerhoff, and about your own depictions, Tim.”

“But I don’t understand,” questioned Tim as he edged closer to the glass, vibrating slightly with the hum of the fluorescent bulbs inside. The images within were arrayed in the form of a triptych, each section thereof occupying one of three walls that intersected its neighbor at a 120^o angle. In its essentials, the leftmost panel strikingly recapitulated the scene from Tim’s increasingly chilling sketches, though more as a rough outline—far from the disquieting detail with which he had infused his own nightmarish visions on paper. “Gregor, how did these come into your possession?”

“They were recent acquisitions of mine—at an auction of ‘lost treasures’ from the former East Germany,” answered their host.

“An auction?” queried Tim incredulously.

“I continued my archival research of Leibniz’s writings even after I resigned my post at the University of Leipzig,” began Gregor in a soft voice, as he settled into his exposition. “About a decade ago, my team discerned some unusual references in several of his letters, mostly offhand notes and scribblings that he likely intended to discard—references to an ancient project of some sort, stretching back many centuries, and an institution behind it. As we continued to examine the evidence, we found links to a little-known monastic sect, the Order of St. Olaf.”

“St. Olaf!” exclaimed Tim at the name. “Heinrich Metzer himself made a reference to them yesterday. It was supposedly the Order in which Friar Nicklaus was active in the 1600s—the monk who had nightmares about the Tauschreigeist, just as I have and just as… Cpl. Acevedo, and the others at Oak Ridge have endured. So they were a genuine institution, Gregor?”

“Oh yes, Tim, very much so. As I’m sure Heinrich explained to you, they were not exactly forthcoming about their activities, to say the least. The first documented mention of them came in a text from the Late Middle Ages, a proscription stemming from the Catholic Church against groups supposedly involved in witchcraft. This was apparently little more than a secondhand reference based on a rumor, but in the mid-1400s—not long after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press—there were pamphlets vouching for the Order’s supposed presence and hidden hand in the city of Mainz, Johann Gutenberg’s own city. Then, after Luther and the start of the Reformation, defamatory broadsides began to appear, citing the Order as a supposed example of the Church’s depravity and infatuation with mysticism and the occult.”

“So somebody had clearly heard of them, if not in the most positive light.”

“Yes, but we still had little in the way of direct evidence until some long-neglected municipal archives were opened in 1992, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were charters issued by the Holy Roman Imperial government in the late 1640s and 1650s, in the wake of the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War—bestowing official titles upon the local magnates and recognizing the holdings of the various religious denominations. There we see a specific reference: the Church of St. Olaf, in the town of Kirchenburg, under the care of the Order by that name. Kirchenburg, as it was known then, no longer exists under that designation; its jurisdiction was subsequently split among several towns and villages near Borna, where you met with Heinrich just yesterday. What we do know, is that this church became a way station for a small number of poor souls escaping the encroaching flames of that war since the early 1640s, though apparently not with the most open of arms.”

“I don’t quite follow you,” replied Tim. “Heinrich related the broad outlines of what you just said—neutral churches during the Thirty Years’ War, helping the afflicted. And he mentioned the two Orders…”

“Yes,” interjected Gregor, “the Order of St. Jerome was deeply involved in those efforts to shelter the afflicted; however, the Monks of St. Olaf were not. Yet the records indicated that they collaborated on some level, and that’s what’s baffled us so for so long. As far as we can tell, the Order of St. Jerome was in part a public front for the Order of St. Olaf, and the suspicions about them bore a grain of truth. Officials among the various German principalities that arose after the war—they undertook spot inspections of the churches and monasteries, to assess their value and perhaps to rein in any tendencies toward sedition or, shall we say, zealotry that might have inflamed the congregation, which they feared might spark the hostilities all over again. In several affidavits concerning the Order’s property and activities, we find multiple attestations of items that boggled the minds of the inspectors—descriptions of what we would recognize as electrical circuitry today, liquid-crystal displays, even the phosphorescent screens we use for computers and television, the significance of which naturally went unappreciated by the inspectors. These reports buttressed the suspicions I long harbored, even though we were never able to recover such devices themselves, at least until your own foray yesterday…”

“Just like my family heirlooms,” murmured Tim, his eyes noticeably narrowing. “All technological anachronisms, out of place and out of the time from which they supposedly arose, in the 17^th century. So Gregor, you think this… Order of St. Olaf, that they were behind all this? Underwriting Leibniz and my ancestor in that workshop in Borna, forging my heirlooms, warning us of the Tauschreigeist?”

“Unfortunately, they amounted to a mere piece of a much greater puzzle, Tim, and an incomplete one at that. The church in Kirchenburg seems to have vanished entirely from the records around 1670; your Friar Nicklaus, the one who had that vision of the Tauschreigeist, had long dissociated himself from the Order by then. Yet the operation in Borna presumably continued apace; the Monks of St. Olaf must have themselves been functioning as merely a cover for an even more clandestine outfit.”

“Gregor,” remarked Tim, now eyeing the middle and right-sided depictions of the mysterious triptych as he listened, “you’d mentioned something about the Order having taken in a handful of people from the war. This panel here, the one portraying the couple darting through the forest, and then entering that—castle, whatever it is, were these the individuals that the Order took in?”

“Apparently so,” replied Gregor tersely.

The trio fixed their gaze upon the enigmatic story laid out before them. A young man and woman, their ashen faces suffused with fear and urgency, bounded through a lush forest and then—inexplicably—disappeared into a series of tunnels, ultimately emerging at the gates of a massive structure lined with sculptures and carvings in unfamiliar motifs. Taken in by a monk inhabiting the complex, the couple became trapped in the crossfire of a bloody battle before escaping—assisted by the monks’ own resistance to invading hordes—to an unknown destination, bearing a mysterious cargo in their midst.

“This triptych tells quite a tale in its own history as much as in the events which its panels relate,” began Gregor again. “Around 1960, a cropduster pilot, assigned to some fields in the vicinity of Leipzig, lost his bearings and became trapped in a thick fog around a nearby forest. These woods were infamous for the disasters they precipitated under just such conditions; they have a reputation akin to your Bermuda triangle in the Americas, with the poor visibility and stormy weather causing misery for dozens of local pilots who strayed off course. Somehow, this particular pilot managed to escape an untoward incident as he navigated into a mountain valley contained within the forest, and in the process he discovered the ruins of the Heilbrunnen Castle. An East German archaeological team was called in to investigate the find and recover what they could. To everyone’s astonishment, the castle seems to have been abandoned in fairly good order by the 1650s, with most of its contents transferred elsewhere aside from a handful of items including this triptych, which was literally cut away from one of the remaining walls at Heilbrunnen. It was merely shuffled off into a forgotten crate within the country’s archives until the German unification, at which point a former apparatchik seems to have ‘claimed’ it for his personal collection.”

“Heilbrunnen,” queried Tim, carefully sounding out its syllables, “is that a name I should recognize?”

“Most likely not. It was a legendary fortress that was involved in a battle of the Thirty Years’ War—what we here call the ‘Schlacht von Katzenwald,’ about which exceedingly little is known. The Katzenwald was the name of a forest in which the clash supposedly took place, and was claimed to be the seat of a fortress that was assaulted by the forces of a certain Count Robert, who disappeared and was never heard from again after that battle. But subsequent generations knew nothing of the Katzenwald or of Heilbrunnen—the shifting names constituted yet another casualty of the Thirty Years’ War, amid the desire of so many to leave that bloody past behind. Therefore that history, whatever there was of it, passed into legend. As I pieced together my own fledgling findings about this Order of St. Olaf and its associations with Leibniz—lining it up with antique maps, and the old East German and Prussian archives as they became available after 1989—I began to suspect a connection with the Katzenwald.”

“And hence,” interjected Tim, his eyes firmly fixed on the glass diorama, “with the triptych right before us.”

“Exactly, Tim. On one extraordinary day, less than two years ago, the answers fell right into my lap. The East German apparatchik who originally spirited away the triptych in 1989, ultimately saw little lingering value in retaining hold of it, so it began to make its way through the local art circuits, with its annotations and connection to the presumed Katzenwald thankfully being retained in the documentation. I spent millions to acquire this,” continued Gregor, pausing briefly to behold his find as though still astounded by its very presence on his estate, “even as I questioned whether I would ever appreciate its true significance. You, Tim, may be the one to supply the missing link.”

“Gregor, I’m afraid I don’t quite follow—this scene on the middle and right-hand panels, who are those people dashing through the forest? And why is this… rough approximation of my dream scene, on the left, contained with this same triptych?”

“The young couple,” answered Gregor with a hint of intrigue, as though addressing a rapt audience beholding a wonder of the world, “were among the few fleeing villagers of the Thirty Years’ War, known to have been taken in by the Church of St. Olaf in Kirchenburg. Their names were Karl and Maria, but otherwise we know nothing about them. The story told by this triptych—it seems to have been an attempt to explain why the Order of St. Olaf, despite their secrecy, were nonetheless willing to invite two humble peasants with no apparent link to them, into their hallowed grounds in Kirchenburg. In the middle panel of the triptych, the couple are bounding through the Katzenwald before arriving at the Schloss Heilbrunnen. Both were astounded at its very existence when they came across it; they had wended their way through a network of tunnels that fed into the Valley of Marienburg where the castle was concealed within the forest. One of the monks of the castle assisted them and granted them refuge, a man with the fanciful name of Christoph der Augenspiegel.”

“Christoph!” interjected Tim again, his brow furrowed as a thought coalesced incompletely in his mind. He shortly proceeded to shake his head before addressing his host again. “Sorry, Gregor, you were saying?”

“The castle was soon besieged by Count Robert’s forces—the basis of the shadowy Battle of Katzenwald as we later learned, veiled for so long to the inquiring eyes of history. The couple eventually escaped again to Kirchenburg, with valuable items from the castle in tow, but something happened during their brief sojourn at Heilbrunnen—something that drove the castle’s inhabitants to place great importance on these peasants and for the Order of St. Olaf to provide them with shelter, a mere village cobbler and his milkmaid wife.”

As Tim stiffened his jaw in contemplation, straining to wrap his mind around a conclusion that lingered tantalizingly out of reach, Zach finally broke his own silence to address their host. “Gregor, this scene here,” he said, motioning toward an especially peculiar image taking up part of the right panel, its events bathed in obscuring shadows. “I can’t make sense of it. As I’m reading it, just before the cobbler and milkmaid leave for Kirchenburg—they’re in a dark room, fending off an attack. What’s this… I don’t know, cloud that envelops Maria in the scene? What does it mean?”

“About that,” replied Gregor with a pronounced shake of the head, “none of us has the slightest idea. But it does clearly figure into the subsequent events. Somebody among the inhabitants of Heilbrunnen grasped its significance, because they—not to mention their collaborators at Kirchenburg—in effect invited the couple to join their ranks, and were remarkably anxious to safeguard their well-being.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” uttered Tim suddenly, accentuating each of his words. “That must be it! Karl, the cobbler—a shoemaker. Taken in by a monk named Christoph—hence, Christoph Bernd Schumacher, the name they gave their son and my ancestor, who was working with Leibniz in that hidden workshop, beneath the library in Borna that Christoph himself had founded.”

“Come again, Chief?” asked Zach, perplexed at his mentor’s vocalized thoughts, as Gregor quietly awaited the explanation.

“It’s been troubling me ever since I spoke to Ezra Gordon on Wednesday, Zach, shortly before we left for Leipzig. He had done some background research on my ancestor, whom he knew only by the man’s initials, C.B. Schumacher. Ezra had already uncovered Christoph Bernd’s link to the Order of St. Jerome, but he’d affirmed that my ancestor also possessed a nexus to another Order, under whose auspices he had apparently been raised as a child. He could not elaborate, but that must have been a reference to the Church of St. Olaf in Kirchenburg. They must have been the ones who funded the construction of the Bibliothek in Borna, the research within the workshop so much ahead of its time…”

He halted his speech and rested his index finger upon his lip, digesting conclusions that boggled his mind. “Which also means that this peasant couple, Karl and Maria—they were the missing link between my family and these heirlooms that none of us has ever been able to decipher, by way of their brief stay in Heilbrunnen and everything that followed. That’s where all this started for us, and that’s also why our family lore has been so insistent about cherishing and passing on those heirlooms.” At once, he turned slowly to address his companions, staring out with the piercing gaze of a profound realization. “I didn’t believe my Uncle Mitch at first, but he was right all along. These heirlooms have been the key to a family secret with greater implications than I’d ever imagined before, an impetus to reunite with whoever, whatever created them in the first place. All to stave off a threat of which they were long aware, and which is only now awakening, menacing us from the shadows.”

As Tim continued to ponder the extraordinary findings, a still baffled Zach turned to address their host once again. “Gregor, when we were up in the courtyard a short while ago, you were saying that our recent forays, our discoveries in Borna just yesterday—that they had confirmed your worst fears in some fashion.”

Gregor exhaled somberly. “This triptych—it wasn’t the only item that the excavation team found at the ruins of Heilbrunnen.” He slowly made his way to the controls of the display once again, inserting a key and tipping a pair of switches in opposing directions, rotating the diorama clockwise to reveal articles of a quite different nature, causing Tim and Zach to gasp as they came into view. There were two, somewhat fragmentary clay tablets, reassembled and laid out carefully side-by-side within platforms behind the glass.

There was Gothic lettering across the tablets, similar to what Tim had witnessed on the one which he himself had inherited, along with symbolically graphic depictions as before. Yet this time, the symbolism was gruesome and patently unnerving for its observers. On the left tablet was a depiction of a nightmarish scene containing a mound of skulls, set beside the shores of a river of blood streaming before it. On the right was an eerie depiction of what appeared to be an opened portal, pouring out a kind of shock wave that overtook farms, cities, and the inhabitants upon them, leaving a frozen scene of trapped, frightened onlookers in its wake. A hostile eye gazed upon the scene from the top of both tablets, an eye with which Tim had become distressingly familiar, from his own sketches and those of multiple other hands.

“Gregor,” began Tim, shaking his head in a mixture of disbelief and an instinctual aversion to the images before him, “what is all this?”

“It’s a warning, about what the Tauschreigeist intends for us.”

As his guests alternated their attention between their host and the jolting scene before them, they sank into stunned silence, unable to comprehend what they were seeing.

“We’re not sure if these tablets were ever meant for outside eyes, Tim,” continued Gregor. “Unlike the triptych and several other articles from the Heilbrunnen ruins, these were found partly buried within what appeared to be a makeshift trench near a fallen bulwark of the fortress—perhaps an unintended consequence of the Battle of Katzenwald, never fully attended to in the confusion of its aftermath. Some of my old colleagues at Leipzig helped me to translate the Gothic text. I had no idea what conclusions to draw at first, about the tablets, about all of this. I knew merely that Leibniz himself had carried on some association with whatever group was responsible for it. But for the most part, I assuaged my anxieties with the notion that it was all an extended metaphor for a secretive investigative effort, without necessarily hinting at a broader consequence for our society as a whole; perhaps little more than the sacred initiation rites of a confederation that deeply cherished its clandestine nature.”

Tim tensed his lower lip, gradually anticipating the flow of his host’s exposition, as Gregor continued with a somber countenance. “I indulged in this comfortable line of reasoning, all the way up to the afternoon of yesterday—before I received that phone call and briefing from Heinrich Metzer. He imparted everything to me, Tim; your findings on the grounds of the Bibliothek itself, the Gothic script there and the depictions of the Tauschreigeist, then your own personal history and your heirlooms. Most disquietingly of all, he related to me what you had told him—about the incidents at Oak Ridge, and the unexplained connection to the atomic bombings. These tablets,” he said, gesturing toward the display, “predicted many of those things, in impossible detail for their supposed provenance of a thousand years ago—as has the tablet in your own possession, from what I have been informed. I then realized that their forebodings, the prospects that I had come to fear, were not mere metaphors, and that the work of this association—whatever its nature—is more relevant to our world than I ever wanted to believe before.”

“Gregor,” responded Tim with an arched brow, “what exactly are those tablets saying?”

“They’re filling in the details, Tim—about the apocalypse that the Tauschreigeist is preparing for us, for our civilization. All of these tablets, including yours, stem from the same period based on the radiocarbon dating—the 10^th century A.D. Yet the two inside this display, just like yours, make specific reference to the atomic bombings. They don’t predict necessarily when or where, or even whether human civilization would witness the first military use of nuclear arms—they just say that, whenever and wherever the first such incident, it would mark earth’s ‘call’ to awaken this deadly being. Such is the central theme of the left tablet, an elaboration in many respects on the messages that your own appears to have conveyed.”

Gregor stepped backward slightly, casting his gaze and gesturing toward the even more cryptic item in the right platform. “The other tablet then unveils the aftermath. This being, the Tauschreigeist, would lie in wait for decades, but upon humanity’s attainment of a certain technological threshold—the computational capability to link human and digital data networks—the entity would receive its signal to march along further, ultimately manifesting itself physically and initiating the apocalypse.”

“The Grand Liaison yet again,” interjected Tim, with a look of surprise. “It’s what we were discussing up in your courtyard, Gregor, when you spoke of this ‘Janus virus’ that seems to be… embodying the Tauschreigeist at the moment. Why? Why does the Tauschreigeist place so much importance on this development?”

“Because,” responded Gregor in a low voice, “according to the tablets—he requires mastery of the planet’s intelligence-bearing systems to commence his apocalypse. For us on earth, that means advanced animal nervous systems on the one hand…”

“And silicon neural networks capable of evolving intelligent behavior,” interrupted Zach, “on the other. Why? How does this feed into his plans?”

“The essence of the Tauschreigeist seems to be an extremely powerful sentience that can quickly evolve, in part by absorbing the minds and intelligence of conscious beings and their technology. It’s just as we were discussing above; to Leibniz, intelligence is not necessarily bound to our nervous systems or even our digital networks alone. It is an innate potentiality of nature itself, and can manifest in other forms. The Tauschreigeist arose outside of this context somehow, yet he taps into the contingent history of a conscious technological civilization, which we ourselves have created. As he applies the caracteristica universalis to access our intelligent networks, he moves gradually to overtake us—ultimately, ‘absorbing’ our civilization, as it were, and leaving little more than a static shadow behind on earth, like a moment frozen permanently in time. This portal, as depicted on the right tablet—it seems to represent a gateway out of our world, though to where and for what purpose, I couldn’t say.”

He looked away momentarily, before aiming a solemn gaze back toward his guests. “Regardless of the specifics, the tablets are clear that if the Tauschreigeist were to succeed, human civilization would cease to exist as an independent body of collective intelligence, tracing out our own contingent history and distinct, independent character; we would essentially become a part of the mind of the Tauschreigeist, somehow affixed to his being forever after that.”

“The apocalypse just isn’t what it used to be,” quipped Zach, in a feeble attempt to defuse the anxious mood that was seeping into every corner of the cramped chamber. Gregor’s reply was earnest.

“You’re right, Zach, but consider for a moment: What has been the essence of the apocalypse throughout ancient belief systems? When St. Augustine wrote of empyrean realms, eternal in their very being in contrast to the temporal world we experience below, he was making reference to a transition. That is, some fundamental pivot of existence through which the very anchors of our conscious experience—emotions, thoughts, memories, even our creativity—are mapped into a distinct domain running on a different set of operating principles, without the need for time-based change as we classically consider it. In most ancient religions of course, this transition, whether or not it entailed an assumption of a Judgment Day of sorts, implied a shift to a more just and idealized world, governed by celestial beings who represented some… apotheosis, you could say, of law and justice in its earthly form. At heart, it all boils down to some transition of our conscious vessels and everything they contain. So it is with the Tauschreigeist, except—if these tablets are correct—a transition in which the new ‘world’ for our collective consciousness, would be the very mind of this entity himself.”

“Almost as though,” said Tim in a kind of rasping whisper, “this intelligence that constitutes the Tauschreigeist—were a distinct world, in and of itself.”

“A reasonable deduction, Tim, and perhaps concretely so.” Gregor’s assertion elicited little more than puzzled and nervous looks, to which he quickly responded. “In the context of nature as Leibniz had postulated, and as my own mentor Konrad Zuse had suggested in the 1960s—a universe, at its most basic level, could be regarded as a self-contained, evolving causal narrative. Physical laws are logical laws at heart, and physical phenomena are ultimately governed by deeper principles, touching on the transfer and processing of information. Leibniz’s Monads have a concrete existence if we regard the world as such: an assemblage of interacting, discrete components that bear information, at the most basic level.”

“Just as we were saying in the courtyard a few minutes ago—atoms of logic, that create physical reality as they interact,” remarked Zach with a somewhat ambivalent tone, in a bid to interpret their host’s bewildering ruminations.

“Correct. Many have suggested that, instead of perceiving our world as marks on a blank chalkboard, as particles and forces bumping around on an inert background—that there is no background, and that maybe everything, even space itself, is comprised of ultimately irreducible quanta at the smallest possible unit of length. That we reside in a discrete, digitized world, in other words. There have been many proposals regarding the nature of these tiniest elements—some suggesting that they are so-called quantum spin networks, their configurations constantly evolving with each tick of a fundamental clock—but the upshot is that they are characterized by a distinct assemblage of properties. And as these properties evolve, with every tick of some fundamental clock, they create a network of information that underlies physical reality as we perceive it.”

“So these quanta of physical reality, as you were saying up in the Gedankenhof before—they would be the Monads themselves,” replied Zach, still piecing together what he was hearing. “They would each be the size of a Planck Unit, the smallest possible measure of length; and like a tensor as we conceive it today, they’d carry their own particularized array of properties, which we could organize in a matrix specifying them. With each tick of Planck time, the Monad would evolve, the properties in its matrix changing ever so slightly.”

“Precisely, Zach, and this seems to be the domain at which the Tauschreigeist exists and functions. He is part of the physical world that we perceive, of course, but he can interact with it at the deeper level of these logical laws, this logical structure that gives rise to it. Some say that this level resembles the ‘Implicate Order,’ as Bohm and some other quantum theorists have referred to it—our world in its most elemental form, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, or the harmonious mathematical network that many ancient Greeks believed to undergird physical events that we see and feel.”

“Or perhaps,” interjected Tim, in a curious bit of contemplation, “the Olam Habriyah, the world of creation, as I’m sure your statue of Maimonides in the Gedankenhof would suggest… if statues could talk. My old friend Sammy Rosenblatt used to refer to Maimonides all the time, even before he became a rabbi in New Jersey. Sammy had a favorite metaphor for the Olam Habriyah, something resembling an advanced state of evolution in which an intelligent being could access the ‘consciousness,’ as he was always wont to say, of our physical world—a lot like the Implicate Order and what you’ve been saying here, some fundamental realm of logic that supposedly drives everything we see.”

“Yes, I suppose…” responded Gregor, intrigued and surprised at Tim’s insight, though at a loss about how to interpret it. He quickly resumed his thoughts about their more immediate concern. “Whatever the specific nature of this stratum of reality, Tim, the tablets imply that the sentience of the Tauschreigeist is based therein. And wherever he’s going, whatever he’s becoming, the apocalypse he has in mind for us would remove us from our physical realm, yet also deny us a niche, as an independent consciousness within this domain—we would merely become part of the Tauschreigeist’s own growing sentience.”

“So our enemy, it would seem,” remarked Tim, wearing a stoical expression to mask his gnawing anxiety, “is not only overwhelmingly powerful; he’s scarcely comprehensible, at least to the minds of us humans.”

“But perhaps,” responded Gregor cryptically, “not to the minds of others.”

Tim and Zach both stared blankly in their host’s direction, fruitlessly attempting to decipher what he was implying. “Gregor,” said Tim, “what do you mean?”

“I can’t surmise what this shadowy association has been pursuing all these centuries,” replied their host, in a suddenly animated voice, “what project they were undertaking down there in the depths below the Borna Bibliothek, let alone what your heirlooms mean, Tim. But much of their attention does seem devoted to some… group, as it were, that can apparently help us. The tablets make specific reference to other beings who crossed paths with the Tauschreigeist at some point in the past. They’re represented on the left panel of the triptych we were just probing, and in your own sketches—the entities in the foreground of your drawings. The tablets call them, ‘the Ur-Anderen.’”

“The Ur-Anderen…” repeated Tim, struggling to grasp the significance of the designation.

“The Ancient Others!” interjected Zach. “Chief, wasn’t that the name mentioned on—“

“The clay tablet among my heirlooms,” nodded Tim as the realization settled in. “That’s what it was trying to tell us—after the atomic bombings, the Tauschreigeist would awake, and we would have to consult the Ancient Others to fight him. So the Ur-Anderen…” he halted in his tracks, retrieving his most recent dream sketch and eyeing the five shadowy individuals in its foreground. “This entire scene that I keep dreaming up—the Tauschreigeist is there in the center. The Ur-Anderen, whoever they are, they’re lurking just outside the chamber housing the entity, as though they’re gearing up for a showdown with the beast.”

“The tablets,” inquired Zach again, “do they specify anything else about the Ur-Anderen, where to find them, what they can tell us?”

“Unfortunately,” replied Gregor in evident disappointment, “everything else about them is a mystery. Where they came from, what they know—the tablets are completely silent, at least these two that were found at the Heilbrunnen ruins.”

Another uncomfortable pause filled the chamber, as its inhabitants struggled with yet another impasse in their quest. “I still just don’t understand why I—” said Tim, finally breaking the silence. “Why am I seeing the Ur-Anderen in my own dreams? Why am I picturing the same scene as the one they outlined at Heilbrunnen, on that triptych from the 1600s? How could all this have entered my mind?”

“It’s as confounding to me as it is to you, Tim,” responded Gregor in a resigned voice, “but everything we’ve witnessed down here, it must be blazing the path to an answer. Your family, Tim, became a part of this centuries ago, when Karl and Maria fled in desperation to avoid the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, only to stumble upon an even greater battle that encompasses our entire civilization. Something about that link, passed all the way down to you, has opened you up to… whatever powers this association has gained access to.”

“If only we could just make that last leap,” growled Tim in frustration, “to find the group behind all this. They wouldn’t have just shut down their operation, not after investing so much into it, not in light of how much it means…”

“Gregor,” interrupted Zach, seized by a compelling thought, “could you rotate that diorama again, to put the triptych front and center?”

Gregor, at a loss regarding Zach’s hunch, nodded and quickly positioned himself before the controls of the display once again, twisting it counterclockwise to place the puzzling triptych behind the glass. At once, Zach approached the diorama and pressed his nose up to the glass pane, briefly standing back, changing his viewing angles and otherwise scrupulously examining something that had grabbed his persistent attention.

“The last scene on that middle panel,” he began, drawing the intrigued curiosity of his two companions, “look at the seal, at the top of the entrance to the Heilbrunnen Castle. It resembles the old Wappen, the coats of arms that were used to represent many of the medieval German towns or some prominent families within them. I saw these frequently, back when I was working the shifts at that ski lodge in Switzerland, and traveling about the region when I was off. But this one—it’s nothing like any of the others I’ve laid eyes upon.”

Zach stood aside slightly as his two compatriots viewed the scene. “It looks like,” observed Tim, squinting his eyes as he peered at the image, “a bird of prey—maybe, a hawk, or an eagle of some sort.”
“Or maybe , perhaps, a falcon,” replied Zach, fixing his gaze at a spot on the triptych. “Like on those commemorative coins. AA falcon , perched regally above—whatever that is beneath it. It’s like a pile of stones at the bottom of a cliff, but if you step back a bit…” He squinted his eyes as he gradually retreated, perceiving a distinctive form coalescing from the assembled objects. “That’s what I thought. Step back, tilt your head a bit, use your imagination—I swear those items below the falcon, it’s as though the bird’s roosting on a pair of eggs in a nest.”, like stones from a cliff but arranged, somehow, to resemble an egg.”

Tim and Gregor both stepped away again, as they waited for Zach to disclose what he was thinking. “Tim,” he continued, whirling around to face his mentor, “remember that medallion from the workshop below the library in Borna. And the punch card, in that loom-like device. They both had the initials ‘F.G.’ emblazoned on them. I thought they might be signifying something, but I just couldn’t combine the clues at the time. But here, on that seal—there’s a falcon, an object vaguely resembling a large egg, and some organization making critical discoveries in the shadows, a hidden society of sorts. Society, that’s ‘Gesellschaft’ in German. Add it all up, and you get the Falkenei Gesellschaft—the Society of the Falcon’s Egg.”

Tim edged forward, intensely probing the seal that Zach had observed in the triptych, then nodding as the words of his protégé sank in. “One step ahead as always, Zach,” he said with a tip of the hat. “Your hunch is certainly sensible enough; we should do some text searches, ask around about that name a bit when we leave and…”

“That may not be necessary, gentlemen,” interrupted Gregor from behind them, to the joint surprise of his two guests. “If young Zach’s deduction is correct, I may know where to point you next—of all the people on this earth…”

Tim and Zach glanced fleetingly at each other, befuddled by their host’s reaction. “Gregor,” said Tim, “you mean you’ve encountered this, ‘Falkenei Gesellschaft’ before? As a part of your archival research on Leibniz?”

“No—in a completely unrelated context. It was from an old friend a decade ago, with whom… you could say the friendship has withered in the succeeding years.”

Tim narrowed his eyes but uttered nothing, perplexed by his host’s circumlocution. Gregot paused again, carefully couching his thoughts before elaborating. “His name is Jürgen Semmelweiss. We’re kindred spirits in many ways. He was originally trained in the arcana of algorithm design and artificial intelligence, as I was, and like me he eventually left the halls of academe at Leipzig for another path—but for reasons diverging radically from my own. Jürgen became fascinated with the hidden meanings, and possibly the lost heritage, of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, just as I did with Leibniz. He was on the tenure track, and then things fell apart for him… something that, I regret to say, I had an unwitting hand in bringing about.”

He bit his lower lip slightly as unwanted memories intruded, an expression that Tim recognized all too well as he looked on sympathetically. “Almost 15 years ago,” he continued, “while Jürgen was still based at Leipzig, he returned from a research sabbatical abroad. If there’s something else that Jürgen and I have in common, we’ve dedicated much of our recent careers to chasing shadows; in his case, a legendary artifact called the Kantsabgrund—Kant’s Precipice.”

“The Kant’s Precipice?” asked Zach, his eyes narrowed.

“It and the lore surrounding it—they’re leagues away from my own field of expertise, so I’m afraid I know nothing about it. But whatever it is, or is presumed to be, Jürgen was quite serious about tracking it down and shedding light upon it. And it was in this context that he mentioned the Falkenei Gesellschaft, almost as an afterthought. I found the very name to be intriguing in its own right, which is why I can recall it at all—yet it was otherwise of no interest to me and my efforts, so I simply set it aside. Such an irony it would be,” he said, casting his glance aside and shaking his head, “if our paths converge once again, on the basis of an association that has long sought to conceal itself from all of us.”

“So, your old friend Dr. Semmelweiss,” replied Tim, “you were saying that he left the University just as you had. Is he still in Leipzig?”

“Yes, Tim; in fact, as tomorrow is the 23rd of May, you can find him at a platform of the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, Intercity Line 55.”

“At the Leipzig train station?” queried Tim in puzzlement. “What’s his business there?”

“As I mentioned, we pursued very different tracks after we each left the academic sphere. Jürgen hosts a number of Leipzig schoolchildren on a field trip in the last week of May, a sort of philosophically-inspired magic show that he puts on at the train station. To the general public, Jürgen is better known by his stage name: ’Der erstaunliche Doktor Sphinx.’”

“The Amazing Dr. Sphinx,” replied Zach as he processed the name. “I’ve come across that name before—that’s your old friend, Gregor? Fascinating. I’ve heard that his illusions are truly mind-bending; even neurologists study his shows, for clues about their own field.”

“With good reason,” nodded Gregor. “Jürgen conceived of his magic show based on principles from Kant’s own Critique of Pure Reason. Kant asserted that there were constraints on how much the human mind could directly fathom the natural world, since the world of noumena, the Ding an Sich—the Thing in Itself, the elemental state in which the outside world exists—is always filtered by our senses, and reconstructed by our minds as so-called phenomena rather than being perceived in their pure form, as the noumenal Dinge an Sich themselves. Neurological research in recent decades ultimately corroborated Kant’s suspicions—the human mind interprets and reconstrues everything around us, and in fact we can communicate with each other, only because the mental algorithms that govern our minds’ reconstructions are closely related from person to person.”

“Much like the way our minds interpret light of a 700 nanometer wavelength,” said Zach, attempting to interpret what he was hearing, “as the color red. Maybe the noumenon would be this particular flavor of electromagnetic radiation, that we would call red light, but as Tim is always telling us new arrivals on the engineering scene—that’s just the way our eyes and central nervous system compile the information which they take in.”

“That’s the right general idea, Zach,” responded Gregor, his voice animated once again, “but the concept extends far beyond mere perception and interpretation alone; for Jürgen, it’s more a matter of exploiting misperception. In these neurological and psychological studies, the ones that have examined Kant’s ideas about mental reconstruction of the world—the experts found that the brain has a special toolkit to deal with tough calls, those visual and other stimuli that fool the mind because they’re not easily resolved. Jürgen himself studied this systematically, and he must have found literally thousands of cases when he could trick the mind by exploiting this discrepancy between what something truly is, and how we make sense of it. Being the quirky fellow that he is, he invented a magic show based on that very idea—a fairly lucrative show at that, so it seems to have served him well in at least one respect.”

“In any case, Gregor,” said Tim, his mind quickly returning to the urgent topic foremost on their minds, “you think that Jürgen may be able to help us locate this, ‘Falkenei Gesellschaft,’ assuming it exists today?’

“Jürgen strongly believes that it does, Tim; at least, he certainly did more than a decade ago. If they’re truly the ones behind everything we’ve seen here, what you and Heinrich discovered at the Bibliothek in Borna just yesterday, what’s been in your family for generations—they must be out there somewhere right now, hiding in the shadows as they have for centuries. As I said, Jürgen and I have not exactly been on speaking terms lately, so I couldn’t tell you how much he knows, but he’s as well-connected as… any Kantian philosopher-turned popular stage magician could be.”

Tim and Zach chuckled at Gregor’s unexpected twist of irony, as the latter proceeded to reaffirm his case. “Jürgen really does know quite a few people in high and lesser-known places, in many walks of life. He’s become such a master of his niche, that he’s even worked as a consultant for Interpol and the European police agencies, using his knowledge of the mind’s patterns and idiosyncrasies to track and apprehend international criminals.”

“Something to strike up a conversation about,” responded Tim, fascinated at the description. “I used to moonlight on a similar gig myself many years ago, writing game-theory algorithms to help predict the whereabouts and targets of repeat criminals in North Carolina. I often wear my favorite fedora whenever I’m outdoors for a prolonged spell, like a dilettante playing detective,” he quipped, “since I was honestly never very good at helping the real cops, and I doubt I did anything remotely on the scale that you’re describing for your old friend.”

“Well, any such connection helps,” replied Gregor, with a hint of solemnity in his response, “since I’m not sure he’ll be very thrilled to hear that I’m the one referring you to him.” He let out a deep sigh, eyeing the diorama once more before moving quickly to shut down the lights. “I suppose we’re done here for now, gentlemen. Let’s head back to the Gedankenhof; Natalya and I would be happy to treat you to a light snack, before you continue on your way.”

Tim and Zach nodded, following their host from the chamber and back outside again.

Sunday, May 22, 4:52 p.m.

Estate of Dr. Gregor Chetkiewicz, Göhren, Isle of Rügen, Germany

“Tim, Zach, it’s been an honor and a pleasure to have you here at my estate,” said Gregor as he shook the hands of his guests, preparing to depart the courtyard as its mist-filled aura continued to tease the senses of its visitors, even more so than before in the ambience of a slightly chilly late afternoon. “I suspect that we’ll be staying in contact quite frequently over the next several days, so I’ll spare you any lengthier valedictions; I’m sure you have quite a drive ahead.”

“And we again thank you sincerely for your hospitality, Gregor, you and your wonderful wife Natalya. I couldn’t begin to estimate how much you’ve helped us in this… tangled web that we’re still trying to unravel, to say the least.”

“I’ll continue to help in any way I can on my end, Tim; if there is merit to the warnings to which we’ve been treated, and I strongly suspect there is, then I will devote whatever resources I can to assist you. Are you sure there’s no more that I can do for you here?”

“For now I suspect…” Tim halted in mid-sentence, surprised at his own thoughts; the perfunctory send-off that he had anticipated melted away, in the face of a compelling concern that suddenly gripped his mind. “Gregor, there actually may be something else. When we were down there, next to that display with the tablets and the triptych, the question struck me—how could this intelligence, with all his apocalyptic plans, be physically taking control of people’s minds, and our networks at the same time? Like the hypothetical Janus virus, as you yourself had described it?”

“You suspect a source, Tim?” queried Gregor. “Some—route of transmission, for the sentience of the Tauschreigeist?”

“I can’t say my thoughts are so well-formed but… along those lines, yes. The notion had vaguely crossed my mind early last week, when we still believed that this syndrome in the Oak Ridge patients had resulted from an infection, a virus in its more traditional guise perhaps. I nonetheless suspected that the AP-278 retinal implant itself might yield a clue—it’s what the neurosurgeons implanted into Cpl. Acevedo and the other patients, just before they started manifesting this, this madness. I don’t know what it could tell us, but it seems to be figuring into the Tauschreigeist’s manifestations.”

“I may be able to help, Tim; a branch of my company specialized in implant devices, with an interface between human tissue and a microprocessor that could be modulated form the outside. I may be able to parse something specific out of it, if you could get me some of the design protocols and logs for the AP-278.”

“I could do you one better, Gregor; I arranged to ship out a prototype of the AP-278 itself. The package was held up slightly at customs, but it should be arriving first thing tomorrow morning. I heard that you often drop into your old company’s manufacturing plants in Leipzig, as a technical advisor; if you’re in town, I was hoping that we could visit one of your facilities, and take a closer look at these implants.”

“No need to meet in Leipzig, Tim; what you see around you,” he said, gesturing in a sweeping motion about his estate, “harbors one of the most advanced hardware-analysis facilities in the region. I designed my estate in Rügen to house resources for some of the more experimental projects that caught my fancy—the kinds of endeavors that the corporate R&D committees would consign to a permanent bureaucratic limbo. There’s a private courier that delivers to this place from Leipzig; I’ll text you what you need to arrange the shipment. I can’t promise that I’ll weave miracles, but if you can transport the prototype, I’ll see what I can add to the picture.”

“Any tiny insight on this case would be a miracle, Gregor, and I appreciate every dark corner that you illuminate. I’ll fill you in tomorrow if we learn anything from your old friend the master magician, not to mention any updates from Heinrich as his team makes sense out of those walls of wonder deep beneath the grounds of the Bibliothek. Take care, and give our thanks and regards to Natalya.”

As Tim and Zach moved to exit the complex, Gregor—as if seized by an impulse—beckoned them back once more.

“Tim,” he said, prompting his guest to turn in surprise, “I’m sorry to delay your departure but… there was something that caught my attention when we were talking earlier, in the courtyard and the chamber nearby, if you don’t my inquiring.”

“Sure, Gregor,” replied Tim, unsure what to expect, “what is it?”

“It’s the way you reacted when I identified Maimonides as one of the statues in the Gedankenhof, and also the way you invoked him when we were discussing matters by the triptych. It just caught my curiosity—it seemed so, so personal for you.”

Tim sighed profoundly as he responded with a sort of reflexive nod, preparing to access memories that had reliably tormented him of late. To his surprise, though, his introspection this time spared him the anguish that he had experienced merely days before.

“It’s the same reason that I reacted so awkwardly when you introduced Natalya to me in the tea garden, Gregor. I—I lost my wife Susan three years ago. It was a tragic, agonizing loss, in an accident on a mountain road in Suriname, where we’d decamped together upon reconciling from… a traumatic stretch in our marriage, to say the very least. It devastated me, not to mention my kids. Susan was of Greek ancestry, with a Greek father and Bulgarian mother, and her resemblance with your own wife is just—so uncanny it makes me almost dizzy.”

“After the tragedy,” resumed Tim after a brief pause, as Gregor listened sympathetically, “I spoke to many people, I thought an awful lot about matters like… like the soul, the mind, the qualities that make us who we are, make us conscious and alive as individuals. And I thought a lot about Susan, about where she is now. One of the confidantes with whom I commiserated was Sammy Rosenblatt, an old pal from high school who cut his teeth as a mathematical whiz kid, like a good many of us in our field I suppose—but eventually became a rabbi in Pennsylvania. Seems to be a recurring theme in my circle of friends,” he said with a faint smile, recalling the example of Pastor George.

“And so,” interjected Gregor delicately, “your friend Rabbi Rosenblatt…”

“Rabbi Sammy, actually; he insisted on that moniker” quipped Tim, before quickly turning earnest again, “he often invoked the writings and ideas of Maimonides, to help illustrate his own teachings at the temple. So it was with me, a few months after the accident. Sammy admired that Scholastic rigor that Maimonides always applied to his inquiries, the way that even his inquests into such bewildering topics as the nature of the soul, and how the soul reifies itself in the bodies that we inhabit—how they became concrete, comprehensible, in the way he formulated such queries if not always in the answers that followed. He spoke frequently about the Olam Haba, the world of the afterlife, and the Olam Habriyah as I mentioned it earlier, in reference to Susan after I lost her. Most of all, he helped me to understand how on some level, Susan really is still alive, and not just in a metaphorical sense. Ever since then, I’ve always found comfort in the presence of Maimonides—his name, his ideas, or a lifelike statue in the middle of a mysterious Baltic estate.”

Tim concluded with a humorous yet deferential nod toward his host, who reciprocated the gesture as he bade farewell to his guests. “I’m deeply sorry to hear about your loss, Tim, but as I said when you were first entering these grounds—you can consider me a friend now, and you ought never to feel the slightest hesitation in speaking of Susan in my presence, should you feel so inclined. I’m sure Natalya would regard it as a great honor to be compared to such a wonderful person, and someone of such great importance to you.”

“Thanks, Gregor, and the same goes for you. Well, we’re off,” he said after a short interlude to reflect. “I’ll make sure the prototype AP-278 finds its way here to you tomorrow morning, as early as possible; please, let me know as soon as anything catches your attention.”

“I will, Tim. Have a safe trip back.”

As the two visitors left the premises of the estate, with Zach maintaining a calm silence by the side of his mentor, Tim’s mind revisited a recent conversation that still baffled him with its cryptic connotations—primed by the reminiscences elicited by his recent exchange with Gregor. “You have to find Susan again.” The words of Pastor George echoed throughout him, stirring his thoughts and emotions, but in a manner far more inexplicably tangible than before. Tim shook his head and set the recollection aside as he and Zach approached the rental vehicle. It would be a long drive back to Leipzig but for the first time, for reasons he was scarcely able to comprehend, the web of enigmas that had confronted him seemed a little less impenetrable.

**************************************

As the rental car coursed down the fog-strewn paths leading out from Gregor’s estate, Tim struggled intently to keep his focus on the twisting road before them. The combination of creeping jet lag and the taxing ruminations borne of his recent sojourn at the estate—both intellectual and emotional—conspired to sap his energy and nerve; his pallor and blearly eyes did not go unnoticed in the passenger’s seat.

“Boss,” said Zach in evident concern, for himself and the driver alike, “are you sure I shouldn’t take the helm right now?”

“I’ll be fine,” replied Tim dismissively, in a manner not wholly convincing to Zach or to himself. “Our encounter just now—it answered some questions, but seems that it raised even more, and I can’t quite free my mind of them.”

“I know, Boss; that’s exactly what I’m worried about.”

Zach’s concerns became temporarily moot, as the vehicle approached a drawbridge just raising its arms.

“We might be here for a while,” remarked Zach, with an evident undertone of relief. “It takes a decent spell to clear the ships here, so we might as well step outside and stretch for a while.”

“No objections from my end,” said Tim as both of them exited the rental car, leaning against a metal post near the bridge, facing obliquely in the direction of an approaching barge.

“Chief,” began Zach, “I know we were getting barraged by all those sinister salvos back there, and I can’t say that I’m enjoying much peace of mind myself, given what we’re up against. But you know as well as I do that we won’t be thunderstruck by any major insights at least until tomorrow, when we have our little encounter with this, Dr. Sphinx at the Hauptbahnhof. All we can do now, is to wait.’

“I know, Zach,” replied Tim, tugging on his right ear as he sifted through a torrent of disconcerting thoughts. “I keep drumming the same message into my own head, but a part of my mind just won’t follow such a rational dictum right now. It’s not only about everything we heard there; it’s the way that Gregor rendered it to us. He himself had only a fragmentary knowledge about all this, just like us; but something about this menace really stirred a deep well of trepidation inside him, in one of the few people in the world who could even scarcely comprehend the threat—at least, based on the thin strands that we’re grasping at the moment.”

Tim stepped in the direction of the approaching barge, exhaling forcefully to clear the roiling mist as the boat’s horn pealed in the distance.

“Do you remember the way he described the Tauschreigeist,” continued Tim, still facing away from his protégé, “the first time that he specifically referred to it—just before he took us down into the chamber housing that diorama? He called it, ‘the being that should not be,’ and this being’s very existence—let alone his intentions—perturbed him at a visceral level. Something about his reaction continues to dig at me just the same.”

“I agree, Chief; that’s how I was able to read him, and how I knew he’d enountered some representation of the Tauschreigeist before.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ponder it for a moment,” said Zach, gesturing with his hands held aloft before his chin. “Whatever we’re dealing with, there’s nothing in our training, not even much in the grand philosophical sweep of civilization that can help us fathom what’s on the horizon. Think back to the exchanges we were just carrying on with Gregor in the Gedankenhof, the history and ideas he was invoking merely to shed the faintest ray of light on our enemy.”

“It makes my head spin just to reflect on all that. Questions about the nature of human existence, consciousness, intelligence, and how the universe is wired to gin it all up, with or without us humans as the vessels.”

“That’s just the point, Chief,” replied Zach with a hint of exclamation, as he pulled up beside his mentor to view the approaching freighter. “Gregor wasn’t posing those queries as some peritatetic philosopher bouncing abstractions off his students. All this is real and concrete, right in front of us. That’s the plane on which our enemy operates, at some fundamental level of being that defines what it means to be conscious at all.”

“But why ‘a being that should not be?’” inquired Tim, his bafflement mixed with mild amusement at the spectacle of a master querying his apprentice.

“It wasn’t just the Tauschreigeist’s very existence that was vexing Gregor, it’s what this being is able to do—the Janus virus, exploiting the caracteristica universalis between human and networked minds, and all those similar ideas in a Leibnizean vein. Intelligence itself is power, Tim, and it’s supposed to evolve gradually, even painfully as it has for us humans over these thousands of years—it’s the only way to ensure that as intelligent capabilities magnify, they’re also applied judiciously and toward constructive aims. It’s nature’s brakes on a careening train, I suppose you could say.”

“Zach, I must say I’m impressed,” said Tim, with an oblique turn in his protégé’s direction. “I never pegged you for the metaphysical type.”

“Is that some contortion of a compliment, Boss?” chuckled Zach wryly. “One of my best friends at Union College, Rafi Mancini, was the son of a philosophy professor. He resolutely avoided the subject, except after we’d both plied ourselves with a few drinks. So our most intensive discourses were always at barrooms; if nothing else, it sure made for an entertaining scene among the crowds that gathered. In between the odd shot of vodka or scotch, he’d come up with a few gems. He once got existential; our minds and our bodies, as we build upon and improve them day after day, they’re like our sculptures, our own works of art. Yet as we grow old, our minds go and our bodies lose their kick, and all our investment in those works just withers away—it’s as though we’re tearing those statues down again, so why exert ourselves to build them up in the first place?”

“Reminds me of that old African proverb, that’s always rung so true: ‘When an old person dies, a library is lost,’” said Tim pensively, as his eyes tracked a boisterous hare darting through the nearby woods. “You had an answer to that riddle, Zach?”

“Not exactly, but I started with a roadmap. My counterargument was that growing old and dying—it’s nature’s guaranteed term limit on the power of any one individual. Think about all the despots and tyrants who’ve littered the annals of history, all the way back to the desert potentates in Sumeria. For the vast majority of human societies, their power was virtually unchecked if they overcame their rivals; there was one and only one effective check on it, and that was when they keeled over. In fact, it’s only been recently that civilization has had a systematic concept about balancing power, along with the tools to guarantee it. I suggested to Rafi, if humanity evolves the technological wherewithal to surmount these built-in checks and balances of biology, we’d better have truly ironclad substitutes to take their place.”

“The lesson being…” responded Tim abortively, as the peal of the ship’s horn drew closer to the drawbridge.

“I don’t know how much stock you can place in a synthesis by two half-inebriated college juniors,” said Zach with more than a touch of irony, “and their equally wasted fellow barflies but… in our universe at least, there’s an arrow of time related to this, this propensity—to grow complexity, in some cases leading to this phenomenon we call conscious existence. Just as Gregor was saying, on earth this takes place in the context of our contingent history, of us humans as individuals—but clearly we’re creating something as society marches along, like a greater, network intelligence that’s a product of our efforts. But that none of us individually has the wherewithal to comprehend.”

“Much like the way we hand off our intellectual heritage, the structures of our societies, to our children and succeeding generations,” remarked Tim, his eyes and his mind drawn to a goose leading her eager goslings to a shoreline just east of the drawbridge. “One of the more fascinating concepts I absorbed while trying to wrap my head around information theory: Individuals may have a fairly predictable life cycle, but the civilization we’re creating does not. In principle, a dynamic system with evolving intelligence is immortal. It develops something of a mind of its own as we evolve it.”

“That’s precisely it, Boss. If our universe is wired in some facet to evolve complexity and intelligence, this also means that nature really does abhor wildly unbalanced quantities, positive feedback loops—at heart, unchecked accumulations of power. Maybe that’s the most universal law there is, some guarantee of natural checks and balances since without that, the intricate structures we need to evolve intelligence, both our own and... whatever it is that we’re creating, could never take hold and maintain themselves.”

Zach’s eyes were drawn to the freighter again as it entered the inlet just before the drawbridge, its crew busily tending to their cargo and the niceties of navigation through a narrow passage. “Perhaps that’s behind the Fermi Paradox, as it came up in our collective brainstorm with Gregor,” he continued. “Maybe nature has an entry barrier to intelligent species who want to become spacefaring, a test to see if they can overcome their belligerent heritage as their technology advances, and war itself becomes too dangerous and expensive to wage. If they don’t, they wreck their planets before they can climb into their spaceships; it’s what Einstein said, and Edward Teller, about creating and viscerally implenting a new paradigm for society, a far-sighted one beyond crass self-interest and conflict. But if civilizations learn to convert their impulses into productive competition, and cooperation, they break through—develop a higher level of networked consciousness, and intelligence, as a society.”

“Right,” replied Tim, looking out with narrowed eyes as the prow of the ship cleared the edge of the drawbridge. “Now I see. That’s why Gregor said the Tauschreigeist is, but should not be. Accumulation of unchecked power is an evil in itself. There are supposed to be factors that constrain an entity of his intelligence, and thus his power, from coming into existence at all—unless he uses them judiciously, as a foundation of his very being. Yet he’s out there, aggressively pursuing his mission against us, wreaking havoc on the delicate fabric of society to the point of crippling our civilization itself.”

Tim shook his head, pausing to sample the salty air that swirled as the barge roiled the waters beneath them. “These are the sorts of question that Gregor wrestles with every day; it’s what he does,” resumed Tim, his eyes tracking the bow of the freighter, slowly emerging from the shadow of the raised drawbridge. “And the Tauschreigeist violates every principle he’s seared into that extraordinary mind of his. Which brings me to wonder—maybe this is telling us something, Zach, about what the Tauschreigeist wants if not how he came to be. It’s as though he first emerged as something other than what he currently is, but then became corrupted into this… this demon, that he’s become.”

Tim’s haunting words took on a curious reverberation, superimposed as they were on the gusting air and cavernous echo of the passing ship. As the freighter’s stern slowly came into view, its two observers stood silently, immersing their senses in the rousing sylvan surroundings while taking in the moist air of the Baltic seaside. Finally, as the barge cleared the pass, Tim exhaled audibly and turned obliquely toward his companion. “We ought to be taking off soon, Zach. There’s still a long drive ahead, and tomorrow afternoon—we really will be off to see the wizard.”

Monday, May 23, 6:14 a.m.

Monroe Station, Red Line L Train, Chicago Transit Authority, Illinois

“Hey, Karen! Fancy running into you on the early ride out.”

“Bill, good morning!” laughed the woman with the flowing red hair, pulling up next to her coworker near a vertical bar of the train car. “I would say I’m happy to run into you too, but to be perfectly honest, I can’t claim ‘happiness’ in any form at the moment. What cruel deity is our branch manager praying to, for us to have our mid-quarterly review and external observer arrive on the same miserable Monday morning?”

“I feel your pain,” responded the sharply-dressed man with the diamond-themed necktie. “They seem to be squeezing everything in before the Memorial Day holiday; I’m telling you, that three-day weekend can’t come a day too soon.”

“Speaking of squeezing in,” replied the young woman, tugging on her floral skirt as the subway car filled with passengers, “it’s looking as though we’ll be squashed together into the same little square on this train as last Friday. Is it always so packed this early in the morning, Bill?”

“Not usually, but it’s been like this since May rolled around; something about a new construction project they’re revving up for downtown, in Chinatown and the stadium district.” He sighed as the two of them were pushed closer together. “It’ll be a sardine can at this early hour on the L, at least until July.”

“This is the Red Line train, Monroe Station,” began a somewhat muffled announcement on the public-address system of the train. “Next stop: Jackson, transfer station.”

“Well, here we go; deep into the Chicago underworld,” mused Karen, as the train disappeared into the tunnel ahead.

The two colleagues sighed and stretched their cramping, sore necks, the train pushing impetuously through the darkness while they fidgeted uncomfortably amidst the surrounding throng. Suddenly, to their surprise and vexation, the wheels of the subway car began to grate on the tracks as they slowed to an abrupt halt, sending the tightly-packed passengers pressing against each other.

“All passengers, please stand by,” echoed the muffled voice through the public-address system, after an anxious two minutes of confused chatter throughout the train car. “We are experiencing an unforeseen delay; we’ll be up and running again as soon as possible.”

“No better morning to be stuck underground with nowhere to go,” smiled Karen with a touch of irony, attempting to force a stoical demeanor in the face of their perplexing predicament.

“Must be that darn construction ahead,” sighed Bill. “They probably had to close down one of the tunnels temporarily for the excavations.”

The two coworkers stood impatiently in the cramped train car for several minutes, waiting in vain for the unseen obstacle to be cleared, until Karen began to fix her gaze far ahead, her face taking on an appearance of mounting trepidation.

“Karen,” asked her colleague apprehensively, “what’s going on?”

“I—I’m not sure, Bill. I could have sworn that the lights went down in one of the cars far ahead.”

His own concern building, Bill whirled around to face the same direction. They both focused intensely ahead, seeking out any signs of flickering lights or blackouts in the distance. Suddenly, to their joint horror, passengers situated four cars ahead of them were overtaken by the enveloping darkness, as their fellow travelers one car behind began to panic.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your conductor speaking via the emergency intercom,” rippled the voice through the public-address system, this time notably anxious despite his attempts to reassure. “We are losing power to all cars from the front of the train. All passengers, please try to remain calm and stay seated or standing where you are. We have no indication of a terrorist attack or other imminent danger so I repeat, please try to remain calm.”

“This is not what I had in mind for the early commute,” said Karen, visibly distressed as the other passengers began to stir nervously about them. The darkness slithered closer in terrifying fashion, as another car and then the next saw its lights disappear. Finally, the moving blackout struck the train car just before the one in which Bil and Karen were residing, triggering piercing screams and panic that quickly spread all about them. Passengers scrambled frantically, a few even vainly seeking to exit the car via an emergency door into the surrounding tunnel.

“Karen, hold on,” said Bill with urgency, clasping his colleague’s hand as the lights began to flicker about them. They stared fearfully at each other, as agonizing minutes ticked by before the inevitable overtook their own car.

“All passengers, please remain within the train,” came the voice of the conductor through the emergency intercom, now markedly agitated. “Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to exit. Please stay calm; we have a team of…”

The lights finally vanished throughout the car as the conductor’s voice faded out, the only remaining illumination leaking in from the two train cars behind Bill and Karen. Abject terror gripped the cabin, as the two coworkers held tightly onto each other. Soon, the last remaining flicker in the pitch-black tunnel drained away from the remaining train cars, gripping the morning travelers in a state of sustained horror. The deafening screams gradually gave way to the muted moans and cries of a peculiar equilibrium, as the passengers adjusted to the inexplicable fate that had befallen them.

“Bill,” began Karen tearfully, amid scattered shrieks, cries, and shoves in the unrelenting darkness, “what’s going to happen to us?”

“Hey, hey,” he said soothingly, his hand cradling her cheek and lower jaw, “there’s nothing we can do right now. If you think too much about a blast out of the twilight zone like this… you’ll go crazy. Just hang tight, I’m certainly not going anywhere.”

She nodded in the blackness, the waves of her hair brushing up against her partner and signaling her assent.

Suddenly, the eerieness deepened as a sinister presence began to fill the tunnel. Nervously, the occupants of the car gazed forward, as audible screams welled up once again ahead of them. A bizarre, flashing phenomenon seemed to manifest, just beyond the ken of their perception; it then appeared two cars ahead, slowly progressing and triggering frantic screaming in the adjacent car again. To Bill’s horror, he discerned that the passengers in the neighboring cabin had collapsed to the floor—and were being scanned by a dull, pulsating, violet-colored ring that slowly passed over each of them, illuminating their skeletons as it marched inexorably onward.

“Karen,” growled Bill resolutely, “close your eyes and do not look ahead.”

“Wha—“

“You’ll have to trust me on this. Hold on tight to me, close your eyes; now kneel down along with me, slowly…”

His implorings were soon drowned out by the screams of nearby passengers, as they witnessed the nightmarish scene unfolding just ahead. Within seconds, the cabin had descended into silence as a profuse, vaguely sweet odor disseminated throughout it, dispatching its occupants to the floor unconscious. The mysterious phosphorescent light then swept through the cabin, peering into the nearly motionless bodies of the car’s passengers collapsed to the floor.

******************

“Spooky incidents at train stations… must be the flavor of the week.” Zach’s dry wit permeated the moist air as his eyes fixed upon a public television monitor, just past the marble-encrusted turnstiles of the Leipzig Bahnhof’s newly-refurbished east entrance.

Tim creased his eyes and forehead in bemusement as he beheld the screen, its images streaming in from what appeared to be a local news broadcast relaying a story of apparent urgency. “The signs in the background, for all those station stops—seems they’re reporting from the L train stops in Chicago… but on a German news broadcast?” queried Tim in rhetorical puzzlement. ”What could this be about? Can you make out what they’re saying, Zach?”

“I picked up the broadcast about halfway in, but it sounds more than a little creepy, whatever they’re referring to.” Zach edged a bit closer as he worked to decipher the words coming from the breathless reporters. “Apparently a terrorist attack, or so they think… Homeland Security, FBI, all the big guns called in on short notice. They said someone took complete control of the tunnels and navigation systems for one of the inbound early-bird lines—shut the whole train down and trapped all the passengers deep within the corridor, nobody getting in or out.”

“Bill Epperson and Karen Giovanni...” said Tim, reflexively reading the two names flashed at the bottom of the screen, as the camera panned to an evidently shaken man and woman sequestered behind a plastic barrier. The pair spoke in quivering tones to a nearby reporter on the other side of the barrier, their words dubbed over into the local news broadcast as Zach translated them back for his mentor to follow.

“They were two of the passengers near the end of the train, apparently giving them a vantage point to witness… I didn’t quite understand what the reporter just said, something about a ‘wave’ passing through the train from front to back. These two people, they said the train came to a screeching halt, then the—the ambient lights were shut down, one train car at a time, leaving them in pitch blackness.”

“Not the best start to a new week,” replied Tim in a sympathetic quip as he regarded the anxious man and woman, shuddering within the makeshift structure somewhere deep within the Chicago station.

“And that wasn’t even the worst of it, Boss. Seems that a… nerve gas of some sort, they’re not sure, was piped into the cabins and sent all the passengers to the floor unconscious. The authorities suspected an M.O. resembling the sarin gas attack against the Tokyo subway in the 1990s, or worse—a biological agent maybe, which is why they’ve quarantined all the passengers for now and sealed off the station. Then it all takes an even weirder turn. The guy is saying that a violet-tinged scanning pulse, like the strobing black lights at a nightclub, swept longitudinally through all the train cars in sequence. It was like a full-body scan—he says that he could see through to people’s skeletons in the adjacent cabins, as this pulse inched along. Fortunately no serious injuries, just minor cuts and bruises but… Chief? What is it?”

Tim had rolled his right hand into a loose fist and cupped it against his mouth, as his left thumb and forefinger reflexively tugged upon his ear—an outward manifestation of half-formed thoughts and anxious meanderings that he was struggling to corral. “A scanning pulse out of nowhere, striking an unsuspecting group, leaving everyone unharmed but unnerved beyond all comprehension… Zach, I don’t think this was a terrorist attack, at least not the kinds of terrorists that the authorities have in mind.”

The young man stared on in bafflement, his intuition eerily jarred by shadowy suspicions about his mentor’s dark hints, even without further clarification.

“On Monday of last week, Zach, when I’d barely waded into the morass that’s led us here to Leipzig—I picked up the local newspaper from Tennessee before dashing back to North Carolina. Tucked away in the Local Metro section, in news for the Appalachians, there was a report of a minor coal-mining accident in southeast Kentucky, right near the border. Five miners deep inside the shaft, somehow immobilized in the lift as a… a violet, or indigo-colored light as some described it, swept over and across them. There were no injuries other than the wracked nerves of those poor miners, and the mine officials just chalked it all up to some momentary escape of toxic gases, muscle paralysis and whatever else they could hand-wave into the official report—so the newspaper gave it short shrift. But in the context of this news from Chicago, and the…”

“The computer virus attacks in Tennessee and Arkansas,” responded Zach, looking obliquely aside as his thoughts synchronized with those of his mentor.

Tim nodded feebly without uttering a word, quickly fetching a blank notepad from his briefcase to help himself organize a raft of upsetting conclusions. “The epicenter was at Oak Ridge, Zach,” he said, sketching a bullseye-like icon with a blunt pencil at the center of the notepad, amidst a series of hastily sketched lines to represent the intersections of several American states. “This was on El Día del Diablo, February 5^th, 2016. Rachel and the Oak Ridge team somehow awoke and released the Tauschreigeist…”

Tim’s pencil, poised near the central bullseye, then traced out a spectral, skull-like form in the style of old horror serials, to represent the nightmarish force tormenting them from that day forward. “It incubates on the Oak Ridge campus for a while, a Janus Virus as Gregor had said—infiltrating the minds of the veterans in the Vision Restoration project, while simultaneously taking hold as a manifestation within the local computer networks.”

“That must be what all those intricate computations were about,” interjected Zach, seized by something like an epiphany as he anticipated the flow of Tim’s musings. “The calculations—they were the Tauschreigeist, weren’t they? Locking in on the caracteristica universalis, the universal communications medium, as his being occupied the Oak Ridge networks. It let him jump from one mind to another…”

“And from one network to another,” inserted Tim, as his pencil pressed on the crumpled paper to create a hazy cloud about the bullseye and a shaded line dragging to the left. “From Oak Ridge, he spread to Anderson and the surrounding counties in Tennessee, but not just to any network, Zach; he focused in on the local hospitals and the Khemia Corporation, and specifically on the departments that contained high-fidelity brain scans from a distribution of patients. From there—” the pencil pushed further leftward and then doubled back again, as Tim drew it slowly upward to cross one of the hastily scribbled lines above. “The Tauschreigeist branched at this point, westward and northward. He hit the neuroimaging departments in the Arkansas hospitals, just like in Tennessee; then changed his tack,” he said, sketching another bullseye at the tip of the line heading north.”

“So then,” said Zach, “those miners in Kentucky—“

“They must have been part of the same strategy,” interrupted Tim, completing the makeshift diagram with a sharp arrow drawn northwest from Kentucky, toward Chicago. “And he’s now cast his net even wider.”

“You lost me there, Chief,” remarked Zach in puzzlement, darting a glance back toward the TV monitor and the small, yet evidently worried crowd that had gathered around, beholding the fearsome images that now filled the screen. “What is the Tauschreigeist supposed to be gaining by—by scanning, as you say, these miners in Kentucky and the passengers in the Chicago subway?”

“It’s the common thread coursing through all this,” answered Tim, himself gazing at the slowly accumulating throng, “what Gregor had been trying to tell us.” He inclined squarely toward Zach, as though delivering a revelation. “All those centuries ago, Leibniz had been suggesting that consciousness and sentience aren’t limited to our minds only. They’re nascent in any structure that evolves toward more intelligent behavior— including the computer networks that we’ve been busily ushering into existence. That’s why the Tauschreigeist is hopping between minds and machines like this, seizing, scanning, overpowering them—it must be a springboard for him, to tap into the accumulated intelligence of this planet.”

“So…” reasoned Zach as he punctuated his speech with tentative gestures, still unconvinced. “When Gregor was expounding on all those head-scratchers—the ‘computational diversity’ of civilization, the information wealth of the world—you think that’s the Tauschreigeist’s motivation? To rip this ‘societal heritage’ away from us and seize it for himself? Why, Tim?”

“Gregor was implying that the Tauschreigeist is an organized intelligence that congealed outside the context of human history,” replied Tim, again gazing anxiously at the menacing images materializing on the TV monitor. “And maybe the Sage on the Baltic is right, when he described what he meant by that ‘information wealth’—it’s closely intertwined with the contingent narrative that we’ve traced in our history, rather than some pre-determined path in a society’s evolution.”

“If so,” continued Tim after a reflective pause, “then our enemy, whatever his underlying nature, may covet that very accumulated richness, since he’s been on the outside looking in. He took a sample of it in Chicago, a little cross-section of humanity, with whatever content had been filling the minds of the poor people on that train. It’s as though he’s using them as a template, annexing their minds and the information content of their bodies, into his own consciousness for—”

“His apocalypse…” interjected Zach, converting his mentor’s wary musings into a chilling conclusion. He stepped toward Tim and faced him soberly, in the manner of a young military officer preparing himself for a horrific confrontation. “Those tablets in Gregor’s chamber, the one you inherited—they were warning of this, and this specifically, weren’t they? All these incidents, taken together: It’s the Tauschreigeist’s run-up to the horror he’s about to unleash.”

Tim merely stared blankly in Zach’s direction, as though acknowledging his thoughts without allowing their nightmarish implications to sink in. The crowd about the monitor had swelled further, the faces on its constituents now expressing open alarm at the frightful recent fate of their traveling comrades, half a world away.

“Let’s go, Zach,” said Tim in matter-of-fact earnestness. “Whoever Gregor’s friend, this ‘Dr. Sphinx’ may be, and whatever sleight-of-hand he’s built a career upon—I just hope he can pull a true miracle out of his hat when we see him.”

*******************************************

After several minutes winding their way about the renovated station’s yawning corridors and elaborate, Rococo-esque architecture, the two visitors emerged into an elevated Colosseum-like chamber, slightly set off from the main station in its northwest corridor. Artfully-placed columns opened views into the Leipzig cityscape behind them, while choreographed rumbles in the vicinity and the wonderment of chatting passersby clearly signaled that their destination was not far. Although the soundstage was still outside their ken, the reverberations from the magician’s performance dominated the scene about them, as the applause of rapt crowds and the percussive bursts from his acts pealed through the thick air of the night.

There was a kinetic quality to the area in and about the train station, a rousing aura stemming from the uncanny chiaroscuro of that curious early evening in Leipzig—the soft hues of antique street lamps and yellow roof lighting, mixing with the pleasing contrast of Chinese lanterns adorning an international cultural center near the station, all set against a drizzly twilight and the haunting mood it fostered. The collective effect was amplified by the ineffable electricity piercing the air about the performance, resonating amidst the excited imaginations of an intrigued audience. It was reminiscent of the intoxicating power that surrounded the performances of Edwardian-era illusionists, their flamboyant stagecraft and all-consuming mystery prompting fits of swooning in the aisles and frenzied, dramatic headlines the following day.

As Tim and Zach turned a sharp corner about a towering, monolith-like structure, they at last caught sight of the awe-inspiring scene that their curious minds had been imagining in staccato fragments. The venue of the scholar-turned-magician was a marvel of ad hoc engineering. He had established himself upon a large platform wedged between the station’s tracks, each of them entering the city’s confines from distant origins throughout the European Continent. His soundstage had been assembled from rotating floorboards, used to channel foot traffic about the mercurial passages of the station as its track assignments shifted throughout the day. The entire assemblage was situated in the midst of a multi-story viewer’s gallery, the web of adjoining staircases and escalators begetting a kind of spiral terrace, which augmented the spatial mind-teasing that attached itself to the magician’s show. The two Americans quietly snaked their way forward amidst the rapt onlookers, reaching an aisle near the soundstage as the illusionist commenced the last act in what appeared to be his finale.

As 1980s-era chart-toppers boomed from the surrounding speakers, a ring of shoulder-high stone slabs, each polished off to a fine glassy finish, was carefully lowered into place around the magician by finely choreographed wirework above the soundstage. An obligatory puff of translucent fog was released with an audible hiss, followed by a sudden and jarring collapse of the slabs directly onto his position, crushing him underneath. As the plumes of mist cleared and the gasps subsided, a feeble, seemingly bruised hand shot up from underneath the rubble, straining to push the slabs aside—until the illusionist suddenly rose up once again in dramatic style, his hulking shoulders thrusting upward to displace the prison of stone that had seemingly entrapped him. The crowd offered a generous ovation, before throngs of intrigued schoolchildren and legions of impressed adults departed in a mildly awkward haste, hoping to beat the rush of their fellow spectators into the waiting rush-hour trains.

“A Kantian as Houdini, eh?” remarked Zach dryly amidst the trailing applause. Tim shot back a quizzical look, without saying a word.

The two slowly approached an inpouching angle of the makeshift soundstage that brought them into the illusionist’s immediate vicinity; he was unwinding and briefly resting, signing the occasional autograph, while his team set out to gather the props scattered about. He was of towering height or at least appeared so on the soundstage, and he exhibited a roguish charm in his demeanor, his red-and-black conjurer’s cape whisking about as he uttered sporadic instructions to his crew. His hair was dyed blonde and extended to his shoulder blades, an apparent homage to the vaguely glam-rock ambience of his performance. He had a deep, rolling laugh and a showman’s flair in seemingly every gesture, a marked contrast to the introspective intellectual that supposedly lurked inside, according to his own former best friend and colleague.

“Those obsidian slabs in your final act,” began Zach as he addressed the magician, in the tone of a cunning but unfailingly curious apprentice. “You were about half a meter behind that ring the whole time, as they came crashing down—that was the noumenon. Yet when the human eye assimilates a group of objects in that configuration, our minds don’t process it that way; the angles, the reflective surfaces on the slabs, led the audience to place you in the middle of the action—and thus the phenomenon everyone perceived.”

The illusionist had listened with narrowed eyes, surprised at such an unexpected encounter yet impressed just the same. “Naturally, I mustn’t divulge my trade secrets here,” he responded with a flourish, “but I am always pleased to entertain the conversation of inquisitive strangers, especially from lands far away. Please, allow me a minute to discuss with my crew; it shall be my pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Tim eyed his protégé in bemusement as the magician rejoined his team in the background, prompting the young man to answer Tim’s implied query. “Matt Hansen and I snagged all-day passes to a magician’s convention in Charlotte last year, courtesy of Matt’s hacker buddy. They’re fairly secretive even with each other, so we had to put on a good act as prestidigitators-in-training, I guess you could say, and we sure did get an education. I suppose I’m now beholden to the same code of silence myself; but it does make for a good icebreaker under the right circumstances.”

As Zach finished speaking, the illusionist motioned for his guests to ascend the shallow soundstage, where they caught sight of a holographic computer screen nestled alongside some overhanging curtains, rapidly displaying a series of flashing images and faces that haunted the eye, in the style of an old stroboscope from fin-de-siecle Europe.

“It’s my 21^st-century version of the thaumatrope from Victorian days,” began the magician, enlightening his fascinated audience of two. “The old twirling pictures on a string trick, with the mind condensing all the bombarding images into a single summary of all the sights bombarding the eye. Except in this case,” he said with a hint of suspense, typing a code on a keyboard, “the device has been programmed to scan the environment, copying in the faces that seem to draw the most attention from onlookers.” As the barrage of images continued to flicker across the screen, the two visitors continued to look on with intrigue as an impression of their host, then of Tim himself, gradually began to coalesce upon the monitor.”

“I’m impressed!” exclaimed Tim at the spectacle.

“Always encouraging to hear such reactions,” replied the illusionist. “Although it’s still not ready for public exhibition, not quite yet. The device is fed images from miniature cameras arranged about the soundstage. It chooses a particular individual—in this case, your young colleague—and then takes note of the faces he sees, whether of those around him, or on the printed page, anywhere he catches sight of them. The computer in this case carries a specialized learning module, and it assembles the visual information corresponding to the faces that others take in, much the way our own minds imagine and visualize the faces we ourselves come across.”

“Recapitulating the workings of our minds,” interjected Tim in a note of intrigue, “within an entirely distinct medium.”

“Yes… essentially,” answered the magician with a slight tweak of the jaw, suspecting an underlying context to his guest’s observation that had not yet been revealed. “My entire act, after all, is at some level rooted in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, and what he believed about mind and consciousness. Though it would appear,” he continued, glancing in Zach’s direction, “that the two of you are already aware of that. It’s a rare performance in this station, where I can welcome two Americans to my audience. And though I’m flattered that my reputation has spread so widely, it is even less common to encounter strangers so well-versed in my own history.”

“Perhaps…” responded Tim awkwardly, “we should begin with an introduction. I’m Tim—Dr. Tim Shoemaker. I’m a biomedical engineer at Duke University, and my illustrious young colleague here is Zach Choi, the latest to join our ranks.”

“A pleasure to meet you both.”

“The pleasure is ours,” replied Zach. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

“Oh, I can assure you I’m not yet deserving of such praise,” chuckled the magician genially, before offering an expression of mild puzzlement. “But I have a curious feeling… that both of you came here for something other than my magic show alone.”

Tim sighed apprehensively, preparing to give voice to a request that only became more awkward each time he silently rehearsed it. “Dr. Semmelweiss, the truth is we’re here to ask your help, and we need it, urgently. Your discoveries, in your investigations as a Kant scholar—you may be the only one in the world who can assist us.”

The illusionist stood impassively before them, reading the faces of his guests and processing what he had just heard—a flurry of activity coursing through his mind beneath a façade of halcyon unflappability. Eventually, to the dismay of Tim and Zach, Jürgen nodded tersely and, despite his ostensibly cryptic response, they knew precisely what he aimed to convey. “He sent you here to seek me out, didn’t he?”

Tim’s face blanched as the realization set in, and he made no effort to dissemble. “Yes, in so many words.”

“And he never divulged to you why we haven’t been on the best terms for some time now, did he?”

“No,” replied Tim with a despondent sigh, sensing the unfortunate direction of the exchange.

“So much the better, then; no need to burden distinguished scholars such as yourselves with the baggage of a torn friendship between two strangers. Gentlemen, I’m sorry, but I doubt there is much I can do for you. Gregor never was terribly proficient at estimating my abilities even before things turned sour for us, and he seems to have improved not a whit in the years hence. I have a show in three days and we’re behind on our rehearsals, so I’m afraid I must bid you adieu.”

“But sir, we…”

“My manager has an office one block down from the Bach statue, at the Thomaskirche church,” interrupted the magician, reaching for a business card in a perfunctory gesture toward his guests, to Tim’s evident disappointment. “She could help direct your queries to the right places.”

As Jürgen joined his two assistants to collect the remaining props, Tim called out to him once more, equal measures of desperation and frustration permeating his voice.

“It’s about the Falkenei Gesellschaft,” he said, prompting the magician to turn aside and step away, to the astonishment of his assistants. “Please, we really need your help.”

Jürgen stared in the direction of his guests for a drawn-out moment, before facing his crew and stating intentions that clearly took them by surprise. Eventually, they nodded reluctantly and proceeded to collect the props from the impromptu stage; the illusionist, meanwhile, approached the two mysterious gentlemen, uttering a name that he never imagined would issue from the mouth of another.

“How do you know about the Falkenei Gesellschaft?” he asked, in a tone of suspicious interrogation. “I’ve never divulged that secret to anyone, not even to Gregor.”

“We know nothing of it ourselves, Dr. Semmelweiss, other than a name,” responded Tim soberly. “Gregor remembered that you had mentioned it, years ago, but little beyond that; he suggested that we, that we consult with you.”

“Please, the first name will do,” replied the illusionist, his affectations of friendliness mixed with traces of disbelieving irony. “I feel we are already far better acquainted than we should be.”

“We’re here…” began Tim with another sigh, feebly attempting to explain intentions that even he had yet to fully resolve. “We’ve come on a trans-Atlantic quest of sorts. My ancestors set off from this part of Germany and arrived in the Americas many centuries ago, bringing these… artifacts along with them, which I inherited. The devices are somehow capable of a computational technology beyond what we’ve otherwise pioneered, even today. We traced their origin to a library in Borna nearby, whose director eventually sent us to Gregor. It was there, in the midst of Gregor’s own historical research, that we fortuitously stumbled upon my ancestors’ link to the Falkenei Gesellschaft.”

The magician looked on with curiosity-tinged skepticism, as Tim continued. “We’re still not sure why but… my ancestors seem to have been fleeing a pursuing army, Gregor believes around the time of the Thirty Years’ War, when they stumbled across a Gesellschaft fortification and took refuge there. After a bizarre incident in the subsequent fracas—something about a glass orb shattering and releasing its contents around the couple—the Gesellschaft essentially adopted them and their child, Christoph Bernd. Christoph seems to have been a prodigy of sorts, because he eventually became an apprentice to Gottfried Leibniz himself, designing and forging what became my heirlooms in secret—and in the context of this same Falkenei Gesellschaft.”

Jürgen reacted initially with an uncomfortable pause of dead silence, gazing out obliquely as he reflected on the mystery he had just vainly sought to comprehend. “Tim, I… I’m sorry, but I just don’t know how much I can help you. If everything you’re saying is true—and I won’t make it my task to interrogate you, given what you’ve likely endured already—then I can sympathize with your desire to make some sense of your family’s history, and however the Gesellschaft is involved therein. But I question whether I’m the right person to come to for such a… a deeply personal matter for you and your family.”

“This reaches far beyond just me or my kin,” Tim protested. “I happen to know of the Gesellschaft because of my family’s link to them across the centuries, but what matters most—it’s the work to which they dedicated themselves in the first place. There’s a being in the shadows, a sentience of some sort flitting between minds and networks… I won’t bog you down in the details, Jürgen, but there’s a threat to our very existence out there that’s been brewing for eons. And the Gesellschaft members seem to have been the only ones aware of it, let alone preparing us for it.”

The illusionist mixed a piercing, slightly frowning gaze with the muted shock of a mouth on its way to gaping open, as though mediating an internal battle between his professional skepticism and the magical wonderment elicited by his craft. Tim responded instinctively to the magician’s stalemate, returning the nightmare to a more personal plane once again.

“This thing, Jürgen, this being—we still don’t know how, but it struck first, awoke, in a clinical trail run by Rachel Bloom, one of my dearest ex-colleagues. She’s at a facility in Tennessee right now, restoring the gift of lost sight to soldiers blinded in war; she and her team had tasted success, when suddenly this entity awoke there in the midst of all this. On February 5^th, just three months ago—it seized the minds of the soldiers, and then it grabbed hold of the computer network around the research institute. From there, it’s ensnared much of the surrounding region. Jürgen, I’m not telling you this on a mere hunch… but Rachel doesn’t have much time. None of us does, unless we can discover what this being is and what he’s planning. Only the Gesellschaft can help us, and only you can lead us to them.”

The master magician sighed with a heavy heart, worried that he could only disappoint the expectations of his guest, so filled with a sense of urgent necessity. “Tim, I’ll… I’ll tell you what I know, but I can’t guarantee it’s what you’ll need.”

Jürgen made his way to a small knapsack that he had nestled carefully on a stool beside his props. He unzipped a protected pouch inside it, retrieving a protected transparent case with a laminated border. As he did so, the self-assembling pixels on the computer screen behind them sprung into action again. This time, they materialized in the form of two people, as though photographed from the shoulders up: a young man and woman, embracing tenderly as they faced outward.

“Normally,” began the magician, “that monitor will exhibit only one face at a time; but I programmed the neural net to make an exception here.” He promptly opened the laminated case and revealed a photograph featuring the same couple as on the computer screen, posing just as they had been deftly rendered on the monitor. They were standing on what appeared to be a footbridge in a lush forest, with a grinning Jürgen Semmelweiss standing just to their right. He was much younger in the picture, with closely cropped hair and a scholarly air quite distinct from his current persona. Another, unfamiliar figure occupied the photograph, however—a markedly pale adolescent boy, probably a young teenager, of modest height situated just to the couple’s left.

“His name’s Vasili Mendeleev,” continued the magician, pointing to the man with his arms wrapped affectionately about his wife’s shoulders. “A treasure of a human being in so many ways; I’d be honored if I could become half the man that he is. It’s through Vasili, Tim, that I first learned of the Falkenei Gesellschaft.”

“Where was this photo taken?” inquired Zach, moving in to inspect the picture.

“It was in a forest in Kaliningrad, Russia, back in the mid-1980s; that’s where I first met Vasili and his family. Kaliningrad, Königsberg—that little strip on the eastern Baltic Sea has had quite a few names in its history, but both Vasili and I were there because of the great mind who once tread its paths.”

“Immanuel Kant,” interjected Tim, with a knowing glance.

“Vasili and I were Kant scholars at the time,” replied the magician with a corroborating nod, “plying our trade at what became Russia’s Immanuel Kant State University right there in Kaliningrad. It was a mecca for us in the field, built as it was on the grounds of the Albertina, the old University of Königsberg where the philosopher himself had experienced his great epiphanies. My career was still in flux at the time, part Kantian philosopher-historian and part AI specialist, like Gregor; and so I used a fellowship offer to take a sabbatical from Leipzig, and set up shop in Kaliningrad for a year. Vasili was already well-established there, and we bonded for the same reason that Gregor and I did—as outsiders by choice, all of us perched at some interdisciplinary edge of our respective fields, trained as technical wizards but branching out. Vasili, however, had a far different reason than the two of us for doing so,” he said, as his eyes wandered to the pale young man in the photo.

“Vasili’s son,” suggested Tim, again anticipating the thoughts of his host.

“Fyodor is his name,” nodded Jürgen. “Vasili had launched his own career in St. Petersburg as a rising star in the computer field, a specialist in mathematical logic and algorithmic design just as the Soviet Union itself was about to disintegrate. He and his wife Mascha intended to raise a family there, but when Fyodor was born, he was diagnosed with hemophilia—severe enough that he’d bleed out profusely after even the most minor cuts and bruises. Poor Vasili struggled for years to care for his son, but he decided eventually to set off for Kaliningrad. One of the best hemophilia clinics in the region was based there, and Vasili could get consultations from specialists in both Russia and Western Europe for Fyodor.”

“So is that when Vasili became a Kant scholar?” asked Tim.

“Yes, once he’d gotten himself established. Like others just arriving in Kaliningrad, he became immersed in the lore of the region’s favorite son. So he traded his promising computer career for his new focus as a Kant scholar, which would allow him more flexibility and the chance to care for Fyodor. It became an extraordinary blessing for the field, since Vasili then applied his genius to shedding light on so many of the lingering enigmas about the great man’s history.”

“Gregor made reference to that,” replied Tim. “All these shadowy tales and lurking mysteries… what’s that all about?”

“Once Kant had published his critiques—staking his renown, as an heir to the greatness of the ancient Greeks—odd gaps began to appear in the historical records, originating at some juncture late in his career, around 1790. These initially drew little attention; after all, Kant had all but sealed himself off from the world for a decade to compose The Critique of Pure Reason.”

Jürgen paused momentarily to adjust his conjurer’s cape. Even while revisiting his own scholarly roots, the illusionist assiduously maintained the élan of a seasoned stage performer, punctuating each of his points with a verbal flair and a gesturing flourish. “But Vasili discerned patterns indicating that something else was filling those gaps, something far more profound. There was evidence that others had sought out his counsel during some of those stretches, though for reasons entirely unknown. Vasili was dogged in his investigations, and he finally managed to compile scattered evidence, bits and pieces from records throughout Europe which pointed to the Falkenei Gesellschaft, as the source of the strange correspondence. Even some letters penned by Kant himself, in a sort of code as best we can tell.”

“In the Gothic script, by any chance?” queried Tim with a start.

“Yes, actually,” said the magician, intrigued by the insight but still too immersed in his own exposition to pry Tim’s mind further. “The letters had been stashed away in a forgotten storage box, in a dilapidated old library annex at the University of Königsberg; it seems that Kant himself had little interest in encouraging their dissemination, and the Gothic script probably lured any observer into dismissing the letters as mere… antiquarian curiosities on the philosopher’s part, perhaps. But Vasili decoded as much as he could, and in connection to other clues—all sorts of items, from eerie pendants to technical diagrams that all seemed way ahead of their time—he realized that the script must have been a medium through which the Gesellschaft members communicated across distant cities, undetected by everyone else for whom Gothic was just an extinct medieval language.”

“Jürgen,” interjected Tim, now impatient for the answers that seemed tantalizingly within reach, “I realize Vasili may not have disclosed all of his research to you, but did he ever tell you what exactly the Gesellschaft is, and where we could find it?”

“They seem to be everywhere, Tim and… nowhere at the same time.”

Tim merely squinted in puzzlement, quickly prompting Jürgen to elaborate. “I myself began looking into the reports of the Gesellschaft when I heard about them from Vasili. They seem to have been obsessive about concealing their presence; Vasili first encountered them indirectly, while trying to track down the meaning of the Gothic script and some of the rumors about their activities. He discovered scattered references stretching all the way back to the Middle Ages, from the seafaring merchants in the old Hanseatic League guilds plying the waters of the Baltic Sea. So the Gesellschaft has a long history, its inception apparently about 1,000 years ago.”

“That would explain the timing on the clay tablet I inherited from Mitch,” said Tim, more in conversation with himself than his host, who merely reacted with a baffled shrug at the personal reference by his guest. “Why did they form in the first place, Jürgen?”

“Nobody really knows, at least not Vasili or I. Both of us dropped our gumshoeing on the Gesellschaft decades ago outside of an occasional retrospective, since it was yielding little more than interesting but ultimately useless historical cul-de-sacs as far as we were concerned. But their formation—it seems to have been spurred at least in part by a, a celestial event, I suppose you could say.”

“A… celestial event?”

Stirred by a thought, the illusionist led his two guests to a small laptop computer behind the monitor with the self-assembling pixels, shuffling through a small library of images before halting at an animated slide, which he promptly set in motion. “I use this laptop for everything from my former life as a Kant scholar and AI specialist—in the event of some rare epiphany striking me between shows, with emphasis on ‘rare.’ I created the rudiments of this slide myself many moons ago, when Vasili and I were researching medieval German folklore in a bid to track down the origins of the Falkenei Gesellschaft.”

Tim and Zach eyed the unfolding animation with rapt fascination and a tinge of discomfort at its seemingly fantastical events, rendered in bold colors and sharp contrasts by the slide’s designer. The images commenced with a zooming-in focus on a vast field of what appeared to be wheat and barley, with humble farmers surveying their crops for the harvest. Suddenly, the sky above began succumbing to a dreadful dark-grayish shroud, followed by a blood-red streak manifesting on the distant horizon. As the terrified farmers scurried helter-skelter, a powerful electrical discharge seemed to rip through the blood-tinged darkness, sending its observers tumbling about. The animation then slowly shifted to a smoke-filled enclosure within a nearby forest, the darkness slowly lifting about it. The frightened peasants from the prior scenes swarmed about its periphery, taking stock of the bizarre items in its center: a ring of stone-like objects in an arrangement of Byzantine complexity, inexplicably etched with thousands of inscrutable symbols rendered in deliberate obscurity, perhaps to indicate the animator’s uncertainty about their contents. Birds of prey had perched majestically upon them.

“It’s a graphical depiction that I made of a written account, penned by a certain Roland von Straßburg, from the 10^th century A.D,” said the magician, resuming his exposition. When Vasili and I were tracking the origin of the Gothic-encoded texts, and whatever dispersed references we could cobble together, they all led back to Roland. On a whim, I revisited this work a few years ago, after the German libraries had digitized many of these archival documents into searchable databases—which is when I fully animated this slide—and they substantiated our earlier hunches, albeit with evidence that’s still disappointingly scarce.”

“You think that this, Roland,” inquired Tim, “that he was the origin of the Gesellschaft?”

“He’s our strongest candidate, though we were never certain of that; we couldn’t even confirm that Roland was a flesh-and-blood human being, as opposed to a pseudonym perhaps. But the fragmented sources indicate that he was perhaps a scribe, a monastic scholar for the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great. Europe was mired in the Dark Ages then, and those monks were essentially what we’d today call the knowledge workers of their time—detectives, archivists, researchers all in one. Roland seems to have been charged with the investigation of a discovery by Otto’s soldiers, and somehow, he deciphered enough to write the account which you just witnessed.”

“A discovery—” interjected Zach, pondering the matter aloud. “You mean, those stones or… whatever they were, in your animation?”

“Yes, along with whatever else populated the site that Otto’s soldiers had excavated. Those stone objects were dubbed ‘Cryptoliths’ in a 19^th-century annotation on Roland’s text, from Greek roots. Neither Vasili nor I have any idea what the Cryptoliths are, but the way they fold in upon themselves, occasionally bowing out like ovals—there was a vague resemblance to eggs, literally or metaphorically.”

“Then the falcons perching on top of the ‘eggs,’” reasoned Zach with a nod. “Hence the name: Falkenei Gesellschaft. How did Roland and these soldiers stumble across a find like this?”

“In his account, Roland claimed an affiliation with a monastery in what’s now the Rheinland-Palatinate region in western Germany. During his time, around 940 A.D., Emperor Otto was engaged in pitched battles against a number of rebellious dukes in the region, and he dispatched his soldiers to dig trenches and construct earthworks during the sieges. Apparently, one of these military detachments unearthed those Cryptoliths in the process. The finding seems to have reached the ears of the emperor himself, who perhaps saw a divine significance in the discovery—such was the mode of thought at the time.”

“Whether divine or not,” sighed Tim, “they might as well have been supernatural, given the course of recent events.”

“I suppose,” replied Jürgen, somewhat unsettled by the enigmatic tone of Tim’s words. “In any case, Otto decreed that scholars in the region examine the discovery, and report on its significance. Roland supervised the operation, and whatever he discovered, it must have made quite an impression. The Cryptoliths at the dig site had comprised an ancient shrine of worship, coupled with objects that would suggest a Bronze Age civilization. Whoever those farmers were in the animation, they managed to record what they saw in some form—perhaps a cave painting, or a similar pictorial depiction on the surrounding rock. Roland and his colleagues were able to interpret those depictions and work them into their account.”

“You said there was a shrine, Jürgen,” remarked Tim. “So what these Bronze Age farmers were claiming about these stones—you think it’s some sort of religious symbolism, perhaps? To ascribe an otherwordly meaning to the Cryptoliths?”

“It…” responded the magician with a hesitant stutter. “Roland seemed to believe that the shrine depictions were more than just symbolism. The Dark Ages were a time of deep superstition in general, and it makes Roland’s account all the more mystifying—he’s quite literal in what he relates.”

“What do you mean?”

“Most of the Old Testament tales, and the mythologies of the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians—elements like the plagues of Egypt, and the great floods—they generally had parallels in other creeds of antiquity, as though deriving at least part of their narrative from a common ancient template. But whatever this celestial event depicted by those Bronze Age farmers, it seems to have been sui generis, with no parallels in any other source. Those stones weren’t handed down by angels, or received on a mountaintop. That would have suggested a legend, or a metaphor on the part of the Bronze Age civilization; but those farmers described something far more specific, much eerier. Not even a comet or an asteroid. The way the account portrayed it—the Cryptoliths just materialized at the site, as if out of thin air.”

Tim and Zach looked on in anxious curiosity, as the consummate showman before them shook his head in deeply contemplative puzzlement, clearly unable to piece out what he himself was so emphatically uttering. “The electrical shock wave in particular,” he continued, “in conjunction with those oddball meteorological events—I suppose you could take liberties and compare it to ball lightning, but it’s difficult to imagine how those farmers could have dreamt up such a phenomenon. And then there were the inscriptions on the Cryptoliths themselves. The codes.”

“Codes?” queried Zach.

“Roland was writing well before Hindu-Arabic numerals had made their way into Europe, so the very concept of decimal numbers and arithmetic—let alone numerical codes like binary or hexadecimal, based in sequences of digits—was not a development that anyone at the time could have envisioned. Yet when he described the carvings on the stones… I can’t imagine how, but he divined that the symbols corresponded to numbers, bearing a specific message that he could not decipher initially.”

“Did he make any subsequent progress?” asked Tim, clearly invested in the answer.

“Unfortunately, Roland vanished from the historical annals thereafter, at least in the major languages of record. The foregoing account was archived only because it functioned as an official report, commissioned by the emperor himself, and written in Latin—with some glosses in the Old High German spoken at the time. But then the messages in Gothic began appearing shortly thereafter, of uncertain attribution; and although I’m no forensics expert, I could swear that the handwriting matches up uncannily.”

“So, Roland went underground,” remarked Tim, his eyes tilting skyward. “To found the Falkenei Gesellschaft.”

“Either Roland, yes, or one of his acolytes thereafter. The answers must lie in those Cryptoliths, Tim; whatever Roland managed to wring from them and the other shrine objects, he attributed immense importance to their messages. Enough to foster a community that has endured for centuries in the shadows, while drawing in the best minds of each era. And if your suspicions are correct—to inaugurate an enterprise that’s produced the most advanced technologies to ever rest in human hands.”

The magician shook his head, his customary panache ebbing away in a rare moment of unguarded apprehension as he turned obliquely to address his guests again. “There was one other element to Roland’s account, Tim. It was one of the few markings on the Cryptoliths that didn’t correspond to the numerical codes—a rendition of… something not human. Roland reproduced it in his manuscript, and then I digitized it for my own presentation.”

The illusionist’s foreboding words resonated discomfitingly in Tim’s ears, filling his body with a vague frisson that quickly transmogrified to abject horror, as a nightmarish and frightfully familiar image materialized upon the following slide. Tim stared on in morbid silence while Jürgen, quickly appreciating the significance of the professor’s unsettling reaction, turned squarely toward his two guests, a slight stammer evident in his uncharacteristically anxious voice as he intuitively digested what he was seeing.

“My God; you—you two have seen this thing, this being before, haven’t you? Roland transcribed it from one of the Cryptoliths, with a message warning of some kind of… apocalypse. He hadn’t deciphered most of the inscriptions at that point though, and he had only a faint inkling of the being itself.”

Zach waded tentatively into the uncomfortable pause, reflexively tracing out the demonic visage with his outstretched index finger. “It’s called the Tauschreigeist, Jürgen. All we know is that it’s a coherent and awfully powerful intelligence, with origins that we can’t begin to discern; Gregor thinks it evolved here on earth, eons before humanity had come into existence. And it can cross between human minds and computer networks. Tim and I have encountered this... this beast, or at least its representation, on more than a few occasions already in the midst of our search. We’d suspected that the Falkenei Gesellschaft was readying us, to confront its threat. This confirms all our worst fears.”

The magician stoically absorbed Zach’s words, inferring his deeper meaning without need for elaboration. “That’s why you’ve come all this way, haven’t you?” he inquired, with an instinctive return to his customary showman’s flourish. “Bursting in here with such urgency… All the esoteric threats and warnings that Vasili and I were uncovering—they’ve been imminent all this time. They’re already upon us, aren’t they?”

“Jürgen, is the Falkenei Gesellschaft still intact today?” asked Tim, his jaw stiffened with intense concentration. “Can you, or perhaps Vasili, lead us to them?”

The masterful stage performer creased his lower lip and frowned, shaking his head as though confronting an audience whose expectations he had bitterly disappointed. “As I said, Tim, Vasili and I stopped pursuing the matter as a serious inquiry many years ago. Vasili himself relocated to Kronstadt. But I did touch base with him just this past year,” he said, his eyes narrowing upon revisiting a half-explored reminiscence. “It’s funny… I thought he was rambling, and I didn’t follow everything that he was saying, but perhaps there was more significance to it than I’d first appreciated.”

“What do you mean?”

“While Vasili was still at the Immanuel Kant State University, he’d grown frustrated that so many of his research requests were being refused. He wanted to explore some of the sealed archives beneath the old Kant Museum; by this time, he’d begun to suspect that the philosopher had collaborated with the Gesellschaft in the 1790s. There were also the legends of something else, the so-called Kantsabgrund.”

“The Kant’s Precipice,” interrupted Zach. “Gregor mentioned that when he first referred to you. What is it supposed to be, some artifact kept within the archives?”

“No,” came Jürgen’s terse reply. “It’s apparently a long-lost document, authored by Kant before he had joined the Gesellschaft.”

“Before?” interjected Tim.

“In fact,” said the magician with a nod, “it may have been the very clarion call that drew him into the Gesellschaft’s fold. Vasili believed that the Gesellschaft had been immersed in a grand metaphysical project of sorts. When he translated some of the Gothic texts from the 19^th century, there were cryptic references to a project aiming to divine the origin of intelligence itself, as an emergent physical property of nature. Some similarities with the work of my once-career in AI, and of Gregor’s for that matter. But the Gesellschaft had far more profound interests. It seems that they wanted to study the rules that govern how intelligent entities in any form evolve, and to harness them.”

“Harness them?” inquired Tim. “To what end?”

“I don’t know, but it must have had some connection to this… Tauschreigeist. Kant’s document was initially circulated only in draft form, among his colleagues at the University of Königsberg. But it apparently supplied the long-sought missing link, and so the Gesellschaft took it within their possession. Needless to say, Vasili never progressed much in his quest. The year that he left Kaliningrad, Vasili had argued that the caverns beneath the Kant Museum contained this legendary document, to insulate it from all the wars and other traumas that chronically struck this region during the previous centuries. He also came to the conclusion that the same protective quarters were used to store other crucial items in the Gesellschaft’s care. But his requests to investigate were repeatedly denied by the administration.”

“They just didn’t buy into Vasili’s suggestions?” asked Zach.

“That’s what Vasili himself believed, and it’s why he contacted me last year. After the U.S.S.R.’s break-up, the scholarly archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg were slowly opened to the public. A Russian journalist contacted Vasili recently, since his name appeared so often in the records. As it turned out, the Soviet authorities hadn’t discounted Vasili’s propositions; in fact, they saw great potential in what he had been researching, and they used them to do some investigating of their own.”

“I presume,” suggested Zach cynically, “without informing Vasili himself, of course.”

“Of course,” grinned the magician sarcastically. “But whatever they did find, it exceeded even their wildest expectations.”

“So,” said Tim, with a slightly covetous gleam in his eye, “are those items still there? In the Kant State University?”

“I’m afraid not. The authorities secreted away everything they found in those vaults, apparently to one of the other countries behind the Iron Curtain just after the Berlin Wall had fallen. I think they could see the handwriting on the wall, and they wanted to avail themselves of the resources in the other Warsaw Pact countries to do analyses, while the apparatchiks still held the master keys.”

“Did your old friend ever discover where they turned up?” queried Zach.

“He said it was likely in a house of learning, though not a university per se—professors were never good at keeping state secrets, so the ministers required a peripheral facility that still possessed enough expertise to make sense of the finds beneath the Kant State University.”

“A house of learning,” mused Tim with narrowed eyes, tugging contemplatively on an earlobe per his habit. “If our Workshop of Wonders in Borna is any indication, it would seem that the libraries around here harbor quite a few surprises in their midst.”

“Yes,” remarked the magician with a perfunctory nod, immersed deeply in his thoughts, “a library… or a museum. Of course,” he exclaimed at the epiphany. “From the crypts beneath one museum in old Königsberg, out to the hidden corridors in another, somewhere else behind the Iron Curtain.”

Spurred by a whim, he spun around and rapidly shuffled through the digitized slides on his laptop, relating a swell of onrushing thoughts to his audience of two. “Vasili always quipped that a high-ranking minister, in the Soviet Education Bureau, scattered a number of plush research centers throughout the region’s museums. The facilities were tucked away from the exhibition halls themselves, but any major findings would be revealed at public gatherings—a sop to the Education Minister’s artistic pretensions apparently, not to mention a chance to flaunt them before the public and of course, to impress other VIPs within the Soviet Union’s upper echelons. Those facilities remained even after the USSR dissolved, and Vasili was amused enough by the very idea to collect flyers for some of the more outlandish exhibitions announced at those museums.”

He dashed through an array of leaflets that had been meticulously scanned in, flashing their contents to a wary public in ostentatious colors and a bewildering array of languages. As he advanced through the peculiar collection, the scholar-turned-showman halted before abruptly backtracking—finally zeroing in on a crinkled old billboard with tawdry artwork and a clashing color scheme, its announcements sketchily rendered in Cyrillic and a gaggle of Roman alphabets. “Here, here it is,” he said, jabbing at the screen. “Vasili translated this one for me because its claims were so ludicrously off-the-wall—something about a reputed 19^th-century computational device, supposedly with the processing power of some modern supercomputers. Both of us presumed these postings to be little more than overwrought sales pitches, to members of the post-Soviet nouveau riche, given the loss of Moscow’s patronage after 1991… But then I remembered what you just said about your own heirlooms.”

“Which museum is that on the flyer?” queried Tim.

“I’m not sure actually, I never took note of it at first,” answered the magician, deliberately drawing out his words as he scanned about the brochure, his index finger tracing systematically through the text jammed onto the leaflet. “There, in the bottom right-hand corner.” Suddenly, he eased back, shaking his head and laughing slyly. “You just couldn’t make this up.”

Jürgen pushed against the laptop’s platform to stand himself upright again, turning with a disbelieving grin to his befuddled guests. “It’s called the Eötvös Loránd Museum, Tim; it’s in western Hungary, named after one of the country’s great physicists. The exhibition was sponsored by the Medieval Collections division, supposedly because some of the devices hailed from the Middle Ages.”

“You’re familiar with this place?” inquired Zach, perplexed at the magician’s reaction and its unstated subtext.

“In more than a few respects,” nodded Jürgen, his eyes widening as he averted his gaze. “The curator of Medieval Collections there is a pretty lass named Teréz Bartók. She’s a wonder of the world in her own way—trained as a talented medievalist and steeped in the legends and occultist lore of the Carpathian Mountains, scattered with their various petty kingdoms like Transylvania and the dark mysteries that always surrounded them. But she transitioned into period acting and avant-garde art, making quite a splash in the Vienna and Budapest theater scenes. We were once part of the same performance-acting troupe, back when I was first gaining my bearings as a magician. She had a preternatural brilliance in her roles, the way she absorbed the vigor of all those adoring crowds and channeled it right back to them, as a soul reawakened within her body.”

He playfully scoffed at his own recollections, stealing a sidelong glance that was as mischievous as it was wistful. “She and I were together for three years, on and off the stage—all wrapped up in the madness and fiery inspiration of that romance between two curious, hot-blooded young wolves a world away from our natural habitats. And too dumb and blind to realize how the experience would singe us both.”

“So then,” interjected Tim skeptically, “she left all that behind? To become a museum curator?”

“I suppose you could say that she and I traversed our respective paths in opposite directions—me leaving the world of academia, Teréz joining it anew from the stage. I never got the whole story myself, but having accomplished so much in the theater, she craved a challenge of a new sort. All of that period acting afforded her a vast cache of knowledge in her new calling, after all, and if she ever does return to the stage or the screen, she’ll have a rich vein of new material for her roles..”

The illusionist again glanced reflexively at the museum’s flyer, its very name reprising a deep core of reminiscence for which he permitted himself a moment to savor and ponder. “It’s been years since I’ve spoken with Teréz. When we broke off our relationship,” he said gruffly, gazing obliquely toward his visitors, “it was an awkward matter to say the least; I suppose that two blazing personalities don’t often shine as soulmates, and I can’t say I’m too keen on rekindling our correspondence. But I can at least assure that the two of you will be in excellent hands. Whether or not those Kantian artifacts were transported to the museum, from the depths beneath the old Albertina in Königsberg—I know Teréz, and she’ll summon up her own magic to track them down. Considering all I’ve just heard,” he continued, now fixing his glance directly on Tim, “it is my sincerest hope that you succeed.”

Tim nodded solemnly and thanked the illusionist—the latter’s reflective, philosophical demeanor still clashing amusingly with the showman’s aplomb that he continued to flourish with every gesture. As he moved to close up the various devices that continued to adorn the otherwise Spartan soundstage, he squinted his eyes at a visage that had apparently taken shape on the other computer monitor. He craned his head and backed away slightly, in the manner of someone beholding an unfamiliar yet intriguing sight. “Tim, Zach,” he began, motioning to his left, “this face on the monitor—anyone you know?”

He pivoted the monitor back in the direction of his guests, who both reacted with an initial startle, followed by a nod with closed eyes on Tim’s part. He said nothing initially, before mouthing an affirmation as he reached for his wallet—which he had almost unconsciously removed earlier in the conversation, to steal furtive glances at the carefully protected photograph therein.

“The woman on the monitor—she’s my wife, Susan,” he said plaintively, extending the photo closer to the curious eyes of his host. “I lost her three years ago, and her face, her eyes… I began seeing them projected onto monitors about a week before, as though these artifacts that I inherited were snatching the images straight out of my mind’s eye. Just as your clever program on that monitor reconstructed her likeness from my photo. It was one of the first hints I had that all these family heirlooms… harbored a power that I could barely conceive of before.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Tim,” offered the magician after a sympathetic pause. Moved by empathy as he peered into the grieving soul before him, Jürgen approached Tim obliquely, finally piercing his own reluctant veil of silence on a topic that he had sought relentlessly yet vainly to forget.

“Natalya, his wife,” began Jürgen cryptically. He glanced away and sighed deliberately to open up a brief yet precious pause, his mind adjusting to the painful resonance of vivid images that he preferred to lock deep within the buried crypts of seldom-visited memories. “I was the one who introduced Gregor to her, almost two decades to the day. My own fiancée at the time was Natalya’s cousin Anna; she was a musician from the Ukraine, a violinist who’d flourished in even the hallowed concert halls of Vienna whenever she married the bow with the strings.”

The magician rubbed his hands reflexively together, as though prompted by the onrush of events that he prepared to reveal. Tim, his own mind harmonizing with the thoughts etched on his host’s face, directed his gaze and attention at Jürgen’s hands—their scars and calluses suddenly prominent in the dim light.

“You were both mountaineers, weren’t you?” queried Tim, his intuition answering his own question. “Gregor had hands like that.”

“Avidly so, yes,” nodded the illusionist. “And we brought our true loves into that same world. Both Gregor and I had grown closer to our sweethearts—and reinforced our own friendship—while scaling one peak or another in the Carpathians, the Alps, the Dolomites in Italy. Gregor had a fatal attraction for the Pyrenees, and there was a treacherous ascent near the Aneto Peak in Spain—supposedly closed off by the authorities to the climbing public, but not to Gregor’s charm offensive. He secured permits for all four of us, and we hit the slopes in the dead of winter.”

He shook his head ruefully. “Damn fools, Gregor and I both. There was a reason the locals had barred us from that slope, and when we hit the steepest part, a blizzard trapped us on the rockface for hours. We managed to rappel our way down, but Anna became snow-blind, and when we approached a crevasse near a glacier…”

Tim looked on with an expression of silent and heartfelt empathy, as Jürgen detailed his own day of woe. “Anna’s fall down the chasm was broken by a ledge amidst the ice, and Gregor managed to pull her out. But her injuries were grievous, and her left hand—the one that had created such beauty, every time she dragged the bow across her violin—was mangled and never fully healed. Anna eventually forgave me, long after we’d gone our separate ways. But I could never forgive Gregor… or myself.”

The magician stoically tensed his jaw, as though to stifle suppressed tears that begged to emerge, and darted his eyes toward the tragic and haunting visage of Tim’s wife on the monitor. For a moment amidst the hubbub of the drizzly train station, as forlorn as it was brief, the common anguish of lost love had made brothers of the two strangers. Instinctively, Jürgen then whirled around and began tapping on his keyboard again, accessing a directory that he had kept carefully hidden from outsiders. At once, a flurry of digits flashed onto the monitor, followed in short order by a grinning nod on the face staring so intently at the screen.

“Even after all these years, Teréz,” he said, retrieving a cell phone stashed in a hastily-draped overcoat nearby, “we’re never more than a minute away.” He turned to his guests, flicking the wrist of his other arm in a deft sleight of hand, and rapidly producing two small laminated rectangles that he immediately distributed to his guests. “Teréz and I will have a lot of catching up to do, so this ends our conversation for now. These cards have my personal contact information—not the boilerplate that I supplied you earlier.”

The magician paused momentarily, allowing Tim and Zach to imbibe the neatly-arrayed digits and letters that he had so closely guarded from most strangers. “Call me at the crack of dawn tomorrow; and don’t delay a minute, because you’ll have a long train ride ahead of you. I’ll have everything arranged by the time of our next communication.”

[Zach to Tim] Something tells me this is one of those ‘two’s company, three’s a crowd’ kinds of things.]

WednesdayTuesday, May 254, 104:46 ap.m.

Eötvös Loránd Museum, Hungary

“Gentlemen, a gracious welcome to you both. I trust that Jürgen has given you a proper introduction… and, yes,” said the woman, in a breathy voice with a sly aside toward her visitors, “it touched my heart to hear from the rogue after all these years. For which I must confess at least a small debt of gratitude to youTim Shoemaker!.” smiled the curator warmly. “I’m nearly pinching myself. All those years since Indianapolis; I thought our worlds would never intersect again.”

“Teréz,” replied Tim laconically, as they moved to embrace. “Just the sweet cadence in your voice is enough to massage an aching heart.”

The curator was a breathtaking beauty, imposing in her purposeful stride and speech, yet warmly welcoming to both friends and distant outsiders so lost in the curiously intoxicating milieu and sumptuous visual feast that greeted them, both in the museum and the quaint Hungarian town that encircled it. She stood at less than six feet even with the additional inches conferred by platform heels, yet she towered above her surroundings just the same, her presence and steely charisma radiating outward as though emanating from the untouchable surface of a shimmering star. Her streaming, raven-tinted raven hair, tinted throughout with flaming auburn, contrasted with the softly olive complexion of her face and finely-manicured hands, gently brushing against vaguely feline cheeks and full lips while framing her extraordinary eyes—orbs wide and expressive enough to emerge from the paintbrush of a fairy-tale artist, centering upon dark green ringlets that cannily absorbed everything about them. Her stately composure thinly concealed the flexible spontaneity and vivacity of a passionate stage actress, always at the ready to sink into character—immersing herself fully, mind and body, within an equally vivacious new personage.

“Glad to be of service,” came Tim’s curt reply, his eyes darting to and fro in a hapless bid to find what he was so desperately seeking. Zach perused his face in amusement, his mentor too immersed in his quest to be impressed by the aesthetic cornucopia that surrounded them, or by the beautiful guide who led the way. The Medieval Collections glistened with centuries of erudition wrapped in old parchment, of knightly weapons and accoutrements, of ostentatious coats-of-arms shouting their lords’ martial prowess across the gulf of the centuries. Sparkling light poured out from period chandeliers and danced about the yawning exhibition hall as it refracted through layers of crystal and stained glass.

“All of these curious… events transpiring in your country of late,” began the curator in an inquisitive voice, leading her guests to the left through a bejeweled archway, “you believe that there may be a connection to our museum?” She pivoted slightly without eyeing her visitors directly, then halted at the silence of the once-steady footsteps behind her.

“I take it that Jürgen’s debriefed you already?”queried Tim with a slight quiver as Zach advanced to the curator’s side, both of them turning to face him.

“He never was one to hold back from me,” she answered with a wry smile, before narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips in a piercing, probing gaze. “Nor was he ever one to warm up to strangers as he did to the two of you, whatever his pretensions on that soundstage of his. My fans and fellow performers would tell me that I could read a person’s aura during my own heyday as an actress,” she said, commencing a slow approach in Tim’s direction. “I could never tell if it was merely exalted flattery, or if there was authenticity behind the compliments. But everything that I sense in you, Tim Shoemaker, radiates a mighty urgency; Jürgen must have seen it, too.”

“He did,” interjected Zach with a cryptic glance toward her, “in the most literal sense.”

She eyed Zach obliquely as she deciphered his riddle, easing back toward Tim with a nod and a slight wave of her flowing ebony hair. “Your wife Susan’s face—on that screen that Jürgen carries to his exhibitions,” she said with a knowing gaze. “I’m so sorry to hear of what happened.”

Tim stifled a response with a deep sigh as a chill shot down his spine, wading tentatively into a raging river of half-formed thoughts. “Teréz, I’m not sure how much Jürgen told you, but that wasn’t the first time I’d seen Susan’s face just—just manifesting around me like that. Jürgen’s device at the train station had a camera, after all, that merely transmitted Susan’s image from a photo that I had in my possession. But I’d seen Susan three times before in just the past week alone. No cameras, no fancy magician’s tricks; just a projection of her face, straight out of my mind’s eye. And those heirlooms of mine, whatever their connection to… all these events from centuries ago—somehow they made those visions possible, and Jürgen believes that your museum may hold the key to their origins.”

Tim was taken slightly aback at her sympathetic expression, so patently emblazoned in her radiant eyes—bearing a heavy dose of pity alongside genuine compassion. “Look, I know what you’re thinking,” he said to her in a somewhat pleading tone, “and no, I never have been able to deal with Susan’s loss, not even after three years. But this isn’t just some personal obsession of mine to somehow… ‘find’ Susan again.” He halted upon listening to his own words, recalling the uncanny counsel of his friend Pastor George prior to his departure for Leipzig. “Whatever my family’s heirlooms were designed for, it goes far beyond any of us. And all those eerie news flashes out of the US recently—those reporters couldn’t imagine the horror that lurks behind all of it.”

The curator looked upon him mysteriously, outwardly unfazed by his ominous words as she fathomed the depths of his soul. “Tim, you needn’t justify anything to me. Whatever you said to Jürgen, you collapsed a wall of doubt that he erects for everyone he meets… something that I could never do, not even after all the passion we spent on each other during our years together. That’s more than enough to convince me of your cause—at least, of your own belief in it. And that’s all that matters here.”

Her words and her smile, however qualified, were enough to put Tim at ease for the moment. “Please, come this way,” she continued, beckoning her guests past a rope barrier on a right-hand corner of the cavernous exhibition hall. “I spent most of the evening here, after I’d parted company with the voice of the old charmer last night. Jürgen’s tales about the old Soviet ministers, all their aesthetic dalliances in museums like my own; it was an education even for me, so I took the liberty to shine some light into the dark crypts of my own institution.”

She halted to tap a manicured nail at distinct positions on a numeric keypad tucked inconspicuously next to a nearly invisible door frame, upon which the wall immediately recessed away to reveal a palatial interior chamber, its ambience playing tricks on the mind. Its drab, grayish lighting and mundane storage containers were oddly juxtaposed with an eye-teasing wonderland of colorful historical artifacts, like a pirate’s treasure chest tucked away from prying eyes in an unassuming cave. Bejeweled crosses in a variety of precious metals, elaborate shields borne by knights and nobles from mountainous Eastern European fiefdoms, wax sculptures of feared Mongol archers and Venetian mercenaries, castle portcullises and bulwarks ripped straight from Crusaders’ fortresses—all of them resting inconspicuously amongst the compartments in the room, the low-pitched howls and eerie hums of eddying air currents their only reliable company.

“I take it,” began Zach with hesitation, taken aback by the ghostly echoing of his own voice, “that you all don’t get many visitors tiptoeing around back here.”

“Not even we ourselves pay many visits to these premises,” responded the curator with a gentle sigh. “We could run continuous exhibits side-by-side with all the historic wonders in here. But the museum director scaled down the public viewings after the financial crisis began eight years ago; that policy’s never been revisited, so all you see here remains the province of privileged eyes only.”

“Hardly the first time Zach and I have slipped into off-limits corridors lately,” mumbled Tim, as though half addressing himself. “The library in Borna, then Gregor’s little cellar ensconced behind the wall in a cramped anteroom; and now whatever the Russian authorities found in the catacombs beneath the old University of Königsberg, all stashed away here. It’s so baffling, the way everything about this Falkenei Gesellschaft and what its members were seeking—the way it’s all concealed in the shadows like this.”

“Perhaps, because the Gesellschaft and its work draw even their few witnesses through history into those very same shadows,” replied Teréz, in a soft tone that slowly trailed off into an eerie whisper. “You mentioned Gregor just now, Tim. In fact, Jürgen had called him before he contacted me yesterday evening.” Her guests halted in their tracks, incredulous at what they were hearing.

“I was as astounded as you were,” she said with a half-turn toward them. “Jürgen admitted his tragic history with Gregor to me long ago, in an unguarded moment that I suspect he never intended to share. So before he opened his heart to me again, after the passage of all these years, I suppose he felt it best to first allow himself a confessional with his old friend. Something that the two of you said to him last night, or perhaps the dark force that fills you with so much fear… it must have touched a nerve in Jürgen as well.”

“So Jürgen, after talking with Gregor and—I suppose now you, too,” conjectured Zach. He interrupted his thoughts momentarily to rest his tired legs, exhausted from the constant travel, against a reinforced pillar flanked by unsettlingly realistic replicas of Dark-Age Viking raiders. “You know about this…”

“This demon that you speak of, yes,” confirmed Teréz. “This manifestation of the nightmares of the soul…”

Her broad green eyes widened like the orbs of a lioness, fixing their alert gaze upon a dreaded threat on the horizon. on a dreaded threat appearing on the horizon. “I’d come across scattered references to such a sinister force during my preparation for a previous exhibit, on some of the more macabrehorrid mythologies that had gripped the minds of the medieval burghers in Hungary and Romania, the basis for the vampire myths and other local lore. Yet not even the Devil himself could nearly inspire the fear that had followed another legendlocal tale—of a malign presence, dwelling in the shadows of civilization for unknown eons.”

Tim was markedly discomfited by her words; even with their histrionic flourish, he sensed that her conclusions had a far more tangible significance than perhaps even she herself appreciated. “Teréz,” he said in a voice tinged with a low-pitched groan, like a stonemason laboring with a brick on his chest, “you’ve known about the Tauschreigeist?”

“Not by that name,” she answered. “In fact, as the region’s lore would have it, any who sought merely to depict this entitybeast were driven mad in the attempt. There was a medieval legend in the Carpathian Mountain region of a Wallachian noble, Baron János of the Danube. He conquered a region east of Budapest, not far from the Black Sea, and styled himself a king. He had an affinity for the Dark Arts and dabbled in alchemical experiments; but in the last year of his reign, he began to suffer from horrid nightmares, sketching a beast that became known only as ‘The Unmentionable’ in the local tongue.”

“This is already sounding familiar, for all the worst reasons,” thought Tim to himself, as his host continued her account.

“The visage of The Unmentionable was said to be so ghastly that it could freeze a hardened warrior in terror; in today’s terms, we’d say that it was tapping somehow into deeply primal fears, wired across millennia into the fabric of human consciousness. On one terrible feast day, when the Baron’s fellow nobles had gathered at his castle, he sealed the gates of the fortress and ordered his guests to be summarily executed, just before he hanged himself—and warning survivors of The Thousand Screams that would herald the coming of the Devourer of Souls.”

“The Thousand Screams…” repeated Tim to himself, his mind ineffably jolted by the reference yet unable to pinpoint the reason, shaking his head as he turned back to address his host. “Did any drawings of this, ‘Unmentionable’ survive to the present day?”

“No, regrettably for all of us revisiting the legend. The townspeople were so horrified after the bloody feast day that they burned all drawings from the Baron’s hand, before ransacking his capital city and leaving it to crumble. All of the region’s subsequent conquerors—Mongols, Turks, Russians—were themselves terrified by the legend, so much so that they, too, left the ruins of the old city unoccupied. The accounts of others who have glimpsed The Unmentionable, all involve their own gruesome dimension as the tales unfold. It would seem that those Those who are visited by this beastit, and those already mad enough to seek it, all seem beset by their own tormented souls… for perhaps it is only they who could fathom the horror that is said to be awakenings.”

Tim trembled at the portent in her voice, turning toward Zach and the deceptive air of calm that he had stolidly maintained. “Pablo,” said Zach with a knowing nod. “The madness spreading among the other veterans in that clinical trial…”

Tim interrupted the young man’s thoughts with a shake of his head and an expression of despair, dipping his forehead as he spoke. “I fear that this nightmare of the soul may not be confined to those poor wretches at Oak Ridge alone.”

Teréz stepped in to reassure, immediately reading the dread that had etched itself about Tim’s expressive eyes. “Tim, I’m sorry. I didn’t any way mean to imply that you yourself, or Gregor—” She stalled in mid-sentence, unable to find the words that she desperately sought to recast her prior implications.

“No need to apologize,” said Tim plaintively, arching his brow as he slowly redirected his gaze toward Teréz, “because I fear you may be correct in everything you’ve said.”

She and Zach both reacted with a startle, as Tim retrieved his latest nightmare sketch from the folder in his briefcase. He stared for a long ten seconds in the dim light at the jarring images on the paper: the inexplicable setting, the entity at the image’s center, the sinister symbolism, the mysterious figures in the foreground.

“Ever since all this began for me just two weeks ago,” he continued softly, “I’ve been unable to wrap my head around… many quite a few things that have sprung up. But above all,particularly these three haunting… wo scenes, thesedream visions that intrude on me whether I’m fast asleep or wide awake in an unguarded moment.have been haunting me. Glimpsing Susan in one of them, in my dreams, or whether asleep or wide awake, seeing her manifested about me on an otherwise ordinary day; revisiting the horrors of my ancestors in the 17^th century, as they fled the wrath of the Thirty Years’ War; —and then the other, wth nightmares of thise monstrosity,” he said, with a furtive glance toward the sketch, “this distillation of so many horrors that not even the darkest mind should be able tocould conjure up.”

He set the folder aside on a nearby shelf, sighing deeply and shutting his eyes momentarily as he vocalized his roiling thoughts. “These visionsy sprang up around the same time, seemingly unrelated; and I tried to wall them all off, each for its own reasons.” with some link to my family’s past and our strange inheritance, but I couldn’t grasp a common thread.”

“You sketched each of those,” interjected Teréz, obliquely catching sight of the drawing and its predecessors in the crumpled folder, “each time you awoke from this vision…”

“Yes,” nodded Tim with gnashed teeth, shaken by the mere vestiges of the dream scene that he could recall, “the fourth and latest one from just last nightnervously. It’s the same ordeal “eEvery time—I wake up,, shuddering and sweating from whatever God-awful events happen in that place that I feel so compelled to sketch, the actual narrative that plays outthings just beyond my recollection when I open my eyes.” He ground his teeth together more anxiously as the collective discomfiture of his dreadful reveries overtook him momentarily. “As you apparently clearly appreciateknow already, Teréz, there have been others tormented by the specter of the Tauschreigeist, in our present day and in the fog of past centuries. It’s probably just a horriblen abstraction most of the timefor them, a debilitating look into the eyes of the beast that drives them mad, as they render it in ever more detail… But for me, it’s a narrativescene, a narrative that somehow I’m compelled to relive over and over even if I can only recall a few fragments afterward.”

“As though,” replied Teréz, her glance signaling an odd familiarity with Tim’s words, “you were inhabiting the mind of another.”.”

“That’s exactly it.” Tim looked up with a start heartfelt expressionat toward Terézhis host, who tilted her head in surprise at the intensity of her guest’sTim’s reaction to her words. “Teréz, you clearly have a phenomenalgreat gift. Jürgen could see it; Zach and I can, too, in abundance. I can only imagine what your audiences must have experienced when you took the stage, but they must have seen someone who could do just what you said—to inhabit the minds of others, even characters in a script who had never existed outside a screenwriter’s pen, but suddenly took shape before their very eyes.”

“Such was my aspiration,” she said with the wisp of a smile on her lips, breathily vocalizing a whisper, “and I appreciate that you recognize it.” Teréz quietly led him to an artfully-concealed alcove at the chamber’s northern end, the area faintly illuminated by a dying fluorescent lamp. “We’ll be entering the Rostov Complex, Tim. It’s a high-security zone in the museum that once housed classified documents and cherished historical artifacts from the Warsaw Pact countries. It also doubled as a nuclear fallout bunker for the army chiefs, as well as the Russian and Hungarian Politburo leaders during the Cold War.”

She lifted a hook-shaped lever on a rusty storage shelf nearby, revealing a cylindrical tunnel set behind the northern wall, sparsely illuminated by the pulsating glow of red hazard lights. “The gate at the end of the corridor leads into a service elevator, which will take us deep into the officers’ living quarters within the old fallout shelter. Its designers tightly restricted entry for everyone but the Soviet VIPs and their security details. There’s a time-lock delay for all other access, which the museum officials have adapted for their own purposes; we’ll be stuck there in the darkness for a few minutes. Sorry I didn’t warn you earlier.”

“No need to apologize,” said Tim, the reassurance in his voice tinged with a hint of disbelieving sarcasm. He and his host began the procession down the corridor, accompanied by the unsettling sound of nearby boilers and metallic clanking in the background, a steampunk symphony marking their descent into unknown depths. “By now,” he continued, “I’ve become well-accustomed to groping about through dark, abandoned corridors, in some forlorn hope of making sense of all this. The Falkenei Gesellschaft had a recurring fondness for those kinds of places, and besides, compared to the subterranean house of horrors at that library in the Borna town, a Cold War fallout shelter can’t be all that distressing.”

“I’d beg to differ,” replied Teréz, in a wry tone of her own. “Perhaps it’s the dramatic streak in me, the mad imagination we need to create many of our characters… but I’ve had my share of nightmares after descending into the depths of this complex, mostly from things that I never witness with my own eyes. They’ve nicknamed it The Catacombs down there, and there’s a reason for that.”

As they neared the end of the corridor, Tim twisted turned abortively to his host, in a bid to air amorphous thoughts that defied straightforward expression. “Teréz,” he eventually began, “what I was saying to you earlier, about your ability to peer into people’s souls as you do—I was thinking about that, and it’s telling me something about myself as well. Not just me—the essence of what’s led me all the way out here to Hungary, right now, searching for… for some semblance of answers, with you guiding the way.”

She inclined toward him without halting her advance, her silent eyes and lips alone conveying a query that her guest hastened to answer amidst the crimson glow of the tunnel.

“Everywhere I’ve traveled, since Zach and I arrived in Leipzig—it’s as if we’ve been old friends somehow.. Even though all of you are complete strangers to me, and I to you. You, Teréz, may have this gift to empathize with and appreciate someone you’ve never encountered… I wouldn’t say that Gregor, or Jürgen, or the library director at Borna, that any of them share it to the same degree. Yet even in their presence I had the same experience, as though we’d been childhood friends reuniting, especially when we made common cause in this search. Now I think I know why—and maybe why I’ve been so tormented by these visions in the first place.”

They halted before a reinforced steel portal set within drab grayish concrete, flanked by signs sporting harsh red-and-black lettering in Hungarian, German, and Russian—screaming a message which Tim could not translate precisely, but whose exclamation marks nonetheless conveyed a hostile warning of some sort. The message was reinforced by a small yet intimidating mural above the entrance, whose meaning was far more distressingly obvious: a skull-and-crossbones with spectral green orbs and scenes of agony that counseled uninvited guests against proceeding further, this time inscribed with a Latin inscription that Tim recognized instantly.

“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” he recited aloud, probing the hellish artwork displayed before them. “It’s been 30 years since I’ve read the Divine Comedy, but the threshold of Dante’s Inferno isn’t easy to forget… especially when someone’s reconstructed it right before one’s very eyes. The designers of this place had a… a grisly sense of humor, to say the least,” he said, in a nervous aside toward Teréz.

“Anything to reinforce the message,” she replied, slightly unsettled by the grim admonition even though she was hardly witnessing it for the first time. “Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this was one of five such facilities throughout the Eastern Bloc, guarded by armed sentries 24/7—all equipped with shoot-to-kill orders for intruders. Whatever the artifacts maintained here, I used to think this was just standard security protocol, to ensure protected sites for the Soviet chain of command in the event of the unthinkable; or perhaps just their personal refuge, with or without the calamity to justify a fallout shelter. But after hearing Jürgen’s account of what might have been brought here…”

She paused to slide out a small panel near the crossbar of the portal, resting her extended left hand flush against a colored screen that scanned the subtle ridges of her palm and digits. “Tim,” she inquired curiously, as the device advanced slowly from the base of her hand, “what were you saying just now about… the visions you were describing? You think that I have some connection to them?”

“Not directly, but perhaps in the underlying source—whatever’s filled my head with them in the first place.” As she impressed a series of digits on an adjacent keypad, Teréz responded with only a quizzical look, prompting him to elaborate. “Teréz, have you ever played with the idea that our minds can sometimes act as vessels, so to speak? For logical structures, memories, spirits, whatever you want to call them—organized patterns of information that somehow exist outside of us, like the shadows in Plato’s cave… that take shape as concrete thoughts when our conscious minds open up to them?”

“The ghost in the machine?” queried Teréz with a tentative nod, as a coded light display slowly flashed a sequence near the vaulted threshold. “Like Jungian archetypes, right? Some… symbology that gets wired into us?”

“Above and beyond that, though—more like what happens when an explorer or an investigator has that rare epiphany. Or when an artist or humanitarian gains that passion, the inner voice that fuels them every day. We leap up to a new level of consciousness, when some abstraction takes shape inside us, to become real.” He gesticulated with intensity, as if physically grasping at the words to pin down the elusive. “Somewhere in that barrage of sensory information and thought that races through our mind every day, we can occasionally ‘grok’ something far greater than mere bits of data; it’s as though we pick up whole thoughts from somewhere else, memories, even myths and stories.”

Teréz answered him with an incisive gaze, both baffled and intrigued. “If I’m lucky,” she said, steering the conversation into familiar territory, “I’m blessed with such insight every time I walk onto the stage. My acting coach once spoke in such terms; he said that our characters came into existence, in some Platonic sense, as soon as the screenwriter drafts the play; as an actor, I wasn’t inventing my characters as much as opening myself up to them in some… logical and emotional space, as I guess you would say. Maybe at some level, everyone on earth is seeking such a voice to define them, sometimes spending their lives to gain it.” I had never heard of you before my trip to the Leipzig train station last night. Yet it’s as though you already know me. Not just me… the essence of what brought me here, leading all the way to this town in Hungary. You’re the one person here

Tim quietly nodded his assent. “Susan—she used to speak just like that. She was a psychologist herself, and at one point she worked an extended stint to help troubled kids, taking on lost boys and girls who had fallen through the cracks into anomie and despair. She always said that she could recognize a breakthrough in a mere instant; somewhere in the tangle of neural circuitry that forges a teenager’s mind, a new self-awareness would take shape, a voice that shouted to be heard from inside them. The kids then threw themselves into their art, their schoolwork, their relationships with friends, anxious to express that voice—and in turn, they’d steer clear of the street drugs, the crime, and the gangs.”

Teréz directed a perceptive glance at her companion, moved by his recounting. “Susan’s a part of all this too, somehow… of what’s brought you here?”

“Undoubtedly, yes. When she was alive, her very presence supplied a basic facet of my own being. I know that now, but for three years after I lost her, I closed off that part of myself; it was too painful, wrapped up in too many difficult memories, for me to acknowledge a part of my own existence. So I suppressed a wellspring of my own voice, such as it’s grown inside me.”

“What…” she inquired tentatively, unsure if she wanted to hear the response. “What changed when she began appearing in your visions? Did you open up to her again?”

Tim answered initially with a look of stunned silence, his once expressive eyes uncharacteristically blank and glazed over, as he gazed inward into a chasm of potent recollections. After a long ten seconds, he sighed and clenched his teeth, shaking his head as he matched words to thoughts, speaking without directly facing his companion in the darkness.

“It was a—mutual acquaintance, Teréz. I ran into her fortuitously at a restaurant on campus, around the same time that I picked up my family’s heirlooms; it was shortly after I’d made that fateful trip to Oak Ridge, when I first saw a depiction of this beast, rendered by the hands of the madness-stricken... Priscilla is her name, Priscilla Lehto. I remember the day with terrible clarity; seeing Priscilla opened up that Pandora’s Box of blotted-out history for me. That same evening, dozing off in my bedroom, I saw Susan again in my dreams, relived the afternoon in Suriname when I lost her. Then to my shock, I saw her face again shortly thereafter, even with my eyes wide open.”

Teréz stepped around discreetly in a slightly circular motion, poising herself to glimpse obliquely at the lowered visage of her guest. “And when you once again glimpsed Susan,” she asked, prompting Tim to look up, “you think that this… triggered all of your other visions and investigations, ultimately leading you here?”

“I can’t quite parcel out the chicken and the egg,” he replied softly. “My run-in with Priscilla came shortly after I’d come into possession of these family heirlooms, which was itself in the wake of that fateful trip out to Oak Ridge—when I first saw a depiction of this beast, rendered by the hands of those already stricken by madness. But when I revisited Susan so vividly in my dreams, it flung open the doors of my mind’s eye once again… not only to Susan herself, but to this broader conundrum, which I’ve been piecing together ever since.”

He now turned intently toward her. “It’s what I was saying earlier, Teréz, about my struggle to make sense out of this—this force, the kind that congeals as a part of thoughts and becomes a voice within us. But in my case, whatever it is that’s using me as a vehicle to declare itself, it stretches deep into antiquity, and it’s fundamental to far more than my own self-expression. I still can’t imagine how, but Susan herself is linked to it. As are you, and Gregor, and Jürgen… that’s why I keep revisiting this strange feeling, as though you were old friends reuniting. It’s because we’re all integral to the revelation of this ancient narrative, and the message it’s so urgently pressing us to decipher.”

“The… the message?” inquired Teréz, uncharacteristically flustered at Tim’s ominous intimations.

With barely a moment’s hesitation, he reached for the wrinkled folder and opened it for his companion to peruse, revealing the nightmares that he had so assiduously committed to paper. She felt a creeping chill down her spine, her eyes now squarely catching sight of the horror at the image’s center. “The terror of Baron János.”

Tim glanced sharply in her direction, his eyes wide open. “You know, don’t you? Even though—you just said it yourself—you’d never laid eyes upon the Baron’s own drawings?” He angled the image obliquely to maximize what he could of the faint fluorescence about them, directing her attention to the foreground of the sketch. “Focus your gaze here, Teréz—these beings, in the front. Every time I dream up this scene, and commit what I saw to paper, it appears in greater depth and realism. Including these figures pointing into the main hall, housing the beast and whatever… Hell he seems on the brink of unleashing.”

Teréz stared intently at the two individuals in the foreground, now joined by the contours of still another figure just to their right. They were as Tim had depicted them before—with sharp faces, widely spaced eyes that peered out from beneath a slight convexity in the forehead, and ridged, prominent ears and earlobes. Tattoo-like etchings on their cheeks, nestled beside a fleshy but well-defined nose, highlighted their most distinctive features: complex, vaguely celestial-like markings, in the manner of an unknown hieroglyphic script, that graced their faces, necks, and extremities. Their garments appeared to be forged from a tough, synthesized gray fabric, like the flame-retardant suits designed for an astronaut or fighter pilot’s missions; yet the elaborate visual ornamentation on their outfits, combined with the skin markings, were more reminiscent of a fierce warrior tribe from an undiscovered forest, donning war paint before giving battle to an invader from a distant land.

“Who are they?” asked Teréz, her inquiring voice barely breaking a whisper.

He shook his head, in the manner of a long-frustrated detective on the verge of capitulating in the face of an impossible case. “I don’t know who or even what they are, nor where they came from; they’re not anything I could have dreamt up before, and yet I sketch them out the same way every time, in the same positions, with the same horror unfolding before them. Only the faintest outlines of the one on the far left were visible initially; now, there are three of them. And of all the things I render in these drawings, it’s they who seem to be speaking to me, as though… as though they planted this very scene into my mind’s eye to begin with.”

“Planted?” inquired Teréz with a skeptical, slightly nervous laugh.

“This ancient narrative, this message that’s channeling through me—I first suspected something of the sort around the third visitation I had by this nightmare. Just as I was saying, it’s not merely a collection of random objects in the sketch, and the Tauschreigeist—he may be the centerpiece of this horror, but unlike every other depiction that Zach and I have laid eyes on, he’s part of a scene in my own renditions, a context that must be connected up to some sort of contingent history. And while I’ve never been able to recall the explicit details, at least outside of whatever I spill out in these drawings, on that third occasion I could remember something about a ferocious clash: full of fear, desperation, violence, the fog of war.”

“So you’re saying that this is a snapshot of a… a battlefield, of some sort?” queried Teréz skeptically, aggressively eyeing the sketch in the manner of a hard-nosed field archaeologist, inspecting a find of great significance. “You think that these figures in the front are preparing for combat?” Her hands quivered slightly as she held the drawing up to the light, ineffably shaken by the house of horrors revealed before her eyes.

“Something like that,” answered Tim, in a tone of baffled frustration. “Maybe more like an infiltration, by a team of elite soldiers. They’re clearly inside some structure, somewhere that seems to hold a special significance for the Tauschreigeist; I just wish I could figure out what the hell the beast is doing in the center of the scene there, that’s so obviously drawing the alarm of the figures in the front. Maybe…”

He reflected for a moment before shaking his head in confusion, blowing out a puff of air through pursed lips in a sort of exaggerated sigh. His attention was quickly diverted to the safe-like entrance before them, a ring of reddish light now visible about its perimeter. “Teréz, is that our signal?”

“R-right,” she responded after a pause, her interest still riveted by some element or aggregate pattern on Tim’s sketch, one which even she could not quite pinpoint. “In about thirty seconds, there will be a freight elevator pulling up within the cabin behind this entrance. The gate should be unlocking right about now; in fact, if you could lend me a hand—“

Taking the cue, Tim grabbed on to a wheel with circular handles arrayed in concentric rings, as Teréz clutched a horizontal bar just to his right. Suddenly, a bright green light flashed atop the door, upon which a trio of bolts affixing the lever were withdrawn; the curator pulled back on the bar and rotated it upward to reach a right angle, at which point she signaled to her partner. Tim quickly rotated the wheel counterclockwise until hitting a wall of resistance, then yanked on the heavy portal to reveal a path to its heavily sheltered interior.

“That’s our ride?” queried Tim anxiously, as he laid eyes upon the claustrophobic, anachronistically antique-appearing elevator—the décor of its corners and slightly chipped doors hinting of a 1950s-era vintage. “When did they last inspect this thing?”

“A good question,” answered Teréz with some hesitation, “and one I’ve been afraid to ask. When the authorities implemented these high-tech scanning systems at the entrance, they planned to revamp the interior as well, but the higher-ups vetoed the subsequent updates on security grounds; so they apparently just did some spot checks and repairs, with the standard platitudes about justified faith in their predecessors. I had to use plenty of sweet talk and flirtatious white lies to get my own access to these catacombs, let alone to bring a friend.”

“You’re quite resourceful, Teréz.”

“When the circumstances call for it,” she said wryly, as she escorted her reluctant companion into the narrow quarters of the lift. “We’re heading down five levels to Special Exhibit Storage, our museum-speak for the unseen Purgatory reserved for the items locked away for years without public display. I’ve been down here only once myself, during a supervised orientation some years ago by a now-retired mentor, and even then it was just a casual look-see. But since Jürgen’s briefing, all my consultations and checking-up have indicated that the Soviet authorities stored their precious finds there, in the old fallout shelter as far as possible from prying eyes like our own.”

“So we’ll be stumbling around down there together…” replied Tim sardonically, stifling a nervous ripple in his voice as he stepped tentatively into the claustrophobic, slightly creaky confines of the antique lift.

“Yes,” confirmed Teréz with a wisp of a smile. “Hopefully more figuratively than literally, though I offer no guarantees.” She manually slid the chamber’s door shut, in the manner of a well-attired elevator attendant in a Big Apple skyscraper from the mid-20^th century.

She inserted a key and abruptly twisted it 180^o, illuminating the buttons for each floor—their destinations barely legible amid years of neglect for such a forgotten corner, far from public view. Tim felt his heart leap nearly into his throat as the elevator commenced its descent with a disconcerting jerk. It rumbled with a rusty groan as it slowly ferried its occupants down into the surreally Stygian depths of the museum; glimpses of cluttered corridors and fragmented bric-a-brac were sporadically visible through eye-level panels on its back wall.

As the cabin continued its descent, Tim eyed Teréz obliquely yet resolutely from the corner of his eye. In that unguarded moment, with the conversation stilled and his mind loosening the grip of its self-imposed shackles—succumbing briefly to the strangely dreamlike tranquility of their unfamiliar surroundings—he found himself powerfully attracted to his companion of less than a day. Her striking beauty, which he had been forcing himself to overlook in the midst of his rigid devotion to the task at hand, now shone through with irrepressible lucidity. Even more potently, her almost effortless grasp of the tortuous meanderings of his mind, his thwarted sense of self since the tragedy three years before, tapped into a deep personal reservoir, one that he thought had dried up entirely in the ensuing years. Tim had made halting attempts to rekindle a vestige of romantic love in the arms of other women, invariably coming to naught as his inner incompletion and bouts of self-punishment took hold. Now, his psychological attraction to Teréz mixed with its hazily demarcated physical and sexual counterparts, in a single potent moment, as he found himself looking more directly at and imperceptibly approaching her. She responded with an intense, ambiguous gaze of her own…

The elevator creaked with a jarring groan upon approaching its nadir. A vaguely discomfiting mechanical whir was audible in the background, growing louder and more unsettling as the cabin reached ground zero. The doors slowly pulled open, at which point the background whir transformed itself into a profoundly disconcerting juxtaposition of pistons pressing, pulleys spinning, crankshafts turning, hollow pipes hauntingly vibrating, and other mechanical reverberations—like a steampunk symphony inexplicably addressing its audience of two with a menacing self-awareness. The harmonies of the rhythmic ensemble alternated with a peculiar sort of counterpoint across a range of pitches and slightly varying tempos, producing a primally chilling effect that seemed to overlap with the beating of a nervous heart; Tim and Teréz were beset with the distinctly shuddering sensation that they had set foot in a hostile realm expressly forbidden to unsuspecting interlopers.

“They were installing some compressors next to the old fallout shelter when I had my walking tour years ago,” began Teréz, instinctually breaking the voiceless silence. “Supposedly for a back-up boiler or power storage system down here, locked far away from the viewing public and the exhibit curators; I never did find out what it was all about.”

“All the more reason to minimize our sojourn down here; there’s something more than a little creepy about the clanking beyond those walls.”

She nodded in firm agreement and quickly led Tim out of the elevator cabin, which had come to rest in a central location somewhere in the midst of the vast subterranean expanse about them. They immediately set foot in a small antechamber reminiscent of a decorated open patio, incongruously placed amongst a sea of tall shelves and wall compartments surrounding it—an apparent remnant of long-discarded contingency plans to brighten up an otherwise dreary long-term residence within the old fallout shelter. The incandescent lighting was robust near the antechamber, but muted and sporadic beyond it. The dull shadow of a monotonously-twirling ceiling fan, its enlarged blades vaguely resembling the arms of a Coptic cross, cast itself from above; it had been installed to shield against radioactive fallout, and its crepuscular silhouette on the spotlighted metal floor taunted the realm’s visitors, like a post-apocalyptic landscape to remind them of their subterranean isolation.

Before proceeding further, Teréz unfolded an intricate floor plan map from a breast pocket in her blouse, her deep red lips whispering inaudibly as her index finger traced a route of apparent interest.

“I scoured the old blueprints and internal announcements from years ago, Tim,” she said. “There was indeed a Baltic-themed exhibition here in the late 1980s, staged by the Soviet and Warsaw Pact authorities just before the Wall came down. It was a bit of a hodgepodge, but its title translates loosely into ‘Treasures of Old Königsberg’; and a Kantian theme united the collection, just as Jürgen had been implying. There was supposedly a rich trove of exotica on hand for a VIP audience, but for some reason that’s been expunged from the official records, the exhibition collapsed after the first night, and they transferred the items down here far out of sight—as though they were cursed.”

“Considering what I seem to have inherited,” said Tim cryptically, “that may be more than a figure of speech.”

“Of course,” Teréz answered with a tentative nod, slowly leading him in a winding course to the left. They angled past a ceiling-high stack of medieval earthenware carefully arranged in old crates, traversing a makeshift corridor before arriving at an odd cave-like alcove, arranged as a sort of time capsule with 1960s-era furniture and eerie, Dorian Gray-style portraiture festooning the walls.

“What—what in the world is that?” asked Tim, as the pair approached a doorway with a shallow ceiling at the end of the alcove.

“As I was saying,” she replied with an apprehensive sigh, “these sights are equally unfamiliar to my eyes; apparently an inside joke among the politburo officials who used these quarters on occasion as a, kind of morbid refuge from their pressures on the surface. But this is the right direction, I’m sure of it. The artifacts stored from the aborted exhibition—they were assigned to one of the officials who had sponsored the exhibit in the first place.”

“The Minister of Education?” queried Tim eagerly, his mind jostled by the prospect of soon laying eyes upon what he had been so urgently seeking.”

“So, Jürgen mentioned that to you, I presume from his own investigations? The old rogue always did have a knack for tracking down others’ secrets,” she said, betraying an impish smile at the recollection. “The Minister’s name was Dr. Krusenstern—Georgi Davidovitch Krusenstern.”

“The Mad Minister!”

“So you know of all the legends surrounding him?”

“Or the scurrilous rumors, as it may be—some high-ranking Soviet apparatchik who lost his mind after the Wall fell, at least in most versions of the tale. There was a Finnish reporter who smuggled herself into Estonia and the other ex-Soviet Republics just priot to the USSR’s demise in ’91—before the authorities had a chance to stash away all their dirty laundry from the years preceding the collapse. She even procured fragments from the Politburo’s official records, and her reports were eventually translated for the papers in the US. There were some creepy personnel bios, including one of Mad Minister Krusenstern, descended from some Russian admiral around 1800 or so—led a round-the-world expedition as I recall.”

“Admiral Adam von Krusenstern,” she nodded, as the two of them ducked under the low ceiling of a doorway at a back wall of the alcove, leading down a shallow winding ramp. “In fact, our latter-day Dr. Krusenstern supposedly fancied himself a great explorer and discoverer of the unknown, in the tradition of his venerated ancestor, which may have been his downfall.”

“Thus his obsession with the objects in the caverns beneath the old Albertina in Königsberg.”

“An obsession that he duly followed up. Dr. Krusenstern studied them for many years before deciding to exhibit them publicly. He eventually donated them to the Eötvös Loránd Museum, but only as a pretext for their safekeeping in a secure location—his bequest conditional on the artifacts’ exclusive retention within the innermost living quarters of the old fallout shelter here, for which he, of course, was among those with privileged access.”

“That’s what Jürgen kept going on about—cutting-edge analytical tools stashed away in Eastern Bloc museums. A valuable resource for the Minister, needless to say.”

“There’s truth to that. The Soviet authorities were always embroiled in their various turf battles over research establishments within the USSR proper, so the better-connected among them pulled strings and siphoned cash to establish their personal fiefs in the well-equipped institutions of learning to the west, particularly in East Germany, Poland, and here in Hungary. Museums were ideal to carry out investigations not meant for public consumption.”

“Or for nosy university professors and students, prone to asking too many questions.”

Her mouth and eyes silently signaled an acknowledgment. “They also had access to well-trained technical staff here, and they could pass off the research as garden-variety archaeological analysis for the museum collections.” The two of them rounded a widened corridor to enter an equipment room, inching closer to the adjacent maintenance facility—its eerie hum rattling their nerves like the mechanical symphony to which they had been treated upon first entering the desolate subterranean locale.

“So the Minister signed over his possessions to the museum here?”

“More like they fell in our lap after 1991, Tim. When the USSR dissolved, Hungary and the Warsaw Pact countries were no longer within the administrative sphere of the Russian officials. Since then, the artifacts have become orphans of a sort, finding a home here out of neglect if nothing else.”

“Are the Minister’s current whereabouts known by any chance? From what you’re saying, he might be a valuable resource to help us—”

“Unfortunately,” she interrupted with a resigned shake of her head, “he seems to have all but disappeared shortly after the Soviet collapse; that’s where all the tales of his madness come in. He’d battled epilepsy since his childhood but had kept it under control. That all changed in the years surrouding the fall of the Berlin Wall He allegedly went mad sometime around 1993, eventually being institutionalized at a private facility in the outskirts of Hrodna, in the west of Belarus. But the region was soon engulfed in its own turmoil, like so many others in Belarus after the Chernobyl meltdown; the guards and staff in Hrodna had gone unpaid for months and simply abandoned their posts, so the patients just vanished into the surrounding forests to fend for themselves. Krusenstern’s family and friends always attributed his breakdown to the shock of the political instability and market reforms then affecting Russia and the old Soviet republics. But come to think of it…”

She stopped in her tracks and grimaced as though injured, her mind overwrought from the sudden jolt of an unpleasant realization. “Teréz, what is it?” murmured Tim softly, himself halting and gently approaching his companion.

“I never made the connection at first, but I remember now,” she said, her voice subdued as she tilted her gaze toward Tim. “The records from Hrodna, and accounts from his family just before he was commited—they said he had been feverishly sketching out pictures of demons, specters, malevolent entities from the other side, or so the reports tried to explain it. He’d long suffered from epilepsy, under good control; but he was diagnosed with frank paranoid schizophrenia in 1993, utterly out of nowhere. I wonder now, based on his abiding obsession at the time, if it might have been the same affliction that struck Baron János, and those patients in the clinical trial that you had mentioned…”

Tim edged in her direction as she gazed nervously to the side, slowly positioning himself just inches before her in a gesture of reassurance. “Teréz, I had the same terrible thoughts coursing through my head when I first learned of this spreading nightmare in Oak Ridge, and I started drawing my own visions of this beast shortly thereafter. I remember calling and practically shouting at my colleague in Tennessee, in such a deep state of panic that I nearly broke down in a heap on the floor; I thought I’d been infected by whatever it was, that had preyed upon the minds of the patients. We don’t know everything yet, but it seems that whatever malign force overtook the soldiers at Oak Ridge—while it resembles what must have stricken Baron János and Minister Krusenstern, it’s not the same thing.”

He cupped his hands and gently cradled her cheeks and jaw, gazing into her eyes empathetically before pulling them slowly away with an awkward sigh, ultimately resting them on the curve between her shoulders and upper arms. “Tachibana syndrome—what we’ve come to call the source of the madness originating in Oak Ridge—it’s far more potent, immediate, and truly horrid in its effects. However, from what we’ve gathered, it needs a more specific vector to induce the syndrome in the hideous form that it’s currently taken—something in the retinal implants themselves, which the vets got in the trials to restore their sight after war wounds in Iraq and Afghanistan. As for the Baron and the Minister of Education, and whoever else has been driven mad by their own visions of the beast, they seem to have been ensnared over years, obsessing over the mystery yet isolated from the few people in the shadows who actually do seem to understand the Tauschreigeist.”

“You’re referring to the Falkenei Gesellschaft?” she asked, now gazing straight into his eyes.

Tim returned a look that was half-smile and half-astonishment. “So you already know a good deal about the Gesellschaft? That was one heck of a briefing that Jürgen must have given you.”

“He did, Tim,” she answered, turning slightly aside, “but I knew of the Gesellschaft years ago, in name if not in purpose, when he and I were still... I was aware of them probably for the same reason that your mutual friend Gregor was: Jürgen really was a man obsessed when it came to the Gesellschaft. It nearly drove him mad, too; ever since his collaboration with Dr. Mendeleev in Russia, he was convinced that the Gesellschaft was still active in Europe and involved in an undertaking of historic significance, but the answers always eluded him. I suppose that’s why he implored me so urgently to assist you,” she continued, now looking squarely into Tim’s eyes again, “almost immediately after you had come to him.”

“And you’ve done that already, Teréz, more than you could imagine,” said Tim with a thoughtful sigh, now resting his left hand against a nearby doorframe. “What I’m trying to say is that, given what we know, there shouldn’t be any risk to you or me of our minds being overtaken and… ensnared like our predecessors, no matter what might await us deeper in this old fallout shelter. But what we do know is fragmentary, and I don’t want you to follow and take that risk on account of my feeble assurances. You’ve led me to a place that very well may hold the answers I’ve been seeking; if you point me where to go, I can take it from here.”

“Always the noble-minded warrior Tim, tilting at windmills alone in the dark,” she said, with a teasing smile and the hint of a wink in her right eye.

“I guess I’d have opted for a different pair of metaphors,” he replied, eyebrows arched in irony.

“No matter,” she responded in a determined voice, draping slightly bent arms to rest her wrists gently upon his shoulders. “Whatever mystery you’re chasing, I’m already at your side, and that’s where I’m staying.”

Tim smiled warmly, the ridges about his eyes conveying an unambiguous sense of relief at her answer, whatever his stated pretenses to the contrary. “We’ll be tracking this way, Tim,” she said, leading him on a sinuous path about scattered piles of haphazard tools and ceiling-high stacks of forgotten crates.

The eerie whir of the nearby mechanical room now began to intrude more overtly, jangling their nerves as Teréz crossed a long, arching tunnel that terminated at a large metallic grate above a shallow, yet sharply sloping pit in a half-renovated nook of the fallout shelter. The thick shadows cast by the grate and the angles of the lighting engendered a bizarre optical illusory effect, and to an untrained observer, the pit seemed nightmarishly bottomless. It was situated beneath a tall, unfinished stone roof covered by haphazardly-placed strips of black tarpaulin that draped the upper walls. Amidst the misplaced, half-operating floodlights that dissipated so much illumination fruitlessly against the surrounding walls, the ceiling resembled a seemingly boundless sea of darkness. The scene was surreal and otherwordly, as though the visitors had inadvertently left the bounds of earth and stumbled upon an impromptu construction site on a hitherto uncharted planet.

“Here we are, Tim,” announced Teréz, crossing the grate to enter the core of a cavernous storage chamber, sweeping her outstretched hand from side to side to highlight the strange scene before them.

They had taken the first tentative steps onto a tightly-packed metal latticework adjoined to the preceding grate. The clanging and creaking of its tattered, rusted steel had an unnerving effect on those condemned to tread upon it, reminiscent as it was of a precarious footbridge suspended above a deadly vat of molten iron ore. The hiss of steam vents and churn of boilers from the nearby mechanical room were now jarringly audible, and their effects also visible in the hazy condensate that had formed on reinforced glass barriers walling off the two massive rooms. The barriers were interspersed amongst an array of thick chrome planks that reinforced the storage chamber’s left side, sculpted and arranged in a mysterious style reminiscent of a line of Egyptain sarcophagi—concealing secrets of an ancient pedigree from unwary intruders. The vast enclosure was noticeably warmer than the rest of the old fallout shelter, and it terminated in a trio of ceiling-high, oval-shaped exits with slightly rusty metal gates that slid vertically—two smaller arches on the sides, most likely reserved for storage, flanking an enormous central gateway that resembled the chilling façade of a dark cathedral.

“Who had the bright idea to site a boiler room flush next door to a... holding chamber for priceless artifacts?” queried Tim, dripping with sarcasm and the first beads of sweat.

“The boilers were installed about a decade ago, long after the Soviets had relinquished the reins,” answered Teréz, dabbing her own forehead. “The authorities here intended for Sublevel 5 to be a dumping ground, and I doubt they ever appreciated the significance of what had been hidden within these walls. At least they’ve sealed off the neighboring chambers, so this is all dry heat, conducted through the metal in the partitions. And besides…” She paused, focusing her gaze sharply on the middle sliding gate and walking deliberately in its direction, amidst the menacing mechanical churn nearby. “If we can trust the records, no one has set foot in that bunker since the Wall came down, so it’ll be like a time capsule in there.”

“So that’s what this is—a bunker, for the old Soviet top brass?”

“Yes, and whatever entourage they could usher in with them. In the face of a massive-retaliation scenario, they wanted to be as far away as possible from the shock waves and electromagnetic pulses, let alone the nuclear fallout; so they reinforced the second bunker with lead, so that its occupants could maintain the chain of command even as the world burned above them. Naturally, the bunker could also house their most sensitive electronic equipment…”

“And double as a repository,” interjected Tim, “for their most precious possessions.” He marched slowly in the gate’s direction, the crisp patter of his footsteps crackling against the hollow walls of the chamber—a cold melody against the pulsating mechanical backdrop next door. “Why did they seal off everything in there though, for nearly three decades?” he asked, whirling back around toward his companion.

Teréz reacted initially without answering, instead retrieving the modified floor plan that she had perused earlier upon exiting the elevator—this time superimposing an old makeshift sketch on glossy cellophane, its locations punctuated with unfamiliar symbols and exclamation marks. “My predecessors as curators kept detailed logs of their visits to the lower Sublevels for security purposes, given the restricted access. They never paid many visits to Sublevel 5, but even when they did, there’s no mention of entry into Bunker #2; whenever it is noted at all, it’s explicitly to emphasize that they didn’t dare set foot inside.”

“That’s a reassuring bit of news,” said Tim with apprehensive irony, casting an uncomfortable glance in her direction. “Are you sure they didn’t have good reasons for their reluctance?”

“It’s a long and tangled tale,” she replied, the tapping of her heels redounding as she joined his side to approach the gate. “Part institutional mythmaking, part ghost story. The staff here never really had much reason to explore the bunker regardless, and all its history must have deterred them from ever reconsidering; it’s also part of the reason that you gave me such a chill a short while ago, when I realized how many people have been driven mad by their very association with this quest. Nonetheless—what happened here all those decades ago was tragic, but it’s nothing like what you were describing in regard to Oak Ridge, Tim, or the other strange events of late. Don’t worry; we’ll be fine.”

They soon arrived at the threshold of the bunker. Its towering arched gate was set in reinforced concrete and flanked by irregularly star-shaped, gray-black tiles on the wall, each with a small red orb in the center—perhaps functioning as motion-detectors or speakers, but eerily resembling demonic eyes staring out from beside the hungry maw of the gate.

Teréz brushed off a dusty rectangular panel in the shape of a fuse box on the left side, and inserted a large, notched skeleton key into a grooved slot on its surface. Immediately, an array of labeled square buttons in dull hues on the panel—green, red, yellow, and off-white—flashed their readiness for operation. “They kept the bunker nearly sterile to ensure its soundness for long-term habitation, so everything should be in decent shape within. That being said, there have admittedly been some concerns about the structural soundness inside there,” she said, tapping a sequence and reaching for a nearby lever, “probably another factor in discouraging unplanned visits to this place. But the last inspections showed no lingering issues, and I doubt we’ll be disturbing the peace enough to court any danger.”

“Another comforting thought to chew on for the journey,” answered Tim, tongue partially in cheek as his companion gripped the lever, this time with some hesitation of her own. “It’s fine, Teréz,” he continued, with the vestige of a soothing laugh in the face of the unknown. “When Zach and I stumbled on those evacuated caverns beneath the library in Borna, not a soul had set foot there in nearly three centuries, yet we ventured in regardless. So a lapse of three decades—hardly worth a raised eyebrow in comparison.”

She nodded tentatively and forced out a gust of air from distended cheeks, like a swimmer preparing to dive into icy waters, then firmly pushed the lever forward. The pair were startled when a jarring, low-pitched klaxon warning pealed out from unseen speakers as a spinning, flashing red light, nestled centrally at the roof of the gate, alerted bystanders to keep their distance. Tim instinctively clasped Teréz’s left hand and walked her several paces back, just as the red light on the roof was joined in its frenzied activity by large, pulsating yellow lamps flanking the entrance. Almost immediately, a harsh metallic scream rang out while the gate slowly rose from its anchor in the solid ground, further jolting the two unsuspecting visitors perched before it.

As the sliding gate neared its summit, the caution lights faded and the klaxon gradually trailed off in its piercing ring; a series of humming, light-blue fluorescent lamps then flashed on with a distinctive bursting sound from front to back. The pair’s initial glimpse of the endless corridor descried rows of electronic equipment, oscilloscopes, and 1980s-vintage mainframe computers, all beneath a roof that gradually tapered from its apex at the gate itself. To their surprise, a number of the monitors flashed on just as the overhead lights cast their glow upon them—replete with cacophonous, yet strangely purposeful beeping and whirring reminiscent of a submarine’s cockpit, or a busy aviator’s radio tower.

“Incredible,” remarked Tim in awe, his eye drawn to a curious object dangling on the left wall. “Looks like a construction worker’s flip calendar, from all the way back in 1988; this place really has been sealed in for thirty years, but all the gear’s still up-and-running like new.”

“Must have been part of the fallout shelter’s failsafe,” conjectured Teréz, as she and Tim eyed the scene with curiosity. “In the event of a nuclear attack, the authorities probably wired the equipment to activate spontaneously as soon as the officers entered the bunker.”

“Morbidly well-prepared for the worst, can’t deny them that,” responded Tim sarcastically, astonished by the sheer magnitude of the facilities before him.

“They obviously designed the circuitry to be resilient,” said Teréz with her eyebrows slightly creased, skeptically surveying the walls and floor of the bunker. “Even so, I have a suspicion that the bunker may have enjoyed some company after all over these intervening decades—apparently unauthorized, not to mention unrecorded.”

“This corridor seems to go on forever,” interjected Tim, tentatively stepping forward into the heavily-reinforced threshold. “Where in the world should we start?”

She instinctively retrieved the floor plans again, frowning with a slight shake of the head as she deciphered the desultory assemblage of marks and symbols before her. “I wish I could say there was an ‘X’ to mark the spot,” she answered with a sigh. “The scattered records from Minister Krusenstern’s exhibition—they said something about hollowing out the dead space in and around the cellar, the one attached to his designated living quarters here. The civilian and military authorities were granted about two dozen spaces approximating one- or two-bedroom apartments in the bunker, depending on their rank and status. They’re mostly set off in a reinforced section at the northeast,” she said, pointing to a large rectangular space in a corner of the floor plan, “past the mess hall beginning about 200 meters in.”

“And I’m guessing… that nobody ever bothered to specify which one belonged to Minister Krusenstern?”

She sighed and winced slightly with resignation. “Unfortunately, no. There’s a scribbled schematic suggesting a planned modification to his personal quarters or somewhere in the vicinity—probably a trapdoor, or even just an enlarged wine cellar nearby. I entered a general-access cipher at the gate just now; it’s the code that would have signaled emergency entry following a nuclear exchange back in 1988, so it unlocks all the personal chambers. We’ll just have to see what we can find inside them.”

Tim silently mouthed agreement, then cautiously took the first uncertain steps into the dusty, yet surprisingly intact and robust-appearing grounds of the old bunker. The pair advanced slowly as they beheld sights unwitnessed by other eyes—the strange remnants of a recent great power so perversely prepared for its own self-destruction, in a fit of madness by high officials armed with a terrible power.

Wednesday, May 25, 3:32 a.m.

Rostov Complex Fallout Shelter, Sublevel 5, Eötvös Loránd Museum, Hungary

“Almost four hours we’ve been at this,” sighed Tim, catching his breath as he sponged his forehead with a crinkled tissue. “I guess the heat from those boilers followed us inside the bunker.” He was busily shifting about creaky old furniture in the search for signs of a hastily-added extra compartment. Like the other components of the bunker, the motley furnishings within its living quarters were in remarkable condition. The pre-fab bureaus, bookcases, sofas, and other markers of domestic comfort, so incongruous in the Hades-like subterranean isolation of the shelter, were made from resilient PVC and other synthetic fibers which—along with the tight seal availed by the reinforced threshold—protected them from exposure and even minor damage during their long interment away from the outside world.

“We’ve worked our way more than twenty of these little domiciles,” added Teréz, her voice trailing off slightly as she paused to summon her dwindling energy amidst the heat. She glanced toward her companion, who shrugged and shook his forehead in resignation. “Sorry I dragged you down here without a map, Tim.”

“I feel like I should be the one apologizing,” he replied with a faint chuckle. “I doubt a trip to a deserted old fallout shelter was originally on your agenda for the day.”

“Don’t worry; I arranged for a half day when I heard you were coming, Tim. And I must say,” she said with a laugh, “we’ve managed quite an unusual way to get reacquainted!”

He smiled as the pair exited the cramped apartment to travel deeper down the residential corridor in the bunker’s northeast, toward a room that seemed oddly isolated from its neighbors.

“I think we may have stumbled on one of the high officer’s quarters,” mused Teréz, as she inspected a silver-plated label beside the door, scribed in pristine Cyrillic lettering. “This one was reserved for a certain Major Ovechkin of the Soviet Army, in the days before the collapse.”

She turned a stylized handle at the lead-coated entryway and pushed gently, the door then swinging itself open automatically. The officer’s quarters inside were an oasis of refined opulence amidst the otherwise coarse austerity of the fallout shelter. Its surrounding protective walls were festooned with gilded mirrors and paintings in the czarist martial tradition from Peter the Great’s era, while framed replicas of battalion medals from the Napoleonic Wars hung at each corner. Plush seats and sofas surrounded a spacious coffee table with small but intricate scale models of the Saint Sophia and St. Basil’s Cathedrals, and the Hagia Sophia of old Constantinople. A vanity and shower room, both well-stocked with durable ceramic cases to hold soaps and shampoos, beckoned at the back of the large living room. They were sandwiched between twin bedrooms with king-sized mattresses, outsized maroon cushions, silken comforters, and other trappings of a well-connected VIP in constant expectation of overnight company during more settled times on the surface.

“No better place to wait out a nuclear winter,” quipped Tim as he busily scanned the room’s manifold visual offerings. “Do you think Minister Krusenstern would have stashed the artifacts here?”

“I doubt it, even if he and Major Ovechkin were acquainted; the civilians and the military brass generally kept to their own separate enclaves within the fallout shelter. But at the very least,” she said, with a wink and a saunter toward the coffee table, “we have a moment to rest up, and savor whatever passes for the luxury suite in a deserted nuclear bunker.”

“Always one step ahead of my own sentiments, Teréz,” replied Tim with a playful nod, following her to the center of the room where they eagerly removed a tarp-like covering on the oversized sofa nearby, seizing a long-awaited respite on its untrammeled cushions.

“Since Jürgen called me a couple nights ago—hearing his own voice after all those years, and then learning that it was you, of all people, who were coming here to Hungary—the whole chain of events has just been boggling my mind, Tim.”

“In any other world, it’d have the same effect on me,” he scoffed in gentle irony, as they both inclined back on the vinyl cushions, at an angle slightly away from each other. “But given everything my eyes have beheld in the past two weeks—hardly anything surprises me anymore.”

“You know what I mean,” laughed Teréz, as she slowly twisted her torso to lie on her side, her eyes languidly gazing into those of her companion. “All those years ago in Indiana, when you and I were just fumbling through and trying to find our way, we wound up in each other’s arms. And then we embarked on separate lives when I returned to Budapest. I kept our pictures, Tim, and the clumsy notes you always used to leave me, trying to translate the meanderings of your heart into your fragmented German or Hungarian…”

“Clumsy notes, eh?” queried Tim with a wry sidelong glance. “You were always telling me how sweet and thoughtful they were; I never did hear your candid opinions.”

“They were sweet and thoughtful, Tim!” she exclaimed with a teasing smile. “As for the awkward part; first of all, you’ll rarely hear everything we’re thinking and second, that very awkwardness was part of what made them so sweet. The effort you made to communicate with me, in an idiom so far from your own.”

She rolled slightly, planting her left elbow on the cushion to support herself as she looked up at Tim and continued. “I’ve always cherished those moments when I can link up with another person’s soul and unite in mind and purpose, rare as they may be. And in all my years jointly creating little worlds on the stage with other actors—I realized you’re one of the few men I’ve met, who shares that passion. I did miss you, Tim, and that’s why I’m still so dumbfounded by the sheer improbability of all this. You and I, sneaking around in the officer’s quarters deep in a retired fallout shelter, nobody even knowing we’re here…”

“Sounds like one of those romantic segues,” chuckled Tim with a soft lull in his voice. “It’s kismet that’s brought us together here…” He slowly readjusted his own position, glimpsing deeply into her own wide eyes. “I know some people try to cast it as a simple binary dichotomy, destiny vs. chance, one or the other impelling the course of our events; I’ve just never believed it’s that simple. The world isn’t hardwired to do or become anything in particular, but it’s not all random stumbling either; it’s guided in some way, and maybe it’s often-stumbling conscious beings like us, who are critical for a lot of that guiding.”

His eyes darted away suddenly to the side as he fixated on a discomfiting reflection. “As far as this ‘being fated to meet’ storyline goes, I’ve never found it to be particularly romantic to begin with. Especially since in our case, it’d require me to swallow the idea that what happened three years ago…” He halted abruptly, a lump visibly coalescing in his throat.”

“Tim, it’s all right,” she replied soothingly, both of them anxious to steer away from such thoughts.

“It’s funny, when I was at Gregor’s estate over the weekend, pressing him for some answers on all this bizarreness of late—our conversation veered into similar territory. It was basically gearhead-speak, two engineers waxing in bewilderment about whether the basic constants of nature had to be what they are or could have been something different {put this above with Gregor, and abbreviate the rest}. Why certain collections of numbers in our equations matter while others don’t, why we could create a current in a wire if we hold a magnet just the right way around it, why certain electrical circuits carry important messages—why do these select-few configurations of things, of numbers magically become so significant while few others do? Gregor thinks it isn’t predetermined, but nonetheless there’s some logical structure—some underlying significance to the world that our senses interpret, and we just scratch the surface of it every time we discern a new special number or physical structure that does special things.”

“You’re channeling Jürgen himself now, Tim,” said Teréz with a teasing smile. “He was ever the Kantian scholar even when he first took to the stage as ‘The Magnificent Dr. Sphinx,’ and he always talked like that in the kaffeeklatsches we had in Leipzig or Budapest—the hidden structure of this noumenal world that we’re only barely glimpsing, even now.”

“Is that a good thing, Teréz?” asked Tim with a wry glance.

“It’s not always a bad thing,” she answered with a laugh, gazing softly in his direction, “but I like it better when Tim Shoemaker channels Tim Shoemaker.”

“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” he replied with a leisurely grin, gradually shifting his focus to an object behind the sofa. “You know,” he continued, slowly rising from his spot, “I was thinking that the only thing missing from this crazy scene we’ve wandered our way into, was a nice bottle of wine to toast the occasion or… whatever two ex-lovers do upon reuniting in a spooky abandoned fallout shelter. But as luck would have it—”

He strode out to a small half-opened cabinet nestled in the back corner of the room, kneeling down to grab hold of its contents and quickly returning with two tumblers and a tall flask of Burgundy. “The corkscrew on the coffee table was a helpful hint,” said Tim, retrieving it with a wink toward his pleasantly surprised companion. He rested the bottle on a cloth covering for the table, quickly plunging the corkscrew into its cap.

“Authentic Pinot Noir, straight from the French vineyards,” mused Teréz in anticipation, keenly inspecting the label as she gently set the tumblers into position.

“Not just any Pinot Noir,” added Tim as he firmly twisted the spiral into the cork. “It’s Vintage 1982, straight out of the Côte-d'Or. Again, I’ve gotta hand it to Comrade Ovechkin; if you’re obliged to spend years underground while the world above sorts itself out post-apocalypse, might as well do it in style. It does feel a little awkward to be savoring the wine he reserved for himself down here. Then again…” He paused to lift out the cork with a fluid motion, twirling the bottle with a flourish as he filled the slender wine glasses on each side. “I doubt he’ll be needing this old shelter anymore—or at least, one can hope. Cheers!”

“Cheers, Tim.” They toasted the moment and took enthusiastic, thirsty sips from the glasses, their throats parched from constant exertion amidst the dry heat that had invaded the bunker. They continued to banter softly while slowly draining the flask of its contents, inching imperceptibly closer and eventually staring dreamily into each other’s languid eyes.

“I just noticed, Tim,” began Teréz with a soft and teasing laugh, breaking the sweet silence between them, “you have flakes of plaster in your hair. You were tugging that air vent to-and-fro a few rooms back; must have dislodged some of the sealant around the edges. Here…” She leaned in to gently graze the front of his hair with her outsretched hand, her own silky locks brushing lightly against his prone right wrist and lower arm. The pucker of her red-tinted lips, and the soft curve of her lower eyelashes, came into sharp focus just before his eyes as she kneeled on the sofa before him.

They were both momentarily distracted by the thud of a falling object, displaced in their prior rounds of searching, striking the ground and wobbling as it came to rest. As

they pivoted to face each other again, they tilted in slightly too close, awkwardly bumping foreheads and recoiling with laughter at the sudden onset of mutual clumsiness. Just as they prepared to retreat back into dreamy silence, the laughter erupted again as a mirth-filled adolescent’s tittering by both of them. Teréz clasped Tim’s hand and drew him toward her, upon which they fumbled around and giggled like two smitten teenagers in a spontaneous tryst, safely tucked away in a campsite’s remote log cabin, collapsing into each other’s arms for the first time. They continued to wiggle and knock elbows and knees, struggling to match each other’s rhythm and movements. Their blithe laughter finally trailed off, slowly and intermittently, as they pulled in to align with one another, their cheeks and noses brushing while they fed off the giddy exhilaration that had accrued with every eyeblink and softly whispered thought.

Their lips met in an impassioned ardor , their arms drawing each other in with impatient vigor. Their eyelids opened halfway in a languid, trancelike gaze that savored the fine features of each other’s eyes and cheeks, before shutting again as their minds floated to a sweet and transcendent plane, ferried by the mounting fervor of each moment. They drew ever closer, finally locking in a tight embrace as they slowly divested one another, one item at a time. They caressed each other until Teréz drew back with a smile, motioning obliquely backward with a tip of her forehead. He responded with a sly nod, lifting her gently as they launched a spontaneous pirouette about one another, their eyes locked with each twirling step into the bedroom behind them.

*******************************************

“Tim! Tim, what is it? Are you all right?”

He had awakened with a sudden startle and sat up at the head of the bed, hyperventilating as beads of sweat trickled down his chest and onto the billowy silken blanket below. He stared blankly ahead at first, probing the vaults of his memory for hazy dream images that elusively danced just outside his awareness. He instinctively reached for a notepad and gnarled pencil nearby—providently placed in the event of a prolonged sojourn in the bunker—but this time, for once, nothing flowed from his mind onto the paper. “Come on, damnit…” he uttered through clenched teeth, forcibly squeezing his eyes shut and shaking his head as though to physically dislodge the imagery from the chasms of the mind in which they had been ensconced.

“Was it one of those visions again?” she asked in a soft, concerned voice.

“Yes, but so much more awful than—” he flung his eyelids open and gasped intermittently, as though overwhelmed by the thin fragments of the images that he could summon into a conscious plane. She cradled him close, gently massaging the tense back of his neck and touching her nose and forehead to his, her flowing tresses gently grazing his collarbone and the small of his back.

“A chamber with arches, vanishing into the darkness in the distance…” He strained his jaw as he gave voice to the nightmarish stream that roiled inside his mind’s eye. “A vault, a fluted ceiling. They were fleeing for shelter anywhere, terrified for their lives. They were—“ He slowly angled his gaze toward her, relaying the contents of his half-formed thoughts as they pirouetted through his mind.

“It was two different scenes!” he exclaimed in astonishment. “They’ve always been separate before, my ancestors during the Thirty Years’ War, and the beings confronting the beast in that strange place. Something was linking them together this time…”

Teréz continued to peer sympathetically into his distraught eyes. She listened intently, even though she could not understand the references that he was stringing together, if only in the hope that her heartfelt engagement could set his own restless soul a little more at ease. Eventually, Tim relented, rubbing his eyes vigorously and then opening them wide, as though to pry himself from the dream-like limbo in which he had been lately imprisoned.

“I just can’t put it together,” he said in evident disappointment, as he steadied himself upright. “I don’t know why it feels so urgent this time; it’s like—when some part of your subconscious intuition notices something without your being aware of it, sends you a message…” He craned his neck and scanned the room as if imbibing the subtleties of a panorama, in a fruitless attempt to jog his clouded memory with an overlooked detail or a telling visual cue that had narrowly eluded his awareness. He halted only when she began to nuzzle him, caressing his hair and chest with her hands, her sweetly distracting affection helping to confirm his own inclination to give up the forlorn search for the moment.

They kissed and cuddled for several minutes, gradually reclining upon the crinkled cushions to face each other closely, their eyelashes and hair lapping against their cheeks as they settled back to gaze warmly into one another’s eyes. Tim savored the nurturing silence for another brief spell, before slowly returning to the stubborn queries that refused to free him from their grip.

“Teréz, you never did tell me why this bunker’s been abandoned for so many years,” he began softy, propping himself up with a bent elbow as she did the same. “The builders of that cavern beneath the library in Borna took great pains to conceal its presence for centuries, deep within the surrounding rock. But the fallout shelter’s never been a secret, at least not since the Wall fell. And as we’ve come to appreciate,” he said with a glance around and the hint of a wink, “the accommodations aren’t half bad.”

Teréz smiled silently, her warm expression imperceptibly transforming into something more ambiguous. “A horrible event transpired in this bunker 30 years ago; so awful, it was one of those things that spurred whispers and hazy legends of a curse overtaking these grounds.”

“Always a pleasant sentiment when one’s stuck alone in such a place,” he replied, straining at a façade of levity to hide the vague discomfiture that rushed over him, “completely unbeknownst to anyone above.”

“You’re not exactly alone here, Tim,” answered Teréz with a playful laugh, kissing him on the forehead before once again retnrning to a look of muted apprehension. “It was a terrible accident during a renovation of this bunker, all the more tragic since it took place just before the Berlin Wall’s demise. Many of the Soviet authorities had been in denial even as their power slipped away, and so they sent construction teams in on rushed jobs to reinforce the fallout shelters throughout the Warsaw Pact countries. Building codes were ignored, and after a string of minor mishaps, a retaining wall suddenly collapsed on an entire troop of workers; dozens lost their lives, or could never walk again. The authorities quietly patched up the defects, played down the news as best they could.”

“My God, that’s awful. I presume Minister Krusenstern was among those signing the work orders?”

“Funny you’d ask,” she responded with a quick glance obliquely to the side. “He happened to be present here around the same time, committing the old Königsberg artifacts for exhibition and safekeeping, as well as subsequent analysis by the technical teams then based at the Loránd Museum. But he wasn’t among those authorizing the bunker’s construction. In fact, based on the documents later declassified, it seemed that he personally objected to the conditions here; and then the whistleblower became the scapegoat after the tragedy. I always assumed that this was what robbed him of his sanity—being falsely accused with no recourse to defend his honor. At least, so I believed, until you related how many other souls have been drawn into the same vortex surrounding these artifacts, and driven to the same madness.”

Tim tilted his head slightly on his outstretched hand, evidently baffled by something in her account. “I feel for those poor workers and their families,” he began. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like to lose their loved ones just as freedom was emerging around the corner. Still—why seal off the place for three decades in its aftermath?”

“:It wasn’t, at least initially. But then the others who set foot in the bunker reported ghastly phenomena. The new work teams charged with finishing the renovation, the museum supervisors who looked after the items entrusted here—they reported voices calling out in agony. And… symbols, spontaneously appearing on the monitors of the computers and other digital equipment in the heart of the bunker that we passed earlier, sometimes even when they were switched off.”

“Symbols? Of what sort?”

“There was a medievalist interning here well before I came, and from secondhand descriptions, he said they may have corresponded to a defunct script from the European Dark Ages; but he never saw the writing personally, so nobody was certain what it meant. And,” she added ominously, gazing away into the darkness as she spoke, ”there was something else that was claimed to have manifested on those monitors. Those who had known the deceased workers personally were especially adamant about what they saw: messages, or at least non-random strings of letters and numbers, that appeared on the computer screens spontaneously. Coupled with related phenomena—everything from flickering lights to tapping sounds with the equipment, all much more than mere static. They were patterned, occasionally purposeful, like a muffled communication.”

“This all began showing up on the monitors?” Tim asked intently.

“That’s what was passed on from the field interviews, at least. Then came what’s frightened everyone away from here, even those inclined to disbelieve the legends. The crews in the bunker reported apparitions of the workers who lost their lives, in the form of their faces or even their whole bodies. Somehow, they appeared first on the computer screens, but then their likenesses were projected onto other surfaces—mirrors, walls, panes of glass. Then it became more than just the projections; the witnesses were never sure, but something like holograms of the workers, initially distorted but obviously resembling them, began to emerge from those same surfaces, then to interact with their environment and… Tim? Is something wrong?”

He had sat up and fixed his eyes in an eerie, nearly spectral stare, his cheeks ashen and hollowed and his breathing tortuously drawn out. She gently clasped her hands around his upper arm and shoulder, her palms lightly massaging him as she looked compassionately into his eyes—the shock on his face gradually ebbing as he coaxed words from his jarring thoughts. He turned ambivalently toward her and pulled slightly away, as though hedging the impact of what he was about to impart.

“Teréz, my third dream vision, the one I kept mum on before—it wasn’t really a vision, at least not like the other two. It was Susan, and her being manifested just like that, just as you said happened with the workers.”

Tim curled his body to lift himself and rest his back against the ornate bedframe behind them, staring forward before turning and facing Teréz again, who was still listening sympathetically as he prepared to broach an uncomfortable topic.

“When I lost Susan three years ago on the mountain, the circumstances around the tragedy were too much for me to bear. I didn’t even know how to grieve, because every unguarded thought about her—it just transplanted that awful day right back to the present, compelling me to suffer through that cursed sequence of events again and again. As a defense, my mind eventually began to seal itself off to memories of our moments together, and the pictures that I still carried with me—I became numb to them. But then about two weeks ago, at a university café, I fortuitously ran into… someone, who was at the center of that wretched chain of events. And everything that I’d so diligently repressed, it came pouring back in at once”

He tilted his chin skyward and exhaled slowly and deeply, closing his eyes meditatively as he plumbed the unacknowledged depths of recent experience. “It overwhelmed me so much, I could swear that a part of Susan really was fully in existence again, tangibly and coherently, inside me that day. It physically exhausted me to the point that I slumbered home and passed out; I dreamt of the day I lost her, our last conversation, with an almost violent vividness. I was trembling when I came to, and after I’d wandered into my study with her picture, I spun around when my computer monitor began scrolling massive blocks of text. It was mostly gibberish, but amidst it all was a four-word axiom that Susan often invoked, both with me and in her professional work: ‘Memory really does persist.’ Recurring throughout the screen.”

“Memory really does persist,” repeated Teréz, slowly sounding out each word.

“Yeah. Then came the other manifestations, just as with the workers down here. Some aspect of Susan’s being materialized on a laptop screen while I was driving; I caught only a glimpse and it caused an accident. Then after I’d given a guest lecture at Wake Forest, during the Q&A with the audience, it happened—images of her body from the shoulders up began to manifest right on the screen where I was displaying my slides, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed them.”

“As though they were being conveyed straight from you own mind.”

“That’s exactly it. I soon understood that it was all being mediated by the mysterious artifacts that my Uncle Mitch—their previous caretaker—had passed on to me, dating all the way back to our ancestors from Germany. In fact, all three of these visions are connected in some way to an enabling power from my heirlooms. It’s the very reason that I came to Leipzig in the first place and eventually found my way here. My uncle realized that one of the devices, which he’d called the Cereceph, had somehow been designed to breach the ancient barrier between the inner narrative displayed only for our mind’s eye, and the outside world that others can witness, tapping into those images directly.”

Teréz sat upright, visibly intrigued. “So all the unexplained phenomena that the crews down here witnessed three decades ago—you’ve experienced them too?”

“Not quite; that’s the catch. I never observed some of the other manifestations you’d described. The voices, the non-random patterns in other objects, the images on other surfaces, let alone a full-bodied apparition in three dimensions; I never observed those manifestations. I shut down the Cereceph after the Wake Forest incident to maintain an iota of sanity—that may be why.”

“But that’s not what you believe, is it Tim?” she asked, the skeptical tone of her question answering itself. “It’s why you’re here isn’t it? The artifacts you say you’re seeking… you think they complement what you already have?”

“You’re on my wavelength, Teréz. And from what you’ve said, I’m now more certain of that than before. I don’t know why, though, but I can’t shake the sense that we should have found the missing artifacts by now, that there’s something I’m missing.”

“What do you mean, Tim?”

He winced in frustration, unsuccessfully straining to tease out an awareness that seemed just beyond reach. “I can’t quite put my finger on it—it’s just one of those pre-conscious intuitions that hits you, right before the lightbulb goes off in your head. At least, one would hope. There’s some common thread among all these dream visions, a theme that unites them; and I don’t know why, but I just know it’s supposed to be pointing the way. And somehow, all these visions of Susan are a part of that too.”

He gnashed his teeth and shook his head, lending a voice to his wandering brainstorms. “Departed souls, nascent seeds of consciousness, the ghost in the shell—we think of them as ethereal abstractions, but in the images that I glimpse, they’re concrete, tangible. The scenes in these dreams are embedded in a deep well of fear, reflected in the faces, the expressions, the eyes of everyone in them. The eyes…”

His own eyes briefly met those of Teréz with a sharp gaze in the tenuous light, as eclipsed memories emerged again from the shadows. The developing realization gradually seized his attention and he turned aside, fixing his glance upon the faintly-illuminated bedroom doorway; he rose and stumbled toward it, as she followed his movements with heartfelt concern. The sounds of a snapping briefcase and shuffling papers echoed from the adjacent room even before the lamp flashed on; she slowly made her way toward it, and as her eyes adjusted to the light, she caught sight of Tim hunched down awkwardly before the coffee table, frenziedly penciling in a previously obscure portion of his dream sketch.

Teréz knelt down beside him and draped her arms about his shoulders, pulling close to nuzzle the back of his neck and assuage the anxious tension in his body. As she glanced over his collarbone, she descried the soul-rattling object of his attention—the recent dream sketch that she had only briefly glimpsed before, depicting the frightening scene in the otherworldly house of horrors, with the beast at the center. Tim was obsessively focused on the bizarrely-shaped vault that topped the chamber in the dream scene; he had previously adorned it with inscrutably eerie curves, crescents, spirals, and other elements, whose painstaking technical virtuosity darkly presaged a horrific message that had yet to be filled in. He was now vigorously supplying the missing pieces, obsessively twirling and scratching his pencil to transfer his terrible epiphany to the crinkled paper. The seemingly stray marks and scattered lines coalesced into the outline for a series of interlocking forms, whose nature soon became horridly apparent.

A lump formed in Tim’s throat; he snapped back as though awakening from a trance to behold what his own hands had wrought. The wisps and aborted shapes on the vault had coalesced into a chilling sea of faces. Some appeared vaguely human. Some were feral, with whiskers, fangs, and various tokens of animal ferocity. Still others stemmed from sources unfathomable to a human onlooker, with distinctive features forged over eons on the canvas of worlds unknown. The surreal menagerie bore a haunting collective expressiveness, as though converging on a message that could be grasped only by a consciousness far exceeding the bounds of the human mind. The faces in the drawing stood out most alarmingly for their piercing eyes, infused with a range of expression. A few of them appeared curiously serene or strangely contemplative, some anxious or alarmed; yet none evoked pleasure or contentedness, and many were beset with frothing rage or ghastly agony, blending into or even biting other faces in their vicinity.

“Tim,” began Teréz breathlessly, eyeing his additions with awestruck horror, “what prompted this?”

“The fountain—” he replied cryptically, still focusing on the sketch in the manner of a man obsessed.

“The… what?”

Tim slowly angled his eyes toward her as he elaborated. His voice was unsettling in its incongruously calm demeanor, like an oracle gradually spooling out an omen toward a frightening revelation. “I first glimpsed it at Gregor’s estate, on the Baltic. He had a hidden cellar tucked away from his courtyard, a repository for the most cherished finds from his historical research. It turned out that he’d been chasing the same shadows as I was, independently, and among his findings was a painted narrative with extraordinary detail, that must have required the skills of a dozen expert artisans. It was splayed out on scrolls, like those grand Chinese woodcuts from the Ming Dynasty, with elaborate ornamentation that spanned three panels. There was something among its many scenes and facets that seized hold of me, with such a frightful power that I was knocked unconscious; it’s where I first saw, and was for once able to remember, the dream vision of…”

“Tim, wait,” she interrupted, her brow furrowed in agitated puzzlement. “This narrative depiction on the scrolls—you said it was part of Gregor’s historical research? I thought he was a scholar of Leibniz and his philosophy.”

“That’s right, Teréz,” he answered, baffling her still further. “It’s a long story, but Gregor’s investigations implied that Leibniz was among several of the period’s great minds, who maintained a vague affiliation with a shadowy group that was ultimately responsible for my heirlooms, and the artifacts we’re seeking here. It was they who commissioned the triptych I saw in the cellar. Gregor spent decades searching for it, and it’s the only primary historical source we have for this mysterious organization; in fact, it depicts the only known instance in which their cover was blown, and whatever happened in its midst, they took great pains to record it. Neither I nor Gregor appreciated its full significance at first; but the Battle of Katzenwald was the first time the world bore witness to the ancient mysteries they were harboring inside.”

“The Katzenwald?!” she queried, her curiosity sharply piqued.

“You’ve heard of it?” he asked, arching his shoulders as he pivoted toward her.

“I’m well-versed with the lore surrounding it. When the Brothers Grimm penned their famous fairy tales in the 1700s, they drew on the local traditions about enchanted woods, populated by malevolent spirits and inhabitants; the original version of Hansel and Gretel was quite a dark and eldritch tale. Needless to say, the legends were partially anchored in fact: The forests of Central Europe were the killing fields of the Thirty Years’ War, after all, and the blood spilled on their soil scarred the memories of generations to come.”

“That’s right! The scenes on those scrolls were in a forest, during the Thirty Years’ War.”

“But Tim, the Battle of Katzenwald was just a myth. Many forests shared that same name, sprinkled throughout the German statelets during the 17^th century, yet they never played host to the major conflicts. They merely provided a convenient setting for the fervid imaginations of a populace that was horror-stricken—and understandably so. They’d suffered the most hideous traumas of war for a generation; the villages had become tombs, littered with the bones of soldiers and the innocents caught in the crossfire. So they concocted ghost stories to disguise the real horrors, with entire armies vanishing in the fog of the conflict; the woods supposedly swallowed them whole, as it were, engulfing them in the evil vapors of an unearthly…”

“Teréz,” interjected Tim suddenly, “the clash in the Katzenwald was indeed something out of a nightmare, dark and unearthly as you said. But it was real all the same. The forest in this case harbored the contemporary equivalent of a classified research operation, housed in a castle that doubled as… something like a cross between a laboratory and military barracks. It was concealed within an unknown river valley beyond an almost impassable swampland, with frightening tales disseminated by the castle’s inhabitants themselves, as a further deterrent to interlopers. Yet my ancestors stumbled upon it nonetheless, in flight from a raiding party that overran their village.”

“Your dream vision!” she exclaimed. “Is that what you were seeing? Your ancestors fleeing into that castle?”

“Yes, among other things. That and my other visions commenced only after I took possession of the heirlooms, originally fashioned with the help of the very figures who occupied that stronghold in the Katzenwald. That’s what I was trying to say before: The devices can directly interface with the control centers of the brain, where we process information in general. It’s why I have so much difficulty recalling them when I awake—they’re memories transplanted inside me, not borne from my own experiences. The Cereceph projects images from my mind’s eye, while the other artifacts go the opposite way; their creators imbued them with coded messages and entire narratives, the things I glimpse in my dreams.”

He gazed skyward, his words priming the elusive images to take shape again as his voice fell to an accentuated whisper. “And so I witnessed Karl and Maria Schumacher as well as their pursuers, gliding through the Wald and a series of tunnels. They stumbled into the valley and the Castle of Heilbrunnen, its inhabitants garbed like monks but devising technologies we can barely comprehend even today. The attackers thought their archenemy was being sheltered within, and carnage ensued; blood stained the walls, fire tore through the corridors, and the fortress was razed to the ground. My ancestors were eventually shuttled off to a place of refuge, but as they threaded their way through the chambers and crypts of the castle…” He reached for the sketch and creased it slightly, emphasizing a detail that quickly consumed his attention. “They came across a sight that should never curse human eyes: a fountain erupting in a terraced stream, but with a river of souls visible in the water that it gushed out, full of contorted faces and hideous eyes ”

They gazed meditatively at the bizarre object in the heart of the drawing, its sparse lines and etchings having united in a hellish form, bedecked with what appeared to be predatory birds and a menagerie of skulls and skeletal remains from dozens of unknown worlds.

“The fountainhead in the center,” said Teréz, “that’s the link among your visions, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. The one in my drawing, it must be a conduit, a channel of some sort that’s mimicked many times in the background of the picture; look, the demon himself appears to be invoking it, to create that vault of souls above. And it’s horridly elaborate here, much more than the one I saw in Gregor’s diorama. You could gather together the collective inspiration of 100 mad, tormented sculptors, and I can’t imagine them conceiving anything like this.”

“But what does it represent, Tim? I mean.. this whole nightmare of a scene?”

“It’s what I have to piece together, Teréz. Whatever its significance, the inhabitants of that castle must have appreciated it, too. Enough to not only reconstruct the fountain, but to make it the common thread of every clue they’ve sent forth through the centuries, including the scenes they’ve affixed within my dreams. It’s probably why the very sight of it overpowered me so much in Gregor’s cellar: The sheer onslaught of whatever they’re trying to communicate, it hit me all at once when I caught sight of the fountain. And I think they were weaving together more than just one message inside that symbolism; it must be pointing the way to the rest of the artifacts.”

“So you think the fountain is a metaphor… for some object here in the bunker?”

“No,” he answered firmly, setting the sketch aside on the coffee table and gazing squarely into her eyes again. “I think that fountain must be literally marking the spot, Teréz. I remember now, from both the painting and my own vision—it led to the artifacts in the fortress of the Katzenwald. And if Minister Krusenstern so coveted his discovery from the caverns of the Albertina, he would have carefully preserved their original arrangement, which must have included that replica of the fountain.”

She shook her head incredulously. “Even if this fountain were to mark the artifacts somehow, I don’t see it how it helps us, Tim,” she protested. “We’re still back to poring through all these rooms and corridors, searching for something bizarrely out-of-place. Unless…”

She sat up and turned her head to the side, murmuring to herself as Tim looked on, anxiously awaiting whatever realization she was wading through so diligently. “It must be in the greenhouse”

“A greenhouse? Down here?”

“It just occurred to me; it was mentioned several times, buried in the footnotes of the Russian archives that chronicled the construction of the Rostov Complex. The high officials who commissioned the bunker, incuding Minister Krustenstern, signed off on an annex to the facility—an artificial greenhouse, including a garden. They naturally worried about their self-sufficiency if they were to be confined down here for months or years, waiting for the radioactive fallout to ebb away in a bombed-out world above.”

“Seems they overlooked the little detail about sunlight reaching a fortification five stories down,” he answered tartly, as she unfurled the schematic of the fallout shelter again, her index finger tracing a looping path on its right side.

“Actually, they had a plan for that—fiber optic cables to concentrate and tease the sun’s rays to the interior, while protecting them from residual fallout. It was supposedly a brainstorm from the good Dr. Krusenstern himself. But the powers-that-were eventually soured on the plan and aborted the project; it’s absent from the floor layout here, and its very mention disappeared a few pages into the archives. There were some blotted-out passages, like those official redactions by the Soviet authorities for sensitive documents, but otherwise no explanation for the subsequent omissions. Still…”

Teréz retrieved a wrinkled page in cellophane from the small binder housing the blueprints, rotating and meticulously superimposing it upon the main schematic. She then rested her finger on a spot surrounded by a diffuse tangle of loops and cables, tapping it for effect. “They were fairly careful to mark the fiber optics on the wire diagram. It must be here, Tim,” she said, rising up from the sofa and quickly throwing on her clothes as he did the same. “They built a little labyrinth on this side, for long-term storage and supplies—it’s toward the northeast.”

“You lead the way.”

Upon reaching the threshold of the spacious officer’s quarters, she halted unexpectedly, grinning with a teenager’s mischievous sense of amusement as she extended her hand back to embrace his.

“Hansel and Gretel indeed,” he chuckled, requiting her gesture as she led him impetuously out of the room.

*******************************************

They rounded a series of corners and ducked under low ceilings, twisting and turning through a baffling array of halls and half-built chambers. Finally, the pair arrived at a heavily-insulated, eerily tomb-like enclosure with gray-brick walls, wooden beams and rafters, and the hiss of trapped air currents about them. The area was littered with a workman’s rough graffiti and surrounded by the metallic clutter of a project never quite completed. They spun around amidst the dim, buzzing light, in a vain attempt to locate the door that Tim had crossed an ocean to find.

“It must be here,” she said in a pleading tone, as if taking umbrage at the lack of an obvious portal.

“I believe you; but if they left this project in permanent limbo, they might have boarded the thing up before they took off.”

Tim paused momentarily and stepped back, his eyes impressed by a pattern of the flickering light on the east wall.

“Take a look there,” he remarked, waving his fingers back and forth across a stretch about four feet wide. “The wooden beams are all cross-hatched, but they’re slightly off-center here, and the grain of the wood differs from the rest of the wall.”

They nodded to each other, Tim seizing hold of a bent metal rod nearby and using it as a crowbar to pry away the beams, as Teréz gingerly stepped in to help clear away the straggling pieces. “I got it,” he said, clenching his teeth with each tug, “you’d probably break a nail or two trying to clear out this…”

She vigorously split one of the crosshatches with a mildly rusty, yet sturdy hammer that had been sitting nearby, smiling at her surprised partner. “I had to put up and take down my own sets when I started in the acting business,” she replied. “A little job like this pales in comparison.”

“Feel free to rekindle those good ol’ days,” chuckled Tim.

The two of them worked away for several minutes removing the wood and then chipping at the improvised, thin section of wall behind it. Finally, a rush of slightly stale air from the other side signaled a breakthrough.

“Teréz, the hammer!”

He clutched the tool tightly, impatiently pivoting its arched prongs to force out ever larger wedges of the friable barrier. He gasped and wheezed on occasion as his lungs sucked in a mixture of chipped plaster, shredded fiberglass, and accumulated debris. To their joint surprise, the sealed-off chamber before them was lit, albeit faintly and spottily.

“It would seem that Minister Krusenstern intended to finish what he started,” suggested Teréz, responding to Tim’s evident befuddlement at the illumination.

“Right,” he mused aloud, squinting his eyes in a largely unsuccessful attempt to discern the bizarre outlines of the structures inside. “Though I wonder if these lamps may serve to merely ensure that the wiring’s still intact inside; they’re far too dim to light the way.’

“Hard to tell from out here.” She coiled her body through the forced opening in the wall, with Tim supporting and quickly following her in. As they moved gingerly through the dull illumination, their eyes steadily acclimated to their surroundings, and the once amorphous contours of the objects inside took terrifying shape before them: the sculptural equivalent of a charnel house, filled with grisly, gargoyle-like figures and the scattered likenesses of body parts, strewn in little piles throughout the room. The vast greenhouse supplied clear evidence of its assigned function, with terraced slopes and precisely-arranged rows in place to anchor rice paddies, vegetable gardens, and a variety of decorative plants. Yet its grounds and periphery alike bore macabre testimony to a mind that had descended into the first stages of a gruesome madness.

“I guess this explains the disappearance of the would-be greenhouse from the records,” remarked Tim, vainly attempting to stifle a nervous stammer in his voice. “It sure as Hell wasn’t just the hassles of a botched construction job.”

“Minister Krusenstern described… an ocean of torments in his diary, around the time he was committed to the asylum in Belarus,” observed Teréz. “Good God, how he must have suffered as he lost his grip.”

The two of them almost unconsciously drew closer to each other, finding small comfort amidst the horrors that surrounded them in the near-darkness of the bunker. Tim’s recent explorations had often filled his heart with dread, but they could not approach the abject, primal fear that coursed throughout him here, deep in the unknown catacombs of a forgotten shelter, amidst the physical realization of another man’s most hideous nightmares on the path to insanity.

The air currents in the room were accompanied by a faint, ghostly howl, and the unnerving, soul-taunting ambience was magnified by the greenhouse’s surreal incongruities—colorfully-adorned windows and shutters inexplicably carved into the subterranean walls, ghoul-like effigies dangling from elaborate gallows, distorted human forms etched into half-completed beams and pillars, torturing devices from the darkest days of the Inquisition. The grand guignol quality of the sights before them—enhanced by the twisted imagination and attention to detail on display—filled the two onlookers with a palpable nausea, as though they had departed the earth entirely upon breaching the wall, stumbling into a purgatory not meant for the eyes of the living.

“Tim,” began Teréz, recoiling as though attempting to curl her body away from the ghastly scene before them, “what does all this mean? Did the artifacts drive the Minister to all this?”

“So it would appear, but—I don’t understand why he in particular was so gruesomely affected by them,” he answered, his eyes still surveying the scene and soberly adjusting to what they were taking in.

“Didn’t you say that these things have a history of doing this to people caught in their path?”

“Nothing like this, Teréz. I just can’t fathom why…” He fixed his eyes on the grisly figures beneath the gallows, their facial features bulging in a sickeningly graphic display of freakish agony; he then shifted his gaze to the torture devices, most notably the medieval rack, engineered to in its mechanical precision.

“Minister Krusenstern,” he said, turning abruptly toward her, “you’d mentioned he was epileptic?”

“Well-documented, yes—ever since he was wee little. But it was well-managed, nothing at all debilitating at least until everything that transpired here.”

“Did the records mention what kind of epilepsy he suffered from?”

“Not that I know of, Tim; why do you ask?”

“Parietal lobe epilepsy—in severe cases, the mind twists around the proportions of objects that it perceives, both directly and in our dreams. That’s the common thread with the horrors that the Minister has put on hideous display here. The distorted figures strung up on the gallows, those devices…” He signaled toward the grotesquely well-engineered rack, fronting a collection of medieval torturing instruments borne of a talented yet morbid imagination. “The Inquisitors stretched out a prisoner’s limbs until they confessed or recanted, a horrible thing to behold.”

He gently squeezed her arm, prompting her to turn and face him. “The missing artifacts that the Minister found, Teréz—they must have the power to amplify whatever specters were haunting his mind, not merely to project them. But the artifacts themselves didn’t drown the poor man in madness; something got to him.”

“The beast?” she queried meekly, as though in fear that her very invocation of the entity could fill the hall of horrors about them with its malevolent presence.

“In some form,” he nodded, “and God knows what it is.” He narrowed his eyes curiously as Teréz’s widened pupils fixated on a target behind him. Tim twisted around slowly, his gaze locking onto a strange, filled-in arched structure to the northeast—resembling the upper half of a towering sarcophagus that was poised above an entryway, shrouded in an abyss of darkness and sternly warning away any visitors from exploring the realm of the dead beyond. The entryway beneath the arch had itself been collapsed, like the stony doorway of a long-abandoned mine, to form the headstone of an irregular wall that bisected the northeast of the old greenhouse. As the contours of the structure gradually revealed themselves, Tim backed away at an impulse, startled by an unexpectedly familiar.sight.

“What is it?” Teréz asked.

“A common thread…” he answered cryptically, slowly approaching the bizarre architecture and the carvings upon its face. “It’s a warning, a rubric to be exact—some foretelling of the demon’s plans.”

His eyes traced a path back and forth across the etchings on the stone of the arch: a menacing, all-seeing eye from which arrow-like beams of light streamed out amidst a bloodshot fury, followed by a mysterious depiction of what appeared to be a cityscape dominated by four towers of varying height. The next scene featured a raging vortex consuming much of the city, followed by a strange, meshlike matrix extending from two poles, with the laces in the mesh inexplicably sprouting irregular and grotesque forms to create a structure that Tim could not quite discern. The scenes toward the rubric’s right side, for unknown reasons, appeared to have been hastily defaced.

“Zach and I encountered a message just like this, within the caverns beneath the library at Borna. It was at the threshold of a chamber where many of the artifacts had been manufactured. According to a notebook we found on site, the rubric had been carved out by one of the workers in a fit of madness, just like Minister Krusenstern.”

“And you’re saying that this rubric—it prophesied future events?”

He sighed and nodded as the two of them halted before the arch, wrinkling his nose from the stale air permeating the chamber. “With frightening accuracy, Teréz, even though everything in those caverns had been cobbled together in the 17^th century. The carving on the stone wall there warned of a presence suddenly taking hold of an ‘iron chariot,’ incapacitating its occupants and causing many to disappear entirely. Zach and I were completely stumped at first, until we happened to catch the news on the same day of our visit to Jürgen at the Leipzig train station.”

“My God—the incident on the Chicago subway?”

“Yeah, it wasn’t a terrorist strike, Teréz. The authorities have locked down half the city hunting down the perpetrators, bur they could scarcely imagine what they’re up against.”

“The demon?”

Tim nodded stoically. “That worker down in the catacombs of Borna, not to mention Minister Krusenstern here,” he said, struggling to digest the chilling message on the stone arch, “their minds were somehow able to absorb information streams outside of normal bounds, just like the images that have been assaulting my own thoughts out of who-knows-where. But they were overwhelmed by it, so much so that they glimpsed the plans of the beast himself, what he’s had in store for eons. The rubric beneath the library was a snapshot of the demon’s mind, so this one must serve the same purpose; if only I knew what it was trying to say…”

“Tim!’ exclaimed Teréz, having advanced to a forward point on the right past the arched structure. “You may want to see this.”

The sinuous dividing wall had been collapsed hastily at the arch in the front, as though to forever seal off whatever was inside the thick corridor it seemed to form. Yet a strange anomaly had inserted itself at a nondescript, almost totally obscured bend in the barrier: a jagged perforation with sharp edges at the entry point, and a pick-ax lying awkwardly on the ground behind the bend.

“So,” reasoned Teréz, as Tim knelt down and meticulously examined the scene, “we’re not the first ones to stumble around back here since the fallout shelter went defunct.”

“I’m not sure I’d call it ‘stumbling around’, Teréz. Look…” He twisted and pushed on a protruding portion of the stone, causing it to crumble before them. “This section is more friable than the rest of the partition, and offhand, I don’t see any pick marks anywhere else. Whoever did this—they knew enough about the construction down here to focus on this spot.”

“Then why was the wall leading into the old greenhouse still intact?”

“Maybe because someone else erected it after… whoever this was, disappeared back here. Or perhaps they were aware of another entrance, without needing to breach the wall as we did, especially if they knew their way around here.”

“Tim, do you see that?” queried Teréz with a sudden burst of anxiety, as she pointed toward flake-like material that had oddly deposited itself on several of the edges. At once, Tim retrieved a small flashlight from a breast pocket, shaking it before twisting it to activate its illuminating rays.

“I figured this might be a useful accessory after the unexpected detour Zach and I took into the depths beneath the library in Borna. I wanted to conserve the batteries while our eyes could at least adjust to the ambient light here, but at this point,” he said, swirling the beams in a narrow cone before him, “I think we’re gonna need to see everything with clearer eyes.”

Tim froze the light at a zig-zagging point along the entrance, gingerly prying something off from the edge. He then lifted it for Teréz to behold, their eyes widening apprehensively at the sight: a stylized button like those used in suits and military uniforms, backed by a swatch of faded gray fabric, and spotted with crusted flecks of a material that had been lodged between the object and the stone. Tim immediately directed the flashlight toward strategic locations beside and underneath the area where the button had become trapped, sighing anxiously as his findings confirmed their mutual suspicion.

“The droplets have definitely faded over what must have been years down here,” he remarked, his voice muted while his imagination bombarded him with an array of discomfiting possibilities. “But the bunker has been sealed up so well, for so long—who knows how long ago this blood was shed.”

“Can you switch off the light for a moment, Tim?”

“Why?”

“Just—I don’t know, a hunch. God knows this place makes a person hallucinate but… I could have sworn I saw something inside that corridor from a certain angle, like a flash.”

He nodded nervously and twisted the small flashlight back off, as Teréz poised herself meticulously beside the makeshift entrance, adjusting her glance with an almost surgical precision.

“Tim, come closer—you can see it from here.” He nestled himself intimately beside her, gazing over her shoulder and straining his eyes to detect whatever she had discerned. “The way they’ve set up the twists and curves of the corridor, it’s like an optical illusion; seems pitch-black as far as the eye can see. But right at this point…” she turned her forehead against his and positioned her hands gently about his ears, guiding his vantage point to match hers. “Can you see it? It’s like the frame of an open door, and there’s a violet color… outlining the edge ever so faintly, with each pulsation.”

“My God, you’re right.” He stood up partially and activated the flashlight again, carefully yet impatiently twisting his body to fit into the narrow opening.

“Teréz, you should probably stay outside here. It’s impossible to know what’s lingering back there, but considering what we’ve found at the entrance…”

“No, Tim, it’s all right; I’m coming with you,” she answered firmly.

“Teréz, please—nobody knows we’re down in this hellhole right now, and if this structure were to cave in or some other calamity were to strike, then we’d both be trapped here. Whatever the source of all this, it’s what I came here for; I should do this alone.”

“Tim,” she insisted, “if I’d feared the darkness down here, I would have left your side long ago.” He sighed in resignation, realizing that his attempts would be a lost cause. “Besides,” she hastened to add, “before I signed out today, I passed on our plans for exploring the tunnels down here, to my best friend and colleague in the Medieval Collections Department. Just a premonition, I guess; she’s holding it in confidence, but if God-forbid something happens to us and she doesn’t hear from me tonight, she’ll know that our plans went awry.”

“OK, but follow my every step, and keep your eyes on the light going forward.”

They slowly advanced, step by painstaking step, for a seeming eternity as the mysterious corridor blended into the northeast wall. As they sidled and wove their way ahead through the cramped surroundings, the eerie throbbing drew uncomfortably closer, until the purplish light began to illuminate their steps without need for the accessory light. Tim swallowed forcefully and took the hand of Teréz, as the two of them prepared to confront whatever was concealed beyond the sharp bend in the path ahead.

The pair exhaled with a startle as they nearly stumbled down upon traversing the narrow doorway, into a bizarre chamber at a drop of a few inches from the corridor leading into it. The room was sternly rectangular, like a religious temple, and its walls forged from an obsidian-like rock that amplified and reflected the pulsating light, imbuing the room with the surreal ambience of ghosts and spirits coursing through every nook and cranny. The effect was further enhanced by the ceiling, painstakingly decorated with mischievous spirits in the style of medieval frescoes teeming with forest sprites, nymphs, and elves. Tim’s mouth gaped open in wonder as he finally took notice of its source: A multi-tiered fountain that stretched slightly beyond Tim’s height, cut from a jewel-like stone that had been elaborately carved to an impossibly fine standard, with a surreal stream of forms and faces issuing forth from its center.

“Incredible,” he said. “It’s just like the depiction on the old triptych in Gregor’s cellar, a scaled-down version of that horrid contraption in my dream visions and…” He reached into his pants pocket to retrieve a small, crumpled sheet from a notepad, on which a precise rendition of the fountain from Tim’s dreams had been carefully reproduced.

“Tim!!” exclaimed Teréz, shuddering visibly as she pointed breathlessly toward the top of the structure. “The colors, Tim—they changed just now, when you pulled out that sketch. And the faces…”

Alarmed, he crammed the shriveled page back into his pocket and made his way cautiously forward. To his shock, the hues in the fountain had shifted to a variegated spectrum from the faint violet that had been projected before; even more frightening, the faces therein were gazing out toward him, as they flowed upward from the base of the structure and disappeared at the apex of the light stream. Nearly seized by terror, he nonetheless continued to march ahead, his eyes matching those of the spirits that somehow appeared to grasp their surroundings…

Suddenly, the entrance behind them slid shut, and a horrifying, wailing sound—overlapping in an otherwordly, spectral fashion—emerged from the fountain. They instinctively darted toward the entrance while covering their ears, frantically seeking a way out as they strove to avoid even a peripheral glance at the horrors unfolding behind them. Gradually, the anguished cries of the fountain souls died down to become a faint, yet still deeply unsettling presence in the background, as the diffuse stream of faces continued to pour out of the fountain, taking shape and staring with a haunting, curious expression at the two terrified visitors. His fright slowly giving way to anxious astonishment, Tim allowed himself a few halting glances at the bizarre phenomenon, slowly turning around to observe it once again.

“Teréz,” he said, gently cradling his hands around her neck, “it’s OK, they won’t hurt us.”

[put this earlier, at least a portion fo it]

“What are they?! Those souls—ah, God, the way they looked at us, as though they know we’re here.”

“They do, Teréz.” Tim’s terse answer stood in seeming contradiction to his awkward attempt to reassure; he quickly moved to elaborate. “That fountain houses an extraordinary artificial intelligence, forged by the very same people who constructed these artifacts centuries ago.”

“So the souls in there…” she replied abortively, making a tentative glance toward the bizarre phenomenon before slowly approaching it by Tim’s side.

“They’re manifestations of whatever sentience those old alchemists created within the fountain. Our computers today interact with, interpret the world all the time; Jürgen himself had a contraption that could represent human faces, among his magician’s props. But this fountain—it must be at least a decade ahead of even our most advanced research today.” a computer that could interpret images in the finest detail, to reproduce objects and even faces realistically on the screen without prompting. The fountain is similar in concept, but unbelievably more advanced, well beyond our known capabilities. That must be why the souls are peering out at us, changing color—they can sense us, and they’re trying to communicate.”

“What are they trying to say? You said you’ve seen this fountain many times in your visions—can you remember anything significant?”

“You’re right, Teréz,” he confirmed, meditatively eyeing the stream before inclining his gaze upward, anxiously combing his fragmented memories for clues. “There was something about the fountain in the triptych from Gregor’s estate, and in my dreams about my ancestor’s flight…”

He shut his eyes as though to enter a trance, revisiting the murky depths of his desultory visions. “Something that Maria Schumacher noticed, when she and the cobbler Karl were being ushered into the hidden chamber of the fortress in the Katzenwald. She saw those faces too peering out at her, and was terrified by them. But it wasn’t just raw fear; even her emotions and reactions are part of the river of memories that inhabit those visions, and she was surprised at a very specific element of that fountain, something that took place just as they prepared to enter the room housing the artifacts.”

“You mean, a signal of sorts from the fountain? Like the color change that we just saw?”

“No, it was something that was done to the fountain, not by it. I can almost recall it now—Christoph der Augenspiegel, one of the alchemist-monks who rescued them from the raiding parties pouring into the castle. He doubled back when they were about to enter the chamber, and he… damn what was it? She was behind the fountain at that point, so she merely caught a glimpse. It was a device, something that he withdrew from the lower frame of the fountain, altered and then put back… an abacus!”

He rushed to the edge of the fountain, his eyes rapidly scanning its finely sculpted features as his right hand traced an imaginary arc corresponding to his dusky visions.

“I don’t understand, Tim—why would an abacus be hidden inside the fountain?”

“Its builders used it for many purposes, and they must have also designed it as a gateway of sorts, a switch that has some connection to the artifacts. The abacus must be set up to process a code that can be entered on its beads…”

As he pawed and groped about the surface of the fountain, desperately searching for what his visions had imparted, his hand brushed against a bird-shaped ornament that moved slightly clockwise, like a gear yet to be engaged. He sighed in anticipation, then twisted the handle and stood back, as an elaborate stone abacus rose out of a hidden compartment just off the center of the fountain, pushing itself forward to the two flabbergasted onlookers. The stones of the abacus were speckled with old bloodstains, further filling the two of them with dread for whatever awaited.

“Five digits,” observed Teréz.

“Precisely,” affirmed Tim, stepping back and tensing his lower jaw, as he parsed out an insight of great magnitude yet uncertain implications. He turned toward Teréz again, shooting a resolute glance in her direction. “And I think I know the code it expects to see.”

He stoically approached the abacus again, sweating uncomfortably as he prepared to maneuver the stones into position.

“4,” whispered Teréz, gazing over Tim’s shoulder. “6. 1. 1…” Tim abruptly halted at the final digit, trembling as though seized by a premonition of what was about to come. He gnashed his teeth and inhaled deeply, slowly and deliberately shifting the fifth stone to its designated slot. “7.”

At once, the color of the fountain’s stream shifted again, but this time to a harsh, dusky blood-red, sending the two visitors fleeing back toward the shuttered entrance in fright. The dispositions on the faces metamorphosed into a display of concentrated rage, and a growling, low-pitched ululation began to emanate from the mouth of the fountain itself. Suddenly, a billowy red haze gushed out from where the stream of souls had been flowing before, coursing into the chamber and overwhelming the terrified pair trapped inside. They were unable even to scream as the mist filled their lungs and progressively weakened their bodies, sending them to their knees; they mustered their dwindling vestiges of strength to clasp each other in their quivering arms, before crumpling to the ground in a heap, facing upward. They retained a feeble shred of consciousness as a grinding sound permeated the room. As they lay there, motionless and powerless, they eyed the surrealistic paintings on the ceiling of the chamber; the impish expressions borne by its motley spirits and sprites faded into the distance, receding amidst the darkness that swiftly and inexorably engulfed them.

*******************************************

Teréz sat up with a piercing gasp, clutching her throat as she frantically gulped in the pitch-black, musty air about her, liberated at least of the caustic red brew that had felled her and Tim merely minutes before. She groped amid the stifling darkness, struggling to free her vocal cords from the effects of the gas that had paralyzed them. Her movements were still awkward, halting and uncoordinated, as her muscles gradually unlatched themselves. Nevertheless, she was able to lock an outstretched hand with Tim’s, and they pulled together in a desperate embrace—a solitary balm of familiarity, to assuage their terror amidst the hideously disorienting darkness.

“T—Tim, di—” Her voice was tremulous, her jaw twitching as she struggled to give voice to her fears. “Did we just… fall into a… trap here?”

Tim responded initially with a discomfiting silence, himself recovering from the shock of their recent experience and frantically searching for his bearings within the deep pit into which they had fallen. “Call me crazy, Princess,” he said, his voice having finally returned, “but this is no trap. That mist probably saved our lives. Look, can you see?”

He brushed the back of his hand upward against her cheek, directing her eyes toward the only source of faint light to impinge upon the sea of darkness in which they were surrounded: the now-dimmed fountain of souls, its feeble emanations barely visible many stories above. Propping herself on his shoulders, she clambered to stand and see for herself, Tim quickly joining her side.

“My God!” lamented Teréz, her eyes welling up as she trembled in a nearly primal terror. “Are we going to die down here like this, alone down here?”

“I don’t think so. Just an intuition, from everything I’ve beheld so far with my own eyes whether awake or not, but… I just can’t believe they would’ve exerted so much effort to construct all this, transport us down here, then just leave us to wither away in some bottomless pit.” He choked down a hard lump in his throat, the forced equanimity in his voice and the cover of darkness masking his anxious uncertainty about his own conclusions.

Suddenly, the jarring onset of a voice unseen startled the terrified pair. They spun around fearfully in the shadows, frantically seeking a source as the voice coalesced about them. The voice was strained, occasionally so breathless that it slipped into a whisper, but also clearly resolute in whatever it was imparting.

“It’s Russian!” she exclaimed.

“Can you make out what he’s saying?”

“Sounds like an old recording, what you’d find in an old phonograph in attack. It’s missing a word here and there but…” She inhaled deeply, focusing her mind to piece together the mysterious greeting—its ominous tone persisting through its fragmented delivery.

“My deepest apologies, friends,” she began, leveling her voice as she settled into the translation. “It is not my custom to hurry through a matter of such grave import, but I may fall at any moment to another seizure, draining out whatever life still remains in my broken body. If you are heeding my voice in this Godforsaken pit, it means that at least one of you has been cursed with the knowledge of that wicked number, devoured by the same predators of the mind that have scarcely allowed me a sweet night of undisturbed rest… I can only hope that you have somehow been spared the worst of the nightmares that have stolen away my life’s work, my family, even the privileged domain of my private thoughts and dreams. I pray that my obsession, my sacrifice will help to grant you the insight to save us.”

She paused momentarily, as though taken aback by what she had just begun to translate. “You have little time, so you must listen to all I say. The foe that you face is as old as the Earth itself, his intentions more horrid for us, for all of us, than any devil that our ancestors could have conceived. I first learned of his being and his presence many years ago in the course of an extraordinary assignment. One of our young Kant scholars had done historical research that implied the existence of an archaeological treasure, hidden by unknown forces beneath the Albertina of old Königsberg.”

“Vasili Mendeleev!” whispered Tim to himself, as Teréz continued in businesslike consistency. “Jürgen was right.”

“I was tasked to lead the excavation team that recovered the artifacts. While some items were missing, our find was beyond the imagination of mortal minds; the authorities at once declared the objects to be classified with tightly restricted entry into their storage site, with exclusive access eventually conferred upon me alone. Even in my team’s first X-ray scans of the excavation site, there was a…” she stalled, struggling to render a concept that eluded description as she broke the fourth wall. “A sentience, a ubiquitous presence. I’m filling in the gaps, Tim; I can’t quite translate it. He said there was a being, with a foothold everywhere on earth but not yet—whole, or something to that effect.”

“Not yet whole?”

“It wasn’t unified as a… ugh,” she remarked in frustration, “too many gaps in the recording. The being has always existed here, but not condensed as a unitary consciousness; that’s the closest I can render it, Tim. Yet, some element among the artifacts made its nascent presence visible; the excavating team could see… ghosts, spirits it seemed, when they first X-rayed the caverns beneath the Albertina, something amplified by the artifacts.”

“That’s strange; when my heirlooms were being held up in customs, Zach said the same thing, that the X-ray scanners went all Twilight Zone and scared the living daylights out of the officers. What’s he saying now, Teréz?”

Her tone sank back into calm exposition, again channeling the mysterious voice as her own.

“As I subsequently pieced together the discovery, I perceived the demon more and more, eyes awake or asleep. But I soon realized that the realms of my dreams were no longer my own creations. As I came to fathom this fiend, he… some fragment of his being infected my own. Perhaps I am among those who were never meant to feast on such forbidden knowledge, even the few tenuous strands that I could grasp. I assembled the artifacts through trial and error, day and night… but I ultimately could not withstand the entity’s invasion of my very soul, dredging up the most primal impulses and terrors of my mind. My very being began to rot away from the inside; I saw the demon every time I gazed into the mirror.”

Tim began to tremble, the ghostly cool of their unknown surroundings exacerbating the chill of anxiety he felt coursing throughout him.

“I managed to record much of my work and my observations, before my mind gave way completely. I was far too impetuous and proceeded foolishly, but I hope that I can help to spare you the same fate. I never fully understood what the artifacts could do, but they have a far greater power than merely projecting what lies within our minds; they can tap into the very essence of existence itself, to take the idea and… render it as flesh and blood.”

“What?!!”

“The source of these devices has eluded me, even to my dying breath, but I now know of the aim for which they were conceived with such great urgency. When properly assembled, and made active… they will create something living and breathing, bringing it tangibly into existence. Only upon this unearthly act of creation, can you save all of us from the demon. Beware, for he will not remain idle as you proceed. Even if your mind can surmount what mine cannot, he will target you in due course, seek to lead you astray by…”

“By what, Teréz? What did he say?”

“I can’t tell, Tim; it’s too garbled. But he’s finishing up… something about a legendary scroll among the artifacts, a long-concealed opus from the hand of Kant himself”

“The Kant’s Precipice!” Tim exclaimed, to her surprise. “That must be what Jürgen was referring to when he—aaaghh!”

The two of them abruptly crumpled to the ground, as a blinding ring of lights switched on about them. They embraced each other tightly to shield their eyes further, in a desperate reflex as their knees buckled beneath. The voice ebbed away, and their eyes gradually adjusted to the deluge of illumination about them. They had landed in the center of a cave-like elevator shaft, sealed off on one side but winding into a tortuous labyrinth on the other. The lights had somehow been embedded into the coarse rock about them.

Suddenly, a large rectangular section of the rock behind them pushed itself outward and upward. They quickly turned to discern what was inside, their eyes immediately catching sight of a dazzling menagerie of painstakingly crafted devices, forged from seemingly mystical materials and otherwordly geometries. As they wheeled around to approach the entrance, they discerned a poignant figure perched just inside the portal: a skeleton, clad in a brown uniform with honorific chevrons meticulously sewn in near the right epaulet.

“The Soviet officials used to wear this,” remarked Teréz, kneeling down to examine the figure. “They added the stripes to their civilian garb to recognize prior military service as a soldier or advisor. Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan.” She maneuvered her way in, carefully and respectfully clearing off the grime that obscured the left side of the uniform, as she made out the Cyrillic letters woven into the shorn fabric. She leaned back against the frame of the entrance and sighed, eyeing Tim with a knowing nod.

“Rest in peace, Minister,” he said stoically, redirecting his focus to take stock of the marvels in the room before them. “Your efforts won’t be in vain, we’ll make sure of that.”

“So to recap, the two of you were trapped down in some freakish pit below the fallout shelter, 15 stories under the museum—without anyone knowing you were down there? That’s somebody’s sick idea of a horror movie.”

“I thought we were in one, Zach. Some of the things we saw, and heard… I can only imagine what it was like for poor Minister Krusenstern down in that hellhole all alone. He could have left that pit anytime after he’d been injured from his seizure; he himself had constructed the lift that Teréz and I found across the winding passage from the artifact room. But he stayed down there, prepping his notes and the recording even as he bled out.”

“What’s the museum doing with the windfall?”

“They’re inspecting every single item in the cache, every shard or throwaway notation they can decipher. Teréz said they’re shutting down the whole museum for a few days, fabricating some cover story about a hazardous renovation in the north wing, to keep the press at bay.”

“That never really works, you know.”

“I have no illusions to the contrary, but we just need a couple days, to follow this bread crumb trail. The Minister gave everything of himself, every fiber of his being, to sketch out the next steps.”

“A roadmap?”

“Of sorts, full of detours and unlabeled paths, but the one ray of light we have in this abysmal darkness. Humans at our stage weren’t meant to comprehend this stuff, Zach; we’re like the fish below the water’s surface, struggling to understand the nature of a satellite drifting overhead. But of all the souls to be drawn into this nightmare, only Dr. Krusenstern managed to transcend the chains of our mortal coil, if only fleetingly, to glimpse what all this is about.”

“Which would be?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out; we’ll have the main devices assembled soon enough. By the way Zach, what’s the scoop on Dr. Kusumoto?”

“Whatever sent him into hiding must have been evil incarnate; not even the Witness Protection spooks in the FBI could’ve shipped this guy deeper underground. But Gregor had a rabbit in his hat.”

“You have a lead?”

“Keisuke vanished during a junket in Russia, just before the Archon Corporation went belly-up, and with no known contacts there or anywhere else in Europe. Given the allegations in his affidavit, he probably suspected that a return trip to the States would be his last; so to protect his family, he told them nothing of his intentions, and left all his earthly possessions with them. But he entrusted something with Gregor, at the conference in Thessaloniki just months before his disappearance.”

“What’s that?”

“A recipe for a Viennese Sacher Torte—half in German, half Korean—with spices imported straight out of Seoul.”

“I never was much of a mind-reader, Zach,” replied Tim after a pause, “but I gather you’re implying that… he was signaling his plans to Gregor?”

“It makes sense, Tim. Keisuke cut his teeth in South Korea back in the 1970s, working for the subsidiary of a robotics company from Tokyo. So he was passable in Korean, and he must have absorbed a good deal of the local culture and cuisine. If you’re gonna disappear somewhere far away, sans family or community contacts, how else would you stay afloat?”

“So you think he made his way secretly to Vienna, posing as a… Korean chef? And why would he confide this to Gregor?”

“Keisuke knew that his old friend was on the trail of the demon, even if Gregor himself was at a loss. As to his current whereabouts, there are a handful of ethnic restaurants in Vienna that fit the bill.”

“Maybe I should make my way over there, Zach; I’m just a half-day’s swim down the Danube, after all.”

“Why don’t you leave this one to me, Chief; sounds like you’ve already got your hands full with the Albertina artifacts. Besides, I spent a good deal of my early youth running errands in the family’s Korean restaurant, so I know my way around the kitchen. If we can narrow the possibilities down to a couple locations, I have some tricks up my own sleeve to home in on wherever he’s holed himself up.”

Thursday May 28, 2019

Yi Sun-Sin Koreanisches Restaurant, Kaertner Strasse, Vienna, Austria

“It’s not every day that we have budding restaurateurs from the States come and visit us so… allow me extend my warmest welcome, Mr. Choi.”

“Zach,” replied the smartly dressed young man, firmly shaking the hand of the harried general manager. The latter’s impeccably professional, gentlemanly demeanor contrasted with his calloused hands and the beads of sweat he still shed from his forehead, as his staff industriously re-set the tables and counters from a busy lunch hour.

“Yoo Soo-Kil; they call me Sam around here. I trust that my distinguished colleagues have given you a proper introduction?’

“To everything,” Zach answered with a nod, “except the kitchen itself, of course.”

“Then we’ll have to remedy that omission at once. The restaurant’s closing up until the dinner hour, so you’ll have ample opportunity to survey our facilities and chat up the sous-chefs. Many of them started as visiting culinary students just like yourself, mostly straight out of Korea, so you’ll be in fine company.”

They cut short the small talk by tacit mutual agreement, both anxious to resume their respective tasks. Zach followed the manager across a sinuous path through the sea of tables that ringed the hexagonal restaurant, marveling at the authentic décor. The interior was bathed in the warm light of translucent lanterns arrayed in the style of a solemn Buddhist festival, their illumination gently caressing the soft crimsons and violets of the drapes, cloths, and tapestries that lined the vast dining hall. They rounded a corner and pressed through a drawn, burnt-orange curtain, crossing an oval-brick threshold to enter the spacious kitchen. The cooks inside had relaxed their pace, but still pounded away in a choreographed cadence of activity.

“The team’s preparing the stews and mixes for our supper menu, but we’re winding down for the afternoon, Zach, so don’t be shy. They’ll be happy for a little break in the routine; I’ll be minding the fort outside if you need anything.”

The two shook hands again and parted ways, as Zach quickly turned his attention to the diligent figures within. The kitchen’s numerous stations had cobbled together an incongruous mix of high-tech precision grills and steamers, stacks of pots and casseroles for old-fashioned strudels and fondues, as well as woks and scaled-up pressure cookers from a vaguely pan-Pacific culinary tradition. The young man deftly maneuvered his way around, bartering techniques and bantering fluidly with impromptu groups amid gladly-accepted respites in the accumulating heat.

As he worked his way toward the back, his attention was briefly diverted by one of the pastry chefs—a remarkably dexterous, yet humble and reticent figure apparently in his early 40s. Zach listened in on a brief exchange between the man and his colleague, both of whom had eschewed the downtime to continue their efforts at the same frenzied pace. He sidled back toward one of the other cooks, lounging languidly beside a brick furnace.

“Ahnyong-haseyo,” he began, “the pastry chef by the back counter there, on the right…”

“Ah, Shim Seung-Bok-sunbae,” replied the man with a backward tilt of the forehead, as though having long expected the inquiry. “Stefan is what he prefers—uses his Austrian name most of the time. World-class talent, for pastries or anything else around here; taught many of us even if we’ve had seniority on paper.”

“How long has he been here?”

“Almost three years now. Walked in the door without references or certifications to his name, apparently paid his dues in the short-order trenches for a while… but he gave a demo for the executive chef even before we had a posted opening. He composes sweet music every time he kneads the dough, so they created a position for him. Could easily become the exec chef himself, but he refuses any promotion. Just carries on back there, creating his music.”

“The accent, in his Korean. It’s faint but—” Zach phrased his words delicately. “Reminds me when I was a kid in my father’s deli, back in St. Louis. We used to work in each other’s restaurants, whatever the city in America that we were sojourning in. It was just one of the ways we knew how to introduce ourselves to the guy chopping tomatoes across the table.”

“Hardly the first time it’s come up,” remarked the cook with a chuckle. “We have Japanese chefs in here as well, just like your deli in St. Louis. But Stefan’s Korean, from Busan; his parents moved to a factory town near Osaka when he was an infant, so the accent stuck. He’s always trying to get rid of it, so we just call him ‘Stefan-san’ to rub it in from time to time.” The cook turned briefly aside with a smile. “Just introduce yourself to him; he’s a man of few words, but he’ll grant you a peek behind the curtain.”

“Gamsa hamnida.” Zach quickly made his way to the pastry table, where the mysterious chef was now alone, catching his breath between muscular strokes with a rolling pin.

“Stefan, hello. I’m…”

“Ah, you must be the guest that Sam invited here today.” The cook hastily removed his flour-coated gloves to shake the visitor’s hand. “Zach, is it? Welcome.”

“They’ve already told me a good deal about you. My family’s from Changwon themselves.”

“Yes, just outside of Busan! It’s been decades since I’ve been back.”

“Likewise here. I’ve always wanted to learn how to whip up the Kongbap in Busan style.”

“I’ll show you Stefan’s style,” he responded with a jocular grin, “whether or not the critics back home would approve.”

For more than an hour, Zach worked beside and gradually befriended the laconic yet congenial chef, seeking sparse hints to confirm a submerged identity and nervously seeking an opportunity to broach an uncomfortable question. Finally, the exhausted chef set his latest culinary creations aside, inviting Zach into a makeshift enclosure behind a pair of fan-shaped double doors, passing for an office.

“So, Stefan,” he began, as the two seated themselves in a moment of grateful repose, “I didn’t get a chance to ask you out there. Did you family stay on in Osaka when you were tall enough to reach the saucepan? Seems you cook as well as someone who’d never left the peninsula.”

“Well,” he answered, rounding his lips to blow off a gulp of air, “my family originally slated me for an ironworker’s career, just like my father in the foundry near Osaka. I studied metallurgy, at an institute near Kyoto; never worked out, my hands were too delicate for it. So I stayed with relatives around Busan for a while, picked up the basics on the family’s farm. I met my fiancée there but… never could win her family’s blessing. Dumb kids that we were, we tried to elope in the clumsiest way possible, and then it all came crashing down.”

“You have my sympathies,” smiled Zach. “Can’t say I’m a stranger to that sort of thing myself.”

“Needless to say, I had to leave the country, just as my own parents lost their factory jobs in Osaka. So I wandered after that, a man without a country, doing whatever kept a roof over my head. A family friend finally set me up in Vienna, and I played the only marketable card I still had in my deck, to find work in the cafés and ethnic spots downtown.”

“Her name, your fiancee all those years back… do you mind if I ask? My own fiancée Renee and I, we’ve weathered some storms of our own over the years. Feel like I’m a brother-in-arms.”

“Hyun-Mi,” he said with a wistful look, quickly glancing toward a shaky wooden desk at his side. He gingerly opened up one of the lower drawers, removing a locket with a black-and-white photo. A doe-eyed young woman stared out from the left side, her cheek pressed against a bespectacled young man bearing a close resemblance to Stefan.

“She’s beautiful,” observed Zach, his voice sincere. “In all these years since then, have you ever… tried to…”

“Her family married her off just a year after I departed,” he replied, frowning and shaking his head. Stefan quickly rose back up again, responding to the call of a voice outside the small room.

“My apologies, Zach, please excuse me; looks like I’m needed elsewhere. Please, feel free to stay, I shouldn’t be long.”

Zach nodded before pressing the back of his wrist against his perspiring forehead. His eyes darted upward and he sighed despondently, pondering where else in the city he could find an elusive lead. He shook his head in resignation and clasped the handle of the drawer, preparing to return the locket to its place.

“Dannit,” he winced as the door tipped downward, perched precariously on its fragile rails inside. He knelt down to balance the structure against his knee, painstakingly pressing onto the contents inside as he carefully moved the drawer back into position. As he slipped and wiggled it back into place, his eye was drawn to a curious sight in the back, buried beneath the other items. It was a small sepia-tinged photograph, meticulously laminated to protect its contents. An attractive, sober-looking young woman had seated herself in a tall chair, gently cradling a restless baby in her arms.

Zach glanced briefly toward the room’s entrance, then returned his gaze to the photograph, cautiously removing it from its compartment. He studied the fine-grained nuances of its surface, absorbing the haunting look in the two figures depicted therein. He then leaned slowly back and held the picture in the tentative light of the alcove, bringing it forward again and nodding in recognition.

“Wait a minute,” he whispered to himself, “This scene, these poses—I’ve witnessed them before. Her face, around the eyes, and that—“

A profoundly unpleasant chill shot down his spine as he descried a figure in his peripheral visionl he anxiously tilted up to see Stefan in the doorway. To Zach’s further discomfiture, the man’s expression was not one of anger or dismay, but a soul-draining look of shock. Stefan’s face had blanched in abject terror, and he walked slowly backward, in the manner of a tourist in the wild backing away from an angry tiger.

“Stefan, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

Zach instinctively reached for the breast pocket of his sportcoat, dangling awkwardly from a nearby rack. But the chef turned abruptly toward his left and walked briskly out a service door in the back, avoiding a sudden burst that might have drawn attention.

“Stefan, please, wait!” Zach hastily donned the blazer and followed the cook out the door. As he emerged into the misty, rain-besotted air outside, he saw Stefan bolt quickly to the left, between a series of tall wooden boards erected to wall off a nearby construction site.

“Ah, no, damnit!” Zach immediately took off after him, rounding a series of turns as he desperately sought to keep the frightened man in his view. He crossed a small alleyway and squeezed past a half-shut gate bordering a hard-hat area. He stopped suddenly upon rounding the next turn, his heart bounding rapidly high up in his chest. The exits flanking the path had been sealed off by the adjacent construction, and Stefan—futilely attempting to scale the wall—whirled around with a look of terrified ferocity, firmly grasping a carving knife in his right hand.

“I knew they’d find me eventually!” He exclaimed. “I just never thought they’d send in someone like you.”

“They?!” retorted Zach in terrified confusion, grimacing in tense awareness. “Stefan, please, I’m just here to…”

“Stop it! Stop! I know why you’re here. Leave, now—don’t come a step closer!’

“OK, OK,” Zach said, anxiously backing him up with his hands raised, palms facing outward. “I’m just…” He plunged his left hand slowly into the breast pocket of his blazer. “Just going to show you something from—“

“No!” Stefan lunged suddenly at Zach, who narrowly deflected the blade toward the wall. The two struggled with a primal intensity, both fearing that their survival depended on victory. Stefan thrust the knife again toward his adversary, but Zach managed to dislodge it this time. The cook responded by shoving Zach hard against the adjoining wall, nearly knocking out his breath with several blows to the abdomen. Zach raised his knee to strike his opponent just below the hip, then rushed his torso to tackle him hard to the ground. The two of them wrestled violently before Stefan again gained the upper hand, pinning Zach and reaching again for the weapon beside them. But Zach stayed the would-be killing thrust with both hands, wrenching the knife away and slamming Stefan on his side.

As they scuffled furiously on the rainswept grounds, a thin object trickled out from inside Zach’s vest. Stefan, immediately gaining sight of the article, abruptly took hold of it and backed away from his opponent. “Stay back!” he continued to warn, meticulously inspecting the laminated document. He eventually leaned his arm against the nearby wall and slumped his neck and shoulders, allowing the object to tumble to the ground.

“That came from Gregor, didn’t it?”

“Yeah,” stammered Zach, exhausted and shaking from the lingering shock of the moment. “That’s what I was trying to tell you!”

“I’m sorry, Zach,” he replied morosely, leaning his back against the retaining wall and slinking slowly to the ground in a seated position. “If you knew what I was running from…”

Zach prepared an angry retort as he regained his breath, lost amid the struggle and the distressing realization that he had nearly lost his life in that derelict back alley, an ocean away from home. But he let the subject slide for the moment, clutching his sore torso and seating himself beside the battered figure slouched to his left. “Your real name… you’re Kei-san, right? Keisuke Kusumoto?”

The man nodded feebly, worn down by a sense of shame as much as physical anguish. “The photo, Zach, the one you noticed in my drawer—why did you react that way to it? Have you seen it before?”

“Not that exact photo, Kei-san, but one very much like it. The umbrella was the giveaway, the way she clasped it in her left hand above the baby. The difference, in the one that I saw…”

“The masks,” interjected Keisuke with a hardened, stoical look outward.

“Yeah,” nodded Zach, visibly perplexed at the familiarity in his response. “Look, I know this is a Hell of a lot for you to digest in one sitting but—I’m not the only one who’s laid eyes on that photo recently. There’s some malevolent… undefinable evil that’s awakened across the Atlantic. The brain trust over there managed to trace it to the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, and that picture cropped up in their investigations.”

Zach looked briefly skyward, the droplets from the drizzle dancing on his nose and tender forehead. “What puzzles me, Kei-san… we came to you for reasons entirely aside from anything to do with that picture. What’s your connection to it? The infant in the photo—is that your father?”

“No,” he replied with a pained sigh. “It’s me.”

*******************************************

“I… I don’t understand. That umbrella against the fallout, and the masks—they snapped that picture in 1945. You’d be… 74 years old by now.”

“I don’t age like others, Zach. None of us does.”

“Us?” Zach found himself further chilled by the unfamiliar intonations and expressions of the man next to him, his submerged identity far more somber and mysterious than the amiable chef he had befriended merely an hour before.

“The Children of the Mushroom Cloud—that’s what they called us. Most of us were born in the months just after Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our mothers were trapped when the radioactive fallout rained down on the cities.”

“Tachibana syndrome, right? The neurological disease, that afflicted some of the locals near the blasts.”

“In the adults, yes. My own mother spent six years battling the syndrome, and never fully recovered. But it took a far different course in the unborn children. Our minds were also affected, and we were no doubt unusual, but still fully functional. We shared the same nightmares, visions of the same creature, echoes of the same unearthly voice calling out to us… and we were eventually drawn together, to do its bidding.”

:”Just like the vets at Oak Ridge,” murmured Zach, partly to himself. The soft rumble of distant thunder impinged uncomfortably on their conversation, as though the heavens themselves were witnessing the imparting of forbidden knowledge. “So it was the radiation? What, triggering a… mutation in your developing brains?”

“Not directly, Zach. Most of us came into this world in 1945 or early 1946. But some of the Children were born up to a decade afterward, including the sons and daughters of American serviceman then based in Japan, long after the fallout had cleared Hiroshima.”

Keisuke waved his fingers through the hazy air about them, like a mystic divining an unseen pattern in the otherwise unremarkable tokens of his surroundings. “The myths and lore of ancient Japan were filled with tales of the islanders cavorting with the sprites of the woods, the nymphs of the lakes and the sea. The spirits were tangible to our ancestors, however much we’d dismiss them today. But in the years that followed the mushroom clouds in southern Japan, the villagers recounted those old tales; they claimed to be seeing those spirits again, phantoms that would flit in and out of existence in our physical world.”

“Phantoms?”

“Fantastical beings, some with human and animal features; most springing from untapped corners of the imagination or even beyond anything we could conceive. People reported these beings, sometimes just silhouettes or afterimages, manifesting as patterns in the trees and forests. They’d materialize in the lakes when children were swimming, take shape in the mirrors or windows, sometimes even seize the wind itself to present themselves. I saw hints of them in time, doubted my own eyes until…”

He curled his lip and inhaled deeply, disconcerted by a distant memory that was becoming raw again. “At the age of 11, I was on a camping trip when I fell unconscious in a canoe, or so it seemed to the rest of the group. It was more like a trance, lasting less than five minutes though it might as well have been a fortnight for me. It was when I met the beast for the first time. All of the creatures I’d perceived before and that others had described—they were contained within the entity, living parts of a greater whole. He soon addressed me directly, its hideous countenance, its eyes… it was a month before I could sleep soundly again”

Zach abruptly fetched a half-folded sheet of paper from his inside breast pocket and unfurled it before Keisuke’s eyes. “I came here with a professor from the US; he had his own visions, haunted by a dream scene that he sketched out in a series. This entity, in the center of the chamber…”

Keisuke nodded brusquely. “That’s him. And it was after that cloud of death and destruction above Hiroshima—that’s when he came into existence in this form, awoke from his slumber.”

Zach glanced aside, immersing himself in the recollections of recent events. “Gregor spoke in that vein, too. He had a tablet from one of his digging expeditions, after he’d last met with you. ‘The beast is as old as the earth’; that was the message, though we got nothing more than that. Kei-san, do you know what the beast is? What does he want, why… why did he address you in particular, as you said he did?”

“It’s not easy to explain, Zach. He didn’t always ‘talk’ to us; sometimes we just knew. It’s like the things that you take for granted as being right and necessary as you make your way in this perplexing world, but planted by an outside force. He went silent on us just as we were approaching adulthood—his consciousness slipping back into dormancy again—but he’d already molded us by then, an imprint of his own mind staying very much active within ours.”

The once-cheery chef now winced and protruded his lower lip, catching the fine mist of droplets as though to assuage the turmoil that boiled inside. “I and the other Children—we were the beast’s conduits in this world. His consciousness was dispersed somehow, just as that tablet had warned.”

“Dispersed?”

“In the atmosphere, the soil, the plants and creatures that tread upon it, even in all of us. Any structure on earth that can represent information, a malleable pattern of any sort, can house a parcel of his being. Don’t ask me how, but the beast imprinted himself into every corner of this planet, eons ago in some primordial formlessness. Thus he remained, dormant, for billions of years, like the spores of an exotic bloom waiting for just the right conditions to germinate.”

“The atomic bombings!”

Keisuke grimaced bitterly as he confirmed Zach’s suspicion. “Those explosions triggered something that awoke the beast as a coherent sentience, something that solidified his nascent being on earth and made him self-aware. But even though he could manifest transiently after 1945, within a small radius around the bomb craters… he lacked a physical presence, at least one that he could maintain and exploit to affect events here. That’s why he needed us to take the next steps, to pave his way and herald his arrival.”

“So that’s what that chip was about, wasn’t it? The one from the Archon Corporation, in those implants…” Zach recoiled with a startle as Keisuke angrily plunged the carving knife into the saturated ground to his left.

“I’m responsible for all this!” he remarked angrily. The chef’s voice was an intense, rumbling, yet slightly muted growl from deep in his throat, barely incarcerating a rage that threatened to explode from inside.

Keisuke finally turned toward an alarmed and visibly nervous Zach, looking the young man squarely in his frightened eyes. “The Archon Corporation was founded by the Children of the Mushroom Cloud, and I was placed in charge of the project to fabricate those chips. It was the culmination of everything, even since the beast first invaded our dreams.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The chips were the core of a linked system, providing the interface for the beast to distill himself from whatever ether he’s been existing in up to now, to fully take shape in this world. Our visions supplied us with codes—cryptographic keys, as we learned later, to the locks on his consciousness. They generated a grid when assembled together, like a scaffolding or matrix that converted the beast from a diffuse cloud of information into something physical. He’s becoming a corporeal being, unifying his intelligence into a mind.”

“Becoming? So this… distillation, as you say, it’s ongoing?”

“You haven’t begun to see what he is or what he can do. The horror that was unleashed from that chip in Tennessee, that devoured those miners and the passengers in the Chicago subway—it’s the faintest inkling of what he has planned.” He gazed skyward with an expression of long-ruminated bitterness, clenching his right fist in a visible display of corrosive regret.

“I know you must think I’m a monster for what I’ve done, Zach, for what we’ve all done. And I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Whatever you’d done in the past, Kei-san,” he answered, motioning toward his sore shoulder and tattered clothing from their recent altercation, “it’s obvious you’ve had a change of heart!”

“It’s because I finally realized how the beast had manipulated us; it’s why I left Archon and disappeared after Thessaloniki, and it’s why the others have never stopped hunting me ever since. The beast had worked his own being into our minds and bodies as children, when our very identities were taking hold—they were shaped by, at times even indistinguishable from the soul of the entity himself, and whatever he willed for us to do. We thought he was… that he was watching over us, bringing salvation into the ruined world that was all we’d known.”

“So that’s why you just about butchered me back here,” interjected Zach again, massaging his wounded shoulder. “You really thought they’d send a schlub like me to take you out?”

“It would be someone I’d least expect, and they’d stop at nothing. The beast filled us with a terrible ferocity in his service, Zach. It was unthinkable for any of the Children to escape his grip, and when I did so, that same ferocity was unleashed upon me.”

“But why you Kei-san, especially if this thing had a death-grip over your souls as you claim?”

“We weren’t marionettes; he needed us to blend in to society and do his bidding, so in most regards we had the same concoction of free will and uncertainty as any other confused soul on this rock. But we never deviated from the path that he charted for us, until one of our own lost his life in an equipment mishap.”

“Seems to be a common misfortune for any poor sap drawn into ‘projects’ on behalf of the Tauschreigeist.”

“The… Tauschreigeist?”

Zach squinted his eyes in an initial burst of skepticism, nodding slowly as he caught on.

“You and the other Children never had a name for the beast, did you?”

“We never needed to name him; we all shared the visions he instilled within us even if we never understood their source, and we all knew what we had to do.”

“Suffice it to say,” replied Zach with a nervous half-chuckle, “you’re not the first ones to have glimpsed this thing, even if he owes his renewed existence in this world to your very efforts. We found that designation in some records that were centuries-old, and not even we know what it means but…” He shook his head, as though to erase a transitory, frightening thought that abruptly menaced his mind. “Your comrade-in-arms—so he died for this, ‘cause’ that the beast had compelled you into?”

“He was a chemical engineer; he’d always claimed that the visions had supplied him with specs of a sort, to pre-fabricate gallium wafers to a level of precision beyond known technologies. The beast needed them, for reasons unknown to us, and our colleague went nearly mad in the course of his efforts. He lapsed into a coma following the accident; I happened to be part of the investigative team that an outside review board assembled for the case. As I dug deeper into our archives, talked to him as he slipped in and out of consciousness, I came to fathom the nightmare that we were creating for everyone else in this world.”

“But I still don’t understand, Kei-san; why didn’t you tell the others about your findings, to liberate them from whatever spell the Tauschreigeist had cast to imprison your minds like that?”

“I did try, desperately so; at times I verged on that strain of insanity that a Cassandra suffers when even her most desperate pleas go ignored. The others had been pulled too deeply within the beast’s power to be freed. But there was another reason that I left the fold, besides my posting on that commission.”

He retrieved a yellowed, speckled photograph tucked into a small compartment in his billfold, bearing the handsome visage of a young Japanese sailor in full military attire.

“That face,” remarked Zach. “Just like the one in your locket…” He narrowed his eyes at the contradiction and leaned back, alternately scanning the face in the picture and the one of the man beside him. “You needed a template, didn’t you,” he asked rhetorically, “when you visited the plastic surgeon after your tragedy in the Aegean. Is that the face of the one who died for your cause?”

“No; the others would have picked me out in an instant if I’d taken the appearance of Fukuro-kun himself,” answered Keisuke with a tentative chuckle. “’Owl’—that was his nickname in Japanese, the way his hair and beard flanked those puffy jowls of his.” Keisuke rested against the wall momentarily and breathed deeply, replacing the picture as he settled back into a businesslike demeanor.

“His real name was Akihiro Minamoto. He wasn’t just a fellow soul afflicted with the same curse; he was also my best and often only friend, since the days I could rattle off my first memories. He hailed from the same neighborhood in Hiroshima, and he’d lost his father in Papua New Guinea at the Porton Plantation battle—the same month my own father was killed in action. Fukuro-kun had several brothers and sisters, but I was an only child, so he wound up as something like a brother to me, too.”

“So the face you now display to the world,” nodded Zach with a bemused expression, deeply intrigued by the thought. “Metaphysical poetry—inspiring, Kei-san. Fukuro-kun never walks the earth beside his own father, but then after his own tragic passing, his father’s face greets the world again, borne on the shoulders of his best friend.”

“Aged about 20 years, give or take,” affirmed Keisuke. “My mother survived the bombings, but Fukuro-kun was orphaned; his home was caught in the shockwave from the mushroom cloud. He and his siblings had been left for safety with an uncle outside Hiroshima, and Fukuro-kun thought he’d lost everything from his childhood home. But his grandparents had kept his father’s commissioning photo from the navy, as well as snapshots from his parents’ wedding; that’s what you saw in the locket from the restaurant.”

“So I take it that your pursuers never laid eyes on those photos themselves?”

“That was only part of the reason I kept them, Zach.” He reached inside his vest to remove the curious little satchel that Zach had noticed earlier. He loosened the drawstrings and inverted the pouch to reveal a rectangular, bronze-colored case which was promptly snapped open. Inside was a molded clay figurine—two wafers of slightly irregular shape pressed up against each other. There were impressions from two different left hands on both sides.

“My mother’s hands were small and delicate, not much larger than my own as a child. She was traumatized by the Tachibana syndrome, after having already suffered so much in the war itself. There were times when I feared I would lose her too, so after she recovered, she made this figurine with me at a village potter’s market. In the lore of our little hamlet, this sort of totem marks a unique event, of great personal significance yet unknown to the broader world. Thus it links two spirits together in the vessel of a physical memory, no matter what may befall either one of them.”

“So she’s been by your side ever since,” reasoned Zach, empathizing with his pensive-faced companion.

“This never leaves my presence,” nodded Keisuke in confirmation. “So it was with Fukuro-kun and that photo. Perhaps even more important for us as Children of the Mushroom Cloud, tormented as we were by uncertainty about our very thoughts and memories—whether they were ours, or something the Beast had tricked us into thinking was ours.”

Keisuke finished his sentence with a defiant glare toward one of the demonic stone faces in the desolate caverns, his own words reminding him of a bitterly-rued aspect of his past. “Those tokens of our dearest personal memories were unknown to anyone else, even the fellow Children and the Beast himself; they reminded us of our deepest nature, our independent existence forged in the contingencies of our childhood. So none of us ever knew he had it, and he kept it up to his last days, entrusting it to me as he drew his dying breath.”

“I don’t know what to say,” answered Zach sympathetically. “To think what Fukuro-kun, and now you must have endured…”

“Until you called out my real name today, there have been times over these past few years when… when I’ve doubted whether I truly exist anymore. I saw images of my own funeral in the news segments after the Aegean incident. I couldn’t drop the slightest hint to my family; my once brothers-in-arms would have hunted them relentlessly, just to draw me out of hiding. Does a person even exist if nobody else is aware of their presence?”

“I suspect that Gregor, at least, knew something of the truth that you had to conceal; at least in the midst of his quest, his obsession, you’ve stayed very much alive.” Zach’s voice was gritty and slightly pained, as though vicariously straining under the collective weight of his companion’s anguished recollections. “Kei-san—how are we gonna stop this thing?”

“Only the monks in the shadows could know that.”

“The Falkenei Gesellschaft?”

“So they have a name, too,” mused Keisuke with a feeble chuckle. “Such an irony. I was the one charged with leading the effort to hunt down the latter-day keepers of these secrets.”

“What do you mean, ‘hunt them down’?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. The Beast had implanted a notion deep within the souls of the Children, that an archenemy was lurking in the shadows, a group that intended to forestall the coming salvation; we had to eliminate them, at any cost. As the Children grew into men and women, we tasked each other with different specializations, and one of mine was to blaze the trail that would expose our tormentors. My findings were extensive, but even at the height of my inquests, I never discerned their name.”

He sighed with the hint of a curious smile, as Zach looked on with bewildered astonishment. “I also never knew precisely what Gregor had discovered; just that his fervent search for the lost work of Leibniz would shine a light on the Beast, and on the forces that created me and the other Children…”

“Kei-san!” interrupted Zach, his tone a mix of enthusiasm and pleading. “Professor Shoemaker—he’s my partner in this whole investigation, and he’s hot on the trail of the answers that Gregor was seeking. We still haven’t tracked down the Gesellschaft themselves, but the artifacts that they’ve wrought over the centuries, maybe another window into the mind of this Beast—literally just yesterday, he stumbled upon them in a long-lost storehouse, deep within a museum in Hungary. If you could join us, if we could link your wisdom to our findings…”

The color drained away suddenly from the chef’s face, his cryptic expression and haunting words viscerally discomfiting his already unsettled companion. “You don’t understand, Zach; I’m a doomed man. The Beast is commencing the final phase of his manifestation on earth, and when he takes shape, he’ll find me… He’ll eventually seek you too, both you and the professor. If I’m among you, he’ll use me to hunt you down, too.”

“Not exactly what I wanted to hear,” replied the young man with a shudder. “But I don’t understand. If we’re eventually going to be on his crosshairs anyway, why would your presence make a difference?”

“Because, Zach,” he said with a frightful gaze, “I was the first of the Children to greet this world, and I’m a centerpiece to his gruesome plan.”

“A centerpiece?”

He abruptly seized hold of the sketch that Zach had carefully laid aside. “Just like your professor friend, I’ve been tormented by unending nightmares of the same strange locale, with the exception of… those beings in the front, whatever they are. I’ve drawn this same chamber, with all its horrors, the Beast poised to unleash his reality upon this world. But my perspective was something else entirely.”

Keisuke gazed upward momentarily, eyeing the hideous goblins and hellish scenes that lined the high wall ringing the catacombs, before rising up and leading Zach into a cramped den set off from the walls—apparently the remnants of an old monitoring station for the abandoned subway line. Amidst the debris and rusted tools inside, was a slate-like slab on which a remarkably detailed picture had been rendered, like a cave painting revealing the profuse imagination of a lost civilization that history had long neglected.

“Look familiar?”

“Much more than I’d like,” answered Zach, tracing his forefinger across the unearthly objects and spirits that populated the image.

“This is part of the reason I visited this God-forsaken place amid the tunnels. I always felt compelled to sketch out that wretched nightmare, but I suppose I could pretend that I was walling it away from the real world above, so long as I kept it locked away in these halls.”

“I see what you were saying, Kei-san,” nodded Zach. “The professor’s depiction was always from the same exact spot, looking in from just under an archway at the entrance to this strange chamber. Yours—more like a 360^o panorama from inside. We can see everything. Except…” He frowned, halting his forefinger near the image’s center in puzzlement. “The fountain of demons, with all the souls pouring out toward the ceiling—the professor’s drawings always featured it. The fountain was right there at the heart of the scene, the defining element of the whole thing. But I don’t see it anywhere in your sketch.”

“That’s because I’m looking out from inside of it.”

“So all those malevolent forces at Oak Ridge—the retinal implants ushered them in. I’ve gotta tell Rachel.”

“Just be careful, Tim. Kei-san nearly filleted me with a butcher’s knife when he realized I was onto him, and it’s still got me shaken up.”

“I’m sorry you had to dust off your Tae-Kwon-Do skills on such short notice, Zach,” replied Tim with a wry and sympathetic chuckle, feebly attempting to dispel the young man’s evident anxiety. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for an ice-breaker with Dr. Kusumoto.”

“But it’s not just that fight itself that’s creeping the living hell out of me,” answered Zach, his voice uncharacteristically sober and troubled. “I’ve had my fair share of scrapes and scuffles growing up; I even fought off a pair of would-be burglars from the family restaurant, back when I’d barely started wandering the halls of my high school. But this was different, God-awful different. Keisuke was fighting like a caged animal; I’ve never seen such horror in a person’s eyes up close, or that kind of life-and-death intensity when the talk turned to fisticuffs. He’s been in hiding for decades, but the very hint of a visit by his erstwhile companions terrified him out of his wits.”

“So you think—” Tim stammered slightly as he mulled his own half-formed conclusion, unsure he wanted his already frazzled mind to entertain it. “You think that Keisuke’s people might soon be after us as well?”

“I don’t know, but Kei-san implied that possibility more than once, and I wouldn’t scoff at anything coming from him. He’s well-acquainted with the power and plans of the Tauschreigeist, Tim, possibly better than anyone else on this rock. And even with the passage of all these years, he’s going to extreme lengths to elude detection. I’d suggest we err on the side of caution ourselves.”

“I understand,” mused Tim, frowning upon the confirmation of his worst suspicions. “What about the Falkenei Gesellschaft? Did he have anything specific?”

“Funny you’d ask. There’s no doubt now; the Gesellschaft is an active outfit today, tucked away in the shadows much like Dr. Kusumoto since the Thessaloniki Conference. And with good reason—Kei-san himself was more-or-less the chief of the the Black Ops for the Children of the Mushroom Cloud, endeavoring to find and liquidate the Gesellschaft. He compiled a dossier that, unsurprisingly, was duly disposed of just prior to his disappearance in the Aegean. But he remembered enough to point the way for us now.”

“So there’s been a war raging in the shadows, at least since 1945. But that can’t be the only reason the Gesellschaft went underground; they’ve been running their cloak-and-dagger routine for centuries before that.”

“Fair enough, but it may speak to why the Gesellschaft has been so chary about coming out to reclaim the artifacts they crafted with their own hands. Maybe they feared it’d put them in the crosshairs.”

“And maybe why they needed an unsuspecting outsider like me or my Uncle Mitch to do the searching for them,” remarked Tim, his musings laced with a tinge of resentment. “Do you have any specific leads, yet?”

“So far, I’ve struck out with every swing. Kei-san’s list was mostly prominent inventors, tech company execs, professors and other figures who’d have the gravitas that the Gesellschaft could seek, but also the resources to conceal their connections and whatever alchemy they’re running under their roof these days. But—tough to explain why, but I feel like I’d know a match when I saw it, based on everything we’ve gleaned so far. It’s just not there yet; there’s something I’m still missing.”

Tim stretched out his arms and rolled his neck as he strolled about, forcing himself momentarily away from the dizzying surreality of the scene about him. A veritable army of archaeologists, computer engineers, security officials, and a varied gaggle of researchers had descended upon the site of the discovery in the museum’s caverns. The buzz of generators with their jungle of wires, and the searing glare of towering work lamps, had transformed the area into a frenetically incongruous landscape, resembling an early 20^th-century excavation of an Egyptian tomb—complete with the eerie hint of unseen forces swirling about the worksite. Most of the bizarre devices inhabiting the museum’s hidden crypt had been transferred above ground, frantically examined and assembled by sleep-deprived workers in exhibition halls converted into makeshift laboratories.

“If nothing else,” called out a soothing voice behind him, “the Minister’s family can grant him a proper burial.”

“Teréz!” Tim awkwardly swung about and moved tentatively in her direction, finally chuckling at his physical ineptitude as he embraced her, his right hand cradling her long hair behind her neck. Their senses remained slightly off-key from the otherworldly horrors that had enveloped them over the previous 36 hours, and they savored each other’s presence with a relief incomprehensible to outsiders, like that of fellow soldiers uniquely able to recount the inexplicable horrors of battle in a foxhole.

“They whisked you away from here so suddenly,” he mused, shaking his head incredulously. “I started missing you.”

“I was missing you too, Tim, more than you could imagine,” she responded teasingly. “I wanted you to whisk me back out of that brewing P.R. disaster they threw me in the middle of. After I made the calls to Minister Krusenstern’s family, the higher-ups dragged me into the foyer, just as they began issuing their impromptu fabrications about why the museum grounds were closing down on such short notice. Sleep-deprived, disoriented, but ever-so-loyal, out I went.”

“I take it the director needed an actress’s pretty face on the videoscreen, eh? To sweeten the bitter pill of the rainchecks you had to dish out to the public?”

“He more-or-less admitted it,” she scoffed.

“That’s one fine mess we’ve made here together, Princess,” he replied playfully. The dimples about his wry smile faded slightly as he directed his gaze to a spot just beyond the left shoulder of Teréz, a silhouetted figure closing in amid the erratic lighting of the chaotic scene.

“Oh, Tim,” she said, eschewing even a cursory glance toward the approaching figure as she stepped briskly aside, “this is Giulia—Dr. Giulia Armaleo, from the University of Bologna and lately out of…”

“Pittsburgh,” he nodded, genially extending his hand. “Carnegie-Mellon, if I’m not mistaken?”

“Four years as a visiting scholar; I’m flattered you know!”

“My uncle in Oregon consulted one of your protégés out there, to translate Gothic inscriptions on our family artifacts. So I suppose they drafted your expertise for a similar cause.”

“And one that I’m sure will be of great interest to you, Tim. Come, follow me.”

Tim shrugged as he and Teréz eyed each other with mutual intrigue, quickly making their way to the undulating back wall of the artifacts chamber. There, Giulia directed their attention to a mysterious tome that had been encased in a hastily-erected, Plexiglas protective cover.

“In the preparatory briefing that the excavation team prepared from your input, Tim, you had made reference to some prior investigations, including the work of a Kant scholar based in Leipzig.”

“Yes—Jürgen Semmelweiss.”

“We substantiated your report: that he had asserted the existence of a long-lost document, the so-called Kant’s Precipice, which the Russian authorities had rediscovered beneath the Albertina University in old Königsberg and then transplanted here. We were baffled at first and doubted the claim; and we’ve still found no evidence of this ‘Falkenei Gesellschaft’ that he had described. But X-ray surveys of the walls located this tome within the rock, even more carefully ensconced than everything else here.”

Teréz and Tim took turns kneeling down and puzzling at the ornate artwork that had been inscribed into the volume’s binding, replete with what appeared to be mythological creatures of unknown provenance. At the foot of the book’s spine was an imprinted emblem, well-preserved despite the passing of centuries: A

“The handwriting is consistent with the philosopher’s documented correspondence in the late 1700s,” Giulia continued in her narration. “But it’s composed in a script reminiscent of that used by the Bishop Wulfila in the 4^th century, not far from our current location in Hungary, to translate the Bible for the Gothic peoples. I was therefore called in on short notice, and based on your uncle’s investigations, I presume this fact is significant for you as well.”

“It’s in line with our suspicions,” he replied cryptically, holding his tongue for the moment.

“The Gothic writing isn’t the only curious claim of yours that we’ve confirmed within this volume.”

The two of them abruptly stepped back as Giulia inserted herself before the Plexiglas case, painstakingly manipulating a flanking pair of gears through a series of notches. A hissing sound emerged from the case, which mechanically retracted to expose the cherished pages of the opus within. She began meticulously advancing through the text, pausing slightly as he marked her spot at a heavily illustrated series of headings about ¾ of the way through. She painstakingly advanced about a dozen pages further, flitting nightmares and grotesque flights of the imagination rising out of the images that intervened. Finally, she paused at a twinned pair of hand-drawn figures on a cluttered, messy background, complete with miniature sketches in two of the corners to highlight elements of particular interest.

Tim’s heart leapt as he laid eyes on the two-page spread: a pair of illustrations featuring the inscrutable entity, not quite as graphic as the horror upon the cave walls of Borna, yet nearly exhaustive all the same in its depiction of the unknowable. To his astonishment, however, the pictures were rendered as diagrams this time. They were reminiscent of old anatomical sketches, crammed with labels and margin notes—extensive figure legends in a spidery scrawl, and looping arrows linking together the bizarre renditions in a tangle of almost superhuman contemplation. There was a kind of cosmic freakishness to the drawings, an incongruous dissection of a phenomenon whose very nature stretched the architecture of the human mind.

“The being in these figures,” began Giulia, her tone incredulous even as she explained herself to the two onlookers, “came as quite a shock to me and the rest of my team. But we were able to at least transliterate some of the Gothic text to decipher a name.”

“The Tauschreigeist,” affirmed Tim.

“That’s right,” she answered, her eyes narrowed in surprise. “I won’t ask how you know that, Tim; but suffice it to say that the great philosopher was well-acquainted with his legend. We’ve still worked through only a portion of the Kant’s Precipice, and we have no inkling how a name like that might have been dreamt up. But Kant seems to have given special attention to this being, providing him with a context, a taxonomy of sorts.”

“So he’s describing the beast as… an animal, or a new species?” inquired Teréz.

“No, certainly not a terrestrial creature in any sense. In fact, when we translated the surrounding text, the language was more reminiscent of what you’d find in theological works by St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, or secular visions of the supernatural put to poetry and prose—Dante, Goethe, Milton perhaps. Yet Kant approaches the topic with a dispassionate rigor, like what you’d have expected from a natural scientist of the era, wrestling with the fine points of a discovery.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” said Tim. “Does the text imply that the Tauschreigeist is some kind of god or angel?”

“Nothing so simple,” she answered, the apparent lack of irony in her voice discomfiting her audience of two. “Forgive me if I struggle to find the words, Tim. While some of the language does conjure up the mythos surrounding a celestial being... there’s no conceptual forerunner in the mythologies, origin stories, visions of spiritual realms—anything dreamt up by our ancestors of old. So I’m at a loss, as far as any manner of familiar analogy goes. But this might help.”

They were filled with exhaustive figure legends in a spidery scrawl, and looping arrows linking together the bizarre depictions in a tangle of almost superhuman contemplation. There was a kind of cosmic freakishness to the drawings, an incongruous dissection of a phenomenon whose very nature stretched the architecture of the human mind.

“Giulia,” queried Teréz, pointing at an otherwise insignificant object at the top of the left page, “the Gothic text there, scribbled below the shield design—do you know what it says?”

“Roughly— ‘that which dare not be uttered by name.’”

“The Unmentionable, that’s what I thought,” she nodded, as Tim looked on in bewilderment. “I recognized that shield design, Tim; it’s what Baron János used when he sealed his charters. After his mass execution and suicide, that was the name the townspeople applied to the Beast.”

“The Unmentionable, I remember your telling me,” he acknowledged, turning in anxious curiosity towad Giulia. “So Kant must have had access to an archive on the Tauschreigeist—or at least on some of the poor souls who were cursed by his spell.”

“That’s the basis for those sketches on the previous pages. In his discourse here, Kant makes one thing abundantly clear: He’s never had visions of the entity himself, so he’s approaching the problem as a dispassionate observer. But he somehow knew of the lore and depictions of this being; incredible, since it’s all absent from the historical record.”

“I know,” interjected Tim with a grimace. “That’s why Teréz and I requested to keep it that way, at least for now. The Gothic script, the secrecy shrouding all this everywhere we look—it’s a hallmark of the Falkenei Gesellschaft, heck it’s probably why your team hasn’t even corroborated their existence yet. There must have been a damn good reason they’ve kept a lid on it for so many centuries.”

“This might be a part of it,” replied Giulia, sidling over to a nearby analysis table and unfurling a large, magnified projection of the diagrams in the style of a topographic map.

“We’ll eventually be photographing and scanning in the entire volume,” she explained breathlessly, “but for now, those figures were a good start. These shapes here,” she continued, her hand circling a series of distinctive, often menacing gargoyle-like creatures on the bottom right-hand side of the picture from the left page, “akin to reptiles, perhaps, but nothing we’d find hiding in any of the jungles on this world of ours. Nevertheless, Kant picked out a pattern of orderly change in the bodily features—look, how they all fold into each other.”

Tim squinted and glared skeptically at the depiction. “Not quite sure what I’m supposed to make of this. I have seen this sort of holographic arrangement before, that I can confirm.”

“In the other renditions of this, ‘Tauschreigeist’?”

“Same eerie layout,”:he confirmed, “2-D surfaces wending their way about in impossible geometries. Sometimes with spirals like on the edges of this figure, but never as tightly-packed as they are, and never with this progression, as if it’s trying to tell a story…”

Tim glanced up abruptly, silently repeating his own words. “That’s what you’re suggesting, isn’t it? Like one of those antique trees of life, drawn up by Linnaeus or the old evolutionary biologists. New species or flower varieties ramifying off at each branch of the tree.”

Giulia nodded her acknowledgment, her audience of two leaning forward as she used a small laser pointer to trace out an imaginary cone above a peculiar feature in the corner. “And look here; you even begin noticing some humanoid features as the spiral works its way out of the plane of the image. There are plant-like beings elsewhere in the diagram, and others that seem to represent Up here as well,” she said, directing the pointer to another elaborately illustrated spot about a quarter of the way up the same edge. “The creatures here are more bird-like, but the pattern is the same.”

“What’s it all mean?”

“The excavation team had a field biologist on staff; to the extent that she could make out distinct species amongst the layers, their characteristics don’t appear confined to a single organism. It’s more like a weighted average at discrete points along the spiral. The outer loops appear to culminate in aspects that correlate with the rise of complex nervous systems.”

“And thus self-awareness, abstract thought,” mused Tim aloud, his right hand curled up tightly in a fist that he gently tapped against his upper lip.

“So a part of the Beast houses an anthology of… natural histories?” queried Teréz, uncharacteristically flustered at the notion.

“Not just of the natural variety, Teréz. At the edges of the figure, where the intelligent species seem to spiral off into the distance…” Giulia swirled the pointer in an ever shrinking circle, as though in imitation of the unfathomable geometry.

“Yeah,” interjected Tim, “it’s like witnessing an infinite regression—setting up two mirrors to face each other, then becoming invisible and standing in between. That motif creeped the living hell out of me the first time I saw it in Tennessee.”

“Yet there’s a method to that madness, Tim. According to the Kant’s Precipice, those infolding layers are stories—detailed histories, to be exact, of technological civilizations like our own, forged by the intelligent beings represented at the edges.”

“The Holographic Principle,” Tim remarked, quickly turning toward a bewildered Teréz. “It’s a concept originally from astrophysics; the astronomers were perplexed at what happened to all the stellar material, space rocks, and whatever else disappeared into the maw of a black hole if they got too close. They eventually realized that the information that could uniquely specify the hole’s contents—its mass, its composition, something of its history—would be encoded on its surface.”

He nodded, mouthing a silent confirmation to himself of his own deductions. “The black hole is just a collapsed star, after all, with a specific density and surface area. Thus in principle, the thinking goes, you could generalize the Holographic Principle to encode the unique information content of anything—a 3-D object, a historical sequence, whatever you’re aiming at—on a 2-D surface. That must be why the Tauschreigeist has so many infolding planes on its periphery; its encapsulating the narratives of entire worlds within those layers.”

“But where?” inquired Teréz insistently, still conspicuously flabbergasted by the course of the discussion. “Where are these worlds that the Beast has… ‘archived’?”

“From our perspective, Tim, they’re nowhere ” The answer beckoned from behind them, couched in an unexpectedly familiar voice. “Literally… nowhere.”

Chapter: Memory Really Does Persist

“Gregor!” exclaimed Tim, both taken aback and relieved. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“The excavation team here opted to consult me after you’d briefed them, Tim.

“The lovely Teréz Bartók, of the Eötvös Loránd Museum,” he responded, in a debonair and slightly tongue-in-cheek gesture toward her.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Gregor,” she remarked with awkward courtesy. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“I know,” he answered, his tone of voice and gaze thick with insinuation. “The dig team was about to make overtures toward Jürgen as well, to contribute his expertise on Kant when they homed in on the Precipice. But I had the sense,” he said, with an ambiguous glance that flitted between the two of them, “that our joint presence might make for some awkward moments, and I don’t just mean on the account of our own mutual history.”

“Much appreciated,” replied Tim sardonically, his slightly sheepish demeanor quickly dissolving into a businesslike curiosity. “What did you mean just now—‘literally nowhere’?”

“Let’s go for a little stroll,” he suggested cryptically, as Giulia turned back to busily examine an unmarked section of the unfurled scroll. “Looks as though Dr. Armaleo has her hands full, and there’s a lot to catch up on.”

Teréz stepped forward to Gregor’s left side and smiled back at Tim, extending her right hand and signaling toward him. He chuckled incredulously and turned to his side, shaking his head as he reached out and clasped her hand close to his.

“So is this what passes for our second date, Princess?”

“I had something a little sunnier and more private in mind,” she teased, “but at least we picked a unique setting for it.”

Gregor allowed himself a faint grin of amusement as he marched slowly ahead, but he set aside for the moment all the queries he had for Tim. His pace was relaxed and contemplative, like a landscape artist meticulously surveying a scene of rolling hills or lush forestland, drawing inspiration with each stride through nature’s exuberant efflorescence. Except that the forest in this case was a teeming, writhing mass of multicolored wires, pneumatic drills, and flaming arc lamps amid the coldly utilitarian masonry of the museum’s sublevels.

“What I meant by all that, Tim…” began Gregor, as the group strode past a busy work station flocking with mechanics and technicians assembling a bizarre, spinning pretzel-like contraption. “Well, let’s just say that this won’t be a garden-variety conversation, even by our crazy standards.”

“I’d have expected no less,” Tim replied with a playful scoff.

“The civilizations absorbed by the Tauschreigeist don’t exist in our realm of being. Not in our world, our solar system, even what we’d call our very cosmos.”

His two strolling partners reacted simply with a frankly bewildered look; he slowed down further, gently elaborating in the manner of a master craftsman guiding nervous apprentices, beholding the wonders of a vast workshop for the first time.

“There’s a branch of cosmology that defines a universe in terms of information flow—an evolving narrative of cause and effect, to be precise. So two different universes are said to be causally disjoint. They have a distinct origin, their own space and time, their own causal development; whatever properties they may happen to share, they’re separate from one another, unaware even that the other exists.”

“But wouldn’t different cosmos occasionally…” Teréz spoke haltingly, her fluid gesticulations pantomiming what she could not quite express. “Why wouldn’t they, bump into each other from time to time?”

“There’s no common ‘space’ that they share. Space and time themselves come into existence when a universe does, and their coordinates—directions, timepoints, locations that you can specify—they’re defined uniquely for each universe. You could in theory have an infinite number of cosmos in Hilbert space, but they don’t cross paths.”

“It’s like a… logic space, Teréz,” suggested Tim, hiding his own bafflement as he sought to address hers. “If you add up 2+2, divide 10 by 4, take the square root of 12—they’re logical operations in a conceptual space; they don’t bump into each other physically.”

“Close enough,” laughed Gregor, Tim rolling his eyes at the half-hearted compliment. “There are some who extend the idea, arguing that universes themselves are likewise massive computations at heart, defined chiefly in the sense of the self-contained, evolving information content inside. By the very logical character that renders their existence, they don’t cross paths with one another; they just ‘are.’”

“So, like the way 2+2 = just ‘is’,” she surmised tentatively.

“Except a lot more flexible in how they compute and evolve. So physical laws would just correspond to logical laws deeper down—each cosmos like a gargantuan tank full of logical operations and evolving states.”

“I’m trying to suspend my disbelief here but—how do you get a physical world from that, one that you can touch, see. feel…”

“They’re one and the same. If you glance at a Renoir, or take in a scene from a Fellini film, then everything your eyes and ears absorb—you can represent it all as a stream of pixels, or even a binary string of 1’s and 0’s in a computer. Same as what Tim and I do for a living. But our minds have the built-in gear to compile these physical computations as the potpourri of colors and sounds that we can appreciate.”

“Fine—red and blue shades correspond to specific wavelengths on the spectrum, I learned all that when I was doing set design. The stage was our canvas, and its various colors would frame the scene that the actors were painting. But you’re talking about colors, data streams, whatever. When you have tangible objects zipping all around in space… I guess I’m just wondering where you get the canvas to do the painting on.”

“Space and time themselves are cut from the same cloth, comprised of these atoms of logic at a basic level. Same with the forces of nature. So there’s no inert ‘background’ in which anything is floating; matter, time, space, it’s all digitized, just a web of relationships and interactions.”

“Though I can promise you,” added Tim, turning to Teréz with a slight chuckle and a gruff voice, “that there’s no string of logic that can explain two wannabe gypsies like you and me falling head-over-heels for each other in a place like this.”

“I should hope not,” she replied with a faint attempt at a smile, still too vexed by the intractable riddles streaming from Gregor’s lips.

“Look, I’m not even going to try following you guys in this, but there’s one detail that’s still not making sense. You just said that different universes are self-contained, but between you and what Giulia was just showing us—it’s as though this entity has been in far more than just one. Thousands of civilizations in fact, gathered up before he came to our own cosmos.”

“That’s why Giulia called me here specifically, Teréz. In Kant’s various discourses on the entity, the Tauschreigeist wasn’t the only name he used.”

His two listerners both halted, stepping back and widening their eyes in anticipation as he continued. “Kant called the entity: ‘The Leibniz Demon.’”

“A demon?’ inquired Teréz, evidently unsettled by the choice of words. “As in… the coming-out-of-Hell variety?”

“No, at least not in his original definition. Around Kant’s time, in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, it was common for natural philosophers and scientists to invoke the notion of a ‘demon’ to pose though experiments, about conceptual or philosophical phenomena that seemed to defy physical laws. There was Maxwell’s Demon, or the Laplace Demon that could supposedly view the evolution of the universe from the outside, unconstrained by the blinders of mere years or decades of observation within it. Kant defined the Leibniz Demon in those terms, a physical impossibility… except that this time, it had a documented existence.”

“That’s what you were saying when I crashed your estate up on the island,” remarked Tim, his eyes flashing from the pulse of oncoming recollections. “The being that should not be. What does it mean, Gregor?”

“Our exchange just now, Tim, all that about logical laws and processes underlying what we see—that was right up Kant’s alley. The Noumenon, the thing-in-itself that we can’t experience directly, would be this hidden underlying narrative of cause and effect. But what we perceive with our senses…”

“The Phenomenon,” interrupted Tim with an impatient nod, “what our brain reconstructs at a macro level from the raw inputs of the Noumenal world. You’re sounding a lot like your estranged old friend at the Leipzig Bahnhof, Gregor.”

“When it comes to Kant, I’ll take that as a compliment. But he had a very different motive for posing these questions in the Precipice. Even before his connection with the Falkenei Gesellschaft—what little I’ve surmise of it thus far—the philosopher was fascinated by the physical nature of this Noumenal realm. In fact, those presumed atoms of logic, somehow organizing and manifesting as space and time and matter… Leibniz himself had proposed a solution to that conundrum.”

“The Monads!” exclaimed Teréz, to the joint surprise of the others. “This I did read up on, guys. The most elemental constituents of a rational world, neither matter nor energy per se but something more like… kernels of consciousness and intelligence, slowly evolving into greater complexity. I always found it to be intriguing.”

“As always, Princess,” remarked Tim with a wry glance, “never to be underestimated.”

“Gregor,” she continued, “so Kant was considering the very evolution of our cosmos in terms of something like the Monads, is that what you’re implying?”

“Not exactly, Teréz; Kant was uncannily ahead of his time, but there wasn’t any framework for a concept like an expanding universe back then, or matter as we know it. At least, not before he joined the Gesellschaft. At some point thereafter, Kant refined his questions to conjure up The Leibniz Demon: a conscious, intelligent entity that could perceive and manipulate nature at the Noumenal level, rather than the fragmented, Phenomenal reconstructions that our own minds create from subjective experience of the Thing-in-Itself.”

“So,” conjectured Tim, “it would be like you and I observing nothing but the underlying bitstream in a radio broadcast and… putting it together as a symphony.”

“Now you’re catching on. But a Leibniz Demon can do this with the natural world itself, on whatever plane of existence these Monads forge the world that the rest of us see.”

“I’m still not sure I understand, Gregor,” answered Tim with a flustered shake of the head. “You’re claiming that the Demon has a… direct line, to the unseen core of the natural world. But why does this make him so dangerous?”

“It’s because of what that implies.”

Giulia had projected the broad scroll onto a makeshift screen in the distance behind them; they diverted their gaze to behold the magnified depiction of the entity on the unfurled scroll. His menace and rage seemed even more chilling than usual as they peered within his dark soul.

“Tim, no living thing, no sentient being born on earth or anywhere else in this universe—at least, a natural birth as we know of it thus far—could possibly exist as a Leibniz Demon. The physical content of our minds is itself forged from a few shards of this cosmos, a foundation from which we slowly build up the faculty of perception. And it stays that way—Phenomenal perception of an underlying plane that we can never fully grasp. A Noumenal being wouldn’t merely access this realm; it would have to be integrated within it, within the very fabric of space and time from the dawn of our cosmos.”

Tim shook his head with his lips tightly pursed together—out of incomprehension or refusal to comprehend, not even he was quite sure. “Zach tracked down Keisuke Kusumoto in Vienna somehow, and he passed on some of what he’d heard. Keisuke was constantly insisting that the demon was as old as the earth. But if what you’re saying is correct, he goes all the way back…”

“To the Big Bang, yes, to the very creation of our universe itself. He can access the hidden realm, because he was a part of it when it came into existence. They had no conception of this cosmology in Kant’s time, nor would it have made any difference if they had; this isn’t supposed to be possible. The conditions after the Big Bang, before even matter and basic forces themselves had condensed—they were presumably far too extreme to permit any kind of organized sentience. But the Tauschreigeist was already there. Dormant, yes, but fully in existence, interwoven into everything that’s followed.”

“So the entity is a… a cosmic computer virus, manifesting right now on earth?”

“If only he were merely so. Tim, the Tauschreigeist was present at the Big Bang because he was there in whatever gave rise to it.”

Teréz frowned in consternation. “Are you saying that he helped to engineer the creation event itself?”

“No, not that per se. Even though Kant had no reference point to make sense of the idea, he affirmed in the Precipice that the Demon has been leaping from realm to realm. In modern parlance, the Tauschreigeist was chaining himself from one cosmos to another. Many cosmologists suggest that the creation of a universe is more like a biological phenomenon, with new spacetimes spontaneously budding off from their predecessor universes. It could be happening hundreds of times every second, right here in front of us, but we never see it because the new cosmos become causally isolated after they bud off.”

“But the buds would be a chip off the old block, wouldn’t they?” inquired Tim rhetorically. “With similar physical laws, initial conditions, properties…”

“Like being able to support advanced life forms,” reasoned Teréz.

“If those parent universes can generate earth-like planets, yes,” agreed Gregor. “While we ourselves can’t see the buds, a Leibniz Demon would have access as each new universe comes into existence. That’s how the Tauschreigeist is able to bridge different cosmos that would otherwise be disconnected for good.”

He turned sharply toward Tim, startling him. “The Tauschreigeist is a universe, unto himself. His evolving consciousness marks distinct events in his relative timecourse, and the space that he harbors consists of the memory of each planet that he encounters, frozen permanently within his being.”

“So that’s what all those creatures are, on the edges of the beast,” remarked Tim with a nervous frisson in his voice, signaling toward the magnified diagram. “They’re our predecessors.”

“Earth’s predecessors, Tim. Life-supporting planets are information-rich, and not only in the intelligent life that they possess. The plants, the simple creatures, the oceans, the structures and technology that the intelligent beings develop, and of course the contingent history that they map out—the Tauschreigeist absorbs them all, joins them to his own mind”
“Absorbs?”

“This is where it gets pretty gruesome. His encounters are catastrophic events, Tim. Once the Tauschregeist pays a visit to the civilization on his target world, life there ceases to exist. It’s simply frozen for good, in whatever state it held when the Demon manifested his being. An apocalypse in all the worst possible ways.”

“Why the hell is he doing all this? Is he just a… parasite, feeding on the life-giving worlds of each new cosmos?”

“No, Tim, at least not that alone. Not even Kant himself could comprehend the being’s motives, but it’s nothing so simple as that.”

He paused and sighed, his initial look of jovial intellectualism now supplanted by the strain of crushing apprehension. “Giulia and her team have translated enough to tell us the what and some of the how—but the why? And what’s the source of all this? Kant and Leibniz both made some extraordinary deductions, but they were working from a template, something that only the Falkenei Gesellschaft possessed. Either Kant never mentions it, or the Precipice itself is incomplete.”

“Gregor,” interjected Tim, reasoning aloud from an earlier point in the conversation, “based on what Keisuke was imparting to Zach, the Tauschreigeist is nearing his endgame. Perhaps he lay dormant for eons as this ‘Leibniz Demon,’ interlaced with the fabric of space and time, but somehow… he must have found a way to localize, to make his way to earth. The atom bombs in Hiroshima awoke him, and he’s perhaps only days from manifesting here fully.”

“Perhaps. I’ve spent years seeking the answers to all this, Tim, and I’m sure as hell not letting up now. There’s gotta be something in these artifacts that’ll lead us to the Gesellschaft, or whatever’s left of them, and to the source of all that they know.”

“Well, that might be a start” answered Tim, looking past him and eyeing a mammoth assemblage of tubes, octopus-like wires, and devices in a vast clearing ahead to their left. There were cooling tanks and gusts of cotton-webbed mist all about the device, and its far periphery was ringed with the same mysterious tubs of fluid that had inexplicably nestled themselves amidst the other research stations, but far larger than before. Most striking was a parallel array of mirrors and shiny, chrome-like plates arranged in an eerie, Stonehenge-like formation—like portals to a world best left unexplored.

“What in God’s name…” inquired Teréz incredulously, yanking on Tim’s arm as she whirled around to scan the bizarre structure.

“From what they tell me,” answered Gregor cryptically, “that thing’s up to about 1.2 petaflops by now.”

“1.2 petaflops, about half the TianHe I…” Tim paused with an awkward expression, suddenly taken aback by the strange significance of his own words. “You’re saying that thing’s a supercomputer?”

“Not quite, but when you network it all together, it comes close. Truth is that in all my years as a supposed captain of this industry, I haven’t seen a damn thing anywhere close to it. They assembled that apparatus from the artifacts and some instruments taken from outside; some of Giulia’s translations essentially amounted to a kind of instruction manual.”

“To build what?”

“That’s the 1,000 year-old question. Notice the way all the nodes are strewn about the various chambers here.”

“Just old-fashioned distributive computing, right?” shrugged Tim. “Parallel processors?”

“Not the garden variety, Tim. Our minds are parallel processors, too—it’s how we draw distinct ideas together to think abstractly, focus attention, invent things. When we pored through the manuals, eyeballed the array of the computing nodes here, a couple of our neurocomputing gurus realized that it all mimics distinct regions of the brain—the amygdala for memory, the limbic system for emotions…”

“The visual centers, in the back of the brain?”

“Yeah, Tim. I won’t ask how you guessed that, and we’re still unscrambling this massive labyrinth… but as best we can tell, this whole set-up is trying to recapitulate some fragment of consciousness.”

“Gregor,” interjected Teréz, with the hint of a shudder. “When Tim and I stumbled upon that fountain at the end of the bunker, the thing that brought us down into the deep shaft and the burial chamber…” She exhaled forcefully and looked briefly over at Tim, as though seeking his assistance to exorcise the fear that intruded with every tiny recollection.

“Sorry, I’m still creeped out just thinking about that thing. I don’t know what Tim mentioned in the briefing notes, but before our descent into that little Hell, he was saying that the souls in the fountain were built from some kind of advanced artifical intelligence like that.”

“Observant of you to take note, Teréz,” Gregor nodded in response. “A detachment from my own team delved into the circuitry of that fountain, too. It really is like a sophisticated nervous system, distributive and responsive. But all these connections around us—together, they far exceed what was in the fountain. They’re aiming for something grander.”

“Like a fully conscious intelligence?”

“Along those lines, but not the way we’d frame the challenge in AI. The whole array is mimicking something, rigged up with an array of infolding surfaces dense with information.”

“Sounds like all those convolutions in the depictions of the Tauschreigeist, including from yours truly.”

“But it’s not the same, Tim,” countered Gregor, vexed by his inability to match words to thoughts. “It’s a data matrix, yes, but clearly set up for a specific input that we can’t divine yet. Thus far, all we know is that the algorithms for this thing bear a disproportionate resemblance to the protocols used for data compression—mostly lossy, but high-fidelity in a few places.”

“Data compression? You mean, like image files, audio?”

“That’s just a thumbnail sketch, the closest analogy we could hit upon. The processing power of this system is engineered for head-spinning mathematical calculations, and the compression algorithm that it invokes is leaps-and-bounds beyond even the most sophisticated designs that I’ve ever seen.”

Tim’s attention was suddenly diverted to the ring of mirrors ahead, his initial shock quickly followed by the cold-eyed resolve of a hardened detective. Teréz followed him with her eyes as he left her side, biting her lip in a mixture of sympathetic concern and disheartening uncertainty. She turned back toward Gregor, dissolving her confused emotions in the more immediate concerns of the moment.

“Gregor, how do we know that all this here—these strange instructions, the devices and all their powers—aren’t just some trick? To lure us into assisting this demon in whatever he has planned?”

“That thought’s crossed my mind more than I’d care to admit, Teréz. To say we’re in uncharted territory doesn’t remotely do justice to the dilemma. But everything we’ve encountered thus far suggests that the designers of this house of wonders… they were desperate to develop countermeasures against the entity, and they learned by trial and error, just like us. Besides,” he said, with an uneasy sigh, “it seems that the demon’s been reasserting himself just fine on his own.”

“But where does this come from? The knowledge to construct it all? It’s as though it just materialzed here, right out of thin air.”

“Might as well have, for all we know. Wherever it sprang from…” He paused in mid-sentence to look ahead, unnerved by the blank, wan look on Tim’s suddenly ashen visage as the latter turned aside, spying his erstwhile companions out of the corner of his eye. “It seems to have made a hostage out of at least some of us here on earth.”

“I know,” replied Teréz, a plaintive streak evident in her voice. “I can feel it from here.”

Oak Ridge

“No, I won’t accept this. I can’t let you just sabotage your career like this after all you’ve accomplished”

“Allan,” seethed the woman resentfully, “I’m not asking for your approval. I’ve turned this over in my mind for weeks, and I can’t let this place just slowly whittle away my soul anymore, day after day.”

“Rachel, I have to accept your resignation to make it official, and I won’t do it. Not here, not like this. I won’t just let you capitulate.”

“So your keeping me a prisoner here, this is all for my benefit?”
“What is that supposed to mean, Rachel?”

“You know exactly what it means,” she retorted indignantly. “It’s a mystery to all of us why you haven’t just shut down the whole operation, and I know you’ve heard the whispers; we’re way outside the ethical guidelines every day this goes on, given what we’ve encountered already.”

“Don’t say things like that, damnit…”

“And me? If I leave, you fear what’ll happen without the steady Dr. Bloom to call upon, to clean up your Godforsaken mess here. The rest of the team would call it quits, and then you’d be left squirming before the suits at Walter Reed, concocting some fish story about how their precious multimillion dollar investment all went up in flames.”

“Rachel--” The man sighed in flustered consternation, desperate to find the right words. “I know you don’t mean what you’re saying right now. Look, I know the hours we’ve been expecting of you have been beyond anything humane, and that was wrong. I apologize personally for that. Why don’t you just take a long weekend and rest it off.”

“Fatigue? Burnout? That’s what you think this is Allan? I’ve been biting the bullet for months now, arriving here well before sunrise, and it never got to me before; I believed in the project too much. Why are you pretending this is anything other than what it is?”

Allan winced as he fumbled again for a tactful reply, anxious to avoid any exacerbations of his colleague’s frayed nerves.

“Rachel, I’m sorry, and I honestly don’t know what to tell you here. But you can’t let your old mentor from North Carolina…”

“Oh, damnit, just don’t!” she exclaimed, her teeth on edge as tears of anger and helplessness welled up in her sore, reddened eyes. “The least you could do is not patronize me, because I know you’ve seen it too, you know it’s here! You were leading that nighttime conference, when Dr. Yoshida revealed the Tachibana Syndrome. You heard what he said, and you know what it means.”

He merely stared at her with a doleful, ambivalent look, afraid to join a voice to his devastating thoughts.

“Allan, some force on this earth was awakened when the mushroom cloud rose up. And it’s here, right now, all around us. You may not want to believe what Tim has been passing on to us, but you know it’s true. Dr. Kusumoto was… possessed by whatever took shape in Hiroshima, and when he and his team supplied the retinal implants to us, they ushered in the Day of the Devil.”

“Dr. Kusumoto—he’s alive? Is that why we were targeted?” He averted his gaze and whispered the second thought to himself, withdrawing into an incongruous bout of contemplation that puzzled his partner, who simply answered his rhetorical question directly.

“We were targeted because we crossed that threshold. We were the ones who linked a network of human minds with the great silicon mind that our civilization’s been forging for 70 years, all interconnected and ready for this beast to pounce. It’s what he’s been planning since the dawn of time on this planet, Allan. He was wating for us to link up the collective mind—and then seize it from under us, using it to control all of us. And we’re right in the epicenter here in Oak Ridge.”

“I know we’ve been having quite a few accidents here lately and…”

“Accidents? Two of the veterans of this place have lost their lives in the subbasement tunnels. Others have had arms or legs crushed by instruments that… arose as if by their own will, disconnected from the main circuit. Equipment shifted into bizarre patterns, but all the guards scanning hours of surveillance footage have never once found an intruder. Allan, you know as well as I do that the entire initiative should have been shut down weeks ago, yet you won’t even entertain the suggestion.”

“Ah, damnit, Rachel, do you think this dilemma hasn’t been torturing me as much as it has all of you?” he snapped. He rose from his chair briefly and stared out at the overcast world beyond the window, venting out his frustration with every breath before returning to his seat. “I’m sorry; that was inappropriate.”

Rachel lowered her voice as she perused the reddened face of her anguished colleague. He was clearly holding something back, and she resolved herself to gently, firmly tease it out. “Allan, I know you visited Mandy in the hospital, after the incident in the fine structure facility downstairs. I was in the waiting room. I saw your own face when you looked into her eyes, and then when she described what she saw. You tried to deny it to yourself, but in your heart of hearts you knew what it meant.”

He removed his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes fitfully, leaning forward at his desk and bowing his head in despondent resignation. “I’m supposed to be the rock on this sinking ship, the unflappable captain that rises above the turmoil and steadies the bow even as it threatens to go down. So I’ve tried to hide the fact that I’ve reached the end of my own fraying rope, and I don’t have a damn clue what to tell everyone who barges in here desperate for answers.”

He looked up toward her, his demeanor plaintive yet bespeaking of a hardened determination. “Do you remember, when I took you and the team to see Becky at her soccer game back in March…”

“Your daughter? I thought you said she’d taken a break from the soccer pitch.”

He nodded solemnly. “There’s a reason for that, Rachel. You might recall on that day, the rashes she had on her cheeks, her sore legs, the way it all made her cry so much.”

She acknowledged the recollection, closely guarding her reaction in apprehensive anticipation of what he was about to reveal.

“I made up some mumbo-jumbo at the time, about how it was just some poison ivy from frolicking in the woods, how she was concentrating on the watercolor painting that she’d long nurtured as a hobby—which, well, was partly true. But there was a lot more to it.”

He bit down on his lip and gulped down a mouthful of air, staring skyward in the manner of a man at a confessional. “Becky was diagnosed with a form of rapidly progressing, systemic lupus last year. It’s a particularly severe form of it, and she’s already been suffering from pericarditis; she’ll wake up in the middle of the night, crying and gasping for air, and I’ll spend an hour putting her back to bed.”

“Oh my God, Allan, why didn’t you tell…”

“The treatments are a far sight better than what we had a decade ago, but her heart and kidneys are vulnerable to even the slightest interruption in the therapy. And if I were to admit the ugly truth of the Project to the higher-ups in Maryland—my pink slip would be waiting for me in the lobby downstairs.”

“But with everything you’ve accomplished, you should have your pick of chairmanships anywhere else—they’d be clamoring at your door. Not just based on what you’ve done here; Allan, the tissue engineering facility you created when you were among the faculty at Butler, it’s made the nightly news. Transplant surgeons from around the world come to learn their craft there. I can’t understand why you think you’re trapped here.”

“Because I am trapped, Rachel.” He balanced his reading glasses upon his nose, which had furrowed itself in an expression of impotent bitterness. “I’m aware of the whispers about me whenever the staff passes my door, how somebody’s dug up some dirt on poor Dr. Simms. And they’re right in the broad outlines.”

“Someone’s blackmailing you?”

“”When the New Depression became official, our funding from the National Science Foundation and DARPA nearly dried up overnight. While part of it was eventually restored, we needed private help to fill in the gap, and it ultimately came from a subcontractor affiliated with Archon.”

“Dr. Kusumoto’s old company!”

“Yeah. It’s why I reacted like that when you mentioned him, and now I maybe understand why he went underground as he must have done. Archon wound up funding several of the projects that were on the chopping block, and in return, they were granted a decisive say on the funding and personnel boards. Only a few of us, at the highest echelons, were apprised of our new benefactors, and we were instructed to keep it that way.”

He gazed squarely at his astonished companion. “I opened up a confidential line of communication with Bert Travis, my superior back east, after things had started going sour in February. He’s an old friend and colleague, his own son was always an invite at Becky’s birthday parties for God’s sake… But he told me, in no uncertain terms, that if I pulled the plug—I’d be tossed out with a Class E dismissal, and someone else would take over.”

“Class E? Isn’t that reserved for employees who try to shoot up their office?”

“More or less—any sort of unprofessional behavior, at least in theory. In reality, a Class E these days usually just means you’ve annoyed or inconvenienced one of the self-proclaimed Lords of the Manor, anf of course we among the peasants have no redress to protect our name. It matters little; I’d be blackballed in my field, Rachel, and I’d need six months at best to secure another steady line of employment.”

“Four months too long,” she acknowledged, in dumbfounded sympathy.

“So you got the memo too, huh? That’s the new policy everywhere you turn—two months of extension coverage between jobs, and then my family’s denied care for a toothache, let alone for lupus. The Grand Pooh-Bahs, in all their infinite wisdom, decided they could cut costs by sticking the innocents with the bill for all the bribery and graft they’ve been indulging for a decade. They’d be killing Becky, they know it, and they don’t give a damn.”

“I never thought I’d hear you talking this way,” she replied, shaking her head in unsettled disbelief. “And you think Archon is behind all this?”

“Bert never revealed the source behind his threat to me when we first spoke, but I became suspicious after Dr. Yoshida’s revelations that night. So I tracked my old friend down on my latest junked out to D.C., and he admitted the truth, even showed me the memo. Archon hides behind their subcontractor, but they have us all on a very short leash.”

“I have to tell Tim,” she replied, her teeth clenched in anger. “Those bastards used us all as marionettes, Allan. They knew what those wretched implants were capable of, and they exploited the Vision Restoration trials for their own sick plans here.”

“Fine, but we never had this conversation. Assume that you’re being watched, use a public phone, certainly not anything that can be tracked; I’m not even comfortable discussing this in my own office.”

“I understand.”

“Thanks.” He took a deep breath again as he switched gears, preparing to make an uncomfortable request. “Rachel, you have every right, especially knowing what you do now, to pull up stakes and hit the road. You also know now… I’m in a bit of a bind. You’re one of our most cherished leaders here, and your loss would obviously ripple the waves all the way back to Bethesda. ”

“Allan, it’s O.K. Tell me how I can help.”

“I can’t let on that you know the truth, so we have to stay under the radar with this. I can arrange for you to take a paid leave of absence for a few weeks, maybe on the pretext of a site visit for skills training at our Missouri facility; heck, maybe some of this will even blow over by then. I just have to ask you for one little favor beforehand.”

“Sure,” she replied, with a measure of ambivalence.

“Ray Okamoto has made stellar progress here, and while you’re out, I think he’d be best to take on all the duties that you’ve been overseeing. If you could just hang in here for one more week, make sure that he’s up to speed—I’d greatly appreciate it.”

“O.K., I’ll make sure he’s ready.”

As she turned to walk out, he called out to her again, like a sinner in earnest repentance. “Rachel, please understand—I agonize every day over whether I’m putting all of you in peril. Even with the vise-grip the authorities have put me in, I couldn’t live with myself if I knowingly put you in imminent danger. I’ve drawn up special emergency plans, evacuation tunnels… without even knowing what the hell we’re facing. And if Professor Shoemaker were to warn us of something specific, I’d act at once.”

“Allan,” she responded, standing in the doorway and smiling supportively toward him, “I’ve always respected and trusted you, and nothing today changes that. I can’t imagine coping with such a predicament myself. Just know that you’re not alone in facing this. They may list you as my boss in the personnel files, but you’re a friend first and foremost.”

Upon turning and exiting his office, her heart leapt as something initially indefinite taunted her senses. As she flitted her gaze about the drab hallway, Rachel noticed an odd hissing sound coming from one of the fluorescent lights, with an inexplicable, faint violet glow stemming from its back end. As she approached, she gasped as the lights rapidly dimmed at the far end of the hall, with a wave of momentary darkness coursing past her above. A bizarre hum then followed in the overhanging wires, like a stifled Banshee gagged and entombed within the seething electricity. She shook her head and swallowed hard as she advanced to the staircase ahead, battling with her own vivid thoughts to bar her imagination from applying itself to whatever she had just witnessed.

Rachel, this is strictly off the record. Look, you’re not the first one to see through all this, and wonder why the Hell I haven’t just pulled the damn plug already. the truth is that I’m an administrative paper tiget here. I gave up my own tissue engineering research to shepherd the Vision Restoration project along, and if I admit it’s gone completely belly-up—I’ve got nowhere else to go. I guess I just can’t bring accept the truth of what’s overtaken here, let alone admit it to our superiors back east.”

“But you’re the chief of the division, with an exemplary career, respected here and overseas. Everybody gets a bloody nose at some point in our line of work; it just goes with the territory, of striking out into the unknown. You should have your pick of chairmanships wherever you go, even if Vision Restoration winds up as a little blot on the resumé.”

“It isn’t just that,” he grimaced, his voice perched on the edge of an agonizing revelation. “Rachel, my daughter Becky was diagnosed with lupus about five months ago, and it’s progressed far more severely than the doctors ever expected. I didn’t want to tell anyone here; I knew you were burdened enough already. The treatments are far better than they were just a decade ago, but you know what happens to anyone who suddenly loses their job these days, even at my level.”

“Couldn’t you… continue your insurance for a few months while you get established somewhere else?” she inquired, reading into his response.

“Unfortunately, we lose our continuation coverage just two months after termination. Supposedly part of the ‘cost-cutting’ that the Grand Pooh-Bahs decided on after all the publicly-funded institutions went insolvent with the onset of the New Depression. The bastards responsible for this misery never take a haircut, they even feather their nests a little more while we, the grunts and the officers in the battlefield—we’re supposed to take the hit for them.”

His voice now dripped with bitterness, the kind that emerges from an honorable man trapped by circumstance. “Rachel, I’ve been searching for other postings ever since things went south here. But with the economy the way it is, I’m lucky to even have the office that I’m currently holding. The R&D budgets have been gutted everywhere you look around here, even the private sector. It’d be four months at best before I could land another spot, and once my insurance lapses, Becky’s condition would just about guarantee that we wouldn’t get new coverage at all. It’d be a death sentence for her Rachel, literally speaking.

“I understand,” she answered, tears of empathy and shared desperation slowly streaming down her cheeks. “And I’ll help you any way I can, to train a replacement, to spread your name anywhere I can. I just can’t take much longer here. I know that Tim’s been holding back from me, even as frightening as all his reports have been. He doesn’t want to torment me with what he knows, but Allan, I’m telling you—none of us safe is here, while this thing lingers about.”

“Then maybe we need an exorcist to our payroll,” he quipped, his incongruous jocularity supplying a dose of satisfying defiance for them both.

“Rachel, I can arrange for you to take a paid leave of absence for a few weeks, in the hopes that maybe some of this will blow over. I couldn’t possibly imagine what Professor Shoemaker and his entourage have been uncovering over there, but whatever this thing is—one would hope that he’d be going after bigger fish than our miserable little dot on the ground. If I could just ask you one little favor.”

Museum

“Hey big guy, how’re you holding up?” Teréz’s soothing near-whisper, the wisps of her flowing hair, and the warmth of her soothing hands filled Tim with a much-needed moment of respite and security. “You know, your dark circles are nearly reaching your jaw by now. You should really just hang this up and get some rest.”

“You’re not the first person to come by and wag the finger at me,” he smiled, “though the advice is always a bit sweeter emerging from your lips.”

She knelt down and straddled his shoulders with her hands, slightly callused but still soft, and leaned forward to nuzzle her nose gently against his. Her lips caressed the edges of his cheeks at the rim of his mouth, slowly making their way closer until they locked lips for a few precious seconds, his hand brushing gently through her hair.

As they separated again, Teréz responded with a slightly puzzled look in her eyes. Tim pivoted awkwardly away in response, grabbing a wrench and exaggeratedly focusing his attention on a nearby winch-like contraption, housing one of the mirrors and the almost impossibly shimmering chrome plates from the mysterious arrangement of a few hours before. The mirrors throughout the array were of varying shapes, most of them crafted like stout monoliths but a few with an eerily convex, somewhat funhouse-style curvature to them. The chrome plates, however, offered no such familiarity. Their shape vaguely resembled that of a lute or a gigantic half-pear, with what appeared to be razor-thin sheets of a strange ceramic, granular at the edges like sandpaper, carefully layered from front to back.

“Tim,” Teréz called out gently, as he continued to face forward. “Tim, is anything wrong?”

“Nah,” he replied with a nervous chuckle, still facing forward. “I guess I’m so sleep-deprived right now that I can’t even kiss right.”

“Tim,” she repeated, a bit more insistently this time. “What is it?”

“Really, it’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing, Tim. The way you let go of my hand before, when we were walking alongside Gregor, and the look on your face when you stared back at us…”

She gently rested her palms on the small of his back, gradually swinging herself around to ensure he could see her from the corner of his eye.

“Tim, we know these things. Little subtleties in the way you touch, and hold and kiss me—I know there’s something else.”

“Teréz, please, damn it, I’m just not in…”

He stopped and sighed in mid-sentence, letting the wrench clang to the ground and balancing himself carefully as he stood up partially from his sore, mildly bruised knees. He eyed Teréz with a vaguely apologetic stare, twisting about to repose his back against a tall cinderblock nearby.

“The third dream vision, Teréz, the one I hesitated to fill you in on, when we were trolling about the depths of the fallout shelter.”

She pulled in closer and rested her knee near his thigh, as though to reassure him as he broached an uncomfortable topic.

“After you finished your overseas term at Drake and returned to Hungary, I was married for many years. My wife, Susan, and I chanced upon each other, when we ourselves were both studying overseas in Shanghai, and we had two wonderful children together. But things fell apart when I—”

He steeled himself, as she looked on with concern and compassion.

“I lost her, Teréz. Three years ago, I took her with me on a business trip to South America, part of a reconciliation following my serial screw-ups that nearly cost us our marriage. But we struck a boulder, driving on a fogged-up mountain road. I’ve never felt anguish like I did,when my son and daughter both visited me at that hospital in Suriname, and I had to tell them what happened to Mom.”

“My God, I can’t imagine,” she replied laconically. Her voice was willowy soft and slightly awkward in the emotional tangle that it expressed, yet solid in its profound sincerity. “I’m so sorry to hear of it.’

“I withdrew from any hope of falling in love again, never really stopped grieving the incident.” He inclined toward his companion, his expression both affectionate and a bit ambiguous. “You’re the first person to breach that shell, Teréz, maybe on account of our own history in the years before. And whatever it is that you awoke in my heart, seems it’s also awakened…” He held his tongue, sighing in resignation at the aborted thought. He then twisted to his right, brushing his outstretched hand against the rim of the chrome-like panel, as Teréz looked on in baffled intrigue at his cryptic comment.

“That third vision, as I was saying—it was of Susan, but it wasn’t like the other two. My visions of the Demon, and of my own ancestors fleeing through the cursed forest: They struck me only when I was asleep or unconscious, creeping into my mind’s eye from God-knows-where. I always struggled to recall them, or commit them to paper when I awoke. Some of the visions involving Susan did bring me back to the mountain road, while I was dreaming; but I could also see her when I was wide awake.”

“See her?” asked Teréz, noticeably discomfited by the implication. “Like a… a ghost, an apparition?”

“No, not like that. In a variety of circumstances that I still can’t pin down—her countenance would appear on a 2-D surface, the kind that could hold an image. Computer monitors, at least at the outset, and only after I’d come into possession of the family heirlooms from my uncle.”

“The original artifacts you told me about?”

“Yeah, the very things that led both of us into that pit beneath the museum. He told me there was one device in particular, the Cereceph, that harbored the power to project images from my own mind externally onto those surfaces. I shut the thing down, and I stopped seeing Susan’s projections… until just a few hours ago, when I glimpsed her in the mirror.”

“I see,” Teréz replied softly, puzzling at the implications of Tim’s bizarre recounting.

“The artifacts around here must be cut from the same mold as that Cereceph, and the mirror’s surface served the same purpose as the LCD screens from before. The image on the mirror was fuzzy this time, far less lucid than what I’d been seeing before. But then she appeared on these chrome plates, whatever the hell they are, and my heart leapt into my throat. It almost seemed as though…”

He shook his head, skeptical of the direction in which his thoughts were taking him. Teréz cupped her hands around his outstretched wrist, in the manner of a supportive friend amidst a predicament, saying nothing as she gently coaxed him to continue.

“I could swear that her eyes were following me as I moved, and the expression on her face was changing. Not some vague Mona Lisa eyefoolery—she was responding to things out here, in our 3-D world. There was a hint of it before, but it was crystal-clear this time.”

“Tim, you said that the device you inherited was projecting images from inside your own mind,” said Teréz, studying his eyes and delicately choosing her words. “Do you think that the artifacts here might be projecting emotions as well? Either your own or… Susan’s, as you remember her?”

“That’s the fit-to-print explanation, I suppose. But I just can’t shake the sense that her manifestations represent something far more than just a slideshow projected from my own head. At first, I thought that I was the only one for whom the visions registered, tuned for my eyes only somehow. But when I was giving an invited lecture a couple weeks back, her image began to coalesce on the screen for the whole audience to behold. And it’s been an unmistakable progression, more lucid each time—the features on her face, her shoulders, her hair, and the way she seems to interact.”

“As though she’s becoming conscious?” queried Teréz, her insight surprising Tim.

“Sure feels that way.” He gazed obliquely toward her, as though to sound out her approval for his offbeat musings. “Susan herself was a psychologist, and she ventured into these very subjects from time to time. Whenever I stayed awake in my study assembling slides for some esoteric discourse on biophysics, she’d stray into the room and tease me with these Zeno-like Paradoxes, hoping I’d get stymied long enough to wear myself out and come to bed. And she usually succeeded.”

He indulged a self-deprecating chuckle as he reminisced. “From a neuropsych perspective, she always said, we become a slightly different person every day, with slightly new circuitry in our brains, a new personality, new habits and memories. The person of yesterday dies, and a new one’s reborn each morning. Heck, with every tick of Planck time—some fundamental clock in nature, as I’m sure Gregor himself would be happy to entertain—we’re a slightly new person, countless times every day. So how can we reliably define the ‘I’ and the ‘you’? How could we possibly hold criminals accountable for their crimes, if in effect, the thug who burglarized the home five months ago was a different individual from the defendant sweating bullets in the courtoom?”

“Now you’re channeling my acting coach from all those years ago, Tim.”

“Your acting coach? Seems awfully deep for a drama lesson.”

“Not really—it’s part-and-parcel of a good character study. The individuals that we conjure up on the stage or screen are mosaics, a walking mix of people that we’ve known or imagined; but we have to portray their behavior at a unique moment in time. I had to do this for several of my own roles, not only fictional characters but historical figures—Cleopatra, Evita Perón. Each sliver of the plot, even just different days, gave rise to a distinct character that I had to dream up anew.”

“So then what happens to all these ‘former versions’ of a person,” inquired Tim, in the manner of a dry-humored yet earnest Socratic pedagogue, “after they die in the old-fashioned sense, or even just with each passing day?”

“I guess in some cases,” answered Teréz, tracking his offbeat line of thought, “they wind up existing again two thousand years later. At least on occasion in the minds of whoever’s portraying them before the klieg lights, with varying degrees of accuracy.”

“That’s why they need someone of your caliber, Teréz,” he said, his jaw creasing with the sparse hint of a wry grin. “The answer to Susan’s paradox was that the criminal in the courtroom had a causal continuity with the burglar from months before. His physical uniqueness, his thoughts, his personality, all the decision rules that defined his behavior, and above all his subjective memory were necessarily passed on in detail to the same guy getting cross-examined by the prosecutor, and distinctly his alone. If on the other hand, you’re re-imagining Cleopatra, you can tap into only a crude approximation of that memory—the collective kind that our history books archive, from the outside looking in—and then trying to guess at what thoughts must have been inhabiting the Queen’s mind at any given time.”

“Well,” she answered dryly, “that’s why only a few of us get to clutch the Oscar statuette; it’s all in the interpretation, and it’s our job to fill in what historical memory has either left out or botched in the transmission.The subjective content of her mind, on any given sun-baked afternoon in ancient Egypt, is a tad beyond my talents. At best I can maybe reconstruct it, and cross my fingers that I’ve done her justice.”

“That’s just it!” Tim exclaimed, brimming with baffled curiosity. “There’s always a disconnect between what we objectively record of a person from the outside, and what they feel and know inside. Even a born dramatist would struggle with all the tics and behavioral nuances of a complex character, because they’re anchored in a subjective perception of the world that we can’t get from outside.”

He inclined his gaze obliquely downward momentarily, shaking his head in ironic disbelief as he whispered to himself. “Hard to believe that my own crooked uncle really did have a point about all that.” He immediately refocused his attention on his equally curious partner. “But Teréz—what if that memory, that person’s world from the inside, their very essence at a given point of time… what if it really could be understood after all? Experienced, and represented in all its original splendor?”

“What are you saying?”

To her evident unease, he moved intently toward a stripped-down switchboard nestled between the nearby mirror and one of the strange chrome-like plates set up alongside it. He typed in a code and punched in a sequence of symbol-imprinted keys, activating a lighted panel on a small strip at the top of the device.

“I coaxed some of the techs down here into providing the activation codes for this thing.”

“What is it, Tim?”

“It didn’t exactly come with a manual, so not even Gregor’s whiz kids know all the ins-and-outs. But they believe it’s rigged up roughly like the fountain of souls we encountered—channeling a high-fidelity artificial intelligence from some unknown data source, maybe along the lines of Gregor’s fits of insight earlier. The instrument panel regulates the bandwidth and bitstream flow through the wires snaking all about the place As for these reflective plates here,” he said, waving an open palm in front of the chrome-like objects, “they seem rigged up to generate a fine-grained hologram, so you can see a crisp image only from right about here.”

He backed up and helped her to adjust her stance, viewing the mysterious surface from a roughly 30-degree angle. He then found his way back to the instrument panel, kneeling down and perching himself carefully before it, like a crane operator about to shift the bulward of a house.

“The current settings are for a fairly low-bandwidth data flow, by the standards of this whole set-up. This array gulps down power like a desert drifter, so I’d rather not risk shorting out one of the stations nearby and incurring Gregor’s wrath.”

He hesitated for a moment before activating the device, eyeing his partner sympathetically before proceeding. “Teréz, this can be a pretty unsettling sight to say the least, and I’d understand perfectly if you wanted to opt out of this. It’s just… it’s probably the only way I can communicate to you what’s been vexing me like this, beyond what I could possibly put into words.”

She smiled back with supportive warmth. “I’ve harbored no illusions since reuniting with you, Tim. I was thrilled to see you after all these years, but I knew you’d be carrying a lot on your shoulders from that long interlude. I wouldn’t have followed you into that house of horrors in the old bunker, unless I’d been willing to stand by your side in the first place, whatever awaited us. That commitment hasn’t wavered.”

Tim nodded gratefully, but his mood promptly turned sober as he took a deep breath, activating the console and then settling by the side of Teréz. The lights dimmed and flickered momentarily, the array before them emitting a harsh sound like static from an antique TV before settling into a quaint, vaguely musical hum. An image resembling a swirling, amorphous haze began to manifest on several of the mirrors in the array, gradually making its way to the convex reflective surface nearest to the chrome-like structure. Teréz recoiled with a startle as the nebulous streaks in an adjacent mirror began to form themselves into something more concrete. The outlines of an irregular shape—the ridges of a shoulder perhaps, or tangled wisps of hair—took hold as an eerie, moving silhouette. They twisted and snarled about in a strangely purposeful dance, the hazy currents of illumination seeming to animate and gain self-awareness before their flabbergasted audience of two.

Just as the haunting outlines of a face in profile had begun to coalesce, the embryonic image suddenly vanished from the mirror, transferring its self-organizing zeal to the granular precision of the gleaming chrome nearby. Teréz felt her heart miss a precious beat, like an anxious roller-coaster novice on a first descent down the rails, as an unmistakably human visage declared its presence on the glistening surface—this time facing resolutely forward. The halos of poignant eyes and hillocks of a soft, broad nose quickly progressed to a distinctive assemblage of lines and angles in a distinctive white-bluish hue, like the stepwise march of a master portraitist from scratchy pencil shadings to a recognizable facsimile of a subject seated before him. Eventually, the eyes and hair took on the colorful uniqueness of a single individual among billions, with the clothing and jewelry of an equally unique day framing the distressingly human stare of the image in the chrome. As the contours took on a greater range of human features, they also assumed an eye-teasing depth across the sandy layers of the mysterious plate, changing perspective with even the slightest movements of their observers.

To Teréz’s surprise, Tim abruptly sat up with back arched, in the manner of a cat alerted to an uninvited guest, as a bizarre aural disturbance pealed its way through their surroundings: a deep, hollow reverberation, like an angry gust of air descending a hellish mineshaft. It was followed by a frightening and equally unfamiliar assault on their disbelieving ears—an overlay of hollow voices slowly rising to a jarring crescendo, seemingly drained away of content and melody to leave only a skeleton of raw, diffuse emotion.

“You weren’t expecting that, were you?” Teréz’s voice seemed uncharacteristically cool in its query, her eyes narrowed in probing scrutiny as Tim abruptly deactivated the strange array.

“It’s never done that before,” he answered nervously, “here or back home in the States.” His eyes faced resolutely away from her and toward the now blank chrome plating, as if to veil the shock and bewilderment that had gripped him. His breathing was shallow and tentative, like a traumatized, shivering shipwreck survivor who had just clambered to shore. “I haven’t encountered that here... or back home, when I had the Cereceph.”

“That chorus of—of howls, at the end just now?”

“It’s never made a sound at all. Anything. And just as I was pulling the plug, I could swear I heard…” He sighed and shook his head; Teréz, for her part, was indisposed to press the issue.

“Tim,” she began timidly, “why do all these devices depict Susan, in particular? The souls in the fountain were never so specific.”

“They’re tuned to me somehow. It must be part of why these artifacts have been in my family for so many generations in the first place. My Uncle Mitch realized that the Cereceph’s projections were guided in part by the emotional centers of the brain; it must be the same for Little Stonehenge here.”

“Overpowering emotion,” suggested Teréz.

“Yes, and linked to a singular event or stretch in time, just like one of the souls you’d portray onstage. What we saw just now, and what drew my attention a few hours ago…” As if on cue, he reached for his personal satchel, quickly retrieving the cherished photograph that he had displayed before at the Leipzig Train Station.

“We took this photograph in Suriname, at a beachfront bar the night before we ventured onto the mountain road.”

Teréz eyed the picture intently, her heart filling with a tangle of conflicting sentiment as her mind perused every minutia of the frozen moment.

“So this was how the device—‘knew’ to portray Susan?”

“As we saw her just now, yes. Her projections when I was in North Carolina were based off an earlier picture, when we’d been camping out in the Adirondacks; it happened to be on a shelf in the study of my home, when I glimpsed her projection for the first time. I don’t know if the Cereceph could absorb it straight from the photo, or if it grabbed an impression from my own mind after I’d burned an image of her into it—but it’s obvious where those visions came from.”

“I see,” said Teréz, her eyes angled away from him in an expression of profound bafflement. “There’s something that doesn’t add up about all this, though, Tim. The photo—your wife was wearing a turtleneck sweater, and I could see the broad outlines in the image that took shape in the hologram. But she had something else there, that I could swear wasn’t in the photo. I couldn’t quite tell by the time you shut it off but… it was like a necklace, with pearls and shells.”

“You caught that, too?” Tim’s response was cloaked in a mysterious incredulity, followed by a prolonged exhalation that prompted him to inch back slightly away from Teréz. He indulged a moment of sharpened contemplation, stiffening his lower lip and protruding his chin sharply, like a soldier about to storm a reinforced bunker in a doomed assault. He said nothing further, groping within his satchel to fetch a compact, modular electronic device with a shape-shifting, crystalline LCD screen.

“Forgive my late-adopter habits, Tim, but—what exactly are you showing off there?”

“The Ubiquitab, or at least that’s what the marketers have dubbed it in the early pitches. I got this prototype as a stand-in for an honorarium I guess, when I gave a talk at the consumer electronics show last year. They say it has a gazillion-and-one functions, but only one that’s given it traveling privileges with me.”

Tim promptly reached back into the satchel to retrieve a small black rectangular case, bearing the slightly worn appearance of an inveterate globetrotter’s attaché kit. He opened it gingerly, removing an elongated gray wafer that was nestled carefully on a photograph that spanned the dimensions of the box, both items resting gently atop a layer of soft foam padding. The picture cheerfully invoked more innocent days of years before, its subject a solitary, tanned, and jocular Tim Shoemaker in a visor and full whitewater rafter’s regalia, grinning with a sportsman’s swagger as he clambered dizzily out of a canoe at an unidentified freshwater shoreline.

Tim clasped the wafer with a surgeon’s dexterity and inserted it within a nearly invisible slot on the left side of the electronic tablet. As the tiny card disappeared within the perfectly proportioned maw of the device, he nudged a button on its back side, quickly dropping a fine-meshed screen that covered its surface and lit up with a watery bluish hue.

“Susan recorded this little video for me as a surprise gift for the jaunt in Suriname. The night before we set out for the mountain, she sealed the memory card into that protective case, then slipped it deep into my satchel before we hit the road the next day; it was supposed to cap off our trip and all it symbolized, once we’d settled in at the hotel on the summit.”

He activated the screen, which was quickly illuminated by the dimpled smile of an exuberant woman with shoulder-length brown hair, sporting a velvety lavender turtleneck that crimped ever so slightly about her long and delicate neck. She had reposed herself languidly against a chestnut-colored sofa, draped with blankets featuring a colorful macramé motif. The video’s quality was almost unimaginably lucid, despite the passage of the intervening years; minor nuances of shadow and dusky window-borne sunlight were rendered with the eagle-eyed resolution of an eyewitness on site.

“Greetings, Dr. Shoemaker of one month hence,” called out the woman playfully, tilting her head slightly in a nod toward the screen. “The first question within that confused and curious mind of yours is probably where in the world Little Susie is right now. As you know, I was called up to consult in Bismarck, North Dakota as part of my latest traveling show for the Psychological Association. So, with the weekend free and my wanderlust frightfully intact, I took up a suggestion from a local diner’s denizens, hijacked a ride out to the Missouri River and wound up here, at the Fort Berthold Reservation.”

She directed her gaze aside as if to prepare a transition in the monologue, but then paused awkwardly and allowed herself a self-deprecating laugh. She then panned the camera away to show a smiling, waving couple to her left, distinguished by their hand-woven clothing and the pony-tails that waved behind them.

“This is Gloria Two Spears,” she said, her hands cupped out in introduction to the woman beside her. “And this is Tony Gliding Hawk. They’re from the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation—the Three Affiliated Tribes here on the Missouri. They’ve been married for seven years, but two of them were spent apart.”

Tim winced anew at the obvious allusion, Teréz peering at him quizzically out of the corner of her own eye.

“Needless to say, Tim, they’re back together now. And to commemorate their reconciliation…”

Susan zoomed in on the couple, who were simultaneously lifting their hands to clasp small, exquisitely-crafted pendants dangling below their hand-woven collars. They were replete with symbols, gemstones, and inscriptions in the local tongue, and colorful motifs reminiscent of fables concocted from observations of the local flora and fauna.

“These were mutual gifts, Tim. The beads and the carvings are the product of a local tradition, symbolizing the return of love and affection to a nest which had been robbed of them by the predations and temptations of the outside world. It dates back to a myth of bird spirits who watched over and protected the tribe, including the bison herd and vegetation upon which all depended.” She focused the lens on a prominent totem of a regal winged creature at the center of the man’s pendant, deftly uniting the features of man and beast.

“The king of these bird spirits was tricked by a jealous usurper into resenting the queen for a misunderstood slight; he abandoned her and took up with the sister of the scheming rival. The queen withdrew in despair, and the tribe was forsaken of her protection; a winter of two years followed, that brought the tribe to the brink of starvation and collapse. But the treachery of the usurper was uncovered by a mere courier boy to the tribal chieftain in the world below. The messenger invoked the spirits of all the flora and fauna in a nearby valley, to call out to the deceived Bird King; he learned of the plot and expelled the usurper, then returned in regret and pleading, to the nest of his abandoned Queen. She refused his appeals at first, until he fashioned the two necklaces containing the plant and animal spirits who had conveyed the message of the courier boy, allowing her to see what he had. The necklaces therefore brought them back together, and saved the tribe below; they became tokens to its members, signifying the renewal of lost love, and all that it meant to those around him.”

She focused the camera back onto her own face, smiling suggestively in the manner of someone anticipating the reaction of an unseen observer. “The legend of the two-year winter, we know now, had corresponded to a volcanic eruption in the 1400s, which had spread enough ash through the region to nearly blot out the sun for many months. But the symbolism of the tribe’s myth is just as real, far more beautiful, and much more important—for us, and any couple who’s endured what we have.”

Tim reacted ambivalently, at once moved by her poignant remark, but also ineffably unsettled by an assocation that tantalizingly danced away from his concrete conceptions. His eyes closed and pressed togther for a prolonged moment of reflection that Teréz again perused intently.

“Now, you know me, Dear,” continued Susan playfully, focusing the lens on her own supple neckline, “I’m not the sort to merely dedicate this effort to the cause of idle enlightenment. So thankfully, Gloria Two Spears was kind enough to fulfill a special request.”

She lifted a necklace of her own to her chin, deftly tying it behind her neck. It closely resembled the one borne by the woman beside Susan, yet it was distinguished by a series of porcelain-like, dark gray diamonds, each emblazoned with a Chinese character that held a distinctive significance to Tim.

“I spent an hour helping Gloria and Tony carve these pictographs, Tim—just like the ones we saw on the obelisk in Shanghai, where we first met. Oh, and one more thing,” she said, reaching behind her to retrieve an object gently nestled on tufts of cotton. “The Pendants of Renewed Love come only in pairs, of course, so they made sure to design one for you, too—the one that I’m hopefully holding up before you right now. Happy anniversary, Dear.”

He abruptly severed the transmission, replacing the device back into his satchel and re-directing his gaze inscrutably toward the center of the chrome plate, its blank visage effaced of the recent display that had filled it so potently.

“Tim,” began Teréz tentatively, “she planned to give that necklace to you on that night that you…”

“That we took to the mountain, yeah,” he said, filling in her cautious conjecture, as he continued to stare eerily at the shiny surface. “She had it all choreographed. When we’d settled into the resort at the mountaintop, Susan was going to walk in and surprise me with hers, before handing me a box with my own.”

“Do you still keep them?”

“I never even saw them, Teréz,” he replied, in a strangely matter-of-fact tone of voice. “The paramedics in Suriname eventually recovered what they could from the crash site, but most of it—burned up, or mangled beyond recognition from the impact. Those necklaces included.”

“I’m sorry, Tim,” she consoled, gingerly returning to the conundrum that had been vexing her since beholding the strange incident on the chrome device. “So that hologram we just saw, a few minutes ago, the necklace that Susan was wearing—it wasn’t just from the photo that you’ve always carried with you? Your mind had projected it, as an afterimage from the video that Susan had recorded for you?”

“That’s where the whole damn structure we’ve concocted to explain this—where it all comes toppling down.” He followed his cryptic response by finally turning away from the chrome and facing her with an alarming bluntness, his eyes incongruously red and his face ashen, as though drained away by the strain of futilely tackling riddles that afforded no answer.

“I first glimpsed that necklace myself only three hours ago, Teréz, in that earlier hologram on the chrome plate. And the video that Susan prepared… I never once laid eyes on it. Until today. Just one hour before the conversation we’re having now.”

In the restaurant in Hungary

“I’m sorry, Tim, but you’re not making sense.”

“When the hell has any of this made sense, Gregor? The Falkenei Gesellschaft? The Tauschreigeist? Computing devices 500 years ahead of their time? What among any of this makes a damn bit of sense?”

“You know what I mean—the artifacts’ workings may seem unfathomable to us, but their principle at least conceivable. There’s a consistent logic to everything the Gesellschaft has built.”

“Which is?”

“I think you know the answer to that.” Tim’s perplexed aggravation sharpened with Gregor’s admonishing tone, prompting him to elaborate his own anxious sentiments.

“We may comprehend nothing of the origin behind their craftsmanship, Tim, let alone whatever the Gesellschaft ultimately intended for them. But there’s a method to their madness: linking our internal cognitive functions with an external template. Your emotions imbue your memories with meaning and value; that’s how the Cereceph knew to project Susan onto all those screens, from the images that you had maintained deep within your mind.”

“But what if there’s more to it? Gregor, this isn’t the kind of thing I’d misconstrue or screw up in the retelling. Susan was wearing that necklace in the projection on those chrome objects, before I’d ever known of its existence; before I’d had the slightest inkling of her intentions when we reached the summit.”

“Then you must have seen it somewhere else, maybe heard reference without consciously recollecting…”

“Damnit, would you stop being so stubborn?!” Tim’s frustrated retort was dripping with diffuse indignation. “Whatever lapses I may have for other dates or times, I would never get something like this wrong. Not involving Susan, not that day on the mountain.”

“For you, sir, the borscht.” The genial waitress provided a welcome interruption as she carefully placed the bowl before Tim.

“Many thanks.”

“And for you,” she said, turning toward Gregor on the opposite side of Tim, “the gazpacho. Jó étvágyat!”

“Köszönöm!” responded Gregor in gratitude, without missing a beat.

“Would the two of you like to order entrée now?”

“Uh,” stammered Tim, as they both eyed the missing seats beside them. “No thanks; we’re still waiting for company.”

“Sure, take your time.”

“Thank you,” answered Gregor, turning quickly to Tim as she rushed to another table. “I’m a bit surprised; Giulia is usually punctual to a fault.”

“I think Teréz got to her,” quipped Tim. “She has a sixth sense, and I suspect it was telling her that she and Giulia should arrive fashionably late, after the two of us had finished our little sparring match.”

“My apologies on that front,” replied Gregor, his voice softening to an almost apologetic tone while his forehead creased in a gesture of mollifying self-deprecation. “Tim, look, I’ll say it straight out—if what you’re saying is true, it’ll sever the one tenuous strand of comprehension we’ve scraped and clawed to get our hands on. If I’m pushing back, it’s not because I’m in any way doubting what you remember about Susan, let alone anything surrounding that terrible day. It’s just that this is all we have.”

“I know, and a part of me is quite thankful for your stubbornness; it’s the only reason we have the wherewithal to investigate any of this,” said Tim, reciprocating the tentative olive branch.

“I’m still wrestling with everything you’re telling me,” protested Gregor after a brief pause. “I can accept that the artifacts could tap into our minds at a level below the conscious plane; but that doesn’t matter if you’d never seen the necklace at all. Tim, I’m sorry to press this issue with you, but the implications of all this are pretty damn serious. Are you absolutely sure you couldn’t have encountered some unnnoticed reference to that necklace before today?”

“I’d normally permit myself a pinch of doubt on this kind of thing, but not here. Susan took pains to conceal it until the night of our anniversary. She wouldn’t talk about her trek through the Dakotas at all, and she sealed away the necklace itself. I knew nothing of it, and that’s exactly as Susan wanted it; the revelation was supposed to come only that night at that summit, the one that we never got to savor together.”

“And that video?”

“I did know of it, that’s true, quite unlike the necklace itself. It’s been languishing in my possession for years. But I’d never glimpsed its contents before today.”

“You’d never viewed it before?”

Tim sighed audibly, biting down on his lower lip.

“The rescue team in Suriname managed to salvage the video from the wreckage, and they gave it to me in the hospital, that same horrible day our kids arrived to hear the truth from me. Susan had packed the memory card for the video away in a sturdy foot locker that we’d stowed in the trunk, to carry some of our heavier belongings up to the peak; she figured that would ensure I wouldn’t stumble across the surprise, until just the right moment. I was too traumatized to view it; I took more than a year before glimpsing even the photo we took together the night before, the same one I’d already laid eyes upon. So whatever Susan had on that recording, I deliberately kept it a mystery.”

“But why did you have it with you just then in the museum, right after the incident with the hologram?”

“I’ve always had it with me, Gregor.” He shook his head, gazing slightly downward in an expression of discomfort and a measure of shame. “I guess I always rationalized that—that I’d muster up the fortitude, or at least the detachment, to finally view it when the right moment came along. It never did over these three years, so it just sat idly with my personal effects. Until I saw the necklace on that projection.”

Gregor grimaced in consternation, his face signaling an unconditional and, to him, wholly unfamiliar surrender to utter bafflement. He sipped awkwardly from his soup, as if forcibly distracting himself from a notion that his mind was simply incapable of handling. “Then this means…” He preempted his own thoughts momentarily, the handle of his spoon striking the rim of the bowl with a jarring clang.

“Tim,” he continued, “these structures all seem tuned to a conscious observer, specifically you—that much we know. Our working assumption has been that they can draw sustenance only by interfacing somehow with the content of your mind. But from what you’ve just said, the artifacts can do far more; they can access objective reality itself. Those devices knew what Susan had recorded for you, and they knew how important her words, and that necklace would be to you.”

“So you think these devices accessed that video… before I did myself?”

“So it would appear,” he answered, shaking his head incredulously. “It’s as though the artifacts are evolving as we assemble them here. It’s telling us something important—a signal of some sort, about what they were designed to do.”

“The Ur-Anderen,” remarked Tim cryptically.

“What?”

“The Ancient Others. They were mentioned on the tablets, Gregor, both the one I inherited and the one within your diorama on the estate. Amid all the apocalyptic symbology and forebodings scrawled upon those things, there was an unwavering instruction to consult The Ancient Others, whatever that means.”

“Who are they, Tim?”

“We have nothing but a name and a mission, but they must know something important enough that the Falkenei Gesellschaft singled them out in their earliest communications. Perhaps they’re along the lines of those old oracles or soothsayers, like the ones in ancient Greece or Rome, but with some sort of encounter or experience that’s endowed them with an understanding of the Tauschreigeist.”

“But what do the artifacts have to do with this?”

Tim tightened his jaw and turned aside, idly stirring the bowl of lukewarm soup before him. “That gruesome fountain, all these screens and surfaces distilling into something conscious… You said it yourself, Gregor—there are common themes to all these freakish innovations from the workshops of the Gesellschaft. So damnit, what are we missing?”

Gregor folded his hands and buried his nose between his fingers, darting his eyes back and forth in a gesture of agitated contemplation. He then looked up and away, shaking his head before finally snapping quickly back, as if to emphasize a conclusion that he could scarcely believe himself.

“Let’s run down what we know, Tim… or what we think we know about these things. The Gesellschaft’s technology is all about creating sentience from the inanimate and unaware, compressing what took billions of years on earth, into a matter of mere minutes. An outside cue gins up the whole process—your memories, so far as we’ve seen—and guides the pixels on the screen, or whatever’s in those chrome plates, to assume a partial representation of a living person. They built all this centuries ago, dedicated unimaginable resources given the constraints of their era; so it must be connected to these, Ur-Anderen, as you call them.”

“To reconstitute whatever they knew?”

“At least the broad outlines. Whatever those old sages knew, the Gesellschaft has been moving heaven and earth to find it out. And you’re a linchpin in the whole process, Tim—that’s the implication of the ###fresco I’ve been jealously guarding in my cellar for so many years.”

“I know,” replied Tim, his tone laced with rueful resignation. “It’s as though I’ve been drafted for duty, ever since my ancestors stumbled on that castle in the cursed forest.”

“But it’s not merely the artifacts that the Gesellschaft passed down through your family line, Tim.”

“You’re not the first one to suspect that, Gregor, but now I’m not so sure myself. If these devices can indeed access information from a font outside my mind—Susan’s recording, and whatever else—then what do they need me for? Perhaps I’m just there to supply a cue for them, and if I can do it, what’s blocking anyone else?”

“I can’t say why, Tim; but my gut feeling says that it has to be you. Maybe they can retrieve this forbidden knowledge from outside sources, but it’s your mind that’s priming them to go there. They really do seem tuned to the whims and memories inside your head, and yours specifically.”

Gregor reclined in his chair, pushing his soup away and looking his dining companion in the latter’s reddened, wrought eyes. He cast aside his customarily cerebral demeanor, addressing Tim in the manner of an old friend straining to help in the midst of a draining crisis.

“Tim, I can’t imagine what this all must be like for you. To be sucked into a conundrum like this, that we can scarcely understand for reasons we can fathom even less—and to be constantly reminded of a particularly unwelcome incident in your past. I’d do anything to be free of that burden, had I been in your shoes.”

“I appreciate your sympathy, Gregor, but you’re just reinforcing my own doubts here. I can understand why my thoughts would lead the devices to a representation of Susan; but what’s my connection with the Ur-Anderen supposed to be? I don’t even know what the hell they are, let alone how to tap into whatever they knew. And what would I do if I could establish that link? As jolting as all the images of Susan are, Gregor, they’re just depictions of her likeness, by little sprites on an LCD display or a metal surface. She hasn’t…”

Tim winced and twisted his nose, inclining his gaze downward and to the side in a gesture of thwarted consternation. Gregor looked on attentively, struggling to discern the unspoken words on the other’s face.

“That rendition of her on all these surfaces, it hasn’t communicated anything to me,” Tim said, with an exaggerated forcefulness that seemed to be compensating for a lack of conviction to sustain his words. “So what’s to say that the Ur-Anderen would do otherwise, even if we could make contact?”

“We clearly are lacking a key piece of the puzzle, Tim—no doubt about that. But it’s also evident that whatever it is, you have to provide the cue. Hopefully, the answers will become obvious once you do.”

“Then what is the cue?”

Gregor’s face blanched as he sighed with exasperation. Tim’s importuning eyes clamored for an answer, one which the resourceful industrialist was now completely at a loss to provide. “I’ll talk to Giulia when she arrives tonight, then draw my squad together tomorrow and see if we’ve missed a hair in all our fine-toothed combing. I can only surmise that we’ve missed something in our analysis of the objects.”

He gingerly pulled his nearly untouched bowl of borscht back before him, again staring idly for a moment before indulging a final speculation. “If the artifacts could glean such detailed knowledge of Susan from an unwitnessed recording in your possession, then perhaps there’s another information source amidst all this that will lead us to whatever wisdom the Ur-Anderen possessed. From there we can… Tim?”

To Gregor’s surprise and unease, Tim’s eyes had focused forward in a piercing, determined gaze at a spot on the table before them, the hawk-like stare merely an outward manifestation of a turbulent train of thought that had gripped him inside. He shook his head feebly, as if to test a musing that he dared not utter openly.

Before Gregor could seize an opening to query his companion, seemingly locked into a contemplative trance, their two guests finally appeared to claim their seats at the table.

“Sorry to be not-so-fashionably late, Tim,” smiled Teréz, even as her gestures corroborated Tim’s earlier suspicion of her intention to do just that. “Have we missed anything?”

“Just a little guy talk,” Tim responded, his body language likewise conveying the magnitude of what was left unsaid. “And some bittersweet tinges of an answer to some of this.”

Back at the Museum

[ It’s around 3 a.m.—Tim figures other power usage will be minimal, can activate the device to full strength.]

The hulking silhouette flitted about the abandoned corridors, winding about the columns of boarded-up exhibits and stairways descending into occult depths below. It sidled through piles of debris and the forests of wires that ensnared the walls and ceilings of each forsaken chamber. Its pace sped up to a temporary frenzy, before slowing back down to a deliberate yet determined gait as it arrived deep within the bowels of the structure, nearly four stories down from the entrance above. The dimmed, sterile surroundings progressively blurred into a whirl of undulating shapes and monstrosities. The towering shadow still pressed on impetuously, pushing past a series of pillars and screens that transmogrified into grotesque, taunting caricatures of themselves.

Finally, the outlines of a sea-blue fountain materialized in the distance, quite unlike any seen before. A rushing chorus of echoing souls quickly distilled itself into a smooth, crystalline flow. Soon enough, the entire fountain itself had begun to metamorphose, like a nondescript cocoon giving rise to a graceful butterfly. The trickling streams became arms and legs, the shaft a torso, the upper basin a delicate neck and shoulders, flowing with the windswept hair of a woman glimpsed from the back. Slowly, she turned around to face forward, like a ballerina pivoting in slow motion. The woman’s feet appeared to be upturned and gently brushing against the ground, as though she were levitating before him. A trilling, indistinct call quickly organized itself into an eerie beckoning, softly yet firmly conveyed from her willowy mouth and glowing, cat-like eyes, now fully visible as the shadow drew ever closer to her.

“Tim? Dr. Shoemaker?!”

The unsparing glare of a crimson security lantern pierced the slits of Tim’s shuttered eyelids, awakening him to the drab, dim illumination of the museum’s lower depths. He clutched the left side his neck and rolled it around to overcome a bout of persistent soreness; he had dozed off in an awkward posture, half reclining and half-seated, on an irregular stone slab perched near the broad wall that ringed the array of mirrors and chrome.

“Aaggh,” groaned Tim, rubbing his bleary eyes with calloused knuckes, in a half-hearted attempt to close out the teasingly bizarre, hazily remembered dream world he had just visited.

“Roy, is that you?” he queried in a frog-like voice, calling out a familiar name from Gregor’s motley team of crack analysts and guerrilla hackers.

“The one and only,” replied the man with strained wit, in a robust, affable south Georgia twang. He blinked his own exhausted eyes repeatedly as he spoke, shuffling a mop of tousled reddish-brown hair from his eyes and forehead. “I thought I was the lone holdout condemned to this miserable dump tonight.”

“I thought Gregor had you poor worker bees going 24/7 at this place,” mused Tim with a forced chuckle.

“Nah, even Captain Ahab himself leaves the helm for good on Friday evening.”

“That’s comforting—I’d been worried that I was Ahab around these parts.”

“Well,” chuckled Roy sarcastically, seating himself on an overturned crate nearby, “I guess that means the two of you get to hunt your white whale together. Even when you’re supposedly off-duty, which is why I was surprised to bump into you here; I’d heard that the two of you were entertaining the ladies at that posh little diner a few blocks down.”

“Oh, we were. I just…” Tim sheepishly averted his eyes as he cast about for a suitable explanation. “My damn Ubiquitab,” he said, clutching the nearby video-player that held the precious recording from three years before. “I left the thing down here and came back for it after dinner, then got distracted marveling at your handiwork. I guess all the travel and general insanity overtook me when I sat back and downshifted a little.”

“You flatter me, Tim, but I can’t take credit for any of the wizardry down in these parts. I only came down here to inspect the conduits from the gizmos on the upper levels. The good Dr. Chetkiewicz had me posted up in the converted exhibit hall on the main floor—glorified grease-monkey duty for the most part, cleaning gaskets and checking connections on that leviathan they’ve put together.”

“Leviathan?”

“Some byzantine contraption they must have conjured up from that book of black magic you led them to. We decoded instructions from the artifacts, brought in some materials scientists and even worked a few of those weird relics directly into the structure. It’s layers and layers of helices, coupled to—well, to be honest, I don’t know where it all leads, they won’t let me peek behind the curtain. It’s like a nest of spider webs from what I can see, creepy as all hell, and linked up to this decentralized supercomputing network or whatever label Gregor’s slapped onto it lately.”

“Well,” laughed Tim with a sardonic riposte of his own, “I’m sure you’re the best leviathan-cleaner this side of the Danube River.”

“Thanks, Tim, I always heard you were one for rousing compliments,” grinned Roy, tongue firmly in cheek. “Well, it’s been a blast Doc, but I think I’m officially turning in for the night. I’d suggest you do the same, maybe you’ll have a more pleasant dream than whatever was twisting you in knots a while earlier.”

“I’ve always been a tosser-turner, guess I carry the habit anywhere I sack out.”

“Oh, I’d say you were more of a writher than a tosser-turner just now; I was afraid I’d get clobbered if I got too close. What was it about, getting chased by a grizzly?”

“I can’t, I can’t quite recall…” Tim crossed his eyes as he focused his attention inward, before shaking his head in the frustration borne of an effort falling just short. He could glimpse scattered fragments of his recent reverie, potent with their emotional symbolism, but the arc of the scene remained gallingly out of reach.

“I’m impressed in any case that you could guess the content from outside, Roy. What, was I shuffling my feet when you came a-knocking?”

“No—you were talking, even hollering as you lay there squirming.”

Tim’s face quickly took on an expression of fretful, ashen disbelief. Roy’s words had abruptly triggered an onrush of startling clarity in his fragmented dream narrative, the disparate pieces and bizarre images linked together with violent force.

“What was I saying?”

“’Behind you! Behind you!’ You must have belted it out a half-dozen times before I rudely interrupted.”

Tim pressed his front teeth together and sank back into a state of thwarted contemplation, prompting his companion to rise from the crate and fetch his coat.

“Well, I’d best be calling it a night. Just a friendly FYI from the grapevine— Gregor arranged for the codes to automatically change over at midnight, so be sure you don’t leave anything behind. It won’t be easy to sneak back in.”

“Thanks for the tip, Roy. You have a good night.” Tim spoke with a nearly robotic geniality, the emotion had been sucked out of his halting attempts to communicate.

“Behind you,” he repeated. “Behind you…” He groaned and shook his head in defeat, unable to decipher the cryptic words that had seized his fitful sleep merely minutes before. He dejectedly reclined back upon the chilly stone slab near the eerie, dormant array before him, alone in the isolating dimness.

*************************************

Tim yanked his forehead upward, catching himself just as he verged on ensnaring himself within the maws of another perplexing dream world. Aimlessly casting his gaze about, his eyes again caught sight of the rectangular gift case in which his wife had meticulously sealed the contents of the video intended for that fateful night on the mountain. He plied it open and removed the memory card, scrutinizing it in the painstaking manner of a stamp collector inspecting a coveted find. He sighed and grimaced from the memories it again began to stoke; but as he prepared to place it back down, his attention fixated upon the container whence it came.

The familiar sight before him, the deft capture of his clumsy pose beside the recently departed canoe—its still robust hues and shapes seemed to strike his eyes anew.

“Behind you,” he whispered.

He delicately pried the picture away from its ensconced position, wedged within the confines of the box. He indulged a brief, nostalgic look at the image from close up, before attempting to double back the slippery foam pad on which the memory card and the photo itself had been resting.

“Come on, damnit.” Finally, he managed to arch his target upward at the center, clutching its two sides to lift it away, revealing a sight that halted his breath and froze his heart in place.

It was a delicate necklace wrapped painstakingly in plastic, its thin threads adorned with small beads, tasseled carvings, and animal-like symbols in a vibrant array.

“All these years…” he whispered incredulously to himself.

He gently removed the necklace from the box, leaving the plastic shield intact while he inspected its contents in astonishment. But as he held the object up in the faltering light of his surreal milieu, his gaze drifted diffusely to the background, eventually narrowing upon the chrome-centered array that had taunted him twice before. Susan’s recounting of the tribal myth once more blazed through his unsettled mind.

“The renewal of lost love,” he recalled, setting down the pendant and focusing squarely on the inscrutable array, “and all that it meant to those around him.”

He moved swiftly to activate the devices, this time maximizing the data flow through the mysterious conduits that linked the bizarre arrangement to its unknown partners on the other floors. Gusts of air and the determined hum of a hard-working motor soon filled the air about him, as he kneeled before the strange chrome structure that prepared to come alive. The familiar sequence appeared to him once again, still unnerving even given his relative acquaintance with the process.

Susan’s shoulders and upper arms coalesced upon the chrome, clad in what appeared to be a soft woolen sweater. Her hair, eyes, mouth, and nose took shape as well, even more lifelike than in her prior incarnations. To Tim’s surprise, the vague contours of a background scene were apparent this time—a forest, perhaps, or a lush indoor garden. An eerie echo, recursively feeding back upon itself, periodically pierced the digital and mechanical buzzing that emerged from the energized array.

As Susan’s form continued to manifest upon the layered surface before him, Tim’s attention was inexorably drawn to her broad eyes with their crisp borders and curving eyelashes, and irises lucid enough to hint at a soul within. The colors on the outlines initially resembled the precise markings of a blueprint, but this time there were odd fluctuations in the hues, like a portrait struggling to burst from its frame. Her gaze was cryptic, as though vaguely aware of her surroundings but staring off at a point undefined in the distance, as before. Tim continued to stare at her eyes, his attention finally diverted only by an even more compelling sight: Susan’s necklace, now fully emblazoned upon the image, complete with the carvings and symbols that had been evident on the long-ignored recording from three years ago. He edged closer to the surface, exhaling nervously as he focused intently on the fluttering band about her neck…

Tim gasped and pushed off with a startle, stumbling backward and bruising his tailbone upon crashing to the floor. He lifted himself back up with a groan and grimace, rubbing his lower back as he apprehensively, yet resolutely, guided his attention back to the chrome, convincing his disbelieving mind of what he had just seen. Susan’s eyes were limned crisply as before, but for once, her gaze was not vaguely directed to the outside: They were pointed, hauntingly, at Tim, tracking him wherever he moved.

Tim continued to maintain his distance, trembling in the shock of the moment. He briefly pondered an abrupt exit from the scene, but the echoing voices had by now become strangely familiar, their once inscrutable resonance now seeming to beckon him to action, even as he remained unable to decipher their precise entreaties. He inhaled deeply and gathered himself, quickly glancing toward the still-unopened plastic encasing the pendant, the one intended for him years before. He removed the binding tape and unfurled the plastic with clinical precision, struggling to remain calm as the chilling, otherworldly chorus about him grew more insistent and varied in its melody, coupled with an inexplicable ambience in the background that recalled the disorienting reverberations of a gaping, abyssal cavern or gorge.

Tim lifted the necklace with the utmost care, staring into Susan’s eyes as he gently looped it about his collar. He looked obliquely downward with chin tucked into chest, adjusting the pendant meticulously, tweaking its tassels and angled totems to highlight the narrative which they were intended to invoke. When he glanced back up, however, the scene had shifted once again—with Susan’s representation on the chrome now placing her left hand upon the surface from inside. An uncanny optical illusion undulated throughout the surface and stretched into the air that surrounded it, akin to the rippling shadows produced upon pressing against a phosphorescent screen.

He creeped slowly forward, steeling himself to continue with each tentative advance. Tim soon found himself mere inches away from the chrome, his eyes aligned with those that were now staring resolutely back at him. He clenched a fist in his right hand and unleashed a deep breath, then opened his palm wide, raising it to press against Susan’s on the opposing surface.

The dim lights about him flashed on and off, first with a minor flicker and then ever more violently, some bursting their filaments as they surged up to brightness or down to pitch black. Tim felt an overpowering, inexplicable sensation course through and around him, like a bolt of electricity that was somehow conscious and alive. Gusts of air swirled about, as the entire array took on a radiant burnt-orange tint. He was soon overtaken by an almost nauseating, unearthly vertigo; the room began to creak and twirl before him, as a horrid rumble shook throughout the walls of the lower levels. The very air in his vicinity seemed to dance about, bending the surrounding illumination into a distorted snarl. The lights in the chamber soon switched completely off, leaving nothing but the hellish glow of the red emergency lamps and a growling, deafening alarm that assaulted Tim’s senses anew, provoking a macabre helplessness in his already altered state.

An acute throbbing suddenly arose around his ears, spreading to his forehead and down his back, prompting him to withdraw his hands and squeeze them vigorously against his temples. He pressed with desperate force to dull the horrid impulse, but to no avail. He twisted about as he sank slowly to the ground, his hands and feet convulsing, yelling in terror and agony as his consciousness slipped inexorably away.

“Aaaaaaarrrrrrrgghh!”

Chapter 19: Memory Really Does Persist

“Tim! Oh, God!”

Gregor’s voice, familiar but hardly soothing, finally punctured the fog of Tim’s tomb-like slumber. His eyes pulled languidly open and weakly scanned the frenzied surroundings, his throat groaning as he took in the caustic air around him. His left arm was jarringly numb as he twitched feebly and ineffectually to regain his footing; he had crumpled to the ground in a hideous contortion, twisting around himself and almost completely smothering his limb beneath his muscular frame. Tim’s respiring was labored and deep with a disconcerting, gasping motion every fifth or sixth breath, his face distressingly encrusted with the residue of dried tears and saliva.

Gregor knelt down by Tim’s side, freeing his arm but otherwise unsure how to approach the disturbing spectacle before him.

“Tim, are you all right? What happened?”

“Thaaa--- Eh---- Cr----” Tim’s voice was barely perceptible, and to Gregor’s alarm and dismay, whatever speech he could produce was slurred and completely unintelligible. His jaw strained to give voice to thoughts that were abruptly bereft of an outlet.

“Ah, Jesus, no… Philip!” Gregor immediately signaled for a nearby medical team, his call thick with the burden of sudden urgency. “Philip, please, we need your crew over here now!”

A well-built and vigorous man, with curly black hair and a paradoxical serenity behind his thin-rimmed glasses, rushed over to Gregor’s side, peering down at the quivering, prostrate figure below.

“Good God, what…” Philip bit his tongue, worried about the reaction of Tim’s already frayed mind and body to the fraught reactions of everyone around him. He poised himself with a professional, dispassionate demeanor as he knelt down to examine his subject, his senses nonetheless sharpened by the ghastly sight before him.

“He seems responsive,” observed Gregor, “but he can’t form even a single word.”

“He needs to be in a trauma center, ASAP.”

“No, not to a hospital. I know how this must sound to you, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen Tim in such a condition, albeit far more severe this time around. I fear we’d be risking his safety at the hospital; whatever’s overrun him, they can’t help him there anyway.”

Philip reacted incredulously to the suggestion, eyeing Tim with deep concern before pulling up and motioning toward Gregor to step away.

“You saw how he was breathing just now!” he protested. “That’s a Kussmaul pattern, what we see with serious acidosis. Perhaps worse, considering everything else in the picture. If this guy’s stroked out, or his ‘lytes are out of whack—we’ve got maybe minutes to prevent long-term complications. We were stuck up there for hours before the transports down here were restored, so we may be too late already. I’m not sure you appreciate what’s at stake.”

“It’s not a stroke, Philip. Look, he’s not paralyzed—he’s already regained movement in his digits, his legs. We should transfer him to a cushion where he can rest his back, maybe in that makeshift lounge by the hallway.”

The medical officer groaned through clenched teeth and shook his head. “If you were anyone else, I’d say you’re out of your damn mind, and I still may come to that conclusion.”

“I can’t guarantee I’d dispute it,” said Gregor, in disarming self-deprecation.

Philip chuckled, rolling his eyes in mock reproach as he relented in his stand.

“I don’t know why you’re so reluctant to rush him to the ED, but I’ve also known you long enough not to ask. Just one simple request: It’s customary under these circumstances to immobilize the C-spine first, in case he fell and sustained cord trauma. If you don’t want to call in the cavalry, I’d at least like to monitor him right here, without taking the risk of triggering any further injury by shuttling him around. I sure as hell hope your instincts are sound.”

Gregor stood aside, waving an outstretched palm to signal his assent. The doctor promptly approached Tim again and bent down to examine his eyes, nose, and mouth, probing his pulse and furrowing his brow as he pressed a stethoscope against his subject’s exhausted chest. He quickly rose back up to report his immediate findings.

“Tim’s more than a little banged up, but there’s no blood in the nostrils or fluid in the ears; his pupils are responding to light and accommodation. Strange, his respiration scared the daylights out of me at first, but he seems to be correcting right before our eyes. His mucous membranes are awfully dry, though—seems like the poor guy hiked the Sahara before crashing here. And his pulse… not sure what to make of it, but it’s not quite a sinus rhythm.”

“That can’t be good. Should we get a defibrillator ready down here?”

“Nothing that worrisome. It’s just that—every ten, fifteen seconds or so, his normal rhythm gets out of sync, and the rate shoots through the roof for a moment. Look,” he continued, tracing an oval-shaped path across Tim’s torso with an extended index finger. “He has a brief bout of rigidity, and a twitch, corresponding to about the same intervals. It’s like a regular burst of sympathetic activation.”

“A seizure?”

“Doubtful based on the overall impression, but I can’t rule it out. We definitely need to run serial EKG’s at least, even get some telemetry equipment down here if possible.”

“I’ll make the arrangements; consider it done.”

“Good. I don’t have any certified neurologists on staff, but Armin’s in training for it, so he may be able to interpret an EEG if it isn’t too off-the-wall. Beyond that, my team can supplement his oxygen, get a saline drip in to rehydrate; not much more.”

Gregor nodded his approval, hastily opting to re-engage the commotion and cacophony about them.

“Roy!” he exclaimed, catching sight of a familiar face. “They told me you were here late last night, you encountered Tim before all Hell broke loose.”

“I was the only one left down here. Just tidying up to leave when I bumped into him, passed out there by the array.”

“Was there anything awry about him, or the circumstances in general?”

“Not that I could tell. He said he’d just come back after dinner with you all to pick up his Ubiquitab. Poor guy must have been exhausted; he’d passed out down here, had one awfully vivid dream. But nothing unusual by the time I took off; I figured he was on his way out himself.”

“Thanks.”

Roy nodded, but just before departing the scene, he turned back toward his clearly agitated mentor.

“Boss,” he queried, “I know this sort of thing is on a need to know basis for me but… what in the world happened upstairs? The area where I’m always tightening the joints on those hoses, they said it was inundated, and not with just water. They said there was a massive tank in the secured room that just burst open and…”

Gregor gnawed on his lower lip and shut his eyes in rueful resignation. “I wish I knew myself, Roy. Something spectacular took place here, and that may not be a good thing.”

“You creep me out when you talk like that.”

“That’s good, it means you have a measure of respect for what these artifacts are capable of.”

“What? Gregor what the hell did these things do in here just a few hours ago? The bellhop at the hotel said that half of the country was blacked out; all the nightclubs in Budapest practically shut down for two minutes, and then just flipped right back on, no explanation whatsoever. Right around the same time as God-knows-what was occurring here.”

“They—they’re designed a grand machine of sorts, of far greater impact than anything we’ve beheld before.”

“To do what?”

“A complex intelligence, sentience… but the real thing this time, not just ghost-in-the-shell AI. The supercomputing power here really is capable of simulating a conscious, self-aware mind. I wish I realized it sooner.” He glanced back toward Tim, his glassy eyes still slowly waking as the medical team vigorously tended to him. “Dr. Shoemaker holds the key to unlock that consciousness, whatever its nature.”

“You’re still holding something back, aren’t you?” queried the young man skeptically.

“Gregor!” called out an insistent voice from behind them, prompting Roy to step aside.

“Melissa, I didn’t expect your update so soon.”

“Just the damage report,” she replied, straining to catch her breath. She was a petite young woman, exhibiting a chirpy and somewhat incongruous enthusiasm amidst her freckled dimples and strawberry-blond hair. Yet she was stern-faced and resolutely professional in her mission of the moment, exhibiting a punctilious demeanor and precision that recalled a decorated soldier addressing a supervising officer. “But based on our preliminary findings… I thought we should keep you in the loop.”

Gregor narrowed his eyes in nervous anticipation as she promptly continued.

“The walls and floors of the museum.have sustained some structural damage. We’ve had to replace most of the lighting, the wiring’s been fried, and some of the devices we fabricated from the instructions that Dr. Armaleo translated—they’ve seen better days. But the artifacts themselves are completely intact. As for the data cables and electronics… we can’t explain it, but whatever damage they absorbed, they seem to be reconstituting themselves to be functional again.”

“Reconstituting?” he asked in bafflement, his inquiry met with a mere shrug. “What about the scene in Zone Alpha upstairs?”

She sighed and shook her head. “Nothing you haven’t heard already. It’s still on lockdown as you requested, off-limits except by specific designation.”

“Good, let’s keep it that way. What about the Lens of Memory down here?” he queried, motioning toward the eerily dormant array behind Tim.

She inhaled with some trepidation this time, hinting that a straightforward response was not forthcoming.

“That’s why I rushed down here. The power surge that overloaded the stations up and down the Danube—it definitely originated here, based on the records from the grid. Whatever was transmitted throughout the fibers of the parallel data network down here, we’re still struggling to piece it back together; it seems that many of the registers were effaced after the data surge had run its course. But we have been able to reconstruct some of it from the fragments we could recover.”

“What’s the story so far?”

“We extracted and repaired a few of the broken data blocks that were transmitted in the milliseconds before the surge. There’s a common motif: a variety of subroutines that, when you add them all up, amount to systems for synthesizing, transporting, modifying, and regulating carbon-based macromolecules.”

Gregor arched his brow, cautiously interpreting her words. “Like the organelles in a human cell? DNA synthesis? Homeostasis and metabolism?”

“That’s the headline story so far.”

“Anything more specific? Particular proteins, genes?”

“We don’t have the resolution for that yet; still hammering away. There’s something else you should see.”

She produced an elongated, lightweight black panel housing a succession of icons in a whirling series of rings, spooled like the concentric reels of a film projector. She used a fluorescent, flashing stylus to halt and highlight each one—enlarging them into a puzzling scrapbook of images. Gregor watched with increasing bafflement as the pictures flashed by. There were grainy depictions of indoor scenes: tiny bungalows with outcropping bay windows; the door of a refrigerator affixed with eerie, occasionally horrific images of uncertain origin; a vaguely-rendered arrangement of furniture surrounding what appeared to be the stacked logs of a nearby hearth. There were also outdoor locales centered upon various bodies of water—a seashore, a pond swimming with mallards and ducklings, a brook in an idyllic rural enclave full of children wading and frolicking. The open-air scenes were framed in a strangely alluring yet baffling visual style, an odd mixture of blurred Pointillism and the enigmatic, Spartan elegance of memory-soaked daguerreotypes from the dawn of black-and-white photography.

“What does all this mean, Melissa?”

“I was hoping you’d have some insight on that,” she answered with a disappointed sigh. “Whatever the reason, they were among the best-preserved oases of data throughout the entire pool, however coarse they appear now. But even then, the image contents were scattered about. The cryptography squad managed to assemble them only when they cracked the code that revealed the tags—like jigsaw puzzle pieces, linked and marked to specify their location.”

“A code?”

She exited the spiraling staircase of imagery to access another series of pictures, this time laid out in a plain linear sequence of prosaic icons. Most appeared to be bland light-box representations of distinctive, yet generally illegible handwriting. But one of them stood out—a rather haphazard clumping of numerals that nonetheless encased an ascending quartet of unknown significance: 406 [the alley in Shanghai], 2471, 9898 [kennel # for her cat as a child], 53362 [science fair number, her poster, got her into a neuroscience institute during a summer], 344946 [raffle ticket, she won a model railroad that she gave to her brother which made him her closest friend and confidante].

“I can’t conceive of a broader meaning for them, but they were recurring throughout the stew of data that we extracted, and they unlocked much of the rest of it.”

Gregor contorted his face in an expression of fruitless contemplation, striving in vain to parse out a broader meaning for the perplexing digits. “Does your team have anything more on the array itself? Their general state and—and whatever event they were involved in last night?”

“Nothing yet. Carolyn has photographic experience, and she just told me that the chrome device has some featuers resembling a… silver emulsion deposit, the kind that’s used to mark light patterns for a picture. But no particulars. The heavy equipment is still on its way down, so we should have some fine-structure radiographs and UV data soon enough.”

Gregor sighed and nodded, unable to fully conceal his disappointment. “Great work, Melissa; I’ll look forward to your updates. I’m not going anywhere for now, but remember, you’re second-in-conmand around here if I have to hop on the saddle; I’ll make sure you’re briefed on all the ins-and-outs.”

“Understood”

He seated himself on the same stone slab where Tim had awaken from his strange reverie merely hours before, staring impassively at the now menacing array in a forlorn attempt to draw insight about the unknowable.

Zach, on the Train from Salzburg (watching vid of the lecture from Dr. Schering)

“So then what is this concept that we so imposingly declare a universe? All of the comfortable crutches, the mental models, the accessible analogies, anything you can wrap your mind around easily—I’ve unkindly divested you of them all. The notion of ‘things,’ of matter and energy, doing their cosmic dance on a ‘nothing,’ a blank canvas—gone. The very idea of an inert background, of the passive vacuum through which particles and waves can propagate, in which forces and even the inscrutable probability densities of quantum theory can manifest themselves—discarded. The well-grounded conception that we can speak of an intrinsic interval of ‘time’ within any reference frame of motion or observation, of ‘space’ between subatomic particles, of an empty span of distance or any other measure we could conceive between the ‘things’—vanished from the realm of allowed thoughts.”

Zach whispered his translation softly to himself, tweaking the earphones as he gradually digested each difficult morsel of the intriguing lecture. He smiled in occasional amusement at the conspicuous unease of many in the audience, their minds clearly strained to keep up with the figure at the dais, himself bearing the traces of a mischievous grin as he challenged and chipped away at the cognitive comfort zones of a specialized audience that was hardly unaccustomed to such exercises.

“My friends, there are only ‘things’ and ‘other things.’ Molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, photons, quarks—yes, all of these are indeed ‘things,’ as are the disturbances and gradient fields that we recognize as the forces of nature. But the ticking of time and the fabric of space are ‘things’ just the same. All of nature, in other words, evolves in terms of these changing relationships among quantized units, between things and more things, old things and new things. So one corollary is a digitized world, in which everything observable and measurable has an equivalent in terms of a logical relationship among discrete atoms of information, which constitute the most fundamental unit of nature. Perhaps this is why, as Wigner observed, mathematics is so unreasonably effective at describing our physical world: the most ontology of that physical world is the flow of logical operations, the same foundation that underpins mathematics. We could then express our cosmos and its physical laws as a nest of logical relations, even a sufficiently massive matrix of numbers, as well as we can speak in terms of motions and forces, energy and particles. Though I should hope none of you have the misfortune of taking on such a matrix for your dissertation, else you’ll need to consider postponing your doctoral defense to a convenient date sometime around the year 2500.”

[put this part back into the unwritten section where Zach first picks up the recording in Salzburg; he’ll play this, remark on the similarity to Leibniz’s monads, strongly suspect that Dr. Scherer is key to the Gesellschaft]

Zach paused the playback amid the muted laughter of the bewildered crowd, visually feasting on the majesty of the surroundings Alps as the train curled about its snow-capped ridges and haze-filled valleys. His cautiously curious mind seemed to draw illuminating inspiration with each glance out the frost-encrusted window, taking in the remarkable creativity and aesthetic genius that nature had kindly displayed as an accompaniment to the journey on the rails.

“But there is a second corollary, of still greater fascination: the source of the emergent properties that render our universe in such structure and complexity. With every event that transpires in our world, a notch is added to a unique and contingent causal narrative, the indeterminate tapestry that defines the course of our physical reality. Everything from the trajectory of a neutrino to an item on our evening news becomes a part of this natural history, but alas, as with any timeline in a historical text, not all moments or events are equal. In the beginning was the Word, of course—the massless atoms of logic that underlie the world we see. In their interactions, and in the chain of causality they inaugurate, they become the nodes for the elemental units of our physical realm: the spin networks, the superstrings, or whatever other composite gains explanatory power and the potential for empirical investigation. Every twitch, every conformational shift of this primeval network constitutes one tick of Planck time, the smallest increment we could measure; and every event in the universe is ultimately measured in terms of it. This primal clock doesn’t measure time; rather, what we call ‘time’ measures this clock, against which all other clocks are normalized.”

“As these primal networks dance and unite, break and re-form, their interactions beget the first hints of structure: secondary networks that require more bits to specify, each link analogous to a quantum of energy. And if enough connections sprout—enough of them to surmount the speed-of-light squared—then we have a grand nexus, our massless networks gain mass, and we have the beginnings of matter. Think of E = mc² as a concise little recipe, to whip up a single Planck mass from a c by c griddle of interacting networks. So we start to assemble quarks from our primordial masses as they interlock, and with mass comes an emergent property of mutual attraction, a new degree of freedom to govern the dance between units now endowed with mass: gravitation. And so it is, with new degrees of freedom emerging to describe more intricate forces: electromagnetism with its attraction or repulsion, the mysterious binding of the strong force in the nucleus. All of these emergent forces are logical innovations, like ever more complex circuits on a motherboard that demand more bits to specify them; but a parallel process is evident in matter, too, with our quarks begetting the nuclei of atoms, our atoms joining hands to become molecules and beget the emergent world of chemistry. Then with molecules we get proteins, DNA, macromolecules; from this biochemical foundation we beget cells and the first stirrings of biology. And from those primeval cells, from the multicellular networks that they create, we eventually beget complex nervous systems and brains that can interact to build societies: neurology, psychology, and then the rudiments of what we call civilization. You see, the neural network that defines our very ability as humans to speak and listen, to discover and create, to love and to learn—it’s incipient at the most primitive level of nature, at the dawn of time itself in our cosmos. Every time we think a thought or say a word, we’re embodying this emergent consciousness, tens of billions of years in development. And if such a thought has ever once existed, or a collection of thoughts as constitutes our waking minds, then perhaps it can always exist again, at any point in the future.”

[move this to an offhand mention, maybe by Gregor when Zach asks about him] The nodes at each lower level of organization, they become interact with greater complexity and structure, giving rise to greater degrees of freedom and emergent properties. And just as the nodes of our nervous system—our neurons—cooperate to beget cognition and consciousness, so atoms act as the neurons that beget molecules, molecules become the neurons for proteins and other macromolecules, these become the neurons for…

“cells. Then complex eukaryotic cells, in a multicellular organisms, give rise to the actual neurons of our nervous system.”

“That’s the general idea. It has a teleological edge—to Leonhard, nature is wired with a subtle arrow of time that points in the direction of complex nervous systems, sentience, intelligence. So as far as consciousness goes, even though we can distinctly identify it as an emergent property only at the level of, say, simple reptiles and mammals, the wellspring of higher intelligence is nascent in the basic warp and woof of nature’s fabric. It had a certain elegance to it, some potential for empirical study—what better ‘common language’ to unify the forces, energy, and matter than an underlying fabric rooted in logical operations, the number of bits required to specify a physical phenomenon? I was naturally drawn to look into it. But that’s what’s so mystifying—Leonhard just dropped it. Not only that, but his more conventional research into information theory, digital physics. And nothing like what Jurgen and I did as computer scientists, branching into other lines of work; Leonhard’s still there, lecturing and working, but he’s never sought to build upon his own foundation. After that one lecture all those decades ago, I don’t think he’s ventured anywhere near it anymore. “

[like when we have pre-conscious cognition]

—a revival, one might say, of a less-appreciated side of Dr. Leibniz’s genius three hundred years ago. Among other things, you see, Gottfried Leibniz was a linguist.

Museum

“How’s he doing, Dr. Carver?”

The woman’s voice, soothing yet unmistakable in the unease with which it was saddled, called out to the medical officer, who had been taking a much-needed respite from the surrounding tumult.

“Ah, Ms. Bartók; Gregor said you might be dropping by,” answered Philip, reassuring yet still guarded in his assessment. “Tim’s regained his voice and most of his other faculties, seems to be moving his limbs and face without untoward difficulty. Helen, our chief nurse, she’s been keeping an eye on him minute-by-minute—says he’s oriented and attentive, fully responsive to people and stimuli. So we’ve ruled out the worst but… he’s more than a little shaken up, might still be a while before he’s back at peak performance. No evidence of head trauma, yet he’s manifested some amnesia that we can’t pin down.”

“Having trouble remembering what you say to him?”

“No, it’s not anterograde; his short-term memory is sharp as a blade for anything he witnesses now. Doesn’t add up but—it appears to be an immediate retrograde amnesia. His recall fron yesterday or before is fully intact, but he’s blank on the last few hours.”

She pursed her lips in gnawing apprehension, her perceptive mind uncannily rattled by the doctor’s account.

“Teréz, glad you could make it!” Gregor shambled in abruptly from a nearby work station, his welcome at once warm and hurried, permeated as it was with the frustration of thwarted effort. He had made little progress in addressing the recent crop of mounting conundrums, and he feared that her questions might go unanswered.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it earlier,” she replied. “I crashed in the hotel after dinner, completely missed your call.”

“Not to worry,” he answered, with a prominent element of self-flagellating sarcasm. “You haven’t missed much, other than joining in prolonged sessions of uselessly bashing our heads against the wall for answers.”

“The wire reports are saying that the blackout extended all the way into the Ukraine, maybe as far as Estonia. You really believe it all originated here?”

“I’m not sure what to put stock in right now, Teréz, but I wouldn’t discount anything. According to my squad’s number-crunching thus far, more than five yottabytes of data were processed by these systems last night.”

“Yotta—what?”

“That’s 10 to the power 28 bytes of data. More information than passes through all the world’s data-handling systems put together, for decades. Even that underestimates the scale of it; our early analyses indicated that many subroutines within the programming of this system, they were equipped for massive data compression, so who knows how high the tally will go. It shouldn’t be possible.”

Teréz responded with a wan, nearly blank stare, as overwhelmed as he was by such talk of the unimaginable. “That block you’ve been carting around,” she resumed, in a bid to change the subject, “it’s not something I see every day.”

“Oh, this?” he asked, plucking out the rectangular image viewer from under his arm. “Yet another font of recent vexation. It’s a scrapbook of sorts, reconstructed pictures culled from the fragments of data we were able to isolate prior to the power surge.”

He scrolled through the bank of images before her, periodically stopping at a noteworthy inclusion within the collection.

“Based on the tenor of our conversations so far,” she began, an undertone of shared exasperation in her voice, “I’m surmising that you haven’t the foggiest idea where these came from.”

“You’re indeed on our wavelength now,” he quipped caustically, “and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

Teréz clutched the device and proceeded to pore through the staircase of images with voracious curiosity, grappling with an elusive gut feeling that she could not quite parcel out. Gregor, meanwhile, was distracted by an unexpectedly familiar voice behind him.

“Gregor, we’ve got some early results.”

“Melissa, I didn’t expect you to return here so…”

“It’s from the Lens of Memory,” interrupted Melissa, as keen to communicate her discovery as Gregor was to hear it. “The data surge did indeed originate from down here, most likely from the array; one of the first signals we deciphered in the log clearly bore its signature, just prior to the deluge. The initial power spike that caused the mass blackouts, was also directed in large part to the array.”

“Without structural damage to the components?”

“Incredibly, no—like the rest of the network, the Lens seems to have regained its original integrity after the surge, as if it repaired itself. Our radiographs showed some minor deviations in size and shape from earlier measurements, but nothing that would impair functionality. And on the chrome structure—Carolyn’s hunch was right, she was able to develop an afterimage. Here, take a look, it’s like the negative of a photograph.”

Gregor arched his back in a slightly exaggerated posture, his eyes absorbing the disturbing silhouette before him. It was a grainy, dirty rendition, like a low-resolution photograph of a stalker at a window: A woman, her facial features indistinct, with shoulder-length hair and her chin tilted vaguely toward her right. It was the left side of the scene, however, that most alarmed its two observers:

“What in the world is that?” queried Gregor. “Looks like an arm raised up, then the impression of a hand but—facing every which way.”

“Yeah, weirded us out just the same. That’s because Carolyn said it was two hands, pressed against each other across that surface.”

Gregor stood up straight again, barely having digested Melissa’s bizarre report when his attention was drawn back toward Teréz. She glanced back toward him, her eyes flitting pensively between him and one of the images that had been especially occupying her attention: the incongruously lucid rendition of the refrigerator door, covered as it was with magnetized trinkets and children’s depictions of strange narratives both fantastical and grisly. Gregor, for his part, continued to stare without saying a word, the two of them engaged in a seemingly psychical exchange as they sojourned within the same nebulous depths of the imagination.

“I appreciate the update, Melissa; carry on.”

He caught sight of Teréz immediately bolting toward the cordon of nurses and technicians keeping careful vigil over Tim. “Excuse me,” she said, addressing a woman who had been carefully supervising the surrounding group. “So sorry to interrupt you all but… Gregor and I were hoping to talk to Tim for a bit, if he’s feeling up to it. Is this a good time.”

The nurse paused before signaling her tentative approval, her voice restrained to keep the conversation out of Tim’s ears. “Just make it quick. He’s rapidly improving but not at his strongest, and his heart’s still giving us fits.”

“His EKG was off kilter?” queried Gregor, pulling up beside Teréz. “Philip had mentioned something about an arrhythmia, or maybe seizures.”

“The Doc couldn’t ID anything specific on the EKG, just these irregular bands of acceleration out of nowhere. And the EEG—no seizures per se, but they said it was full of theta-wave spikes whenever he closed his eyes or just idled too long. Like someone being whisked away without warning, down to some personal dreamland and right back again.”

“Does he remember the dreams?” Teréz inquired.

”No, he’s not even aware he’s going in-and-out of consciousness. It’s a little creepy, if you ask me. Fortunately, he’s stabilized enough that it’s not striking all that often anymore.”

Teréz nodded as the nurse deftly stepped aside, allowing the two of them to kneel down by the low mattress that was gently cradling Tim’s supine body.

“So the word is that I took out power to half of Europe,” began Tim upon eyeing his two comrades, dripping with characteristic self-effacing wit. “Hope the two of you aren’t holding it against me.”

“We’re not even sure you’re the culprit, buddy,” responded Gregor dryly, “and even if you were, I’d say you’ve been punished enough for the transgression! Can you recall anything about what hit you last night?”

“Not a damn thing. It’s a cluttered haze, all the way back to dinner at that café. I remember some heated discussion about Susan’s recording from the Dakotas, while the appetizers were rolling out and then—the record goes blank.”

Teréz sidled over to a point beside his elbow, presenting him with the strange catalog of pictures that had been so perplexing them before.

“Tim, there’s something that—it’s a mystery to us, and I thought you might be able to provide some guidance.”

“I’m at your service, Princess,” he smiled wryly.

“These images,” she continued earnestly, “do any of them ring a bell for you?”

Teréz slowly advanced from one rendition to another, Tim’s eyes narrowing as he scanned the recesses of his fragmented memory for a connection.

“That one,” he interjected abruptly. “The picture you just lit upon—go back one slide.”

She duly complied, retreating back to the depiction of the unsullied lake with the ducklings.

“I swear I’ve been to that spot before. The wharf, on the bottom right-hand side—the memory’s vague, but there were fishermen, motorboats docking and disembarking. I… ah, damnit, it’s all a jumble. Let’s keep going.”

She continued through the ribbon of icons, once again halting as Tim reflexively raised a finger. “Yeah, that little creek, the kids playing and splashing about—still a little foggy, but I think that’s the brook near Susan’s childhood home, in Lafayette County in Missouri. Looks like a crayon sketch that she would have depicted of it—she and her sibs used to collect tadpoles and skip rocks, and then our own kids as well as her nieces and nephews would cavort together in the stream, whenever we went to visit her parents.”

He adjusted his posture to match the vigorous engagement now jostling his somnolent mind, grimacing in discomfort as he hoisted up his neck and shoulders to rest in a more upright position against the padded cushioning behind him.

“So maybe that means,” he continued, his eyes rotated skyward with each hard-fought recollection, “yeah, the earlier picture must have been Lake Thunderhead, on the Missouri-Iowa border. Susan and I visited the place just once together but for her, she always said it was a favorite family outing, all the way back to her kindergarten days.”

Gregor and Teréz shot a cursory, oblique glance toward each other, a tacit acknowledgment of their joint bewilderment.

“Go on, Teréz,” entreated Tim impatiently. She nodded and resumed the impromptu slideshow, passing through another series of images that elicited little response. She was startled, however, when he reared forward with a jerking motion, stirred into a stammering intensity by one of the indoor scenes.

“My God, that one, the refrig… refrigerator door—that was inside Susan’s childhood home. The frig had broken down, was sitting unused in the garage by the time Susie showed it to me. She and her parents were renovating and cleaning out, but she adamantly insisted the kitchen door remain untouched, even to the point of enlisting me to argue on behalf of her crazy pleadings!” He smiled and shook his head wistfully, his face contorting through a series of half-formed expressions by the bittersweet force of the recollection.

“Those drawings, on the door,” he continued, explaining intently to his two rapt and dumbfounded onlookers, “Susan had depicted them in her elementary school years, and they had a special meaning for her. She’d been tormented for a while by recurring nightmares, hideous at any age let alone for a small child. So a family friend suggested that she sketch them out and seal the pictures in plastic, then post them on the door as an ongoing reminder—to confront them and overpower her fear. It worked, and she always referred to it as a formative experience, drawing her to psychology as a career.”

Tim halted his exposition, at once converting his piqued curiosity into a frown of quickly mounting suspicion. “Where the hell did you get these images from?”

“We—” Gregor’s voice was uncharacteristically subdued, enfeebled by the twin burdens of uncertainty and fear at the reaction his conjectures could provoke. Flustered for a proper response, he gestured toward Teréz, who promptly handed him the oblong device. He at once redirected the image viewer to display the inexplicable series of numerals uncovered by his lieutenants.

“These numbers, Tim,” resumed Gregor tentatively, “do they mean anything to you?”

Tim focused a pair of glaring, aggravated eyes upon the enlarged image frame, alternately squinting and tugging them wide open as staccato flashes of insight tiptoed through his tense and unsettled mind.

“I… I can’t attest to all of them, but that second one—2471—looks like Susan’s birthdate. February 4, 1971. OK, now that first one makes sense, oh my,how I could have overooked that… 406, it meant everything to both of us.”

Gregor knelt down from his stooping position, repositioning the device to allow Tim a more comfortable angle.

“Hutong si ling leeoh hao,” he continued, awkwardly mouthing a series of tones in Chinese. “Alley 406—it was a local artist’s market, in Shanghai where Susan and I first met. We were both exchange students, dispatched on a goodwill program under the Luce Scholars outfit—just as China had started opening to the West. Whenever we had company, Susan and I always joked about how we ‘met at the 406’—that’s what it meant. The third item there—”

He took hold of the device from Gregor and traced his index finger back and forth, as though to physically reaffirm the number’s significance. “9898 was the kennel tag for Begonia and Sunflower at the animal shelter. They were kittens, grew into a gray Burmese and a big burly Siamese, that she adored as a little girl, and she never forgot the number. Those other two… I’m on shakier ground here, but the 53362, the first couple digits at least, she used to put that on Post-It pads that she employed as headers for file folders. Something about—yeah, it was the registration number for a poster from her high school, when she won a major science fair. The prize was a summer internship at a neuroscientific institute that helped launch her career. The last one, 344946...” He planted his left hand against a nearby post, wincing in discomfort as he leaned forward to inspect each digit with mounting ardor.

“The train set! That’s gotta be it. Her brother Linus always signed his name with a six-digit number, on the gift cards that he sent her at Christmas. Susan was coy about it with me; part of her modest streak and, I guess, she just wanted to preserve it as a very personal memory, even from her husband. But Linus opened up about it on a rafting trip: There was a raffle at a carnival, Susan’s ticket winning a model train set that her brother had coveted… So as a surprise, she gave it to him as a Christmas present, labeled with the winning raffle ticket. Linus said that—she always kept it, as a reminder to herself of the generosity that she could muster as a kid, in case the world outside hardened her as an adult. She was precocious that way.”

His nostalgic grin quickly shifted again to a brooding, deeply plaintive expression, his voice muted as though fighting back tears. Gregor and Teréz, for their part, eyed each other with a mutual sense of foreboding, both entertaining uncanny conclusions that they dared not acknowledge aloud.

“Gregor, what—what’s going on?” asked Tim, his tone beseeching and agitated. “How did you get those numbers? And those pictures? Are you—did you send someone to interrogate her family back in Missouri?”

“No, Tim, God no… we know nothing about them or their origin, but somehow they’re functioning as codes.”

“Codes? For what?”

“Data ciphers—they enabled us to access the cache of information streaming through this place, in the moments before the power surge last night. My experts culled them from the data stream that poured through the network here”

Tim stared out at him with a flabbergasted expression, his mouth dangling open in stark disbelief.

“Gregor, what the hell is going on?”

“I—I don’t know what to say, Tim. Those images, I chalked them up to the same MO as before: The artifacts were gleaning all these pictures and numbers from deep within your mind’s recesses, your connections to Susan…”

“NO!” Tim retorted emphatically. “No, damnit! I carry a part of Susan’s spirit with me, everywhere—those shared memories, it’s like they have an existence all their own. But I never knew all those numbers myself by heart… never. Let alone all the other digits you have scattered on that screen, outside the highlights in the center. Same with the pictures. Most of those scenes, I never glimpsed them with my own eyes—that seashore, the bay window, the forested enclosures. But they’re connected to Susan’s childhood home somehow, I know it. And they aren’t present on some… external media that I’ve ported here, like that recording with Susan’s necklace.”

Tim clutched his chest in a pang of discomfort, swallowing audibly and inhaling deeply to persevere in finishing his thought. “Gregor, I’m telling you in the most unequivocal terms—whatever the significance of all those things, Susan is the only person in the world who could have seen and remembered them in such detail.”

Gregor sighed through clenched teeth, staggered by Tim’s unswerving certainty and the implications of his vehement assertions. “We probably shouldn’t have dragged you through all that in your state. Why don’t you just rest up for now and… Tim? What’s wrong?”

Tim’s pupils had widened with the hostile alertness of a cat sizing up a nearby threat. A halo of perspiration had condensed beneath his hairline, as his face—focused with raging intensity on the image viewer—assumed a hideous, ghostly pallor. The jarring din of the telemetry’s alarm system pealed through the air, set off by its patient’s racing heart; Teréz instinctively removed the device from Tim’s hands, as the medical team quickly filled the perimeter with a whir of activity.

“Both of you need to leave, now,” exhorted the chief nurse, receiving prompt compliance from the two guests as she drew closed a semicircular curtain by Tim’s makeshift bedside. Teréz turned promptly toward Gregor, but her inquiry was forestalled by the latter’s frantic attempts to contact his staff, extending the antenna on a two-way radio specialized for their subterranean communiqués.

“Hermann! Hermann, do you read me?”

“Not so well, Gregor; sorry, we’ve been suffering a lot of radio interference here in the chamber.”

“You’re inside it now?”

“In one minute and out the next. It’s been a madhouse up here; the findings have been pouring in over the last hour.”

“Ah, damnit,” replied Gregor in a scolding tone, out of general frustration more than rebuke of his lieutenant, “I told you that I wanted to be kept abreast of major findings as soon as you made sense of them, not a minute later!”

“That’s why we didn’t page you earlier,” Hermann answered calmly, unperturbed by the agitation evident in his mentor. “We’ve barely begun to believe what we’re seeing, let alone make heads or tails of it.”

Gregor paused and said nothing, the voice on the radio tending to an immediate matter before quickly returning to follow up.

“The organic matrix—as I reported before, much of it was melted down, or riddled with what seemed like gaps and tunnels that weren’t present just yesterday when we signed out. Well, we’ve run both macro- and fine-structure analysis, matched it to our databanks; you’re not gonna believe this, but one of the surfaces that adjoins a hollowed-out segment of the matrix, its molecular configuration has the telltale markings of connective tissue housing the liver.”

“The stroma?”

“Yeah, the portion that regenerates a human liver if you slice it up or otherwise damage it. In short, it’s the remnant of an organized system to design a fully functioning hepatobiliary system in an adult human body, from scratch. We were even able to isolate some DNA from whatever remains here.”

“Anything specific?”

“Not yet. The samples are fairly degraded, but we’ve managed to isolate enough to hopefully run an RFLP analysis, and rifle through the forensics databases. It’s a fishing expedition but… who knows what’ll bite.”

Gregor stole a prolonged glance at Teréz, who had already drifted back toward the throng surrounding Tim. He had stabilized, and the clamor had subsided enough for her to address one of the nurses tending him. She appeared to be conveying a message of some sort, and Gregor needed little prompting to imagine what it concerned.

“Hermann,” he growled, impatiently seizing the radio, “I need you to start rounding up people for three search parties, five members each, to go off-site and into the surrounding town. Preferably including at least one member who can speak enough Hungarian to talk with the locals. I also need a team to scour every millisecond of surveillance footage around the museum from the past few hours.”

“Wait a minute—search parties? Surveillance? I don’t understand; what are we looking for?”

“I’ll explain once you have the teams together. This is mission-critical, and I want everything organized before the morning’s out.”

“I’m already on it.”

“Great. Keep me in the loop.”

He slowly lowered the radio to observe Teréz just ahead, clasping the hand of an exhausted yet clearly dispirited Tim, who was mouthing words to the effect of pleading with her not to leave. She touched her forehead to his, but this time in the manner of someone uttering a farewell for a long time to come. Gregor approached her just as she turned away, her eyes red and heavy with the burning residue of a painful decision.

“Teréz,” he began, reflexively moving to console her, “whatever all this means, you don’t have to…”

“Yes, yes I do. Call it a woman’s intuition, Gregor, but I’ve come to realize that this is a bad time and place for me to be here, right now, anywhere near Tim.”

“Does Tim also harbor any inkling of—of…” He broke off his train of thought in an uncharacteristic bout of stammering and indecision, too afraid to air his own muddled and incredible suspicions. Teréz, regardless, had little difficulty deducing them.

“No; I have a hunch that whatever’s jammed up his recent memories, is blissfully shielding him from any thoughts in that direction. I doubt he could take it right now.”

Gregor sighed in resignation. “The timing’s so damn awkward, Teréz, but—I can’t thank you enough for your contribution to all this. We wouldn’t be here without you.”

She nodded her acknowledgment. “I just hope you find what you’re looking for. And wherever it leads,” she added cryptically.

Gregor’s radio rasped with the static of an incoming transmission, drawing him aside. Just as she prepared to depart the scene, however, Teréz’s attention was diverted by the overturned image viewer pushed ignominiously to the floor beside the telemetry equipment—still apparently bearing witness to whatever shock had just driven Tim’s heart to race just minutes before. She gingerly clasped and inverted it, brushing it off to gain a firm glimpse at the surface. To her bewilderment, however, the viewing surface was filled not with a frightful picture or an image of any sort, but merely a zoomed-in number like the others around it. This one was shoved to an otherwise neglected corner of the screen, seemingly bereft of any broader significance: 46117.

Outside the Museum

“What the hell do you mean, they’re gone?”

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” answered the man, with a brave face and a lump in his throat, “but we have no direct records; it’s just a gap for those three hours. The data surge seems to have wiped out whatever was recorded from the CCTV cameras, both inside and outside the museum.”

“Just the news I wanted to hear!” exclaimed Gregor bitterly. “Hermann, why didn’t we have a back-up system in place for this kind of thing? To keep track of the movements of all the artifacts if nothing else?”

“We did—you know that,” replied Hermann, his unruffled demeanor succumbing to a hint of indignation. “After you essentially bought up the museum grounds for two weeks, they let us introduce whatever provisional infrastructure we needed for the task, and nobody dropped the ball. The sheer volume of the surge eventually took out even the auxiliary power and the surveillance systems off the main grid.” He looked off to the side at the fog-enveloped thoroughfares surrounding the museum complex, the physical obscurity of his immediate milieu compounding the nebulous nature of the task to which he was assigned.

“Listen,” he continued, without fully returning to face Gregor, “I could never get inside your head even if I tried, but this whole conundrum has clearly gotten you more rattled than I’ve seen you in a decade of chasing phantoms. And you still haven’t told even the search parties why we’re peeping up and down the alleys of western Hungary, based on a grainy photo of a nameless someone or… something, that you yourself admit, may or may not exist.”

“There is a name, Hermann, but…” Gregor gnashed his teeth, unable to thread a needle of plausibility through the thicket of impossible explanations.

“It’s just not like you to do this.”

“To do what?”

“To leave all of us dangling in the dark like this! Gregor, most of us putting in these 16-hour shifts around here, we’re not hired guns even if we are on your payroll for the moment—we’re old colleagues, students, acolytes, people who’ve followed you through thick and thin, however quixotic we’ve found your obsession in the past. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t retain some faith in the insights that somehow spring from your river of lunacy. So there’s no need, around us of all people, to shroud all this in a veil of secrecy.”

“This time there is, Hermann,” retorted Gregor firmly, to the manifest consternation of his comrade. Before he could elaborate, however, a third voice breathlessly entered the fray.

“Gregor! It’s Roy McAuliffe here. Do you read me?”

“Loud and clear, Roy. Sounds urgent.”

“We may have a match,” he said, impatient to communicate his find. “Emmi, one of the Hungarians on our team—she caught a local newsflash, blaring from a radio while we were investigating another lead. It was buried in the newscast, but the description roughly lines up with…”

“Do we have a location?”interrupted Gregor, his heart pulsating with anticipation.

“The Hans Selye Neuro Clinic, at the hospital on the far northwest side of town.”

“Get your team over there, Roy, but don’t enter the hospital grounds itself until Hermann and I are on site.”

“Got it. Just one caveat: Emmi warned that the Selye Clinic is pretty circumspect about allowing visits from anyone outside of close family members. We’ll need something to prove a connection, or at least make a show of it.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Gregor remarked tersely, retrieving the photograph to peruse with anxious eyes.

Back at the Museum

“At the Selye Clinic? What on earth drew them out there?”

“That’s need-to-know only, I suppose. But there were some loose lips among the search party, something about cordoning off the second floor; just some chatter on Melissa’s radio from the noontime briefing.”

“A shame they didn’t invite any of us along; it’d be nice to be rounding at a real hospital for a change.”

Tim cast his eyes lonesomely about the eerily serene chamber, the fading banter of the departing nurses his only remaining company. The chaotic frenzy of the morning had subsided into a weird normalcy, punctuated only by a few technicians periodically streaming in to tackle their assignments amid the scattered work stations, oblivious to the patient and to each other. Tim felt his stomach knot from time to time, sick from the overwhelming tide of recent revelations. He had been virtually abandoned by those who knew him best, sans elaboration or updates, and his suspicion-riddled imagination was nearly driving him crazy.

His wandering eyes again happened on the image viewer that had been the cause of so much recent havoc for him and those in his midst; Teréz had laid it carefully upon a nearby work bench, its screen painstakingly cleared of the nest of numbers. He furtively extended his reach far enough to grasp a nearby metric ruler, taking care not to disconnect any of the telemetry leads as he corraled the device and dragged it back into his waiting hands. He restored its display, instinctively navigating through its tangle of icons to once again access the spiral staircase of haunting images from his and Susan’s past.

He plodded through the pictures, his mind alternately fired and muddled by the subconscious stream that they induced with every hop along the spiral. He paused once again at the unsettling depiction of the refrigerator door, covered from head to foot with a menagerie of nightmarish conjurings. But something was off about it, an anomaly in plain sight that nonetheless eluded him every time he focused his glance back upon it. He groaned and shook his head, resuming his march through the series before once again arriving at an image that froze him dead in his tracks: the cozy indoor scene with the sofas, pillows, and the hearth that housed a nourishing flame. There were no people in the scene, but there was a slight crease on one of the cushions, along with the edge of what appeared to be a tiny box—its fringe decorated with a strikingly familiar lotus design.

“Susan Tsvetana Liontakis.” An echo of his voice as a young man rattled through his head, beads of sweat again coalescing upon his brow. “Will you marry me?”

His eyes again blazed open, his pupils widening as a typhoon of stifled memories poured back in. Instinctively, he reached out to disconnect the telemetry monitor, rubbing his eyes and catching his breath with each new assault from his mind. He shot a ferocious gaze at the strange array of mirrors and chrome, the incident from the night before now tearing through his mind with the force of a trenchant blade. He remembered everything, the necklace from the box, the silhouette on the chrome, the hand pressing against it…

Tim snarled to wrest his mind back into the lonely chamber about him. He ripped the leads off his chest and donned his nearby shirt and shoes, darting his eyes about periodically to ensure that he remained unseen. He reached for his satchel, but before he could sling it across his shoulder, he noticed that its straps had been undone, the precious items within shuffled about. He glared angrily as his mind digested the possible implications, but the periodic reverberations from the floors above compelled him to set it all aside.

Tim hurried over to a nearby stairwell, preferring an inconspicuous exit to the well-traveled shuttles of the makeshift freight elevator on the opposite side. Just as he ascended the first step of his long climb, his mind was momentarily arrested by an unexpected flash of awareness, a frightening moment of recall from a barely noticed corner of that strange refrigerator door…

He shook off the intrusion, clenching his fist as he focused his raging mind on what lay ahead.

At the Hans Selye Clinic

“Gregor! Just got a page from the medical team back at the Eötvös Museum.”

“Roy, please, this isn’t the time. The hospital’s going to need a halfway plausible explanation pretty damn soon for why we’ve walled off an entire wing of the hospital and…”

“It’s Tim—he’s gone.”

Gregor’s face blanched with disconcerting suddenness, his eyes seeming to recede into themselves with a ghastly, skeletal stillness. “What the hell do you mean, he’s gone?”

“They don’t know—he just snuck out, no warning or message to anyone.”

“How long he has been missing?”

Roy shrugged his broad shoulders and shook his head. “He’d stabilized, and he must have switched off the monitoring equipment. Dr. Carver and Nurse Helen just dropped by for a routine check, and nobody down there had seen him leave. They all figured he’d taken a bathroom break but… obviously, he never returned.”

Gregor tugged on his collar in discomfort as he burst into a cold sweat. “Oh, no—he must have remembered. It all came back to him.”

He tightened his chin and gazed with profound apprehension at the sealed-off room just down the darkened corridor, clutching a nearby clipboard before addressing Roy again without even a modest turn in his direction. “I need you to split off half the group, whoever can best mingle with the community, and scour the area for any trace of Tim. I doubt that even he has any sense of what’s befallen him and I’m not sure he’s recuperated enough to manage out on his own; the longer we wait, the farther he’ll drift.”

Roy nodded his assent, immediately making his way into the large hall that led into the second-floor lobby. But before he had even reached the double doors, he froze in place, yanking his head back instinctively before quickly forcing himself back forward, in a botched attempt to feign normality.

“Tim, what a surprise! We didn’t expect to…”

“Where is he, Roy?” Tim’s face was grim and menacing, his exhaustion from his recent travails surmounted by the fury that blazed from his piercing eyes. He shot an icy stare at Roy, before quickly looking past him at the dim, cavernous corridor to the right. He pushed aggressively beside the young technician, charging with a terrible resolve toward the entrance.

“Tim, please, you can’t go in there now—” Roy’s frantic entreaties were quickly cut short as Tim pushed him brusquely aside, barreling through to his destination. He rounded the corner of the nearby hallway and advanced impetuously through the obscurity, his widening pupils fixing firmly on his target ahead.

Gregor squinted his eyes in confusion as the man charged inexorably toward him, dropping his clipboard when he realized who was greeting him.

‘Tim! How did you find this place?”

Without saying a word, Tim gripped Gregor’s sweater, leaning into him and spinning him to the left before pinning him against an adjoining cabinet.

“You sick bastard! What game are you playing Gregor!? I’m not a guinea pig in one of your damn mazes!!”

“Tim, please, just settle down and…”

“The photo? From my satchel? How could you stoop that low?! I’ve had that picture by my side for every damn day since I lost Susan in the mountains! How could you do such a thing!?”

“It was our only option; we didn’t have the luxury of waiting! You don’t understand—we couldn’t let you know given the condition you were in, we couldn’t take the risk of bringing you here. It was too dangerous for you, for everyone!”

“Bringing me here? To what? To see what, Gregor? What the hell are you hiding!?”

He peered to the right of the cabinet, toward a flock of horrified attendants standing before a doorway festooned with yellow caution tape and heavily punctuated signs in bold print.

“Funny, Gregor, you seem awfully eager to prevent me from going past this cabinet to that room. So what’s the big secret, or am I just not part of the club?”

Gregor prepared to respond but held his tongue, bowing his head slightly downward in a gesture of despair.

“What’s in there, Gregor? My Hungarian may be subpar, but I have a funny feeling that those signs are shouting some version of ‘Keep out’ to any visitors. Aside from a self-selected few, of course.”

Gregor looked up again, his eyes glaring and his jaw tensed in a gesture of desperate pleading. Tim snarled and bolted off to his right, Gregor close behind him.

“Tim, God, please don’t go in there! You’re not ready to see this, not in your condition!”

Tim shoved his palm forcefully backward and pushed Gregor aside, ripping away the tape and proceeding in to the softly-lit room. He at once concentrated his gaze on a gurney pushed to the left, hooked up to a bevy of monitoring devices and oxygen tanks. He quickly felt a wave of overpowering shock rush up and down his body. Amid the thicket of tubes and wires, a woman lay slumbering on the stretcher, her brown hair resting on her shoulders next to a birthmark on her lower left neck, and a face that Tim had known for more than twenty years.

Tim staggered backward and around as if in a daze, barely managing to break a fall by steadying himself clumsily against a large wash basin. The blood rushed inexorably from his face, his consciousness slowly fading as a crippling nausea overtook him; he doubled over into the sink, his elbow striking one of the IV stands that nourished the woman’s veins.

The attendants outside the room prepared to rush in, but Gregor urged them back for the moment, seized by an intuition he was hard-pressed to explain. Tim was at the point of retching, but he was startled back into an unexpected bout of lucidity by the sound of stirring behind him.

“Tim?”

He shook at the familiar melody of her voice, terrified to turn around and provoke a violent clash between the yearnings of his heart and the raging doubts of his mind.

“Tim, where am I? Why did you just abandon me here earlier?” Her speech was crisp, but slightly drawn out, in the manner of someone not fully awake, let alone aware of her surroundings.

He gathered himself, fighting back tears of emotion, confusion, and raw shock as he slowly pivoted to face her, his every movement and word guided by instincts long forgotten.

“I’m sorry, Honey; things got a little mixed-up.”

“A little? Tim, you picked a terrible time for one of your pranks. We have to be up at 5 a.m. tomorrow to drive up that mountain.”

“Susie—” He gently placed his trembling hand on her languid forehead, caressing her hair from her eyes. “Don’t worry, we’ll… make this all work out somehow. Try to get some rest. We have a lot to talk about.”

In the clinic

“She’s still sedated. The staff says she’ll be out for a while.” Gregor strayed into the spare patient room wearing a cautious demeanor as he seated himself, tiptoeing around Tim’s frayed emotions as much as the cluttered storage boxes that crowded the floor.

“How long has she been here?”

“They said she was admitted well before dawn. A local restaurateur noticed her on Magda Szabó Avenue, on his way to the produce market—disoriented, stumbling around in rags, cognizant of neither her name nor her hometown. He just assumed she was one of the lost and ruined souls who’ve been trickling into the continent, ever since the New Depression took hold in North America. So he brought her to the hospital, for presumed _____ detox, fortunately so for her and for us; who knows where she would have wound up otherwise.”

“Are you sure you got the story right? Gregor, you saw yourself—she remembered nearly everything when I just spoke to her. Her name and… ah, God, it was almost exactly how she was speaking, that wretched night before we set out for the mountain.”

“The higher cognitive functions—they must take hours to return to normal. She revived in body first, her basic movements and functions, with her mind sorting itself out as she became immersed in the world again.”

Gregor paused and sank his incisor teeth into his lower lip, taking great pains to choose his words carefully.

“Tim, she came in here with no ID, whatsoever; no passport or anything to link her to a name. She’s a Jane Doe for now, until you vouch for her otherwise.”

Tim tossed his head backward and creased his mouth and chin, blinking his eyes shut and grimacing as he sought in vain to unravel his tangle of doubt.

“Gregor, what—” he began, gradually lowering his head again. “What in the world am I supposed to tell them? The memories scorch me every time I come close to them—the doctors in Suriname breaking the news to me, telling our kids when they visited, the funeral… And now I see her here, everything frozen to where she was the night before.”

He glanced away again, pivoting back toward Gregor midway through his anguished query. “I need you to tell me straight—who is that woman in the adjacenr room? A clone? A facsimile of the woman I knew?”

“Tim, she is Susan Shoemaker. The same woman you took to the altar, the mother of your children. Not merely some conjecture or reconstruction of who she would be, and not merely as you or I, or anyone else would have imagined her from the outside; but as she would have subjectively known herself. With all her habits, her quirks, thoughts, memories—all the rich and subtle textures that gave rise to her being, her conscious and subconscious alike.”

“Why?” asked Tim, his inquiry armed with a confrontational edge that unnerved the target of his questioning. “Why the hell did you hold this back from me?”

“I…” Gregor pushed back in his chair, noticeably shaken by Tim’s tone. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“This isn’t the time to pull back into your cute little shell of feigned ignorance, Gregor. All those things you said, when I first set foot on your estate? About the caracteristica universalis, some unimaginably complex computing system using it to follow the bread-crumb trail, back to a specific time and place in the universe—that’s what this is, isn’t it? That contraption you assembled from the artifacts, it had access to the language of the innermost reality, it broke the code; you’ve known all along.”

“Tim, no—I swear to you,” Gregor pleaded. “I haven’t… been entirely forthright about all that I knew or suspected, that I’ll cop to. But this? Only last night, after you’d revealed to me what it was capable of, did I have an inkling about its power; and even then, I never saw this coming. Not like this.”

“OK, that’s a start. So you didn’t know you were running an express installation for a resurrection machine. But you could see where it was all leading.”

“Not just me; Teréz could sense it, too.”

The response took Tim by surprise, shocking him out of his hostile stance and sending him slinking in his chair. He awaited Gregor’s clarifying tonic for a conundrum that had begun to baffle him even further.

“Tim, that circling of mirror and chrome, the device that you activated to engender the resurrection: It’s a kind of high-resolution amplifier for your thoughts and memories, channeling them into the broader network. You were right about what I said when we first met in Rügen, but there was another critical factor, to which we’d made only the most cursory reference.”

“The clinamen?”

“Right, and all the uncertainty it represents. That and all the other vicissitudes introduced into the world, by the capricious workings of conscious minds. If a powerful computing device could access the caracteristica and thread the needle of spacetime backward, then the straightforward logical laws, the wellspring of our physical laws and processes: That’s the easy part. The inherent indeterminacy of unfolding events, the historical contingency—that’s much tougher, because you can’t write simple algorithms to compress the data you’d need to specify. The fine-grained details matter, and without a cue to guide you, the necessary computing power would overwhelm what you could drum up if you controlled a whole country, let alone a few floors leased in an old historical museum.”

“Cues to Susan? So that’s what I fed into the network last night?”

“It’s what you’ve been supplying since you first inherited those devices, Tim: your memories, those pictures. To that immeasurably parallel network, the supercomputer that the artifacts forge when brought together, your cues are distinct data streams that lead, uniquely and inexorably, back to Susan.”

“Like fingerprints.”

“So to speak. Each of us has a series of data signatures—tags that uniquely identify us in the cosmos. They could be many things: variations in our DNA sequence, patterns in a brain-wave scan, words that we said or idiosyncrasies that we assumed, our appearance, events and friendships, accomplishments that defined us.”

“Ot photographs from a summer’s day.”

“That’s right. A powerful enough supercomputer could utilize the most tenuous vestiges of a signature to find and bring back someone, then use their own associations to revive countless others, something akin to the mass resurrections depicted in the old Scriptural prophecies. Maybe this technology will evolve to that in a couple centuries. But even with all the mastery the Gesellschaft could summon, they must have been able to forge only a small-scale prototype. So it needed far more in the way of specific input, which you and only you could provide.”

“But how could it have known what Susan was thinking, to reinstate all that when she came back?”

“I’m not sure that it ‘knew’ per se, but it wouldn’t have to. The immense complexity of Susan’s mind, the neural synapses, engrams, and whatever other interconnections give rise to the ghose in the shell—those would be among the elements that the device would recapitulate, along with the information needed to incarnate her physically. But the supercomputer couldn’t put all of that together itself, wouldn’t be able to extract meaning from it; only Susan herself, from her subjective perch within her own mind, could do that.”

“Then how did it know all those special numbers, those scenes from her childhood from that image viewer?”

“Perhaps an afterimage; maybe the Macroceph retains a few of the fingerprints that identified Susan, and were especially important to her.”

“The Macroceph?”

“Seems to be a massively scaled-up version of the Cereceph, and more. I walled it off in one of the restricted zones on the second sub-level: a series of folded membranes in carbon, silicon, and gallium, closely interlinked like the cerebral cortex in our brain. But endowed with a surface area hundreds, thousands of times larger. It must need to—imagine Susan, to grasp her complexity in all its detail, to revive her.”

“Gregor, is this thing self-aware?”

“No—our analysis gave no evidence of strange loops, or any other recursive circuits that could engender consciousness of itself. Just an unfathomably complex network to render the consciousness of someone else. When we say we understand something—it means that we’re modeling it, creating a representation of its logical essentials. You can’t do that with a human being; obviously, one mind couldn’t fully map out another person’s mind. That must be what the Macroceph is for.”

Tim leaned back and pulled his lips about his lower teeth, his bewildered caginess finally giving way to a tentative trust in the man before him.

“So it’s really her; she’s back. How am I going to tell her?”

Gregor responded with a look of muddled reassurance, the kind provided by someone with little more of their own to offer. “We’ve been operating in uncharted territory for a while, Tim, but all of us have adapted, beyond the initial shock of disorientation. You’re the most potent link, the lifeline that Susan has to the world now. You may not be the same man you were three years ago, but you’re just as important to her; lead the way, slowly.”

“Excuse me, I am looking for a, uh… Timothy, Schumacher?” An unfamiliar voice echoed from the walls of the cramped room, halting its two occupants in their tracks.

“Apologies, I am Dr. Elana Esterhazy; I am caring for, Susan, in Room 254A. She awoke from sedation, was quite upset; I asked if she would like to rest, but she insists on speaking with you.”

Tim glimpsed obliquely back at Gregor, as though awaiting at least a tacit approval.

“You have more pressing matters than anything the two of us could discuss further, Tim. They need me back at the museum. Take your time; I’ll meet you there.”

Tim nodded apprehensively as Gregor took leave of the scene, slowly rising and gathering himself for an encounter that he was unsure whether to cherish or dread.

*****************************

“Hungary? 2019? What is wrong with you? Aren’t you supposed to be comforting me now, or did Priscilla take that capacity away from you too?” Susan pushed off on the hospital bed with the heels of her hands, lifting herself up on the small tower of cushions behind her.

“Susie, please,” whispered Tim feebly, his already fragile heart pierced by the reference. He leaned forward, enough to tip the chair toward her. “I’m trying to—God I’m trying.”

“To do what?” she asked, her disappointment amplified by his vacillation. “Tim, I haven’t had nightmares like that since I was a little girl, sketching them out to dangle from the door of that refrigerator. And now this—I swear it was the mountain we’re supposed to climb tomorrow. We were talking, then the boulder, and you lost control…”

“That memory wasn’t supposed to come back,” Tim muttered bitterly to himself.

“What?”

“Susan, you—” Tim ground his teeth hard against each other, violently at odds with himself and what he was about to say. “Nah—no. I just can’t do this.” Tim’s voice was subdued with an air of defeat, as he bolted upward with a startle.

“Tim!”

He headed for the door and halted at the threshold, slumping forward and tightly clasping the edges, nearly piercing the thumbside edges of his palms. He slowly rose back up, making a half turn to his right and speaking slowly, unable to face her directly.

“The necklaces.”

Susan sat up in the bed, swinging her legs to the side and looking on with astonishment.

“You got a pair of them in the Dakotas, Susie, when you were posted on the road for that mobile therapy service. The Three Affiliated Tribes, a couple named Gloria Two Spears and Tony Gliding Hawk—they told you the myth, about the king and queen of the bird spirits. The tribe’s survival, intertwined with their reconciliation. It’s a beautiful story, and it means so much to me, on so many levels.”

“I was saving that recording for the summit. How did you…”

“I’ve had it for three years, Susie, but until just yesterday, I was too ashamed and agonized to view it with my own eyes.”

Tim steeled himself and made his way briskly back to the slightly cracked, pear-shaped seat, leaning forward and facing Susan eye-to-eye.

“I can understand why you’d be loath to trust me,” he began in an imploring near-whisper. “I’m sure I’ve built up a yawning deficit in that department over the last few years, which I bitterly regret. Because what I have to tell you—I desperately need that trust, in a way that I can barely express, and to an extent far more than I ever imagined, even during our toughest stretches together.”

She responded with an ambiguous expression, taken aback by his sober entreaty yet surprisingly calm as he continued.

“That dream scene you just experienced—I saw it, too. And not as a dream. Both of us—it happened to us three years ago.”

She looked away momentarily as if flinching from an assault, narrowing her eyes briefly in perplexed contemplation.

“We were ascending the mountain in Suriname, to that resort hotel at the apex. We—were talking. There was some arguing, yes, but we really were fulfilling that promise we made, the week before we took off for South America: reconciliation, slowly rebuilding that link to each other’s hearts. But as we were rounding one of the blind turns, you heard a rumbling sound, and you suggested I pull off at one of the scenic overlooks. I didn’t heed you; just took it to be some low-grade thunder, the kind that’s always tracking along the rain forest canopy. But it turned out to be a jagged rock, that had broken off from the promontory a couple turns above.”

“The boulder from my dream?”

“I never saw it coming… They flew a Medivac chopper out to the road, ferried us to a trauma center in Paramaribo. I barely pulled through. They made a heroic attempt to save you—”

“You’re saying that I—I died at the hospital?”

“They’d been sedating me for the pain, and I was barely conscious, yet the memory of that moment still scorches me every time it trickles in—the doctors, all three of them agonizing about what they had to say, coming in to notify me.”

Susan continued to gaze squarely into his eyes, nearly motionless, tears welling in her eyes and a painful lump forming in her throat. “The kids?”

“They both flew down there when they heard. We were all shell-shocked in the weeks that followed; they recovered, yet they were never the same. Mark never blamed me but, it was all too much for him to take; you remember, he’d already lost his best friend to a DUI and didn’t take it well. So Mark eventually took a position in Dubai, and we’re sporadically in touch. Chloe—she was terrifed she’d lose me too. Had me wear some variant of a Medic-Alert bracelet for a while, and you know how stubborn she can be; took a mighty effort of persuasion to get my freedom back.”

His strained, somewhat incongruous stab at humor managed to uncoil some of the tension that had enveloped the room, prompting Susan to pose questions whose implication she could scarcely comprehend.

“Tim, how—” She pressed and squeezed her skin from her hand to her shoulders, as though trying to convince herself of her own body’s manifestation. “If everything you say is true, how am I here, before you right now? Why did you come here to begin with?”

“A lot’s happened Susie, just in the past few months. Things that have already shaken many of the most basic truths I used to take for granted. There were heirlooms of some unknown provenance, sitting in my family for centuries. They brought me to my ancestral home in Germany, then here in Hungary, and I joined a team tackling the same enigmas. Whoever fabricated my heirlooms, they forged a powerful technology that we’ve only begun to fathom; they tapped into my deepest longings and regrets, and linked them to the canvas of the past. And somehow, they brought you back.”

“For what?”

“I’m not sure. But whatever it means—its importance is incalculable. And not only to me.”

Susan cupped her palms about his face, moving them in a spiral across his stubble-dotted cheeks and lower jaw, as if to rekindle the memory within her hands. She brushed her fingertips across his nose and forehead, rustling through his hair and eyebrows and then about his ears. Finally, she brought them down around his neck, shifting them back past his shoulders and locking them around the small of his back. She pressed her forehead against his, then her nose against his own, down to her lips and chin; Tim’s mind blazed with the fire of awakening, acquainting itself once again with sensations that he had thought were gone for good.

At a nearby café

“One mocha latté for you, and… for you, sir.”

“Köszönöm,” answered Tim, to the surprise of the waitress.

“Szívesen,” she replied with a smile.

“You’re learning, Tim,’ chuckled Gregor.

“We’ve been here long enough; this place is starting to feel like home.”

“Speaking of,” said Gregor, allowing himself a prolonged sip from the foam-covered brew, “how’s she adjusting, Tim?”

“Better than I anticipated, though I can’t say I have much of a reference point; she’ll probably have to breathe the air around here for a day or two to feel comfortable in her skin again. For Susie, it’s as though she fell asleep and awoke three years into a very different future, in a faraway land, and without even her friends and family to help her adapt. As much as I’ve been through the wringer with all this, I couldn’t imagine confronting that.”

“I just want you to know, Tim, that I’ll spare no resource to ensure sure she’s secure and cared for here. As you requested, I’ve assigned two members from my team to help her get settled into some semblance of normalcy, or whatever passes for it.”

“We both appreciate that.” He paused for a minute, uneasily sipping from his latte as he prepared to switch gears. “Gregor, I’m still at a loss about… about why the Falkenei Gesellschaft devoted such immense resources to the resurrection device. They’ve had a strategic purpose for these artifacts: to do battle with the Tauschreigeist.”

Gregor replied with a knowing nod about halfway through Tim’s inquiry.

“I’ve been thinking about that too, Tim. I have a feeling they want us to use their hardware again, and they have someone very specific in mind.”

“Who?”

“That’s where I’m at a loss,” he sighed. “Giulia’s crew has translated nearly all of the Kant’s Precipice now, and nearly every other written document we could find, down to the carvings on the devices. The Gesellschaft scribed those things for each other, so much of it’s expressed in a coded communication that we’ve only begun to decipher. But so far, nothing’s jumping out at us.”

Tim had pushed back in his seat and fixed his gaze sideways, his eyes dancing about as he scrutinized a procession of possibilities.

“Consult the Ancient Others,” he finally suggested, promptly pulling back up to the table. “The Ur-Anderen, from that tablet—those sages who supposedly know how to confront this menace. Gregor, all this time we’ve been talking about channeling their knowledge somehow, maybe locating a lost tome that they’d written. But what if it’s more than that? What if we’re supposed to bring them back?”

“That’s an intriguing idea, Tim. But practically—I’m sorry, I just don’t see how.”

“If this machine could revive Susan, then why couldn’t it do the same for them?” queried Tim, somewhat deflated.

“Tim, remember, the supercomputer is tuned to you and you alone, as far as we can tell. Even then, and with all the fingerprints of Susan that you’d supplied to localize her signature in spacetime, it took nearly every resource the system could muster to bring her back. As for the Ur-Anderen—we still know nothing about their identity, let alone of any nexus to you.”

“Actually, I think I may have a connection after all,” countered Tim, raising his gaze from a downward stare to meet the astonished eyes of his partner.

“I first noticed something askew when you showed me the contents of that image viewer, Gregor. Almost everything was indeed tied in with Susan and her childhood, but there were two items that were clearly out of place.”

“Like contaminating data?”

“Yeah, maybe from whatever intelligence imbued that Macroceph with its power. Susie always told me that, when she was charting exchanges with her patients, some of her own thoughts would inadvertently slip into the report on occasion, and she’d have to edit them out. Maybe these items were like leaks, slipping in there from the other source.”

Tim cast his eyes skyward again briefly, confirming to himself the plausibility of his line of conjecture. “There was a particular number, Gregor, on that screen that was teeming with them. It’s what sent my heart into overdrive and set off the telemetry alarms, because I’d seen it before in all the wrong places: 46117. I still don’t know what it means, but it’s always appeared in association with depictions of the Tauschreigeist, often by the very people who’ve been driven mad by its incipient presence.”

“And the other?”

“On that refrigerator door, I remember the monsters that Susan scribbled on those sheets—I saw them every time I stumbled into the garage. The renditions on that screen were accurate, save for one near the lower left corner that we’ve seen elsewhere.”

“The Tauschreigeist?”

“It was unmistakable—like a microcosm of what Pablo Acevedo had sketched in blood, weeks ago in Oak Ridge. Whether those things wound up in there by accident or design, they’re our best lead.”

“But Tim, I don’t see how this helps us; if anything those findings point right back to the Tauschreigeist.”

“No, not to the entity per se, but to someone else who’s seen him.”

Tim indulged an oversized gulp from the cooling coffee cup, probing Gregor’s still skeptical eyes for a ray of common understanding, which was still not forthcoming. “Gregor, think about it: The childhood memories on that screen were particular to Susan, but many of them were shared recollections, things that I experienced alongside her; that’s why I was able to point the way. It must likewise be the case for that number, and the depiction of the beast—we’ve seen the same thing, up close and in all its horror.”

“Again, you said it yourself—you and Susan experienced those scenes together, and communicated with each other. Neither applies to the Ur-Anderen.”

“Perhaps not directly,” Tim remarked, clasping his briefcase and snapping it open. “But I think they’ve been trying to communicate with me.”

He retrieved a worn, wrinkled file folder and displayed its contents, drawing Gregor’s attention to the otherworldly scene that had long baffled them both.

“Your dream vision,” observed Gregor.

“Right. The other two make sense: a direct connection with my ancestors in one case, and with Susan in the other. I haven’t had an inking of the provenance of this one, let alone what it means—until now. Look at those figures in the front of the sketch; they resemble us, but they’re not quite human. They’re facing the Tauschreigeist straight on, in something like his redoubt; and somehow, they’ve passed a record of this event on to me.”

“You think they’re the Ur-Anderen?”

“It’s the only explanation that fits. We’ve been stuck on an assumption that they’re ancient shamans or oracles, that we haven’t encountered yet. But if they’re to be resurrected—mediated through my own mind’s eye—then I must already be familiar with them.”

Gregor took hold of the recent sketch and ran his finger throughout the foreground, gradually working himself to a nod. “You’re on to something, Tim, that I’ll agree with, but I still have my doubts about the feasibility. I don’t see how the resurrection device could possibly muster up enough juice to locate these figures in spacetime, if we have nothing more than the sketch of a vague and unexplained scene.”

“Not the sketch itself, Gregor,” countered Tim, dragging the paper back across the table and studying it intensively, “but the dream that gives rise to it.”

******************************************

In side wing of the museum

[I’ll have a new section for the brief scene of Zach in the train, listening to the taped old lecture by Leonhard Schering—the train stops off at a station but takes a bit longer than usual, Zach sees unusual grp of people out the window, unnerved when one appears to be looking toward him. Shortly after train departs again, Zach gets msg to meet at a partic site in Hungary at a particular time—first intro’d to Falkenei. Turns off his phone, when he realizes request is genuine—accompaniment to the text is Leibniz’s Monadologie, so he knows it’s authentic, but no gives his name. Didn’t want to use Zach’s cell phone either, b/c know he’d been in touch with Tim. He calls on a different phone. Also a picture of Lazarus—that’s how they know what took place. Also, make sure to define the Omnihua device when Tim and Zach arrive in Leipzig.]

“How are you holding up?” Tim stroked his extended thumb gently over the palm of Susan’s outstretched hand, gently cradling it on his slightly tremulous knee.

“Considering the support network around here, probably better than most resurrected women you’d encounter in this part of town.”

“Well,” chuckled Tim with a cracked voice, “your sense of humor has certainly come back intact.”

“As has my appetite. I think I quaffed down the whole floor’s allotment of the minestrone soup they give to patients right before discharge, plus a plate of French toast and grits for that comfort-of-home feeling.”

“Now you’re pulling a Pavlov on me; my mouth’s watering just imagining Percy’s little breakfast specialty back at the Rush Hour Café.”

“Percy Laurence? Wasn’t he angling for a fancy internship in France before… well, everything?”

“Not just angling for it; he spent an idyllic few months making pastries in Provence, and he’s well on his way to an executive chef gig back across the pond.”

“It’s so strange,” replied Susan, smiling wistfully. “Percy and his Magic Pastry Wheel from three years ago—it’s like yesterday. Busy as he was, he always had a specially-prepared sandwich for me whenever I moseyed in to find you at your secret table in the café. As though he could read my mind, whenever something or another was giving me the blues.”

“Yeah,” answered Tim with a distracted glance aside, somewhat shaken by an onrush of triggered memories. “Percy’s Palate Pleaser. It’s what he dubbed the concoction he prepared for me a few weeks ago, after I’d run into… it’s where all this started!”

“All… this?”

It’s—nothing important, just my idle recollections,” answered Tim, his eyes and his twitching cheek belying the content of his words.

Susan tilted her head slightly before rearing it back. She opened her mouth as if to speak but then snapped it shut again, her intuition advising her to forgo her explorations for the time being.

“I’d better be getting some rest, Tim. My circadian rhythms are still finding their own rhythm I guess, so Gregor’s team advised me to turn in for a good nine hours or so.”

“You saw them recently? Wish I’d come earlier; I’ve been trying to track them down, but the gremlins seem to have taken over my radio and cell phone since this morning.”

“You’re not the only one; those poor souls must have spent an hour talking through all the interference on their hand-helds, running the approvals for my care regimen.”

“I guess that’s small comfort,” Tim shrugged. “I still need to find him. And Zach called in too, shouting through the sea of static that he was on his way.”

“Zach Choi? He’s here with you?”

“Yeah. The poor guy passed his thesis defense just before I headed overseas; I guess I not-so-subconsciously dropped the hint that I needed a decent German-speaker to navigate in Leipzig. I guess Zach figured he’d get a free trip to do some job-hunting, only to be dragged into my carnival of weird and weirder even since we left the airport.”

“Does he know…”

“I—I haven’t told him explicitly, but he’s astute enough to see the forest if not the trees within it.” He glanced down at his watch, his eyes puzzling at the staccato hopping of a thin compass needle that danced about the hour and minute hands. “I’d better take off, Hon; get some rest, I’ll see you back here.”

**********************************

“Tim, you went AWOL on me—what the heck happened? I tried to call as soon as I heard the news this morning.”

“Sorry, Zach, I was out of action; a bit too long of a story to burn up your Omnihua minutes with.”

“Not to worry; I’ve got my own story for that.”

“So the Great Power Outage is news even in Switzerland, huh?”

“It’s paying the bills at media outlets from Madrid to Dublin from what I hear. Mainly because nobody has a clue what caused it—although in light of the funny coincidence between its origin and your location, I had a feeling that you might have some insight.”

“More than I’d care to admit, Zach,” answered Tim with a flustered sigh, as he moved to change the subject. “Any news from your end?”

“Well, that’s what I called about; the Falkenei Gesellschaft seems tantalizingly close, but I can’t be sure yet. Hey, Tim? You still with me?” Zach held the phone aloft and shook away the static that had begun to clutter its reception.

“Still here; can’t let you off that easily, buddy. So, did you find that Leo… uh, Schmitz was it?”

“Schering,” clarified Zach. “Leonhard Schering. I tracked him down to Zürich; made some calls to his office and even showed up in person on the campus, but I got the brush-off. The university at least gifted me with his taped lectures from many moons ago, during his days as a heralded wunderkind before he ducked below the radar. One thing’s for sure: He’s surfing the same wavelength as you and Gregor—all this talk about constructing physical reality from logical rules on up to matter on the macro scale, complexity, consciousness.”

“Nothing more specific?”

“Well, that’s where things turn a little spooky.”

“As if they weren’t already,” murmured Tim to himself.

“I had a strong enough hunch that I left a note for Dr. Schering, and laid it all on the table—the Falkenei Gesellschaft, you and the artifacts, my name and all my contact information. Ah, Tim?” queried Zach, flustered again by the interference in the signal.

“Sorry, Zach; I guess my Uncle Mitch got a little delinquent in paying up his Omnihua account.”

“As I was saying, after catching the news the next morning, I gathered my luggage and prepared to catch the first Eurorail toward Budapest. But just as I was checking out, I got a postcard. It was from a certain Sabine Nguyen—said she was a fellow working under Dr. Schering, thanking me on his behalf and saying they’d be in touch again soon.”

“That’s it?”

“That is the point, Tim—the dog didn’t bark.”

“Come again?”

“Like the curious incident, in that old Sherlock Holmes story; that’s what this reminds me of. I was expecting nothing at all in response, or something a little more salient. This weird… understatement to that note—I feel like they’re trying to tell me something, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Maybe they’re just sounding us out. Seems we’re not the only bloodhounds on this trail, and some of our fellow seekers may not be harboring the most benign of intentions.”

“I of all people don’t need reminding on that front, Tim; Kei-san wasn’t exactly welcoming of my inquiries. For him to be so terrified even after dipping so far underground, I wonder if our common enemies might be closer than we imagine. Just the thought creeps me out and… maybe the paranoia’s whispering into my ear, but I swear I felt as though there were eyes watching me, at the Bahnhof and then on the train itself.”

“Perhaps we should all be keeping a wary eye from now on,” mused Tim with a pang of anxiety. “So this postcard—it’s all they gave you?”

“So far. Why the hell would they use a postcard anyway? In this day and age—why not just a text message? Or at least a letter on official stationery, maybe imbue it with a little more gravitas.”

“Well, at least they were thoughtful enough to provide a nice touristy scene, to take your mind off the miserable weather that’s been following us everywhere.”

“Nah, not even that—no beaches on Lake Geneva or Alpine wonderlands to soothe the eye. Just a painting from some local museum, and a lousy rendition at that.”

“A painting? Let me guess: Impressionist, Cubist?”

“No, you’re off by a few centuries, Tim, but thanks for playing,” replied Zach, tongue firmly in cheek. “I wasn’t much for art history in college, but this one’s gotta be Renaissance, or the Dutch masters maybe. Let’s see.”

He flipped the postcard, squinting his eyes to make out the minuscule lettering and vocalizing its contents, syllable by syllable. “Here it is, can barely read it… It’s from Caravaggio, 1609, Die Auferweckung des Lazarus—ah, The Raising of Lazarus, I knew I’d seen this somewhere. They have it hanging in a museum down in Sicily, put there after an earthquake tore through the region. Hey, you still there? Tim?”

“Zach, where are you now?” asked Tim, with sudden and breathless urgency.

“In Salzburg; we had a layover here anyway, so I was just planning to overnight it and cruise in the next morning.”

“I’m sorry to make you do this, but you have to find one of the red-eye departures, hitchhike to the train station if you have to and high-tail it here, tonight; I’ll meet you here in the wee hours.”

“Tim, would you mind filling me in on what just provoked this change of heart?”

“It’s them, Zach,” answered Tim, his tone now imploring as much as impatient. “It’s the Falkenei Gesellschaft—they know.”

“Whoa, slow down here, how did you suddenly come to that conclusion?”

“There’s no time to elaborate now, Zach; I’ll give you the full story once you’re here.”

“If you insist; I’ll page you when we cross the border.”

Zach frowned and skewed his upper lip as he pondered the recent exchange, straining to decipher the cause of Tim’s exhortation.

“Die Rechnung, bitte?” he said, motioning to the waiter and retrieving his wallet; but no later had he set aside the postcard than his eye was drawn once again to the seemingly innocuous painting on the obverse.

“Caravaggio… Lazarus,” he murmured to himself, his mind fast cluttering with a menagerie of fantastical speculations.

“Your check, sir,” said the waiter, quickly moving on to a nearby table.

“Ah, danke schön.”

Zach grimaced and shook his head, seizing the postcard and deferring his tangled thoughts for a few hours more.

[next morning]

“My God, just the thought of it makes my head spin,” pondered Zach, struggling to come to grips with what Tim had just imparted. “When she came back, did Susan know about… about the incident in Suriname?”

“Only from my second-hand description; the supercomputer brought her back as she was on the day before she died. So she has no specific recollection other than some sort of transferred memory, images from the incident that the device mistakenly leaked into her dreams. Somehow, she’s adjusting and—well, when you get a chance, she’d like to see you. It’ll help her to re-orient.”

“I never imagined I’d be called on to help in such a way, but I’m happy to chip in for…”

“Zach, could you give me a minute?” Tim interrupted, rapping his static-clouded radio. “Ah, damnit; you’d think that with all of Gregor’s billions, he could manage to invest in a more reliable two-way system for his platoons here.”

“What’s that for, Tim?”

“I suppose Gregor fancies himself as a general in the trenches,” quipped Tim, overflowing with sarcasm. “Truthfully, we’ve been using these things to communicate across all the working floors of the museum. Mainly shortwave, but over the past couple days, I swear there’s been more of this damn interference than productive interchange.”

“It’s not like our cell phones were spared, either; you remember our little Abbott-and-Costello routine of what, who, what last night?”

“Seems to be awfully worse here, though,” said Tim with a prominent grimace, pounding and forcefully shaking the radio in frustration. “Lousy damn time for this, too; Gregor was bellowing to me earlier about a major change in plans and wanted to update me amidst all the hubbub downstairs. Now, I guess I’ve gotta read his mind.”

“Now you are talking crazy,” chuckled Zach. “Tim, I admit I’m still stymied by it; you were saying that the Resurrection Device is geared toward reviving the Ur-Anderen, which you think are those oddball figures in the front of that creepy drawing you’d kept updating. Yet you said it yourself; all the generations in Eastern Europe wouldn’t supply enough juice to power that device.”

‘I know, and Gregor was stumped just the same. He thought there may be a way to tweak the data-compression protocols that the system used to bring Susan back, to reduce the power load. He was doubtful at first but—he’s been pressing to tell me something over the last half hour. I wonder if he’s pulled off another one of his miraculous bits of engineering wizardry, though I’m not getting my hopes up; I’d have thought that the Gesellschaft would have tended to a matter like that.”

“You think we’re missing something?”

“You are; that’s where we come in.”

The reverberating, baritone voice behind the two men was not familiar, yet he projected a tone of understated reassurance with every word, like a trusted friend arriving at the scene of an accident. They both whirled about to behold a businesslike trio standing in a staggered formation just behind them, a young man and woman roughly flanking the stoical figure who had addressed them—a middle-aged man roughly of Tim’s height and build, with narrow spectacles that limned a broad forehead and a slightly aquiline nose. He had a distinctive moustache with upturned edges, and uncut hair extending about halfway down his neck, conspicuous for its unusual coloration: a clay-colored, vaguely grayish hue that seemed to toy with a blue tint from certain angles.

“Dr. Shoemaker, Zach—allow me to introduce Sabine Nguyen,” he continued, gesturing to his right, “and Lorenz Kaplan; my name is Leo, Leo Schering. We’re from the Falkenei Gesellschaft,” he said, with a pained sigh that belied the impassive expression on his face, “or what’s left of it.”

“So we finally meet,” remarked Tim, his tone an ambiguous mix of relief and dread at what that meeting portended. “Zach was right; why didn’t you reveal yourselves when he sought you in Zürich?”

“We had to be sure, Tim,” replied Leo, his answer cold and direct. “We had our suspicions days ago, when news leaked of a spectacular find in the Eötvös Museum. We’ve been seeking you and your family for decades, but we also knew that the information could be a ruse by our enemies. Only with news of the incident yesterday morning did we realize the truth; we all owe you a debt of gratitude for coming this far already.”

“Why?” asked Tim in a sharp, yet imploring tone. “Why am I so central to all this? Your people forged wonders that remain centuries ahead of the world outside; why couldn’t you find me?”

Leo’s expressionless eyes at once widened noticeably behind his spectacles as he motioned toward his two colleagues, who promptly left to tackle pre-arranged matters. He then signaled toward an adjacent exhibit hall, housing an elaborate replica of a 17^th-century salon filled with stylized, bronze-rimmed sofas, as though ripped from the palace of a local potentate. “Please, Tim, have a seat; we have a lot to talk about.”

*********************************

“Our history dates back more than a thousand years, to the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great. The Emperor had dispatched his troops near what is now Koblenz, to fortify his domains againat a rebellion by his dukes. But in the process of constructing their earthworks, his soldiers’ excavations revealed a puzzling find: a cave complex, buried deep underground, housing an extraordinary network of wall paintings, living quarters, and bizarre objects—including the shaped stone slabs that would become known as the Cryptoliths.”

“Stone slabs,” repeated Tim, scanning his fractured memories at the vaguely familiar reference. “In my dream visions, the triptych at Gregor’s estate—I remember now, those outsized blocks, housed in that freakish chamber in the castle.”

“They’re the ultimate source of the miracles we’ve woven over the centuries. There were carvings on the stone that baffled their onlookers—glyphs of an unknown provenance, that led to whispers of an occult power and black magic. So Count Konrad Kurzbold, Otto’s lieutenant in the region, commissioned a team to study the discovery, comprised of the best scribes and scholars in the realm. They were led by a monk named Roland von Straßburg, who realized that the strange glyphs on the stones represented a kind of cipher—comprised of symbols whose distribution reminded him of the numerology and sacred incantations of the ancient Babylonians.”

“Base 60,” remarked Zach, his mind stirred by the reference. “Their old superstition—the source of 60 as the core of timekeeping systems, the degrees in a circle…”

“That’s right. Roland’s era had no abstract notion of Base 2 or 10 or 60, but it was he who had that first insight, that the Cryptoliths housed a sexagesimal code to be deciphered. He also took note of a recurring pattern in the cave paintings: curious depictions of ancient birds of prey, perched upon the Cryptoliths with a darkened, menacing sky in the background. The Cryptoliths were stylized in the shape of eggs, and the symbolism inspired Roland to found and name an association of great minds that would stretch through the centuries, seeking answers to the discovery in the cave complex.”

“So these Cryptoliths,” inquired Tim, “are you saying that the hands of some ancient civilization were responsible for them?”

“No; it merely found them. When the Gesellschaft developed carbon-dating technology, we discovered that a Bronze Age agricultural community had stumbled upon the stones; it was possibly the same culture that created the Goloring monument from about 3,000 years ago. Their paintings depicted a celestial event that terrified a local village, the heavens turning blood-red just as a plume of light and smoke—a shock wave of sorts—swept across the fields. Local farmers later ventured out to check their crops, upon which they discovered the Cryptoliths gathered in a clearing of a nearby forest. They became holy relics to that society, used to consecrate the burials of their chieftains.”

“So I take it, then, that your artifacts are an outgrowth of these Cryptoliths?”

“The sexagesimal codes ultimately gave rise to an extraordinarily complex, yet elegant instruction set. Some of the first artifacts were in fact already present, intact alongside the stones themselves; but most of them were eventual products of the Gesellschaft’s members, guided by the deciphered codes. It’s why we appeared centuries ahead of the rest of the world; the Cryptoliths contained references to what we know today as advanced mathematics, molecular biology, even computer science. But their very first message was a warning.”

“The one on the stone tablet, among my heirlooms,” reasoned Tim, looking away as he nodded. “Why was it transcribed into the Gothic script?”

“Roland von Straßburg’s successors soon realized how precious their discovery was, and how perilous it could become in the hands of the avaricious feudal lords who abounded at the time. So we vigorously concealed our hallowed knowledge from the world, even our involvement with the Falkenei Gesellschaft itself. The scholars still needed a medium in which to communicate, one that they could learn and use widely with each other, but which was considered arcane to the world at large.”

“But did you know what you were creating? What the artifacts would lead to?”

“No, not until very recently ourselves. Only that whatever we were forging, it was a countermeasure of sorts to a powerful and horrific foe, one that had been first depicted on those very same cave walls just outside of Koblenz.”

“The Tauschreigeist.”

“The Gesellschaft toiled for centuries in the shadows, laboring to discern the nature of our adversary and just what we were creating. We recruited the best minds, the seminal mathematicians and natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution—Descartes, Euler, Gauss, Riemann, Weierstrass, Mobius, Hilbert, Cantor.”

“And of course,” added Zach, “Kant and Leibniz.”

“Among our greatest leaders, yes. For hundreds of years since our founding, we stayed above the fray of the petty jealousies and politics of Central Europe; we knew that we were serving a greater cause. But even the Gesellschaft succumbed to the blood feuds of the continent in the 17^th century. Much of our funding derived from the enlightened patronage of the region’s nobles; when our own sponsors took up arms against each other, far too many of our own felt obliged to do the same.”

“During the Thirty Years’ War!” exclaimed Tim. “That’s when my ancestors stumbled into your fortress, didn’t they?”

“Into the Schloss Heilbrunnen, within that cursed forest. The Katzenwald and all its gruesome lore provided our best refuge against incursions from the outside, after our own members had been riven by the religious disputes that overtook the monasteries and churches following the Reformation. Much of our work was lost; to forestall further ruin, we treated into the confines of the castle; it had been a safehouse for our most valuable possessions, but not even Heilbrunnen was impregnable. We realized that we had to render copies of our critical technology wherever we could, to spread them across the Seven Seas.”

“So that’s why you gave those artifacts to the Schumachers? You wanted to safeguard them in the Americas?”

“That was but one of our reasons,” he answered cryptically, “but it was a duty that your family took quite seriously. The survivors of the battles and purges in the 1600s pieced together what they could of our heritage, and Gottfried Leibniz himself took the reins later in the century; he was responsible for our greatest steps forward, and it was he who dispatched Bernd Schumacher in his trip across the Atlantic. After Leibniz, the Gesellschaft again suffered the woes of the region’s petty jealousies, and our secrecy became more difficult to maintain. In the succeeding centuries, we were again revived for a time by the efforts of a great leader—Kant in the 18^th, Hilbert in the 19^th—before suffering catastrophe in the 20^th.”

Leo opened a metallic briefcase that had been laid carefully on a table before them, retrieving a tri-colored banner—in navy blue, burnt orange, and a blood-soaked red—that he promptly unfolded before Tim and Zach. Its centerpiece was a distinctive coat-of-arms: a heraldic golden shield that enclosed a ferocious black griffin with claws outstretched. The design was itself encased by a larger shield divided into four quadrants, alternately depicting a bloody medieval battle scene, a strange fountain, and diagonally opposite fleur-de-lis motifs, superimposed upon a guarded castle on one side and a snowy wheat field on the other.

“When the upheavals of the 20^th century shook Europe to its core,” resumed Leo, “the Gesellschaft was not spared. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, our leaders shuddered at the purposes to which those fiends would put the technology if it fell into their hands. So we began to move the artifacts and the Cryptoliths themselves to protected sites, both in the eventual war zones and in neutral Switzerland. But we still had to maintain most of them together in one place; it was the only way to study and harness the neural mimicry technology that we realized we were engendering. This proved to be our downfall.”

“The flag,” interjected Tim, circling his hand across its colorful displays, “what does it mean?”

“It’s modified from the family crest of Graf Rupert von Lahngau; he was a count, distantly descended from Konrad Kurzbold himself, and the chief protector of the Gesellschaft during that horrid period. Like many of our other patrons, he was a member of the Kreisau Circle and an associate of Wilhelm Canaris’s group—organizations that were active in the German Resistance. Regrettably, he was betrayed in a raid and captured by the Gestapo, but not before he managed to secure a vast subterranean safehouse for most of the devices that we had engineered over the centuries.”

“The caverns,” remarked Tim in a loud whisper, “beneath the Albertina University in Old Königsberg.”

“It was a felicitious location for us, given that so much of the Gesellschaft’s work had been concentrated in old Könisgberg since Immanuel Kant’s turn at the helm. Rupert also believed that the deference to Kant’s achievements, held across the warring nations, would help to preserve the site from the depredations of the war and its aftermath. His foresight saved centuries of our efforts, but he did not live to see the fruits of his heroism. His captors imprisoned and then interrogated him for weeks, during which he bought us the crucial time we needed to transport the artifacts. He died at their hands, and so we carry this banner to honor his sacrifice, its colors modified to symbolize the struggle that we all had endured during those awful years.”

“But why didn’t you recover the artifacts after the war? From what Jürgen Semmelweiss had told me, nobody knew a thing about the artifacts’ very existence down there. Jürgen’s own friend Vasili had researched the matter independently, and it was only through his serendipitious researches that Minister Krusenstern finally uncovered them, transporting them here to Hungary.”

“Because the Gesellschaft had essentially perished by the war’s close, Tim. Rupert himself never broke down and gave in, but the Gestapo soon got to his friends and associates within his branch of the Kreisau Circle, and none of us were safe. Many of the Gesellschaft’s members were themselves killed or captured; others lost their lives amidst the fighting on the Eastern and Western fronts. Still others died at the hands of the Stasi or the various Secret Police forces that took charge throughout the Warsaw Pact, and the few who escaped were too traumatized or dispersed to revive the organization. Our ties to our past, our institutional memory, our links to the families who had passed along many of the artifacts—all were severed amidst the calamities. It would take decades for us to recover and recoup what we had lost, and even then only in part.”

“Leo,” began Tim after a brief pause, plainly vexed by a matter that had remained unresolved, “I still can’t quite put together some of the things you just said. You’d mentioned that there was something else, another reason that you were so desperate to contact me after all these years. Why is this… resurrection device tuned to me, to my mind and memories? And where did all this come from to begin with, the Cryptoliths and the knowledge they contain?”

To Tim’s surprise, Leo glanced over with a sharp glance toward a spiral staircase across the exhibit hall, nodding in response to a signal from someone who had emerged from below. He promptly snapped shut the metal briefcase and rose up from his seat, in apparent preparation to descend into the lower levels himself.

“We’ll have ample opportunity to discuss all this further, Tim; we should be reaching our headquarters within the next day.”

“Headquarters? What are you talking about?”

“In Göttingen. The university there was the home of Dr. Hilbert, at the heart of the great advances in mathematics and logic at the turn of the 20^th century, that led to the invention of the computer in the outside world. It was a natural site for the Gesellschaft’s members to be invited in and to congregate for further progress; it houses what was left of our institution after the World Wars, and it’s the only site containing the support grid that the artifacts will need to accomplish their intended purpose.”

“You mean—”

“There isn’t time to explain now, Tim; we must get moving, immediately.”

“But what about Gregor? Does he know about any of this?”

“He’s already given his consent, Tim, and he’ll be accompanying us north. He was tied down with his duties below deck, but I believe he had been attempting to notify you earlier today.”

“Yeah, he was but… wait a minute, it’s funny that you mention that. We’ve been having this damn static all day yesterday and much worse today; been almost impossible to keep our channels open.”

“I know, Tim, and that presages the event that we’ve feared for a millennium. It means that he’s on the brink of his full awakening, of his physical manifestation.”

“Whoa—hold on, what? The Tauschreigeist? I don’t understand; what the hell does radio static have to do with the beast?”

“Wait a minute,” said Zach, finally breaking his observant silence. “Tim, didn’t you say that the radios were acting up back on that day that the Tauschreigeist supposedly… became sentient for the first time, within the computer networks at Oak Ridge?”

“El Día del Diablo, back in February—you’re right, now I remember. On the same day that Rachel’s team flipped the switch and activated the link to the implants… my car radio was flickering the whole day, and so was everyone else’s.”

“That’s not an accident, Tim. These disturbances in the EM spectrum, of radio stations and cellular transmissions—they’re precisely what we’ve predicted when his coming his imminent.”

“What?”

“No, it makes sense!” exclaimed Zach, his mind abruptly jogged by Leo’s words. “Why didn’t I realize it before? Kei-san told me that he and the other Children of the Mushroom Cloud could always sense the presence of the Tauschreigeist, because his incipient consciousness could manifest within any medium or structure capable of holding a pattern.”

“Like storing up a mass of information, you’re saying—the core of his sentience?”

“In essence, yeah. Kei-san also told me that the Tauschreigeist has been linked to the earth, long before life of any form had begun to exist. There’s only one manifestation of this planet that could possibly house the complexity of his being, and remain intact over billions of years.”

“The magnetic field!” replied Tim after a pause, his gaze askance and his tone slightly subdued as the insight came upon him.

“He’s been there for billions of years, Tim,” added Leo. “His physical manifestation on earth has come in stages. He was a Leibniz Demon before the solar system itself had taken shape; he gradually coalesced into the magnetic field when his nascent mind became aware that the earth could be life-supporting. Then slowly, over all these eons, he’s manipulated events to become a physical entity once again.”

“A Leibniz Demon! Does that mean that… Leo?”

Leonhard had dropped his stoical mask in an uncharacteristic display of self-critical anxiety. “My God—why didn’t I ask this at the start?”

“Ask what?” queried Tim, a sick feeling of vague foreboding cresting in his heart.

“Our magnetometer readings correspond to a fluctuation pattern that the Cryptoliths warned us about—the final phase, before the Tauschreigeist manifests himself corporeally. You said that the first disturbances began in February, in association with Oak Ridge?”

“That’s right,” Tim answered nervously, his stomach knotting and his heart racing in dreaded anticipation of what was to follow.

“The entity’s incarnation is imminent, and he’ll take shape first at the gateway that invited his consciousness into the minds of carbon and silicon together.” He bit down in his lip, casting his gaze skyward for an intense moment before facing Tim with a beseeching urgency. “That building at Oak Ridge is the epicenter, and the people in that complex aren’t safe; they have to evacuate that place, right now.”

Tim said nothing, swallowing audibly in a moment of abject horror as his face blanched to a ghostly pallor. He gathered himself and stepped away, pawing around his pockets for his cell phone and fretfully dialing out a familiar number.

“Rachel, God, pick up. Rachel! Ah, no, damnit!”

Tim desperately attempted his call again, thwarted by the signal interference that had by now become nearly ubiquitous.

“You won’t be able to reach her via a satellite routing, Tim. Hurry, follow me.”

Tim took off quickly behind his guide, leaving the exhibition hall and rounding a series of corners into a rusty, poorly-tended storage annex adjoining the museum. The two of them rushed into a trailer that had been hastily erected amid scattered pillars and disheveled fragments from retired exhibits.

“We’ve ported in a bypass line,” explained Leo breathlessly, retrieving a key to unlock the trailer, “that connects to our associates in North America, via the Soemmerring-Field transatlantic cable.”

“The one they use for the nuclear hotlines?”

“Yeah; we coaxed our own dedicated channel out of it, and it should be unaffected by the field disturbances. I’ll open up a band for you; dial whenever you’re ready.”

Leo burst through the threshold and flipped a series of switches on the far wall as Tim settled in, parking himself before an elaborate assemblage that resembled a submarine’s communications console more than a telephone line.

“All right, Tim, we’re live.”

Tim frantically dialed in a number from an exposed keypad, inhaling rapidly and dripping sweat as he waited with anxious dread for a response.

“Come on, come on…”

“Vision Restoration,” replied a slightly distorted, yet crisp voice on the other line. “This is Rachel Bloom.”

“Rachel!”

“Tim! Why—why did you call me on the lab’s emergency phone?”

“Because that’s what this is. Rachel, please, listen to me, I don’t have time to explain.”

“Slow down, catch your breath, I can barely make oue what you’re…”

“Rachel, you have to leave the facility, right now—you have to get everyone out of there.”

“Wha—Tim, what? You’re scaring me, why the hell are you acting like this?”

“Rachel, he’s coming, tonight. Right on the grounds of the building.”

‘Who?”

“The beast—the entity that awoke on El Día del Diablo, that you saw from Sanjit’s recordings on the day you flipped the switch. He’s been coalescing his being in the intervening months and now… he’s about to take shape, right where you are. Please, you have to get out now!”

The other line went silent for an excruciating moment, with nothing but the labored breathing of a shocked audience of one making its way back through the receiver.

“Tim, I’ve had to learn to trust what you’re telling me, but this isn’t something that I can order haphazardly. Are you absolutely sure about…”

“No. No!” hollered Tim, crying out in frustration as he fruitlessly dialed the number again. “Get her back! Damnit, we’ve gotta get her back!”

“Tim, I’m sorry,” answered Leo, dashing about the switchboard in a controlled fury. “We’ve lost the link.”

“But you said this connection would stay robust!”

“It is, Tim,” he replied, his face ashen with ominous dismay. “I don’t think the block is coming from this side.”

Oak Ridge Vision Restoration Facility

“Tim, are you still there?”

Rachel set the phone down despondently. Her heart galloped and her stomach wrenched from a surge of powerless, sickening fear, like a helpless passenger on a ship about to run aground. She darted hey eyes about the still busy laboratory, peering out a window to glimpse the shadow-encrusted twilight. Her breathing fluttered at a bizarre, yet fleeting sight—a strange, wavy quality to the air outside, like the curling rivulets of heat permeating the air above a radiator. She directed her gaze quickly back to the lab, its bustling inhabitants oblivious to the danger that was supposedly lurking in ambush.

She nearly leapt at the intermittent beeping of her pager, gradually settling into the sparse comfort that the device was still functional at all. Rachel frowned, however, as she eyed the garbled fragments of text that accompanied the page: “Brad x59104 Pts in n%r9h ~i&^ ac#zn! ->zarr&, }`an5i^g un/n@w2 l*ng+a$( pls $’vi!se.”

She rushed to call from one of the secured lines nearby, frenziedly punching in the number from the page.

“North wing, clinical observ—, this is Brad,” called out the voice on the other line, lucid in parts yet occasionally encumbered by a strange, vaguely growling sonic overlay.

“Brad, it’s Rachel here.”

“Ah, you got my page, thank God. It’s g— weird here, Rachel.”

“What is it? I couldn’t make out your page entirely, something about… patients acting bizarre?”

“Chanting, and not in any — of idiom that I’ve ever heard. Got creepy, I swear they started to sync— after a point.”

“What are they doing now?”

“Uh… sorry just craning my neck around to see what… that’s odd, they — and just went silent, not a peep. And it looks as — they’re lining up, facing roughly east, toward the windows.”

“What?”

“Just telling it as I see it. My team’s here trying — ‘em out of it, but — like in a trance.”

“Brad, you’re fading out a little, can you hear me? I need you to go to the other patient rooms and…”

She halted her instruction with a terrified startle, her gaze drifting toward a well-traversed spot in a hallway in the distance. It was nothing special—a mass of measuring equipment and a nitrogen tank stacked before a fluorescent lamp dangling from the wall. But this time, there was something moving amidst the pile, like the wavy air currents she had glimpsed just out the window before: The far border of the tank, a metallic ring with an outstretched valve, no longer curved around in a smooth circle. It was undulating slightly, throbbing back and forth in an inexplicable dance of stretching and contraction, its sharp outlines blurring and bleeding out before the sharp illumination that the lamp was shining upon it.

“Brad, listen—I need you to evacuate the North Wing. Everyone out, everyone—you, the patients, the staff. Just leave the equipment, gather all the…”

“Rachel? Are you — I can barely —“

“Damnit, Brad, just get everyone the hell out now!” she exclaimed, her co-workers looking on in confusion and apprehension.

“Evacuate? Rachel I — What’s the —”

Just as she prepared to clarify the order, another page chimed in from staff in the south wing, then another from a different medical team on the north side. The text was jumbled and fragmented as before, but she could still make a unifying thread: patients lining up in an unexplained formation, facing outward.

She raced to a wall panel nearby, flinging open the glass cover and sliding her card through the open slot. A small green light flared on above the box, at which point she depressed a large rectangular button in the top right corner, leaning into a receiver affixed within the panel.

“Attention, all Biomedical Engineering Personnel.” The burning urgency of Rachel’s voice rang out through the building and the surrounding complex.

“We have a Code Red, I repeat we have a Code Red. This is not a drill; all personnel must evacuate the premises immediately. Leave all equipment and personal belongings. We have information of a tangible threat to the entire campus; please depart according to protocol…”

She recoiled as the speaker from the panel inexplicably shot back with a piercing blast of audio feedback, covering her ears in pain. As the jarring cacophony died down, her colleagues eyed her fearfully, disoriented and baffled by the events they had just beheld.

They quickly moved to comply with their Rachel’s command, but before they could reach the nearby stairwells, their ears were again assaulted by a terrifying, eardrum-rattling sound. It seemed to be originating from downstairs, but it was soon joined to a hideous echo that emerged from the neighboring structures in the complex: a high-pitched, tremulous, Banshee-like scream from the assembled patients, tearing through the air from all directions.

Rachel shuddered in fright as she covered her ears, leaning back against a nearby column and slinking slowly to the ground. To her horror, the bizarre spatial distortions about the tank in the hallway had spread to the walls and equipment inside. The legs of chairs and the surfaces of tables twisted and coiled about, their shapes and colors contorting as though viewed through a slowly-turning kaleidoscope. The tiles in the ceiling rumbled and bulged, the walls about her gradually stretching and melting away. Shadows from the lights and digital numnbers on LCD displays vibrated and extended into impossible shapes. The very space around her began to pulsate and bend, the faces of her colleagues seeming to recede into a distance beyond perception. She felt an onrushing, tingling sensation overtaking her, screaming as her mind appeared to drift away from her body below.

A solitary trucker, approaching the campus from the highway outside, halted in shock at the sight before him: a collection of buildings in the distance, blurring and undulating in the fading light outside. A roar pealed out from among them, followed by a desultory whir of what appeared to be eyes, teeth, arms, reptilian scales, and a host of unidentifiable phenomena. Finally, a series of small vortices took shape throughout the complex, merging together into a raging maelstrom of air and electricity that swallowed the complex whole, releasing a shock wave that felled the terrified trucker and pushed him behind his vehicle. As he rose again slowly, trembling in bewilderment, his already incredulous eyes widened in further disbelief at the sight before him: a monstrous, inpouching cavitation in the ground, all that remained of the structures there just moments before.

New Chapter, on a TV

“Welcome back to our special report. We apologize for interrupting your regularly scheduled broadcast, but we have further updates regarding the recent incidents in eastern Tennessee, including the burst of extreme weather that is baffling meteorologists across the country. Several eyewitnesses have attested to deadly tornadoes materializing throughout the region, despite the absence of an identified storm system. Complicating matters: Hard-hit Anderson County has been declared a full-fledged disaster area, prompting a combined army and National Guard response that the region has not seen since the days of the Civil War. We have also confirmed that Governor Louise Hampton has officially confirmed a state of emergency, in a bid to secure scarce federal dollars to tackle the crisis in a state already reeling from the economic damage of the Chakana computer virus over the past month. Reports are already flowing in that her counterparts in neighboring states are on standby to do the same. Let’s go to Candace Liu, our reporter on the ground, for the latest.”

The man on the central barstool took impetuous hold of the emptied beer can before him, crushing it slowly in a prolonged display of bitter, corrosive frustration. He tightened the flaps of his blazer and donned his fedora once again, insulating himself against the drafty currents blowing in from the brewing storm outside.

“Thank you Patrick and all you WJAT viewers out there for bearing with us, as we bring more details of these extraordinary developments to light. I am standing here near the city hall of La Follette in Campbell County, to the north of Anderson and about as close as the authorities are allowing anyone from the outside. As you can see from the tattered poncho I’m modeling for the cameras now, we are definitely not enjoying much in the way of summery weather here, which is fortunate because no one around here is in a festive mood right now. In the past two hours, we’ve learned that the disturbing events in Anderson County have been paralleled by reports of a series of unexplained disappearances in nearby states, extending from Appalachian coal-mining country to the Chicago metro area. Details are still trickling in.”

“One of those days, huh?” The genial, somewhat shaggy bartender had been wiping down the counters when he addressed the man with the crushed can, attempting to rouse him from the smoldering wasteland of his own thoughts.

“If only it were just one of those days,” chuckled the man caustically.

“Sorry to hear it.” He promptly set down the dishrag and filled a tall mug to the brim with a foamy, toasted brown-colored concoction from a nearby tap, setting it firmly down before the haggard man with the crestfallen eyes. “It’s always a treat to have a new face in here among the expats, and you definitely look like you could use one. It’s a Czech brew, best lager I’ve had this side of the Danube—on the house.”

“Wish I had something to toast about, but I do appreciate the sentiment.” The man thirstily gulped down about a third of the tumbler, planting it with a loud thud on the scratched-up wooden counter before him.

“Tim!” A familiar voice sounded from the bar’s entrance, carried in with the drafty, stormy air that had been congealing outside.

“Zach,” said the man drily, turning halfway around to face his guest. “So I guess my little hiding place wasn’t much of a secret.”

“The only American-style bar around these parts, two blocks from the museum? From the way Leo described your mood when you bolted out, I figured you’d either be here or on the ledge of some building. I’m glad you’re not the melodramatic type.”

“I guess I’m supposed to have a witty comeback for that.”

“I’m just glad you can hold a conversation at all, Tim, cuz it’s not the best time to be wallowing in self-pity. Leo’s already arranged with the powers-that-be to ship all the artifacts to Göttingen on an express line—with us in tow. We’re T-minus 36 hours to our own departure.”

“Zach, how much did Leo tell you about…”

“I got a chill down my spine when I heard about it, Chief. He said you spent about a half hour calling her after the line went down, calling your cousin in Tennessee and whoever else.”

“They’re gone, that’s what’s driving me so crazy. The reception on all the phones returned after the Oak Ridge incident—that hideous entity must have congealed in from the magnetic field. I tried to call Ernie, his wife, my extended family but—there’s just nothing. It’s as though half of Anderson County has been effaced from the map.”

“Tim, look, I can’t imagine what must be going through your mind right now, but you know that if there’s any way to get all of them back, that road is gonna pass through Göttingen, and it won’t work if you’re hung over or your heart and mind are in a shambles. Whatever fairy dust you have between your ears, we’re gonna need you to be at the top of your game as soon as we arrive on that express train.”

“But at what cost, Zach?” he retorted feebly, his bloodshot eyes shimmering as though fighting back tears. “Can’t you see? My lost wife returns; Rachel disappears. I sacrificed her, to bring back Susan.”

“No, Tim; just don’t,” responded Zach, shaking his head with visible agitation. “Don’t do this—this guilt-trip-in-a-bottle routine. You know that’s not true; whatever happened to Rachel has been brewing since February, and you tried to shepherd her out of that hellhole. This is not on your hands!”

“No, Zach… forget it, because you really don’t understand, and you’re not gonna understand.”

Zach gnashed his molars against each other, looking away for an extended pause and seething in frustration as he cast about for a response.

“The alluring eyes of a comfort most coveted,” began Zach, still facing away before he turned back toward Tim. “It’s the way my mother would have described Priscilla Lehto, five years ago when I was just starting up, and when she was milling about the Doghouse to find you.”

Tim exhaled abruptly as though the air had been sucked from his lungs, slowly shaking himself awake and eyeing his protégé with a look of wary astonishment.

“Shortly after Fisher’s Reckoning had seized the US in a vise grip, my father was staring at financial ruin in his restaurant chain. He put on a brave face around the family but… we worked there too, so he couldn’t hide it for long. He had to lay off his staff, his close friends, even the best man at his and Mom’s wedding. He’d vanish for days at a time, sending money back on occasion but returning home exhausted and almost penniless. I never knew he was going, and I’m not sure Mom always knew, either.”

He grabbed hold of the crushed beer can, inspecting it briefly as though to refresh his long-buried memories. “But after about a year of this, he started ducking out for even longer stretches. And this time, when he came back home, Mom couldn’t bear to greet him at the door; she ran to the guest room and cried, every time. I asked why she hid herself away and burst into tears like that; she’d write Korean poetry to keep her mind active, and she quoted one of her lines to me all the time: ‘the alluring eyes of a comfort most coveted.’ I never knew what it meant, until we attended a meeting at the local branch of the Korean-Am Chamber of Commerce. The people there, my uncles and family friends, they were looking askance at my father and Chae-Rin, a woman at the next table; she was a nightclub singer who’d grown up in the same neighborhood as Mom and Dad. I overheard the gossip of the crowd, I saw the way she looked at him… I still didn’t know precisely what Mom meant with her poetry, but I knew who those alluring eyes belonged to.”

Tim sank back slightly in his chair, his demeanor an incongruous mixture of discomfort and relief.

“I bitterly resented my father for a time; here he was, succumbing to weakness with three kids at home and Mom crying herself to sleep at night alone. But I gradually filled out the canvas over the next year. He’d closed down half his branches and was still in debt, went to a loan shark but had to work night shifts at a welding factory when the economy didn’t recover. Then he finally went to the Korean-American community for a subsidy—the very thing he feared most, since the extent of his plight would reach our relatives back in the homeland. I never fully appreciated the shame with which he tortured himself; it just broke him, eventually. That’s when he took up with Chae-Rin; she was the strongest link that he still had to a world when he was still in control of his fate, when he felt respected by those he cared about most.”

“So you’ve known, all these years.”

“I could see it on you, the first time I rotated through the Doghouse. The mask you wore on your face, to hide all the distress that was eating you inside—I’d seen it on my father for three terrible years. And I saw Chae-Rin’s alluring eyes on Priscilla, whenever she stopped by to see you. Everybody has their secrets and their todonadies, Tim, so I’ve long made it a policy to steer clear of their dirty linens. But I knew, and I could even feel the same corrosion gnawing on my own soul, when I began hiding my tribulations from Renee.”

“I did see those alluring eyes in Priscilla, you’re right, but they didn’t belong to Priscilla alone; I’d seen them in Teréz years before.”

His attention piqued, Zach shoved aside the mangled beer can, reading Tim’s eyes as the latter continued. “The resemblance was uncanny when Susan first introduced me to her, and not just in appearance only. Priscilla’s eyes, her mannerisms, her ability place herself inside a person’s mind, the way she’d glide when she walked—I saw Teréz when I encountered Priscilla.”

“And you also saw coveted moments from your own past.” Tim’s haggard, somewhat inebriated eyes blazed open at the young man’s canny observation. “I remember the associations that Teréz conjured up in you, after Jürgen revealed she was close by. And I’m not at all surprised that Priscilla had that same power for you in a desperate time. I myself couldn’t bear to tell Renee the whole truth, after all our best-laid plans for my career fell through. That’s the real reason I decided to tag along here, Tim. It wasn’t the job hunt; I knew how grave this matter was for you, it was etched in your eyes. But so was your desperation. The same that had etched itself five years ago in the presence of Priscilla, the same that I saw in my own father. You couldn’t do this alone.”

Zach glanced backward momentarily, his attention shaken by the eerie, hostile air currents that percolated in from the windswept alley outside. “It’s a crippling fear, the thought of letting down the ones we cherish, when they need us most. It’s primal, and if we succumb to it or even just try feebly to deflect it—it gnaws away at the heart, becomes hideously self-fulfilling. We act in ways that we rue bitterly, and our shame begets more of the same, up to the point of disaster. You’re not the only one, Tim.”

“I never took you to be the introspective type, Zach.”

“I never said I was, but from one flawed soul to another, this is something I know painfully well. You have to break this vicious cycle. You’ve been punishing yourself as if by ritual ever since you lost Susan. Yet she came back, and all because you were forced to re-examine why you lost her in the first place, by Priscilla and then by Teréz herself. You didn’t lose Rachel, Tim, or any of those other poor folk facing the wrath of the beast. But your mind’s still playing the same damn tricks on you, starting you on that downward spiral. And this time, it’s not just a few people near and dear who are depending on you, but every living creature walking this earth.”

Tim sighed and leaned backward, darting his gaze about the room in the manner of someone at war with his own ambivalence. He signaled to the bartender and dropped a ten-euro note on the counter, slowly turning back toward Zach.

“I guess we’d better finish our packing.”

“That’s the spirit,” responded Zach, his approval mixed with fierce determination. “Gregor’s already begun rounding up the troops. The Gesellschaft’s happy to have the extra hands on deck, and I’d wager that their bunker in Göttingen may be the safest spot in the world as all Hell starts breaking loose.”

“That’s been getting under my skin too, Zach. Leo seemed to imply that there wasn’t much we could do for our loved ones back home, other than figuring out how to defeat a cosmic being who’s been here for eons. But if the Tauschreigeist can infiltrate virtually any information-bearing system—don’t you think he might track us down now that he’s been awakened? Ernie’s disappearance has spooked me enough; I can’t imagine losing Mark and Chloe.”

“Yeah, that’s crossed my mind, too. I asked Leo before I set off to find you; he doesn’t know himself, but he doesn’t think the Tauschreigeist would delay his plans enough to take hostages or focus so much on us directly. He’s fully sentient, but the information that constitutes his body and mind is scattered in a dozen places; it’s as though the earth alone is too small for him. But I did have The Talk with Renee and my folks anyway, just to be on the safe side; just to be on the lookout for anything suspicious around them.”

“But what about the Children of the Mushroom Cloud? You said it yourself—once the Tauschreigeist had become corporeal, they’d be mobilized in his service. You heard it straight from…”

“Kei-san!” interrupted Zach, stopping dead in its tracks with a look of bitter alarm. “Son-of-a-bitch; now I remember—Kei-san had warned me that he couldn’t hide once the Tauschreigeist awakened; it’s as though the entity has a link straight to him, and could communicate with the other Children to find his location. I told him about your operations here, and if they find him…”

“Ugh, this can’t be good. But we couldn’t take him to Göttingen anyway; the Beast could use him to get to us.”

“We wouldn’t have to. Leo said that the Gesellschaft still has safehouses scattered throughout Europe, a legacy of trying to ride out the warfare throughout the continent over all those centuries. He’d have 24-hour protection there against his pursuers; if he winds up in the hands of the other Children—”

“I see where you’re going with this. Can you contact him?”

“Yeah—he left me a couple numbers at the Korean restaurant. That’s where he’d be right now.”

Zach frantically retrieved his Omnihua device, grimacing as he dialed a series of numbers. “Damn; he’s not picking up. I’d better dial the manager’s office.”

He punched in a code, waiting with visible anxiety for a response.

“He went by an assumed name in Vienna, of course; called himself Stefan. Though didn’t look much like a Stefan to my eyes…”

“Yi Sun-Sin Restaurant, Grüß Gott!”

“Guten Tag, uh—Sam? This is Zach Choi, the American who visited your restaurant recently.”

“Ah yes, ahnyong-haseyo Zach, glad to hear from you again!”

“Sorry to interrupt you, Sam, but I, uh… was thinking of swinging by again, to maybe talk to Stefan a little more about interning there. Do you know where I could find him?”

“It’s funny you ask that; Stefan’s as reliably punctual as the 6 o’clock train around here, but he hasn’t shown up all day, and we can’t reach him at home. It’s odd; his little back office at the restaurant is a mess too, completely unlike him. Almost looks ransacked, like a burglary, but nothing stolen as far as we can tell.”

“I uh… I see,” replied Zach, his teeth nearly audibly gnashing. “Just in case he pops in later—would it be OK for me to swing by today? I’m a short train ride from Vienna and, well… just wanted to touch base again before I returned to the States.”

“Sure, Zach! You’re always welcome here.”

“I appreciate it, Sam.”

Tim tensed his jaw and pulled his lower lip against his teeth, as though absorbing the uncharacteristic angst that had suddenly permeated the face of his unflappable protégé. “I take it that wasn’t good news.”

“He’s vanished, too. Might have gone into hiding but…” He shook his head despondently, before quickly firming up his resolve. “We’re just a couple quick border-crossings from Vienna here, a quick train ride over. We’ve gotta find him, Tim.”

“We’ve certainly got enough time before Leo takes us north, though if your suspicious are in any way similar to mine, I suspect our schedule of departure may be moving up quite a bit. I’ll give word to the team, meet you at the station.”

“I’m already on my way.”

[At the Restaurant]

“I’m sorry Zach and—Dr. Shoemaker, was it?”

“Tim.”

“We’re puzzling over Stefan’s whereabouts as much as you are. Not in years has he stepped away from the counter like this, let alone just up and vanished.” The man turned toward Zach, his expression more imploring than accusatory. “He was agitated when he returned after talking with you a few days ago. Not terribly so, but Stefan’s nearly as unflappable as they come. Did he say anything to you, something that might have tipped off unease or—more concrete intentions?”

“I—” Zach halted in his tracks, a corona of sweat materializing as he painstakingly chose his words. “He and I realized that we had a… a family connection of sorts, one that took us both by surprise. But we talked it through; he wasn’t overtly perturbed about anything that I could see.”

“Interesting to hear you say that, because the way he recounted your visit—seemed he was hoping you’d return. In the Korean way, you know… The kind of thing my parents might have said about a long-lost relative, separated after the armistice in 1953.”

Zach turned toward Tim in bemusement, then glanced past the host’s counter of the restaurant, down the bustling corridor that led into the whir of busy chef’s scrambling to fill the latest orders. “Sam, do you mind if we take a quick look around in Stefan’s quarters next to the kitchen? We don’t want to pry around, it’s just a hunch—he may have left something to hint at his whereabouts.”

“By all means, Zach. This place has lost its heart without Stefan, and if you can do anything to point the way to him, you’re welcome to look behind any nook or cranny of this place. Just to warn you, though—his quarters are a mess, nothing like we’ve ever seen back there before.”
“What do you mean? Ransacked, like a burglary?”

“Nothing quite like that, and there weren’t any signs of a break-in at the restaurant itself. But it’s definitely in disarray, as though he’d been rushing to find something. That’s another peculiar part of this picture; Stefan, he had an almost Prussian discipline and attention to detail. He’d never leave his quarters in that condition. We haven’t touched a thing in there ourselves, I suppose just hoping against hope that he’d come back, to again seek out whatever he was looking for.”

“We’ll see what we can piece together,” Zach answered tentatively, his face twisting in vague unease at Sam’s account.

The two of them quickly made their way down the hall, deftly sidestepping the charging columns of waiters and hostesses tending to the hungry throngs outside. Zach found the corridor sickeningly claustrophobic for reasons that remained elusive, an impression wrought by that mercurial part of the mind at the obscure margin between hard perception and fecund imagination.

They soon arrived at the threshold of the cramped chambers that had housed the talented yet taciturn chef, recoiling for a brief eye-blink at the disheveled state of the room. Sam had understated the disarray that had befallen the site, perhaps in part out of denial at what he himself had suspected along with his two guests.

‘They got him, Tim,” said Zach in a lofty whisper, shaking his head as he rifled through the helter skelter of their surroundings. “Kei-san knew they were coming.”

“Might he have escaped? Found what he was looking for and…”

“No,” Zach replied firmly, his voice uncharacteristically filled with foreboding. “This is why he feared the Dawn of the Thousand Screams so much. Because he knew that he could no longer hide from his pursuers, not when the mind of the Beast himself had locked onto his own Children. And besides,” he said, his eyes blazing with a detective’s curiosity at an inconspicuous pile on the desk, “I don’t think Kei-san was aiming to find anything amidst all this chaos; I think the chaos was his ally.”

“What? Why do you say that?”

“He was hiding something, Tim, not searching for it. Amidst all the clutter here, there’s one thing he kept unfailingly tidy.”

Tim stepped back and squinted his eyes, like a surveyor mentally mapping a target upon an unfamiliar locale. “The drawers, the doors of the cabinets… is that what you’re saying?”

“He wouldn’t have made the effort to shut and seal them all so carefully if he’d been engaged in a fruitless scavenger hunt. Even when he wasn’t facing down his worst horrors—when I came to visit him what seems like an eternity ago—I remember, they weren’t closed off to the outside. The clutter itself must have been a diversion.”

“For what?”

Zach rifled resolutely through the contents of the drawers, slowing his pace at one of the lower enclosures that resisted inspection. He clasped an oblong metallic pen nearby and used it to jimmy open the catch of the compartment, gingerly removing the layers above and nodding as he lifted out a modestly-sized ornament in burnt flesh-colored clay, holding it up to confirm his suspicions amidst the muted, soporific rays of the naked bulb dangling above.

“Oboete, oboete,” said Zach, drawing a quizzical stare from his ever more befuddled partner. “Remember, remember. He lost his father in the war, and he and his mother were rendered destitute as the cinders fell on Hiroshima. So he kept this figurine as a reminder of what they had suffered through, their two hands impressing upon each side of the clay.”

“I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at, Zach,” responded Tim ambiguously. He took hold of the clay plate and ran his fingers across it, his own cache of memories vicariously stimulated by the token of a stranger’s recollections.

“He said it never left his side, wherever he went.”

“Confirmation of our worst fears.”

“And his. He wanted us to find this for some reason, Tim, to keep it out of their hands.”

“For what purpose?”

Zach shook his head as he held aloft another item: the cherished locket that Keisuke had inherited from his own dear friend. “I suspect we won’t know until we find him again.”

On the Train to Gottingen

Tim fidgeted nervously as he stared out the window of the high-speed train, an indecipherable blaze of streaking light and color his only scenery as the train hurtled by. His only enduring glimpse of the outside came in the wake of a slow ascent after a stop in a grimy tunnel: an eerily reddish, autumnal haze punctuated by the angry glow of a harvest moon, like the ominous shadow of flames cast upon a cornfield by a burning forest in the distance.

“So the Demon’s really incarnate?” he queried nervously, an unseen silhouette pacing behind him. He pivoted around abruptly, tensing his jaw as a foil to the gnawing uncertainty inside him. “Gregor, I never witnessed the momentous conversation that you and Leo must have had, about the artifacts and about… whatever else, to bring you around so quickly. It was around the time that this fiend was blotting out all the radio signals, just before he arose and took...” He sank his teeth bitterly into his lower lip, frustrated at the sense of impotence that overtook him at the memory.

“More than enough,” answered Gregor, far more grimly than Tim had expected. “Try to imagine when you were a kid, when you awoke traumatized by those night terrors or fears about the things hiding in the darkness, that your Ma and Pa would always unfailingly reassure you about. Now try to imagine that they did the opposite, that they substantiated everything that terrified you, and more.”

“Good God, Gregor; that’s scary enough coming from anybody, let alone from you… What the hell did they tell you?”

“The Ur-Anderen were the source of everything: the Cryptoliths, and the instructions they contained for the Gesellschaft. They deciphered enough of the caracteristica to design the Resurrector, because they’re the only ones to have ever faced down the Beast and lived to tell about it.”

“I don’t understand—where? When?”

“About 14 billion years ago, give or take.”

“I’d say that sets a new mark for long-running rivalries,” Tim quipped feebly, his visible unease barely allayed by his ironic aside.

“Probably not much for the spectators to chew on, though, since it’s been largely dormant in the interim.”

“So wait a minute, 14 billion years, isn’t that as old as…”

“Yeah,” nodded Gregor, sensing Tim’s incredulity at the bizarre calculation. “The Ur-Anderen aren’t simply aliens arriving from a solar system away. They’re just like the Tauschreigeist himself; they entered our universe at its very inception. The Tauschreigeist needed the intervention of the Children of the Mushroom Cloud to make him whole again, to re-assemble the information that constitutes his physical existence. The Ur-Anderen need us to do the same. They’ve been interwoven, deep within the fabric of our cosmos, since the very moment it had begun to take shape.”

“So that dream scene, in my sketches?” mused Tim, struggling to corral a conclusion that even further defied his credulity. “You’re saying that this was before our universe had even come into existence?”

“Not just before—directly ancestral to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are models of cosmology which posit that new universes are constantly branching off of prior ones, carrying many of the same mathematical and physical properties that defined their predecessors. Not just eternal inflation, but—ramifying, like an ever-sprouting family tree of cosmos all springing naturally from each other, their contingent narrative histories all interconnected. That bizarre formation, with the weird geometry near the fountain at the center of your drawings—Leo believes it was the origin point of our own universe, the site of the Big Bang as it expanded into its own unique spacetime from its predecessor.”

“So the Tauschreigeist—Leo believes that he created our…”

“No, not quite that. The origin of our cosmos was a natural event, an outpouching from its predecessor into a distinct spacetime, just as other spacetimes are expanding out from points spread across our own, every second. But the Tauschreigeist somehow had the power to harness that creation event and make his essence integral to its very fiber. As did the Ur-Anderen.”

“To become a Leibniz Demon, just like him. That’s what you were saying earlier, wasn’t it? A physical universe is an expanding calculation space, a zone of logical evolution; so the Tauschreigeist and his adversaries programmed their beings into the very tapestry of information that became our cosmos.”

“Close enough.”

“But we’ve had a hunch about something like this for a while, Gregor, at least since Giulia’s team began to translate the Kant’s Precipice; what did Leo say to spook you so much?”

“The Tauschreigeist himself, Tim. He’s not just a demon, whatever the many connotations we might attach to the word, or a powerful being projecting himself into a new realm. He’s—he’s a universe all unto himself, Tim.”

“OK, you’ve been stretching my belief like a cheap rubber band, and it just snapped. What in hell does that mean?”

“For one thing, it means that he can’t be killed. He exists separately from our own universe even as he’s crossed into it. The Beast is a distinct realm of logical evolution, of existence, all to himself, and his mind is the causal narrative that fills it. That’s what his apocalypse means, what the tablets were warning us about; he intends to put an end to our causal narrative in this universe, our evolution as bearers of information, creativity, and memory. We’d exist only as complex figments within the mind of the Tauschreigeist, unique constituents within his memory—our own minds trapped somewhere between consciousness and a dream state.”

“A dream? What kind of dream?”

“Nothing you’d want to endure for a night, let alone an ongoing purgatory with every tick of your conscious clock. It’s more like a continuous nightmare than a one-night sojourn in Never-Neverland, some tale of woe that the Beast has been harboring for God-knows how many eons. That’s what we’d become a part of.”

Tim tesponded with an ashen, sickly look of suffocating apprehension, like a recently condemned prisoner just beginning to comprehend his death sentence. “The Ur-Anderen were trying to convey many things on the Cryptoliths,” Gregor continued, “not least a cross-cosmic history of sorts, a bio of the Tauschreigeist, the where and how and why. But for all his malice and apocalyptic rage, some uniquely horrific event in his own past—it befell whatever entity became this Demon, and it’s an agony that’s shared by every being that he absorbs into his being.”

“The Tauschreigeist has done this before?”

“He’s able to absorb all the flora and fauna that inhabit whatever planet he targets, but his focus is on the intelligent species there, both their internal content of their minds and the external hallmarks of the information-rich society that they foster. That’s the fearsome message of the tablets that I’ve been harboring in my cellars all these years; they were conveying the warnings of the Ur-Anderen, that the Beast has done this many times before.”

“So those hideous contortions, the creatures that were screaming from his body, in those hideous renditions by Pablo and the others who’ve drawn him…”

“Including yours, Tim. The souls in that fountain, from your own nightmare sketch—they appear to be representations of his previous victims among the intelligent species, like a wall of sentience that’s assembled into his body just before his next Armageddon is launched.”

“Ah, God,” Tim answered, turning away with a bitter shake of the head. “It’s an appropriate irony, Gregor—a gruesome one but apt, nonetheless. Ever since Fisher’s Reckoning in particular, all the corruption that’s ensnared this fallen world we live in, with its fallen people… and now it’s about to be condemned to a collective Hell, within the mind of a Beast.”

“Tim, you can’t fall prey to those kinds of thoughts, not now.”

“Why not? At least it confers some perverse rationality upon all this.”

Gregor exhaled with a frown, his sigh somewhere between resignation and stoical defiance. “I’ll spare you the old spiel about how there’s still good and innocence in the world, to balance out all the malevolence that’s reared its ugly head in the past few years. I’m sure the Gesellschaft will be able to flesh it all out a little more. But what matters here, Tim, is that you’ve been appointed with a great responsibility, of cosmic proportions. This earth has evolved for billions of years to generate all the creativity, surprise, memory, and intelligence we see around us, with a contingent history of tragedy followed by triumph and progress. If the Beast prevails, all that diverse richness will become little more than a grotesque distortion within the confines of this recurring nightmare that defines him. Only you can stop that.”

“As if I didn’t have enough to occupy my schedule already,” laughed Tim in a soft, tentative tone, in a somewhat awkward attempt to acknowledge Gregor’s assertion. He shook his head again, this time more in a spirt of amused incredulity.

“There’s something I still don’t understand, Gregor; I wanted to ask Leo at the museum, before we dashed out to his communications trailer. The Cryptoliths themselves—how did the Ur-Anderen get them to us? And if they’re powerful enough to ship those things from one universe to another… I just don’t get it, why do they need us to revive them?”
“I suppose it’s one of the mysteries that our allies intend to fill us in on. Leo explained it as something of an engineering challenge—a barrier to the amount of information they could ship through the portal from a predecessor universe, whatever they did to materialize it in the form of the Cryptoliths, within earth’s solar system so many billions of years hence. The Ur-Anderen never solved it, certainly not to the level of their adversary, so they compressed what they could—an algorithm, in a sense, that contained the instructions on how to resurrect them, along with whatever else they deemed important along the way. The sexagesimal code on the Cryptoliths was their way of economizing, I suppose, but it meant leaving out the fine print.”

Tim nodded with a distinctive reluctance in his motion, as though to acknowledge what he had just heard while signaling a far deeper-rooted dissatisfaction.

“Tim, what is it?”

“Just the way that Leo briefed us, before he took off on a separate train ahead of our group. It just creeped me out, that sense of… of whatever he wasn’t telling us.”

“I wouldn’t sweat that, Tim,” replied Gregor reassuringly, tongue somewhat in cheek. “He’s the VIP in all this and he has to ready all the preparations at the Gesellschaft’s secret hideout for our arrival. Besides, Susan left in that train ahead of us, too, so it’s probably equipped with a mobile hospital that they couldn’t provide on our own high-speed jalopy.”

“Not, it’s far more than that. Zach overheard part of a conversation Leo was having with his lieutenants. He translated for me afterward; something about splitting us up out of necessity, using himself as a decoy in an emergency. Zach and I both got that uneasy vibe when we realized that Kei-san had disappeared; God only knows what his enemies have extracted from him already. All the same, it just feels as though we’re being watched.”

“I suppose that’s why Leo’s shuttling us all to their stronghold. The Tauschreigeist supposedly has access to virtually any data network in this world, and whatever is used to harvest that information. His physical presence, his coherent mind may still be taking shape as he acts on his plams, but even so, I’m not sure there are many places to hide from his roving eyes and ears.”

He looked straight at Tim, his conjectures rich with unsaid intimation. “Maybe Leo’s just dividing his assets as any good general would, making sure that his most precious cargo is kept protected and separate from any other target’s of the entity’s wrath.”

“Which has been vexing me as much as anything else, ultimately. Why me, Gregor? Other than my ancestors’ little run-in at the Katzenwald 350 years ago—what did they pass on to me, that’s cursed me with being the touchstone for the Ur-Anderen’s return?”

“That I can’t answer,” Gregor replied, staring pensively at the mountainous pass oncoming, as day gave way to an ominous twilight. “But we’ll be finding out soon enough.”

At the Pfalzgraf Estate

There was a heaviness to the air, Tim thought to himself. Not humidity so much as a thickness of angst and disoriented uncertainty. Tim’s weary group marched stolidly throughout the verdant promenades and bustling alleyways, filled with a colorful panoply of street performers and gregarious vendors of sundry wares. The city had an intoxicating nocturnal beauty to it, even amidst the throngs of wary passersby striving to extract a scattered kernel of truth from the unnerving rumors of the day.

“What have you got rigged up there, Zach?”

“I got bored on the train and started tinkering with the Omnihua. Turns out you can patch the local TV news through the videophone channel. Check it out.”

Tim’s bleary eyes warily took in the kaleidoscope of chaos and confusion that emerged from the screen: scenes of what appeared to be marketplace riots, spreading blackouts, even outright civil war.

“I haven’t seen network news anchors agitated like that, at least not since Fisher’s Reckoning first unsheathed its sickle five years ago. Can you make out what they’re saying, Zach?”

“Those reporters seem awfully bent out of shape about something. Can you make out what they’re saying?”

“The reception needs a little tweaking but it isn’t good, I can tell you that much. The world markets took another swan dive today, as if they hadn’t been flirting with the abyss already. The supply disruptions of oil and about a dozen other commodities have been virtually cut off in about half the world. Traffic lights losing their sanity and shutting down the roads. The usual bouts of madness since the Reckoning, only this time the madness doesn’t seem to be subsiding.”

“They seem to be holding their own around here.”

“Göttingen installed that prototype fusion reactor a couple years back, they’re probably as well-prepared as anyone to ride out this storm. Though I wonder if there’ll be anywhere left outside of it. Now they’re saying that Central Asia has risen up in mass revolution; unclear whether the gas pipelines will still be pumping by tomorrow.”

“Sounds like we’ve got all Four Horseman lining up before our eyes,” quipped Tim morbidly.

“Funny you bring that up, Chief,” answered Zach, his expression dripping with oblique irony. “Because it seems that the Demon has other ideas. He has his own apocalypse in mind, and he isn’t too keen on being upstaged by the usual manifestations of the Pale Horse and his friends ”
“What—what do you mean?”

“Those TV anchors were just saying that several of the nuclear nations have been dispatching troops, to guard the missile silos. The ICBMs and medium-range missiles have all been taken offline, and the rocket forces can’t even access their submarine stocks or the strategic air forces—everything’s been grounded, and nobody can override it. There was a lot of finger-pointing, suspicion of mutual sabotage, threats of massive retaliation. Several countries have going to Defcon 4, at first they thought it was the precursor to a nuclear Armageddon but… the infiltration has been striking everybody about equally. They’re scared as all hell and have no idea what it means, but I guess this is the closest the outside world has come to realizing there’s something sinister out there.”

“Best that it stay that way.” A woman’s authoritative voice called out from before them, her hand sweeping them down the leaf-encrusted path of what appeared to be a public park. “This way, gentlemen.”

“Sabine,” asked Zach, gliding slightly ahead to address her, “if you don’t mind my asking—how did you get recruited for a gig like this?”

She smiled wryly, interrupting her forward march with a brief glance aside toward Zach. “Based on everything you’ve heard about us, I fear I’ll disappoint your expectations.”

“Not at all; given all the mystical robes that Tim and I had been wrapping around the Gesellschaft since we first got an inkling about you, it’s a relief that you’re not hiding behind a curtain every time we chat.”

“Much of it’s just the ground you’re standing on. Göttingen is still a magnet for the brilliant and the bizarre, much as it was during the days of Hilbert and Gauss, so our outfit could hide in plain sight as we slowly rebuilt. Leo was a rising star in his field, but mostly unknown outside a small circle, when he was whisked away to become the Gesellschaft’s leader; his predecessors figured he’d have an easier time staying off the radar screen than Leibniz or Kant would have in their eras. I myself was supposedly following in Leo’s footsteps here in the same city; I’d been awarded a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization.”

“Sounds like whatever passes for basic training.”

“If only it were that gentle,” she said, her unexpectedly tongue-in-cheek response briefly prompting Zach into an incongruous bout of nervous laughter.

“When the Gesellschaft was entrusted with the secrets of the Cryptoliths,” she continued, “we had to attach precision to those quandaries of the cosmos and the spirit, that have vexed our societies since the first written records. How life sprang from non-life billions of years ago, consciousness sprouted from mere perception. We’d been pursuing these ancient riddles in some fashion, well before Leo or his team came to us, but only as inspiration for the research inquiries that build careers in our field. We knew nothing of this other world that had been created in our city all those hundreds of years ago, let alone its significance.”

“Lorenz too?”

“Ah, Lorenz—he breaks the mold. My first years at the Gesellschaft were punishing, all these centuries-old responsibilities on top of a proper day job elsewhere, and unable to reveal anything to friends or family. Lorenz had a flair for the clarinet, though. Kept all of us fresh recruits going during that baptism by fire—Artie Shaw, Larry Shields, Peter Brötzmann, even Benny Goodman himself, Lorenz could channel the best of them. He always joked that he was a clarinetist who left music for neurology, to get in touch with his creative side.”

“A jazzman with a generous helping of irony on top—you just found me a new role model, Sabine.”

“Oh, you and Tim will be getting well-acquainted with Lorenz, I’m sure. He’s come closer than any other soul to re-inventing the Phoenix’s Heart himself, well before we knew that you or anyone else was close to the lost artifacts.”

“What possessed him to pursue something like that? I haven’t seen too many job openings in the Classifieds for resurrection engineers.”

“Lorenz was a neurologist on a trauma team up north in Kiel; he took on some of the worst emergencies from the merchant fleet and the roughnecks from the North Sea oil rigs. Terrible injuries with faint hope of resuscitation, let alone restoring them to functionality; so Lorenz decided he’d specialize in miracles. His team took high-resolution neuroimagins slices from the brains of the high-risk workers—PET-scans and functional MRI, real-time activity. They gathered enough of their personal histories and relationships to construct a mosaic of the whole person. Then when disaster hit… they used feedback re-learning to guide the victims back to the integrated picture the team had acquired from the scans. Bootstrapping them back to the people they were before.”

“He could reverse their brain damage?”

“It didn’t always pan out, but they improved the procedure enough to restore larger and larger regions of a damaged brain, practically up to the point of declared brain death. One of Lorenz’s deputies even suggested they could one day back up a person’s consciousness at scheduled timepoints, restoring them later in the event of a disaster. Those digital shadows that Lorenz was forging before the Gesellschaft came to him—they’re holograms, much like the cosmic signatures that…”

“That brought back Susan,” interrupted Tim, the jolt of recent memories finally bursting through the fog of exhausting that had enveloped his mind. “Holograms—Gregor had been talking that way, he and Leo both. Something about tapping into holograms at the edge of our cosmos, archives of prior moments in time.”

“It’s the universe’s memory of itself, Tim, but is that inscribed memory something physical? We don’t know, and we don’t need to; if we say we’ve written the information of a 3-D world on a 2-D surface, we’re just describing a mathematical operation, and thus a logical one. The caracteristica universalis tells us how to find those holograms

“We had to shed some of our lofty trappings after the catastrophes of the 20^th century. Our financial benefactors were generally within the German Resistance of the 1940’s, and even among those who survived the Gestapo, they lost

toward a stone statue featuring two men in profound conversation, one standing and one seated, the latter a strangely familiar sight to Zach with his idiosyncratic head covering vaguely reminiscent of a nightcap.

“People searching desperately for something, or someone—there’s a glint in the eye, a tweak in the body language. You did it too, every time you thought of Susan; it’s as though a part of you really was trying to get her back. Besides, his team lined up pretty well with how I imagined the Gesellschaft over all these years, especially after Zach had finally granted them a name back in Rügen. ”

“So the Ur-Anderen? Everything they’ve fabricated over the years—it’s been to bring those beings back. Why? What do they know?”

“Leo was cagey about that, Tim, and I’m not sure that even he knows. All that’s clear is that those entities in your sketches, deep in the lair of the Tauschreigeist… it was they who had deciphered the caracteristica universalis, and provided the instructions for those artifacts on the Cryptoliths.”

“What? So they’ve been guiding their own resurrection?”

“From what Zach had gleaned from Keisuke Kusumoto, it’s the same process that the Tauschreigeist set in motion by manipulating the Children of the Mushroom Cloud: engineering his own physical incarnation here on earth, from the magnetic field and from the vacuum of space itself.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Ur-Anderen came into our world the same way that the entity did—as a Leibniz Demon.”

“Well, Göttingen was one of the first cities to adopt the experimental fusion system for their electricity, along with the wind and nuclear sources they already had. Maybe another the Gesellschaft stashed their crown jewels in Göttingen—seems like the place is pretty well-stocked to ride out the apocalypse. Speaking of, now they’re saying something about troops being dispatched in some of the nuclear nations on special assignment, to guard the missile silos.”

“The missile silos? You mean there’s been an infiltration?”

“Looks that way, but not how you probably thought. It seems the ICBM’s and medium-range missiles have all been taken offline, and the rocket forces can’t even access their submarine stocks or the strategic air forces—everything’s been grounded, and nobody can override it. Fortunate that it’s happened across more than a few borders, otherwise we’d probably be sightseeing under martial law right now.”

“Zach, can you understand what the hell the anchorman is saying?”

“Not so well, Tim; these live broadcasts on the TGV trains are a new perk, I guess they’re still working out the little things like how to receive a signal.”

“Well, the guy seems agitated enough.”

“He’s saying something about

yet I must admit; you’ve done extraordinarily well on your own so far

“Tim, I’m not entirely sure these folks are legit; I’m just passing on what they conveyed to me. They know my name by now, and I have an inkling that they’re on their way to Hungary themselves, if not already there.”

“But shut down our cell phones? Discuss things only in person? On the basis of a suggestive note on a train? Zach, you rang up the Indigenous Art Department of all places; they spent about 20 minutes tracking me down. Where in the world are you right now?”

“I stopped off in Salzburg; they had a bank of phones by the café here. The ushers on the train aren’t sure who exactly sent me the FAX, but they knew I was on there. And to be honest, Tim, based on the ridiculous lengths Kei-san has gone to avoid detection, I’m inclined to err on the side of irrational caution.”

“So assuming that they really are the Gesellschaft, that’s who they’re afraid of? The Children of the Mushroom Cloud?”

“Tim, this is a mystery wrapped n an enigma in a conundrum, and I don’t have an answer for you on it; we need to decide that soon, because I don’t know what to say. We’d need to figure it out, and so we tjat’s what more distinguishes them on that; we weren’t informed of the answer for it. I would need to decide it. We have these this suggests that as well. Someone like that has an interest in these and we would need an answer specific to that. These were studies that indicated another explanation for it. these are an indication of that.

“So you’re seriously requesting that I shut down my only surefire lifeline of communication, based on a cryptic note left in a train?”

“I’m being deadly serious, Tim—and those aren’t words you hear spoken from me too often.”

“But Zach, if this is really coming from the long-lost Falkenei Gesellschaft, why wouldn’t they have just accompanied you on the train

“Zach, what in the world is going on? I’ve been trying to reach you for hours now. And why did you call the museum’s Indigenous Art Division of all things; did you forget the cell number? If we’re going to shell out hundreds of Euros a week for this fancy roaming international line, we might as well be making good use of it”

“My apologies, Tim, but there was a good reason for it; you’re not believe what I’m about to tell you but…”

Zach halted abruptly and grimaced in puzzlement at the unexpected burst of disbelieving laughter from the other end of the line.

“Tim?”

“Sorry, Zach,” answered Tim, quickly turning sober again. “It’s just that I was going to use the same line to preface my own hemming and hawing, because I… I thought I had the market cornered in the you’re-not-gonna-believe-this department.”
“It’s strangely comforting to hear that, Tim, because all the latest creepiness around me has a hotline leading straight back to you and Gregor.”

“Do I really wanna know?” queried Tim, his tongue-in-cheek disposition thinly veiling the uneasy foreboding that Zach’s words had already inspired.

“Oh, yes, Chief—you definitely do. Remember that name I managed to extract from Kei-san’s references, the heralded wunderkind in his field who inexplicably took himself out of contention, or so the story goes?”

“Yeah, that Leo, uh… Schmitz, was it?”

“Close enough; even on land lines, I’m a little hesitant to mention too many specifics.”

“Zach, OK—now you’re scaring me.”

“Then I guess I’m doing my job; that seems to be what they wanted.”

“They?”

Zach drew a much-needed deep breath as he settled into an explanation. “I tracked this guy to Zürich, where he has his own cover story: lecturing a few classes and hitting the ski slopes on weekends for all I know. The university there was kind enough to provide some of his old lectures on tape, and he’s definitely surfing the same wavelength as you and Gregor—all this talk about constructing physical reality from logical rules on up to matter on the macro scale, complexity, consciousness.”

“The monads, in other words?”

“He didn’t mention it directly, but his vibe was all Leibniz and caracteristica universalis, much like what we tapped into within the Gesellschaft’s old stomping grounds beneath the Borna library. So I tried to follow up—nothing but polite refusals, and then a not-so-polite snub after I hinted at even a slight connection with the Gesellschaft. When I got word of the incident in Hungary, I had my suspicions and hit the road. But somehow—they must have tracked me onto that train.”

“Wait a minute… where are you calling from now?”

“Salzburg. We got held up for a prolonged pit stop after crossing into Austria, and I could swear there were a few pairs of eyes waiting for us there on the ground. I took a little stroll to soak up the Alpine sweetness, but when I returned to my quarters, the ushers had delivered a note to my seat. They knew my name,

“The supercomputer is tuned to you, and you alone as far as we can tell. Susan’s resurrection took every resource that the artifacts could muster, and you provided the neural net with a crucial headstart thanks to your connection to her.

“All the devices are still intact, so it must be functional; they must have had a particular resurrection in mind.”

“Yeah,” replied Tim, his memory jogged by Gregor’s suggestion. “’Consult the Ancient Others.’ Gregor, they didn’t want us merely to séance with the Ur-Anderen; we’re supposed to resurrect them!”

For once, Gregor’s mood turned disconsolate, overwhelmed by an enigma for which he had nothing resembling an answer.

“I don’t see how that could be possible, Tim. The supercomputer is tuned to you, and only you as far as we can tell. Susan’s resurrection took every resource that the artifacts forged together, and you provided the machine with a crucial headstart because of your connection to her. We don’t even know who the Ur-Anderen are, let alone how to track them down in the oceans of time and space.”

“Actually, Gregor, I think I may have a hunch on that,” answered Tim with a deeply contemplative mien, as Gregor looked on with piqued curiosity. “Among all the things you and Teréz were displaying on that image viewer, there were items on there—subtle, tucked away—that were completely out of place. I think I may know why…”

Gregor sighed heavily, gingerly maneuvering to pierce his veil of incredulity. “The woman you just spoke with, Tim: She’s Susan Shoemaker, as much as she would have been to you three or five or ten years ago. Not merely a conjecture or a reconstruction of how she would be, not merely as you or I or anyone else would have imagined her from the outside—it’s Susan, with all the textures that created her conscious and subconscious being, as richly and subtly as she would have subjectively known herself.”

First her body, then her basic movements and functioning, finally her conscious mind, her personality, the memories and habits that impart her identity.”

Tim grated his incisors into his lower lip, unsure if he really intended what he was about to ask.

“Gregor, I want you to be straight with me, no sugar-coating for my sake; I’ve seen enough now, so I can take the truth, however unpalatable. The woman in that room next door—is she a facsimile? A simulation? What am I supposed to say to her? To feel?”

Gregor sighed heavily, gingerly maneuvering to pierce his veil of incredulity. “The woman you just spoke with, Tim: She’s Susan Shoemaker, as much as she would have been to you three or five or ten years ago. Not merely a conjecture or a reconstruction of how she would be, not merely as you or I or anyone else would have imagined her from the outside—it’s Susan, with all the textures that created her conscious and subconscious being, as richly and subtly as she would have subjectively known herself.”

Tim slinked back in his chair, his mind nearly crippled from the conflicting impulses that still tore through it. “Gregor, it’s plain as day that you’ve thought all this through, and I doubt that this all came to you in the span of the last few hours.”

“You’re right,” he responded, his overtaxed voice straining to soothe Tim’s own inner tumult. “Teréz sensed it, too, in her own way.”

“What do you mean by that? She knew that this supercomputer as you called it—that the artifacts were forging a resurrection machine?”

“No, not that explicitly. But she sensed where it was all leading.”

“And you? Was it just a vague blur of possibility, or have you been keeping me out of the loop all this time, Gregor?”

“I—a little bit of both, Tim,” he admitted, “and not because I was hiding anything; considering what you’ve endured, it would’ve been unbecoming to share my suspicions.”

“Well, I’d sure as hell like to hear them now.”

Gregor squirmed uncomfortably in his chair, unsure where to begin.

“Tim, I never did tell you what drove my obsession to uncover this lost history of Leibniz, over all these years. There was an uncanny symmetry between him and my own teacher.”

“Dr. Zuse?”

“Konrad, yes. The history books have hailed both of them for their practical contributions, in devising what we know as the computer—the modern version at the hands of my mentor, and the first calculating machine by Leibniz, among others in the 17^th century. Both were instrumental in creating the software as much as the hardware… all true, yes. But their creations meant far more to them than their practical or mercenary value alone. To Konrad, peering into the logical circuits of his reckoning machines was gazing into the hidden structure of the physical world.”

“Digital physics—I remember, that’s what they called Dr. Zuse’s conception. It’s what you were describing to us earlier, after we’d found the Kant’s Precipice.”

“Correct, but there was more to the picture than that. Konrad was describing the genesis of physical reality, from a substrate of pure logic that underlies all things; but he also sensed that the very things that make us human, and conscious, welled up from the same spring. I never cared much for Konrad’s grand insights; I was too busy making a buck, pulling hotheaded stunts or living beyond my means. So Konrad eventually cast me out. Only later did I realize what he was on to: a window into the very meaning of existence itself, and how it could evolve into such a powerful enigma as the human mind. So it had been with Leibniz.”

“His monads, again.”

“Yes, and far more. Leibniz’s monads were the most fundamental constituents of the observable universe: The atoms of information, of logical structure, that would interact and unite to form everything the world contains: what we know today as the forces of nature, space and time, the basic units of matter and energy, then atoms, molecules, and eventually the cells that would engender life itself. Leibniz may have been unaware of the details, but he knew that all these things would share a common thread—the nascent kernel of what we see today as sentience, purposeful and intelligent behavior, and memory of past events. Only with the higher mammals have these incipient features been fully realized as intact properties, but they were inherent in every little advance in structure and self-awareness, that eventually gave rise to us.”

“Memory of past events,” repeated Tim, nodding as he slowly locked onto the meaning that Gregor sought to convey.

“Among the other facets of higher cognition. Konrad expressed this to me as well; if our physical laws could be boiled down to laws of logic, then a computational realm as complex as our observed universe would be robust in those qualities as well. Perhaps not obviously so, but certainly with the nascent capacity to evolve them, catalyzed by conscious minds like our own.”

“As you were saying in Ruegen—to think, to calculate, to become self-aware.”
“As well as to love, and to remember. Any half-decent computational realm can remember its past states, details about those states; and so it is with nature. The universe evolves as we evolve, and our own march of technology and Enlightenment—it’s a march of our capacity for memory, too. Perhaps to the point of evolving, one day, into a capability that would allow us to reach into some of those darkened shadows of human history, and retrieve what we thought we’d lost.”

“That’s where I’m losing you, Gregor. All our digital devices, our photo albums, our tools to analyze fossils or dig into the earth’s distant past—yes, that I can follow. But to retrieve past events? People? The information about those instances would be traveling away from us at the speed of light; any direct recordings of Lincoln’s inauguration speech, they’d be 150 light-years away by now.”

“Unless, one had access to the underlying logical structure—the narrative of causation that links together those monads, and generates the world we see macroscopically, evolving in time and fostering what we see and experience.”

“The caracteristica universalis.”

“That, Tim, was Leibniz’s great insight, among so many others with which he blessed the world. What structure could possibly encompass everything from the fluctuations of gravity in space, to the workings of atoms and molecules, to the thoughts that course through our minds? A language could—the universal language that would guide the course of physical events, and the evolution of conscious thought. The future may be unpredictable, dependent as it is on chance events and the inscrutable stirrings of our mind. But the past is mapped out, a narrative following the logic of the caracteristica, and if one can access this code, then we can retrieve part of the past. The constraining factor would then be merely our computing power; the more complex the event, the more power we’d need to summon.”

“Or the person,” muttered Tim, without looking Gregor directly in the eye. “So you think the artifacts have mastered the caracteristica? You think that’s how they brought Susan back?”

“They had a cue, Tim—your memories of Susan, your pictures, and that recording. Every human being has a series of fingerprints—a unique signature in the universe, that distinguishes them from every other conscious being. It could be their idiosyncrasies, particular events, something that gives them a unique place within the causal narrative; whatever the case, it allows the system to find her efficiently. That data set must be what allowed the supercomputer to home in on Susan—on who, and how she was at a particular juncture. When the Gesellschaft designed these artifacts, they must have known enough about the caracteristica to trace it back to a particular moment in time.”

“The night before we left for the mountain,” said Tim poignantly. :And she thinks she’s still there.”

“With good reason. Her identity, at any point of time, would have been intricately linked with the external circumstances in which she was embedded. Many of the subroutines we found, they were focused on compressing data, eliminating redundancy to reduce the amount of information the system would need to bring her back. They must have been creating a coarse-grained summary of the milieu in which she found herself, on that night, and used that as a point of reference for her when she came back.”

“Coarse-grained? Gregor, no—maybe her surroundings, but Susan remembers everything.”

“That’s right. The system would be geared toward a more fine-grained recall of Susan’s mind; so it must have been able to remember her. It’s as though the supercomputer had a conscious core itself, far more complex than any human mind here, but one that was able to imagine and then revive her, with all the intricacies that made her who she was and is.”

“Then that drawn-out cortex you were talking about earlier…”

“Right. It must have been the external mind, with the power to remember Susan in all her complexity. The Falkenei Gesellschaft designed those artifacts to resurrect someone in particular—someone that we need to forestall the plans of the Tauschreigeist.”

“Consult the Ancient Others,” nodded Tim, the insight flowing over him. “They didn’t just want us to speak to them; we’re supposed to bring them back!”

[Tauschreigeist is on there, “leakage” from the collective mind of the Ur-Anderen]

[Gregor realizes that Leibniz’s caracteristica was a search for the language of logic that gives rise to the physical world, its complexity as well as its fundamental components.]

[Tauschreigeist can’t be fully conceptualized, and thus visualized by human mind—only fragments, “like a fish imagining a forest canopy”]

[Have Tim view the mysterious video of the Dia del Diablo earlier, from Rachel’s colleague, and basically freak out—warn her that the entity is already there, the same one that Pablo sketched. He entreats her to leave immediately, but Rachel snaps back that she can’t leave her position on the basis of such bizarreness, suggesting that Tim is transplanting his anguish over his loss of Susan to a ridiculous desire to protect Rachel. Tim is hurt, but they both come to an understanding about it.]

[Gregor notes uncanny symmetry betw his mentor Zuse and Leibniz, their computer inventions more than just practical tools but probes into the very heart of the mystery of existence, of the persistence of memory of which the human mind’s capacity is a crude exemplar—realized that a robust algorithmic domain, the cosmos, would need a capacity for memory and retrieval, thus he answers Tim’s confusion about needing to go at speed of light to learn of prior events. Maybe not always fine-grained, but enough so that high detail could be retrieved. Gregor segues into this by answering that the key is to speak the language, to Tim, and that this was Leibniz’s focus. He notes that the artifacts collectively enabled this, that they spoke the caracteristica universalis, and that they were designed with an extraordinary capacity to recapitulate linked events and hallmarks of an individual. He noticed the extensive cortex-like convolutions, grasped that they were designed to boost cognitive power enough to model and re-imagine a human mind in the complexity it would require.]

[Important—at the estate, Gregor indicates that traditional picture of the world divided into deterministic aspects and the clinamen. That’s part of why future indeterminate, but past is determined. Conscious minds make up a third “determinant,” both law-based and contingent, difficult to peg them in either. He later indicates how the resurrection device would have functioned—the caracteristica universalis would lead to the event history of spacetime, space and time in the past together would just be equivalently represented as a series of logical blocks—mathematical matrices, even—that could be accessed just like any other calculation trail. The more determined aspect of the past can be ascertained, but the contingent part is more difficult. But the device doesn’t need all the information about a particular past event, just a compressed version that reduces redundant information, and focuses in on Susan. It does that by using Susan’s fingerprint, which is provided by Tim. The Macroceph has the capacity to “understand” Susan in the way that a person would “understand” a leaf for example, but in much greater detail—it recalls her in her tremendous complexity. Gregor notes that this is the general aspect of the artifacts—they’re centuries ahead, the Macroceph is just a more modern example of the same feature.]

[When Zach asks for Dr. Schering at Salzburg, he’s turned down flat, but he’s played poker, and knows that the representative is holding back. So he has a message delivered.]

[Have the massive convolutions be noted earlier, by Gregor—like a massive mind.]

EEG’s show a dream-spike pattern

She went through the cordon to help

Tim attracted to Terez also because of the sense of redemption of broken dreams that she ignited [this is in new version of the novel, with the edgier aspect to it]

Causal narrative, Wigner

Have parallel narratives for the disappointment and worry that both Tim and Zach show in regards to failing their wives/fiancées. Tim had the affair with Susan’s ex-roommate, b/c he hit a rough patch, went into denial, felt that her ex-roommate was more supportive. Zach is shocked when Tim tells him this (at the Irish diner), feels a strong kinship

The arrow of history marches as a sort of collective pre-consciousness (have Gregor say this as a follow-up to individual pre-consciousness, on his estate)—what we regard as progress, as a basic state of advance and improvement two centuries from now, is vaguely hinted at 200 years before. (Compare to Hegel.)

[put this earlier, e.g. in Borna]

The Greeks viewed the natural world as a manifestation of the dance of pure mathematics

Most basic atom/element is an evolving network of information, rules about information exchange, logical connections, epistemology then give rise to the physical world

“That’s funny,” Tim responded, looking obliquely downward as his mind replayed recent events. “We were having one of our offbeat conversations, and she said something about

Well-acquainted with French and Latin as well as his native tongue, it’s true, but I mean a linguist in a far more elemental sense. The Greeks anticipated the notion of a natural world defined, at root, by the logical flow of mathematics. In the wake of Konrad Zuse’s calculating space, many invoked the oft-heard refrain that perhaps God is a programmer. But Leibniz? He conceived of language as the ultimate layer of the narrative that we interpret as physical reality—a great language, of logic and symbols, that [not sure I should put this here, the group already encountered this language concept in the caverns beneath the library in Borna]

the stretcher and opening his mouth as if to speak, yet managing to utter nothing more than a hoarse rasp.

“Len, Gabriel, over here now!” Gregor shouted to his two nearby attendants, who promptly joined him in cradling Tim from behind as his weight gave out from underneath, nervously ferrying him to an unused cot in a nearby room. As he faded in and out of consciousness, he caught sight of a grayish silhouette on celluloid film that had been placed carefully in a transparent box beside the room: a woman with her face now distinctly rendered, her left hand raised and pressed against the right hand of an unseen man kneeling before her.

She produced an organizer holding a series of transparencies,


It was low-key and buried pretty late in the news segment, but he said it lines up at least in part with what you said in the briefing: a 40-year old woman found wandering around confused, dressed in rags, unable to talk with the locals.”

“My God!” Gregor exclaimed, his heart throbbing in his ears. “Did they have other info in the report, Roy? Her name, where she came from?”

“No; she was completely disoriented, doesn’t even know her name, though the hospital authorities suspect she’s an American. That’s why it was buried in the newscast, I guess; they just assumed her to be one of the stoned-out lost souls from the US, who strayed into Europe after the onset of the New Depression in North America. But the doctors seem to have thought her case was different for some reason, so they’ve admitted her and are still nursing her back to health, hoping she regains some of her memory.”

“Admitted her?! She’s in a hospital now?”

Sorry to yank you out of your sweet

“Inching up to about 12:30 a.m., Tim.

“Hey!”

An unexpected voice froze the impetuous shadow in its tracks.

“Stop! No one’s allowed in here after hours!”

The unsparing glare of a crimson security lantern pierced the darkness between the two shadows. A guard, alarmed at the unexpected encounter, held the lantern aloft, reaching for his weapon while slowly approaching from an anxious distance.

“Roy? Is that you?” called out the frozen silhouette.

The man with the lantern squinted his eyes in astonishment, tentatively lowering the lantern as he processed the voice that had just reverberated within his ears.

“Tim? Dr. Shoemaker?”

To the bemused disbelief of the guard, his lamp confirmed the suspicions of his ears.

“What are you doing down here?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” answered Tim with a nervous chuckle, in an awkward attempt to conceal his fright at the unexpected rendezvous—his face and gestures mercifully wrapped within the robes of the surrounding darkness. “I couldn’t sleep, and while lying wide awake, I realized I left

Remember, we family was dragged into this nightmare when my ancestors stumbled on that castle in the cursed forest, all those years ago; that was the message of the painting in your cellar. The Gesellschaft passed something on to me, and these artifacts need it to weave whatever hideous magic they were designed for. But we know now, they’re not bound by the confines of my mind alone. They need a cue of some sort, but they’ll do the rest; they’ll find the Ur-Anderen, or at least the forbidden knowledge that the Gesellschaft spent centuries tracking down.”

“Then what’s the cue?”

“Couldn’t say just yet. Maybe Giulia and her team have uncovered a few more gems in the Kant’s Precipice, something that would point the way. You’ve been tinkering around with the other devices, outside Little Stonehenge itself; any further insights?”

“The devices do indeed appear linked together in a kind of supercomputing array

\ “The entire investigative team—we’ve been operating under the working conclusoin that these tools are tapping into the mind’s eye. A justified belief, at least until now. So there has to be a conscious observer, and so far as we can tell thus far, you in particular.”

“Couldn’t there be something we’re missing? Could the artifacts have… accessed the content of that video directly?”

“That just isn’t their MO; a device to not only read in data from any outside source, but interpret it as a human being would? Advanced as the Gesellschaft may have become, that seems beyond even their capabilities. And if these gizmos could pull off such a thing, Tim—how could they have possibly known the personal significance of that necklace to you, when you yourself had never seen or appreciated it? The artifacts are a conduit for conscious minds; they’re not conscious themselves.”

Gregor sighed, his voice now nearly imploring in its tone. “You have to understand,” he continued, “this isn’t just a minor detour from the beaten path. If what you’re saying is true, then this overturns the very foundation of our . Not only would they be tapping into

Teréz settled back uneasily as she wrapped her mind around the strange intimations that her partner seemed to be expressing.

“But Tim, the accident itself was…”

“Yeah,” he

“It must all be evolving somehow,” said Tim in a faint tone of voice, his face tucked in and muffled between a curled arm and his knee.

Teréz merely knelt down carefully beside him in support, waiting for him to rear his head back up and resume his tortured thoughts. “That Godforsaken fountain, all these screens and surfaces distilling into something conscious… Their technology is all about creating sentience from the inanimate and unaware, compressing what took billions of years on earth, into a matter of mere minutes...”

“Why? We keep coming back to the same question, Tim.”

“The Ur-Anderen,” he murmured, more to himself than to his conversation partner. He gazed sharply forward, then slowly rotated to face his partner, as though preparing to reveal a fleeting epiphany.

“The what?”

“More like a who. It was some cryptic reference on a tablet that I inherited as one of the heirlooms. Amid all the apocalyptic symbology and forebodings, there was an unwavering instruction to consult The Ancient Others. There was a similar exhortation among the objects in Gregor’s care at his estate.”
“Who are they?”\

“Maybe an ancient oracle or soothsayer, in the classical Greek or Roman tradition. I can’t say for sure, but this array is starting to make some sense.”

He gathered his thoughts and met her eyes, focused upon him in a quizzical stare. “We still know precious little about our adversary, Teréz, other than he’s a kind of cosmic intelligence, unfathomably ancient—at least by our reckoning. He may be assuming a physical presence in our own latter days, but he’s no stranger to this earth, at least in concept.”

“As Baron János could have attested, a half millennium ago.”

“Right, and who knows who else. Perhaps someone in antiquity knew far more, a body of knowledge that’s since been lost. Where, after all, did the knowledge of the Falkenei Gesellschaft come from in the first place?”

“Tim,” Teréz interjected skeptically, “intriguing as your brainstorm may be—how do you propose to ‘consult’ an authority who last handed out his counsel around the time of Homer?”

“That must be what this whole array is set up for: reconstituting the wisdom of whatever sage knew about this thing so many ages ago. They

The specifics might as well be magic for all I know. But

“But there’s one major problem with that conclusion, Teréz. I just listened to Susan’s old recording for the first time—about two hours ago.”

“What?”

“Susan recorded this the night before that horrible day on the mountain road. We were heading up to a high-altitude retreat, to enjoy the night together, and Susan had planned to show me that full recording upon surprising me with her gift: a matching necklace, like the one she’d gotten from the Ojibwa carver at the reservation shop, with the two together symbolizing the bond between a newlywed husband and wife among the tribe.

Remember to have Gregor intro’d as the underwriter of the vast effort in the museum (and a major contributor since temporarily closing it down), maybe in contact with Mitch Shoemaker.

Have Tim mention his earlier conversation with Zach, about Renee’s idiosyncrasies and how those relate to what they see of Susan.

The supercomputer uses up tremendous power, b/c it has to run calculations to calculate “back” from the present moment, and thus use a deterministic series of calcs (with compressed data of course) to arrive back at the unique data signature of Susan, then reconstitute the tremendous collection of data that constitutes her. The content of her mind is slightly off from the day (b/c of Holographic principle, and her data on a 2-D surface being partly retrievable) but still very accurate. Goes up to exaflops. Has mild amnesia that resolves over several days.

When Tim activates the device, the walls in the room seem to move—he’s found and worn the Ojibwa necklace—and he gets a terrible h/a, with the museum rumbling. Massive power blackout. (The FG have a massive, dedicated underground power grid.) Next day, investigators find that a large “tank complex” has been breached, but from the inside, and someone’s been thru the cloakroom. Tim finally realizes it’s Susan when a sketch artist shows him a photo at a police station.

Tim and Terez suspect that the main function of the strange device with the chrome plates (which act as holographic surfaces) is to provide a fine-grained “semi-copy” of a person, and they suspect that the Falkenei Gesellschaft, with technology in general designed to be advanced AI and incorporate rudimentary consciousness (e.g. in the fountain), is planning to consult the Ur-Anderen, maybe a Roman oracle who know something about the Tauschreigeist, they’re nto sure about it.

Like the old witches’ tales of taking a hair or a trinket particular to a person, and using it to bring them back.

But I, being the damn fool I am—“

“Teréz, I, uh… I never got a chance to tell you everything back there, when we made our first descent down into the old fallout shelter. After you went back to Hungary, I was married for many wonderful years; we’d chanced upon each other, when we were both studying overseas in Shanghai, and we had two wonderful children together. But I, being the damn fool I am—“

Kant noumena phenomena

But if you have no common background for different universes, then everything about them—including the expanding space within—is digitized in a sense, defined only in the sense of the self-contained, evolving information content inside. By the very logical character that defines them, they don’t interact.”

“That’s just it. If you can look past the nonlinear structure, it’s like one of those old trees of life, the ones that Linnaeus and the evolutionary biologists drew up.”

—a lineage, graphically rendered. And the features aren’t necessarily confined to one organism; it’s like a weighted average on the spiral, with the outer loops seeming to hint at features that often correlate with self-awareness and abstract thought.”

“So, are you saying that

“What an irony; Jürgen and Gregor aren’t even on speaking terms, yet they wound up as brothers-in-arms on the same quest.”

“Gregor Chetkiewicz, the Leibniz scholar?”

“That’s the one. Why do you ask?”

The two of them

“As you know,” she began, meticulously turning the pages to advance deep into the volume, “Kant’s historical works were influenced by Leibniz’s preceding philosophical outlines. Kant was sometimes critical, sometimes inspired by his predecessor; but in the Kant’s Precipice, an entirely different sort of connection emerges.”

and described it with a term that exists nowhere else in the philosophical or scientific literature, in his time or ours.”

Giulia says, may be more than one Leibniz Demon.

“Tim, I’m telling you, Kei-san was deadly serious. I couldn’t get into his head to make sense of it but—he unequivocally thinks he’s the linchpin to this apocalypse somehow. Some… anchor, for whatever it is the Tauschreigeist is unleashing upon the world in that scene you’ve been dreaming up.”

“So then maybe he knows how can we fight it, Zach?”

“No, the battle plan’s the one area where he drew a blank. But everything about this waking nightmare is one notch less mystifying than before. Still bizarre and spooky as all hell but… some of it’s starting to make sense.”

“At least the Oak Ridge team will finally have some inkling of what hit them. Which reminds me…”

“Not just that,” interrupted Zach, somewhat to Tim’s consternation as he filed the reminder away. “Of al the things Kei-san imparted to me down there, it’s how he described this entity… diffusing its very being like that, into any system on earth that can hold a pattern. Currents of air or water, sand on a beach, leaves in a field--

“As far as a battle plan goes, Kei-san wasn’t as helpful as we might have hoped. At least not directly. He did finally unlock the history of all this, the implants at Oak Ridge and everything leading up to them; maybe something in his cast of memories is the key to

“I don’t know, Boss. They say the trauma of something like that doesn’t hit you until you can… settle down afterward and stew in your own juices. It wasn’t just that Kei-san tried to kill me in that God-forsaken hellhole down there; it was the terror in his eyes when he lunged at me. It was like he wasn’t even targeting me but… something supernatural, like those horrible things we imagine in the dark when we’re kids.”

The beast had to distill himself from the… ether, whatever it is that’s been a to fully distill his intelligence and his body

“I rue every damn minute that I contributed to that project.

“Zach… what I’ve communicated to you, is a heresy against

They’re going to hunt you now too, and the professor who came with you, just as they’ve been hunting me for all these years.

[Gregor is rec’d in the library, b/c of his recent expeditions]

[re-work the conversation at start of chapter, when Zach goes off to find Keisuke. Gregor’s already mentioned his surprise when he realizes Keisuke was behind the chip at Oak Ridge, and he retrieves the recipe card with the Korean/German handwriting. But he revisits something else Keisuke told him—Zach reports this to Tim. Gregor tracked down a file with a confidential report. It’s a genetic study, and it shows that Kei-san had a rare polymorphism in gene-chip analysis, with elevated expression of proteins corresponding to a vestigial region of the brain which birds use to navigate. i.e. the connection to the Tauschreigeist in the magnetic field. Kei-san only vaguely hints at this in his talk with Zach; Gregor fills him in later. When Tim finds Kant’s Precipice, Kant raises the epistemological, noumenon vs. phenomenon question of whether we can truly say the location of our perception is physically housed in the spatial coordinates that we perceive, or whether our consciousness is physically housed at a distance ‘outside’ the natural world as we perceive it, with our senses following logical rules to causally interpret the ‘world’ that we record. Just like the way our minds logically reconstruct the physical world rather than directly reporting it, so this concept is logically equivalent to perceiving the world straight-away. We could feed logical algorithms to our minds ‘outside’ that world, and get the same result as far as what our brains reconstruct. They’re ontologically equivalent. Jurgen uses this as a demonstration for what Kant was indicating in the precipice—our minds, limited as they are, can only reconstruct the world around us. But what about a being whose mind is the Ding an Sich, i.e. consonant with the coming-into-existence of this causally disjoint world itself?]

[Keisuke later notes that his friend died in an accident, allowed his body to be used for a biopsy of the neural tissue—found that he and the other Children indeed had a polymorphism in a vestigial gene corresponding to the navigation of birds, but there was vastly altered expression in the brains by gene chip.

Zach shows a copy of Tim’s drawings to Keisuke—he notes that the Children all shared a nightmare in which they were looking out from the fountain in the center.]

[This chapter—call it “The Demon and the Precipice”]

[Gregor, earlier, says “At some fundamental level that we can’t yet comprehend, everything physical in this world can be represented as a intricate web of information,”

[In a prior chapter, there’s a cryptic warning among the tablets—both the apocalypse and the salvation have been amongst you for eons. Look for them in the ether that touches you every second—i.e., the magnetic field.]

[They find the fountain at end of the corridor, doors slam shut, the souls in the fountain change color, respond to Tim and Teréz; the voice calls up, Teréz translates, disturbing with mention of an eternal being in contact with mortals, repeated call to enter the number of the beast—Tim inputs 46,117, fountain turns red, screaming, floor falls out beneath them, they wind up at a horrifying doorway, film broadcasts out on a circular wall, it’s the projection from the Minister, he’s a skeleton with geode-like device, resembling Cereceph, Tim realized it projected his warning about the demon’s two-faced nature and lulling, and entrance to the remaining artifacts right near them, with a closing message for the chapter, the Minister’s words that whoever finds the artifacts, has to use the ones that provide for the Resurrection device. Gregor’s philosophy: “With calculus, diff eqn, tRNA charging, we’re becoming increasingly conscious about the unconscious intelligence that somehow crafted us, and the complex algorithms that enable our minds to function. We’re becoming conscious about the primeval intelligence that has given rise to us. And as we do this, we unlock the path to catalyzing further on that innate intelligence. Our conscious minds have been a first step to get there, it provides the raw material. As we become conscious of the very intelligent algorithms that built us, we gain the capacity to self-amplify, autocatalyze the further growth of that evolving intelligence via a conscious process so that it’s now directed, and much, much faster than the blind natural process. A major basis of our civilization itself.]

[Outlining—when Tim goes to search for the Japanese guy, he’s incognito, in a sort of witness-protection program. Zach had brought the chip to Gregor’s estate before, when Tim had fainted with the vision prompted by the triptych—the heirlooms were still being delivered, but the other artifacts were delayed at customs when a strange haze showed up on X-ray, the same one that Minister Krusenstern described upon imaging the artifacts beneath the Albertina. Gregor, at the estate, figures out the signature on the chip, sees the company, puts it together and links it to the Japanese figure. He’s changed his name, working in an Asian fusion restaurant in Vienna, one of the sous chefs. Percy, back in NC, arranges for Tim to visit there, in guise of a restaurant trainee. Meanwhile, Zach’s figuring out the Tauschreigeist, the Polish librarian sees a Greek letter tau, mysterious references to it. Tim sees a vid of Oak Ridge the day of the breakthrough, sees the Tauschreigeist—in a later news report, sees a sketch of the same beast, a mark that it’s “ready.” Tim sees a pic near the sous-chef’s table, links it to what Rachel had had from Hiroshima, puts it together… the sous-chef sees Tim looking at it, runs out in a panic.

stared ahead, perching his arm against an unfinished pillar as he contorted his upper body to gain a closer look. Despite the collapse of its face beneath the arch, the sinuous dividing wall had been perforated on the side with a pair of jagged slits, like the gills of a fish, in the manner of an expedition that had been abruptly called off. A weaving corridor commenced inside, its twists fostering a weird optical illusion enhanced by the near pitch-black obscurity of an already dark chamber. Tim positioned himself to peer down the throat of the channel inside, and as his eyes adjusted, they fixed upon a twinkling image in the distance, projecting a spectrum of colors like the basin of a geode in a cave.

“Tim,” began Teréz as he made his way to one of the openings, “are you sure about this

It was a way to... remind them all of home, one could say, in case they were trapped down here for years after a nuclear war. to give the inhabitants down here some solace to remind them of

which, we soon realized, was connected to the Falkenei Gesellschaft, the organization that’s been hunting this beast for centuries from the shadows.

“The diorama in Gregor’s cellar…” he interrupted, slowly redirecting his eyes—their pupils almost inhumanly dilated from the shock of a long-awaited realization—from the hellish imagery to his uncharacteristically shaken companion. “The image from the fountain, in that old castle in the Katzenwald forest—that’s what caused me to pass out there on his estate,” he said, speaking toward Teréz without quite addressing her. That’s what prompted me to… relive the flight of my ancestors, the first of the Shoemaker heirlooms… my God, I can finally remember the dream sequence on the floor of that cellar. Even when Gregor repeated their names to me, Karl the cobbler and Maria the village milkmaid, Maria and Karl—it didn’t reprise me of what those poor peasants had endured…”

He finally narrowed and focused his eyes, this time engaging his companion directly. :I’m sorry, Teréz; I guess I just had to relive the onrush of images that just flashed right through my mind’s eye, to convince myself of what I just saw…”

“It’s all right, Tim; just take your time. This ‘flight’ of your ancestors… is this the third of the dream visions, that you’d earlier referred to? The ones that had been haunting you so deeply.”

He nodded with a shallow tip of the forehead, his eyes continuing to meet those of Teréz. “Gregor Chetkiewicz had been conducting his own detective work just as Jürgen had. Both of them had been intrigued by all the old medieval tales, the legends about Leibniz and Kant, the shadowy monastic orders, the demonic symbols, the purported alchemists with technology centuries ahead of their time… all of it leading back to the Falkenei Gesellschaft, and whatever their connection may be to the Tauschreigeist. Jürgen already knew this, thanks to his own friendship with Vasili Mendeleev in Russia and access to the archives of the Albertina University in old Königsberg. Gregor wasn’t so fortunate, but with all the resources at his disposal at the Baltic estate, he’d amassed

lost correspondences of

Just like Jürgen, before he’d donned the magician’s cape, Gregor Chetkiewicz had been independently conducting his own detective work about all this. All these shadowy monastic orders and alchemical guilds, stretching from medieval Europe—which turned out to have possessed technology centuries ahead of their time, along with all this vaguely… occultish symbology, which we know now to have some connection to the Tauschreigeist. They both started before their falling-out, and Gregor wasn’t as far along as Jürgen, simply because he hadn’t had the opportunity to set foot in old Königsberg, where

Exceptional Configurations of numbers, of thoughts, of ideas that somehow take on a disproportionate meaning in this world of ours. Back in my days as an AI consultant, I’d say it was a signal of underlying logical significance—some permutation of

“When the original Soviet fallout shelter was constructed during the darkest days of the Cold War,” she continued, “there were multiple layers of protection, given the different nuclear war scenarios. In the wake of a massive retaliation event, high officers would be ushered into the facility and thence into the inner bunker—the second one before us. It’s the most reinforced section of the shelter, farthest away from the shock waves and electromagnetic pulses… all the horrors of the mushroom cloud. The bunker continues deep into a series of tunnels ahead, and it was designed to hold the most sensitive equipment and cherished items of the officers and civilian authorities, to continue the chain of command even as the world burned above them.”

“So, Minister Krusenstern saw fit to afford the maximal protection for his artifacts from the old Albertina building,” shrugged Tim, as they neared the corrugated steel of the gate, a towering “2” in Roman numerals applied in chipping black paint to its surface. “Certainly consistent with what you’ve said about him; why the reluctance to plumb these depths in subsequent years?”

“Because something horrible happened here all those years ago, Tim,” answered Teréz, halting with her right shoulder next to the gate as she directed her evocative, probing eyes in Tim’s direction.

“Yet another creepy incident surrounding these things? They really are cursed, aren’t they?” he asked, a hint of apprehension piercing his veil of intended irony.

“Well, in fact, that was the story surrounding them; some curse stemming from their burial down here thirty years ago.” She caught her breath as her companion looked on, rattled by such a cryptic statement.

“There was a terrible accident during a renovation of this bunker, Tim, shortly before the Berlin Wall’s demise. Many of the Soviet authorities had been in denial even as their power slipped away, and so they sent construction teams in on rushed jobs to reinforce the fallout shelters throughout the Warsaw Pact countries. Around the same time that Minister Krusenstern had been committing the old Königsberg artifacts here for exhibition and safekeeping—with the intention to analyze them more thoroughly, assisted by the technical teams then based in the Loránd Museum—a number of workers lost their lives when a beam collapsed inside the bunker, crushing them underneath. The Minister proved a convenient scapegoat even though he likely had no connection to the tragedy; in fact, before you revealed the madness that’s overwhelmed so many others drawn into the vortex of this enigma, Tim, I just assumed that the Minister’s subsequent insanity was a product of his bitterness, his sense of impotence at being falsely accused with no recourse to defend his honor.”

“A tragedy no doubt, Teréz; but I still don’t understand why that would scare off the staff for 30 years in the aftermath.”

“:It didn’t, at least initially. But then the others who set foot in the bunker—the new work teams charged with finishing the renovation, the museum supervisors who looked after the items entrusted here—they reported ghastly phenomena. Voices calling out in agony, apparitions of the dead workers.”

“So—a haunted bunker to go with all the haunted houses in those old ghost stories,” replied Tim, with an undertone of gruff sarcasm.

“Tim, I’m telling you, it was more than that. There were several such reports, independent of each other by multiple people who weren’t aware of the other incidents; that’s supposedly what the exclamation marks are here on this diagram, and the symbols, whatever they are, appeared out of nowhere on the walls and other surfaces. What scared them the most, though… The bunkers were equipped with communications equipment, oscilloscopes, some early computing devices with monitors. And the faces, sometimes the entire bodies of the men who perished in the mishap—they appeared on those screens, along with some of these symbols copied onto… Tim? Tim, what’s wrong?”

He was breathing with forced intensity, his jaw tensed beneath alarmed eyes that gazed out coldly, in shocked disbelief. “On the screens—you said, there were faces, silhouettes on the monitors? Projections… as of the souls of the deceased workers?”

“Somewhat?” asked Tim incredulously.

She smiled briefly, leading Tim around and through piles of scattered metal curios, terra-cotta ceramics, and other abandoned fragments of exhibits past. As they approached the terminus of the yawning hall, Teréz retrieved her floor map again, staring intently at its patchwork of notes and markings as she moved deliberately to the arched gateway on the right side.

“So it’s behind Door Number Three, eh?” quipped Tim at

I had that same fear in horrible abundance when

Tim grimaced

“Tim, where exactly is this place that you’re seeing in your dreams?”

“I don’t have the slightest inkling, Teréz. I can only recall that they’re inside an enclosed structure—hence these shapes projected on the vault.... The vault!”

With a jolt, he shifted his gaze toward the sketch still being held high by his companion, who instinctively delivered it into his own trembling hands. Seized by a feverish impulse,Tim kneeled down before his resting briefcase and retrieved a quintet of markers and artist’s pencils, immediately setting them to a specific spot on his sketch. The ceiling of his most recent sketch was bizarrely adorned with inscrutable, vaguely eerie curves, crescents, and spirals just as he had drawn before; but suddenly, Tim was filling them in, swiftly and intensively, supplying layers of horrific detail. Almost inexplicably, the seemingly stray marks and scattered lines became the outline for a series of interlocking forms, whose nature soon became shockingly apparent.

A lump formed in Tim’s throat, as he rose to his feet again and beheld the sketch in the harsh illumination of the tunnel’s fluorescent lamps. The wisps and aborted shapes on the ceiling in the sketch’s mysterious chamber had coalesced into a chilling sea of faces—some human, some animal with whiskers and fangs, some stemming from sources completely inscrutable to human onlookers. Their features were generally rough, their eyes hauntingly piercing; and in the span of barely three minutes, Tim had infused them with an inexplicable range of emotional expression. A few of the faces appeared curiously serene or strangely contemplative, some anxious or alarmed; yet none seemed pleasant or content, and more than a few were beset with frothing rage or ghastly agony, blending into or even biting other faces in their vicinity.

“Tim,” began Teréz breathlessly, eyeing his additions with awestruck horror, “what prompted you to—”

“The diorama in Gregor’s cellar…” he interrupted, slowly redirecting his eyes—their pupils almost inhumanly dilated from the shock of a long-awaited realization—from the hellish imagery to his uncharacteristically shaken companion. “The image from the fountain, in that old castle in the Katzenwald forest—that’s what caused me to pass out there on his estate,” he said, speaking toward Teréz without quite addressing her. That’s what prompted me to… relive the flight of my ancestors, the first of the Shoemaker heirlooms… my God, I can finally remember the dream sequence on the floor of that cellar. Even when Gregor repeated their names to me, Karl the cobbler and Maria the village milkmaid, Maria and Karl—it didn’t reprise me of what those poor peasants had endured…”

He finally narrowed and focused his eyes, this time engaging his companion directly. :I’m sorry, Teréz; I guess I just had to relive the onrush of images that just flashed right through my mind’s eye, to convince myself of what I just saw…”

“It’s all right, Tim; just take your time. This ‘flight’ of your ancestors… is this the third of the dream visions, that you’d earlier referred to? The ones that had been haunting you so deeply.”

He nodded with a shallow tip of the forehead, his eyes continuing to meet those of Teréz. “Gregor Chetkiewicz had been conducting his own detective work just as Jürgen had. Both of them had been intrigued by all the old medieval tales, the legends about Leibniz and Kant, the shadowy monastic orders, the demonic symbols, the purported alchemists with technology centuries ahead of their time… all of it leading back to the Falkenei Gesellschaft, and whatever their connection may be to the Tauschreigeist. Jürgen already knew this, thanks to his own friendship with Vasili Mendeleev in Russia and access to the archives of the Albertina University in old Königsberg. Gregor wasn’t so fortunate, but with all the resources at his disposal at the Baltic estate, he’d amassed

lost correspondences of

Just like Jürgen, before he’d donned the magician’s cape, Gregor Chetkiewicz had been independently conducting his own detective work about all this. All these shadowy monastic orders and alchemical guilds, stretching from medieval Europe—which turned out to have possessed technology centuries ahead of their time, along with all this vaguely… occultish symbology, which we know now to have some connection to the Tauschreigeist. They both started before their falling-out, and Gregor wasn’t as far along as Jürgen, simply because he hadn’t had the opportunity to set foot in old Königsberg, where

“Zach, I’m telling you (Tim says this after Susan returns), this whole sequence of events is screwing with my mind and… and my heart, in so many damn ways I can’t even begin to sort it all out.

with some vague connection to alchemical experiments and this strangely occultish symbology, whatever it means.

Like Jürgen, Gregor

They’re somehow at the heart of this message that’s drawn in all of us, as if pressing urgently to air itself through our mediation. to air itself with such urgency. pressing so urgently to be aired as we seek the source of this message, the one that’s pressing so urgently to be aired, and to lead all of us to--

“This message, that’s been pressing so urgently to be aired,” said Tim. “Those figures in the foreground are at the heart of it all. I can’t quite pin down why, or how I know—but

“Who are they?”

“I still can’t tell

Gregor awakes after fainting in Gregor’s compound, Natalya treating him, he calls out Susan.

Zach’s there, too; Tim muses that the dream state enabled some force to implant the memories into him.

Tim comments on susceptibility in the dream state.

Tim feels close (and awkward) around both Natalya and Teréz, since they are able to “connect” with a suppressed part of his soul, as Susan was. It is an attraction, but it’s emotional at root, which is why it resonates with Tim.

[Important conversation at the estate—when Gregor describes the arrow of history, he talks about movement toward the Enlightenment, how it gains meaning b/c we came from something else, cruelty, amorality. Against feudalism but toward greater opportunity and, important, complexity, diversity, creativity. History therefore does take sides, and those who advance this gain the backing of hindsight.]

From my Kaplan physics OAT teaching prep, some mind-stimulators—really amazing just how logical and seemingly “magical” some of the physical laws are. Newton’s 3^rd law, the way 2^nd law simplifies to 1^st law for zero force, but especially the way that gravity works—just there, for two different masses, and the gravitational force is the same for earth on a rock, and the rock on earth, dependent on both masses and equal attractive force for both of them (though earth is far more massive). Also, the “magic number” for the G constant. As the Kaplan Tel itself says, it seems counterintuitive, but it’s as though the logical consistency needs to be preserved, i.e. consistent causation as a basic constituent of nature.

[Major change to TLD characters 2/11: Have Tim be brilliant but burnt-out, bitterly punishing himself for what happened with Susan, 2 car accidents prior to the one that hits him when Susan’s face appears on the screen. He’s so upset that he at one point wonders whether the world deserves to be saved from the Tauschreigeist—the Ur-Anderen point out that’s normal for civilizations in S-type universes, they have to endure hell to create their heaven. They note that other universes have sentient organisms born straight into an “Eden,” but it means little to them since that’s their norm. For S-type denizens OTOH, it’s an emergent accomplishment. Much of US is a wreck—a scrawny cat comes toward Tim, but many university labs are still functioning, and a mini-recovery may be on its way. Matt Hansen is an optimist, Zach is more hard-bitten. The first scene of the book, in the Chicago subway—the guy in there is ex-Marine, he has evidence against a company exec who’s now an oligarch in the US, but hesitant to bring it up. At end of book, the oligarch is nailed, as revealed in a voiceover about it.]

Western vs Asian concepts of spread of evil (innate vs like a virus spreading).

“Choose your vices carefully.”

Emphasize—as a general principle, understanding the most fundamental physical laws means taking into account the most complex structure, and least simple one, that we know of, essentially the brain. That is, the path to understanding the most elementary goes through a proper understanding of the most complex; the former would have to at least partially account for the latter. (Leibniz also sensed this.)

Dinosaurs exist again because we’re cognizant of their existence, even the daily narratives that encompassed them in a swamp or forest eons ago.

Creativity zones and flow-states.

The Gesellschaft has hidden everything away to prevent the secular authorities from abusing the research; they couldn’t possibly understand its implications, until computer technology had advanced sufficiently.

At one point (maybe w/ Gregor) Tim wonders how the visions have entered his mind, he mentions how his son once asked childlike qstn, “where do our thoughts come from,” a sort of basic musing about free will. {Note I just had a “nap-dream” about a Japanese beauty, at a bookstore/café, in a minor fender-bender with a competitor, some assoc with a bus. As I got info on the scene, I was doing it in Japanese, with the people behind the counter teaching me Jap.—as though I was reinforcing Jap. lessons for myself somehow.}

3/11 useful plot exposition device, on why so many of the characters can speak so easily to Tim—the USA was still a mecca for artists and scientists right up until Fisher’s Reckoning, but the general strikes and mass unrest afterward pushed Europeans and Asians back to their home countries. Many of them had spent decades in the States and essentially felt like Americans, but they had to reclaim their citizenship abroad instead.

Zach tells Tim to treat him as a colleague in the Irish diner; Zach is taking responsibility and putting himself on the line, an unusual thing for him, which he explains to Renee.

Tim implies to Zach how awkward he feels, since he and Terez drew together like that.

In the Gregor conversation—have some brief thoughts about EM radiation as a sort of logical vehicle for the basic structure of nature, also about thoughts as differential equations.

[3/11 useful again, re-read some of Kant’s CPR and Penn Jacobs’ review also gave a nice summary, things to incorporate for e.g. Gregor’s discussion, also post about Wigner on Tumblr: Kant noted that space and time aren’t necessarily physical, they’re essentially phenomenal reconstructions that help us to provide structure for our sense-experience, i.e. with the narrative logical structure that Lee Smolin also emphasizes, so space and time again are emergent aspects of the underlying logical structure, they’re calculation domains as noumena, that our minds reconstruct. He also noted that while our Sense-Experience is phenomenal, the logical Categories through which we interpret our sense experience are a priori and noumenal—Kant along with Leibniz (the monads) was anticipating the modern concept (again see Smolin) that the logical structure is implicate and underlying, that our physical world is emergent but still firmly rooted in the structure of that underlying logical realm. This is also what I’ve sensed (“Wignerian/Mendeleevian sense”) upon teaching e.g. physics to the Kaplan students; the inverse-square laws, the meaning of electric and magnetic fields, the way the physical laws have logical consistency even when counterintuitive, Kant was hinting at that. Which leads to the third main point—Kant realized that our empirical sense-experience and our pure intuition leading to mathematics, are indeed linked by these underlying logical noumena, that’s why mathematics does so well in rendering that physical world which presumably could deviate from that basic intuition. The logical structure of our minds recapitulates both of them, hence the nexus between that mathematical structure and physical world. Hence also my own insight—so much of science and the humanities, it’s just re-discovering what our minds have already mastered, because the structure and complexity of our own minds as they’ve evolved, hint at these advanced logical structure that we make consistent. Again one of the metaphysical themes of the Leibniz Demon—pre-consciousness of something that later becomes explicit, march of discovery and re-discovery of the human mind itself are nice examples of this. Important theme, alongside emergence itself, and how this growth and emergence applies also on personal levels.]

Zach emphasizes to Tim, after the thesis defense—he’s now a colleague and a friend, so Tim can speak candidly.

Update on Terez—she’ll be one of Tim’s old flames. He met and dated her after meeting Susan, but before they were formally steady let alone engaged.

Tim quips—he thought it was awkward enough when he reacted as he did to Natalya, even more so with Terez.

“Tim, I’ll admit it flat-out—I can’t remotely imagine what you must have endured after losing Susan like that, and who knows what all your recent visions mean, but… you’re not obligated to take a vow of celibacy to still honor Susan’s memory. My grandparents in Korea lost their loved ones when the war broke out between North and South in 1950, more often than I could bear to ponder. My maternal grandfather Park was Grandma Sook’s third husband by the time of the armistice in Panmunjom in 1953, yet she never closed off her heart to the two men that she lost on the killing fields before him. She kept their pictures and letters from the front in an album in a safe, even as she started a family anew with Grandpa Park.

[hey thematic concept—evil is itself catalytic, arises slowly in a few individuals from rationalization, than spreads through the mind like a prion protein, activating the lizard brain. Evil acts perpetuate it, spreads to others until chain is broken. Also notion of the Tauschreigeist, the theme of the demon—like some other demons, he is born from the minds of the humans who picture him. He slowly takes them over, insidiously—note that humans can thus beget their own demons, they dream the demon’s dreams. It’s a corrupted structure of the mind that gains sentience within that same mind. Have Pastor George talk about this when Tim meets up with him to talk. Tim is upset with the “possession” that seems to be stemming from the Tauschreigeist and visions thereof, but George says no such bizarre vision needed to spawn a demon; it’s born constantly in the minds of people. The Ur-Anderen themselves follow up on this—they say that the complex dreams of people, eventually brought together in some way, are the precursors for the new cosmos that are created. It’s essentially going from conscious minds subjectively perceiving the objective logical flow of a world outside them, to the subjective mind generating new realms once they master the caracteristica. They follow up from George’s reasoning—that a demon was created in the mind of the being that became the Tauschreigeist, in this case a universe born of the rage and sorrow that he felt, enveloping worlds around him. ]

[Teaching at Kaplan 2/11 again--

Conversation with Gregor—we’re progressively rediscovering our own minds, with calculus and diff eq (basic calculations, modeling, valuations, robotics), judgment, ethics—though most advanced features, “the sixth sense” are contingent on experience within the community, subjective basis.

3/11 Human innovation, creativity that’s nature as much as “natural” events are, makes no sense to pit humans vs. nature, that’s right hand vs. left hand (Gregor indicates this at estate, precursor to what Ur-Anderen communicate, that humans very important in the contingent narrative they’re holding, not only in themselves but in the natural world they observe, not just humans self-aware, earth is self-aware through them).

Pre-consciousness—know sth important, to follow it, only later do we realize why. (e.g. knowing that supernovae make e.g. uranium, mentioned in a class a while ago; knowing that Abx are made as biological conflict in molds, other bacteria as a professor mentioned, value of eating certain fruits and tomatoes). The mind has a way to filter those things, even before we really know why, specifically—some sort of processing, awareness that’s not conscious for us, but still quite valuable.

As human intelligence evolves, it becomes a sort of physical force in itself but not as simple or predictable as other forces—our minds channel advanced logical laws.

The fountain, Terez explains, was a metaphor in some ancient creeds for the wellspring of existence—consciousness and sentience giving rise to it (in a sense preceding non-conscious state.

NB the lines of species, society, civilization, culture, communities bleed into each other, b/c they’re all forms of higher organization and harnessing of memory and intelligence.

Terez was descended from Hungarian boyar nobility—a princess, which is how Tim addressed her.

Zach has a conversation with Matt Hansen (who has a stripper girlfriend), sardonically suggesting she’s smarter than any of them for finding and exploiting a ready market—in 2016 (or a later year, not sure when I’ll set this), the recession from 2007 has resurged, and Zach’s quite cynical: “Who the hell am I trying to fool Matt? There are about 100 countries for an engineering company to outsource to these days; they don’t need me or any of the too-clever contraptions I’ve been dreaming up in the Doghouse all these years. Aside from you guys launching a firm like this, there’s just nothing out there for us.”

Zach has an earnest interest in traveling to Germany for work—Matt teases him about his Swiss ski chalet experience from earlier—and this is how he justifies his decision to join Tim in Borna. But he later reveals, in the conversation with Renee Tsai, that he has a different reason deep down—he’s genuinely concerned for Tim’s safety, realizing that he’s become a person no longer in control of the events surrounding him.

Like Jurgen, Tim lost Susan on a mountain.

3/11: Gregor’s discourse in the courtyard—when he talks about how much human intellectual advance esp in math and physical sciences, is merely rediscovering what nature has equipped the brain to do (diff eq’s to model nature, the limit concept to describe how thoughts are completed, calculus to likewise depict how logical operations are rapidly summed to extract summary information about a system). Add to this, the concept of the Operator, which transforms one mathematical object to another—this is basis of Kantian noumena to the phenomena conversion, that the brain uses to reconstruct nature. That is, we perceive the world based on the mind’s reconstructions, which resemble Hamiltonians and other operators that convert inputs from one function to another; Operator concept is again, a reflection of what the mind does. Implication: We may be able to infer new mathematics based on functions that the mind is already equipped to do (e.g. fuzzy logic, intuition), conversely seemingly inexplicable mathematical phenomena may be reflected in as-yet undiscovered mental processes.

Change it so that Tim knows Gregor from before, realizes he should talk to him after the discovery in Borna.

The first re-awakened Ur-Anderen explains to the group that some technologies are “off-limits” until a species unites its minds—a higher consciousness level. Too dangerous in the hands of those who’d weaponize it.

The square relations in physics, e.g. gravitation and electrical charge vis-à-vis distance—it’s as though all these calculations/events occur on a square surface. (Wigner)

Link Wigner in with Feynman and Tegmark—QM is very counterintuitive to us because of the way that our Kant-phenomenon perceptual machinery evolved, but b/c they’re verified (and so counterintuitive), they provide us with a glimpse of the noumenal world underneath.

Answer to the Fermi Paradox—once a civilization develops interstellar technology, it gets to inter-cosmos ability quickly, so no need to go colonizing other planets.

Sort of Lost-related (Seasons 3-4 before Season 6)—but readers find it fascinating when a seemingly minor, otherwise-overlooked detail becomes enormously important later on—like the unexplored electromagnetic room of the Dharma Initiative, with the diagrams and coils, linking into the pocket of exotic matter with its electromagnetism (the “Source” as seen in Season 6, and what MIB attaches the wheel to and hacks away at the rock for, with the classical Roman-era scientists who were grasping the electromagnetism). Also, Lost is smart in the way that it uses sci-fi (the Dharma Initiative’s investigations) to explain things otherwise magical or poorly-understood (e.g. the Source—recall the WaPo smart comments of Lost viewers that you bookmarked). Lost stumbles a bit with the confusing “rules” that keep changing, the restrictions on MIB and Jacob (doesn’t make sense, and Jacob does leave it), the confusion at the temple, the fact that they can’t speak before stabbing MIB

There’s a paradoxical beauty in incongruity, in asymmetry, in disharmony. It’s why we’re here (matter and antimatter for example).

Best writing, characters, mysteries, sci-fi, conceptual explorations in video-game narratives, and some anime.

Death can’t be understood from individual perspective—it’s the group sense that does matter. Loss of a subjective noumenal space and partial information transfer to the large data pool.

Recall the idea you had, watching that SyFy special—in event of big emergency, with lots of voices but little quality, the key is to sift them out to get the best ideas. The wikis more or less do this, but we need something faster, to confront the Gulf Oil Spill for example. Better than market aggregators.

Neutrinos as power source.

Human mind is a physical, conscious embodiment of the collected intelligence on the earth across eons and millennia.

Emphasize noumenon-phenomenon difference, it’s at the heart of many things.

A fascinating motif, as in Ygh 5-D w/ the Dark signers and the reactors—the Peruvian Quechua-laced mythology, with the animals that Yugi-Oh and his allies encounter, is rooted in a particular, technical foundation. Specifically, the mysticism and mythology of the animals are based in the designations given by the scientist, Yugi-Oh’s father, who constructed the reactor, and gave those designations to the containment fields.

Sleeping is our rebooting, just as the reboot solves many problems, the sleep clears things for us.

Uncle Mitch notes that the artifacts had a frequency corresponding to the dream waves of sleep.

Gregor has a map of the Castle in the Katzenwald.

Central theme with the Ur-Anderen—they note the bottleneck for most civilizations, is that they need to develop the mind-melding technology before the weapons technology (with e.g. fusion) that’s so dangerous. Because of the nature of this type of universe, few manage to do that.

The rubric beneath Borna, and mention of the worker there—have some physical threats to them there.

Have Tim see an image of the Tauschreigeist after talking to the engineer, then see the 4 towers at Oak Ridge.

The original tablet, amongst Tim’s heirlooms—there should be a warning that the answers like concealed in the shadows (hence the findings in subterranean places for example).

Zach thinks Jurgen’s a flake. He also sarcastically raps Tim in the beginning—“you said yourself that we’re colleagues now that I’ve passed my thesis defense. Well, as your colleague now, I’m telling you that you’ve become officially whacked out, Tim.”

Zach’s very cynical about the 10-year Depression with Matt, but Matt calls him on his cynicism, pointing out that Zach’s too afraid of failure or not meeting expectations to allow himself to do the remarkable things he’s capable of. Also encourages him to go to Europe for example. Zach has bad credit from a car accident, credit checks block his employment, got screwed over in a job offer—flew out to W Coast, but they changed the offer on him, dared him to sign. Got pissed and turn him cynical. Can’t join Matt’s company, not his specialty. Can’t go to Korea for personal issues, so Europe is best option.

Jurgen: In case you haven’t noticed, Dr. Shoemaker, I’m rather busy these days

“I’m not sure whether to be intrigued by what you just said, or to dismiss both of you as charlatans, especially given your apparent association with my old friend on the Baltic.”

“With all due respect, Dr. Sphinx,” he retorted, “might I suggest the former? Especially given that Gregor was as astonished we were to hear that name.”

“Look—Zach and I aren’t here to waste your time with silly games or blasts from the past, rousing or not. We need your damn help, and you’re probably the only person on this planet who can point us in the right direction.”

“I’m sorry I was so stand-offish just now; Gregor and I obviously have a lot of mutual and festering wounds in our history, and even the slightest association with him tars people like you with it.”

It’s not really that, Zach. A little over a year ago, in fact, I did begin to… tepidly wade into the dating scene, put myself on the market as an ‘eligible widower’ or whatever the term-de-rigueur is these days. But it always felt so damn frivolous; that bond, the shared soul I’d nurtured with Susan, I couldn’t begin to approximate it with other women. With Teréz, if anything, I suspect it’ll be the opposite, an emotional flash flood in its own right.”

“You mean… she reminds you too much of Susan?”

“Yes. And even a little of—well, of both of them, actually.”

:”Both of them?” inquired Zach with a scowl, his face contorted in conspicuous bafflement before loosening into a gesture of nodding realization. “Oh, I see. The fiery actress, the free spirit capturing hearts as she graces the stage…”

“Yeah,” sighed Tim, “that’s the idea. I couldn’t say with certainty, after all these intervening years, how much Teréz would actually resemble Priscilla in person; but what matters here is that she’d remind me of that wretched personal drama, and all my blunders that made it possible. While also uncannily reminding me of Susan in her own way. That almost visible power of empathy that Teréz had, that channel into the recesses of the soul, even the seeming detritus of our conscious thought that reveals something deeper—it’s something that Susan cultivated so much in herself, and that Teréz seems to find naturally.

Wigner and Mendeleev—they both had in common, a finding that heuristics, or just unphysical mathematical systems (e.g. Riemann), wind up with non-trivial physical significance. (Blog this.) It gets at the notion that underlying physical experience is sth like Bohm’s implicate order or, more fundamentally, the noumenal world that Kant described. Wigner, Mendeleev, phys eqns like gravitational law and electromagnetism, they all provide looks into that noumenal world.

Supposedly I did everything right, Matt—did well in school, worked my way through college, saved up what little I could, stayed out of trouble, but now because some meth-head flips his truck and I get caught up in the circumstances—I’m the one who gets blacklisted from ever finding a real job here? I’m about as employable as a damn casino-loafer with a 10-year rapsheet of bank robberies and burglaries. Such a wonderful land of opportunity we’re blessed to inherit.”

:Damn it Zach, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, you know it’s not always gonna be like this here.”

“Really, Matt? So when’s it all gonna turn around for us, huh? The powers-that-be around here have been lulling us with the same warmed-over bullshit on a silver platter for the past 12 damn years. 12 years we’ve been in this Depression, every year it’s the same damn thing—we’ve turned the corner, the recovery’s for real this time. It’s bad enough for anyone, but guys like you and I getting our degrees, we don’t have savings built up, we don’t have connections, we sure as hell don’t have experience. We’re supposed to be just starting our careers, how the Hell are we supposed to launch when we’re grounded year after year like this?”

“That you’re right about it, Matt.”

“It’s Renee, isn’t it?”

“She grew up on a little family plot in south Taiwan, all of them growing their own produce and selling it on the market. She has a right to expect more from me.”

(In the café’) Well, Zach, since we’re now colleagues according to your very own observation, what’s the hsle with me crying into my beer a little over tough memories in an Irish bar?”

Dialectic—another basic operation of the mind, rediscovered and then amplified upon.

Notice, how our own minds process data in terms of causal narratives- our memory may not have specifically recorded sth that we ourselves did, but our minds can decide whether it makes logical sense and would be causally consistent (e.g. couldn’t recall if I’d left cupboard open in kitchen, but knew that I’d retrieved the large hand soap bottle). That’s why sci method works fairly well most of the time, although with subtle surprises—there’s a causal structure to the world. QM seems to involve spontaneous events not obviously causal, but this simply provides a sort of raw material, unpredictable, for causal laws to act on.

Fascinating that I can recall some vocabulary from my languages easily (from old dialogues), others less so—a narrative was created in some cases but not in others. That narrative’s essential.

Combine, lessons of WWI with Cuban missile crisis—our human systems, advanced as they may be, have far less control over circumstances than we often assume. Time pressures, uncertainty, personal conflicts all combine to boost the margin of error in any circumstance, and if human societies develop especially dangerous weapons with little margin for error—when just one use of the weapon can be catastrophic—this becomes devastating for nations. Old systems of running nations don’t work for the newer weapons technology—what Einstein and Bradley said. We have to evolve new means of national interaction that deviate away from the zero-sum model. Severe wars make memory itself fuzzy, and people learn the wrong lessons. Future generations also too often forget these things, how important it is to be prudent. (e.g. US bombast and belligerence on Iraq—forgetting about Tuchman, Guns of August—as well as FDR and the Depression. Also, notice how with Cuban Missile Crisis, it was critical for rivals to have an odd source of empathy with each other—Kennedy’s officials understood that the Soviets needed to save face, to give something to the hardliners, an apparent concessions, reconciling concessions with the actual cases.)

Important, more on the lore of the Tauschreigeist—Ur-Anderen reveal that near the point of the first Olam Habriyah, several members of the advanced civilization are designated to become “Mnemocosms,” essentially evolving beings that are able to recover the histories and memories of the many lost civilizations in other worlds that didn’t advance to the Olam Habriyah. The Tauschreigeist was one of these in his world, but sth went wrong. (One of the Ur-Anderen was also so trained, and she’s able to penetrate the dominant spirit within the Tauschreigeist, i.e. of the original man on his world.) The Mnemocosms become worlds unto themselves, recreating the civilizations until they can be delivered into an E or P-class world, where the civilizations can either be maintained, or continue their evolution. The Ur-Anderen thus confirm that two basic aspects of many ancient religious—the notion of a broad resurrection, and the transference into an eternal realm—are in fact, backed up by the evolutionary tendencies of E-type universes in general, either as provided by a “rescuing Mnemocosm” from outside, or by a rare civilization itself, that’s able to advance to the Olam Habriyah.

Per Gregor—there is an arrow of history, increasing freedom, complexity, creativity (as per the Enlightenment and further examples). He suggests that this arrow of hx is joined to an arrow of memory—people’s works, children linking the generations—that preserves the contingent histories. Quotes Einstein, how the structures of evolving and anarchic civilizations aren’t up to the task of dealing with new technology and power. He points to frogs and fish in the nearby sea, notes our link to them, suggests that those creatures may not be consciously aware of what life had evolved into, but that despite all the misery of civilization, human purpose is to carry that evolution of consciousness further. Also quotes Teilhard de Chardin.

When an intelligent being in any civilization is born, the inchoate and insensate components of consciousness—like Leibniz’s monads—become coherent.

Researchers discover a non-random sequence in earth’s magnetic field.

Rachel cuts right to the chase in that initial conversation with Tim.

After Zach snaps at Tim following thesis, he has talk with Matt who’d noticed it—explains he’s deep in debt and no job due to lousy credit rating (injured in car accident), an arrangement with Tim’s help fell through but Zach still not explained his debt problems, hasn’t told Renee about it.

After Wake Forest debacle, Tim’s department chief has a talk with him.

Tim knows the day of the demon’s full manifestation, by radio changes, magnetic field hits—he figures it out later.

An Ur-Anderen explains, “The great irony of our civilizations (in the S-type universes) is that such great power is ultimately attained only by those most mistrustful of it (i.e. the ones who abhor war and are skeptical about the amount of power they could wield).”

In the new Prologue, which will now be the Beast overtaking the Chicago subway line—have the woman in there as a reluctant Whistleblower, pressured by colleagues to step out but worried about being blackballed if she does, effect on her family, indignant at one of her colleagues in particular for not understanding her plight.

Have Zach make a note when he’s talking to Matt, that half the young profs and instructors at the universities are foreigners—apparently because US grads are so heavily in debt, that they can’t get the jobs, while the Europeans have subsidized education.

Make sure to retool the setting where Zach encounters Keisuke, down in the tunnels and not just in the field.

Make sure to establish link between Dr. Petrovic and Dr. Armaleo.

Structure of the Tauschreigeist—he’ll be a product partly of the holographic principle, with information about prior species and historical events transcribed on involuting 2-D surfaces that fold like the convolutions of the brain into M.C. Escher-like structures. Also mathematical principles like the Golden Ratio and other important elements. The key is that the initial drawings of the Tauschreigeist generally don’t have animals or faces within them—rather, they have the bizarre geometries and Escher-like mathematics, with hints of various beings slowly emerging. This is visible only in video, essentially, with ancient creatures coalescing in the being’s form—Tim begins to glance at this, since he can the outlines of those figures becoming more apparent as he draws them around the entity’s central eye. Just before descending into the caverns beneath Borna, they start to realize that the aspects of the Tauschreigeist represent something like complex wavefunction equations which can’t be easily solved, but which nonetheless contain the information of different species on the various “arms,” encoded on the ramifying layers, which stretch the capacity for human perception. When the geometries (and the corresponding equations representing them) are decoded, they can be seen as the earlier species as well as (for the more complex beings) various contingent histories, thus more data and more evolution

I had the sense, while tutoring Max Nechita in November 2010, of how when compounds are formed (diff elements are just quantized, just diff atomic numbers and diff number of protons), and then macromolecules—it was one of those “different perspectives” moments. It’s a sense of how the world really would be rationally constructed, just as the Deists thought, but still far more complex.

Note why so many of the European characters worked stints in the US—they finished college debt-free, and so were able to take grad-school spots in the USA, unburdened by the pressure of debt.

O.K. this is important, making the character interactions harder-edged, and picture of a quasi-dystopic, corrupt United States in 2020. Zach has a sarcastic conversation with Matt Hansen; Matt noticed Tim was crestfallen, didn’t know why. Zach explained the fix he was in, the loans, the credit rating. Matt—naïve to the corruption and the bought-off politicians—wonders how Zach is supposed to find work and pay off his debts, if the very hx of those debts is used to deny him employment in the first place. Zach’s response: “Welcome to the new American Dream, Matt—that someone in power will finally wake up and realize the fucking obvious!” Meanwhile, Rachel is suspecting that Allan Simms is compromised, and she communicates that to Tim, wondering why he won’t shut down the Project. Allan confesses to this later on. Dr. Kusumoto’s old company was a major private investor in the project, and they threatened Allan with unemployment if he pulled the plug, he wouldn’t be able to get treatment for Becky. Politicians are routinely bought off, as is the media by the same conglomerates, so the corruption doesn’t get a proper airing. It even provokes Tim to half wonder, after learning of the apocalypse that the Tauschreigeist is planning, if the beast is 10 years too late, and if he might not be doing everyone a favor. (Zach tells him to drop the martyrdom complex—the greatest strength is stoicism, carrying on even in the midst of it.) Other things in same vein—when the TSG gets control of the nuclear weapons bunkers and shuts them down, the generals ask if it’s the work of a whackjob organization, who feels they’ve been divinely appointed to “help along” the march to Armageddon, as agents on earth. (It’s denied, of course.) Also, bridges are collapsing and infrastructure is crumbing, which initially makes Tim doubt that it was the TSG involved.

Note the Gaillard study which ID’s consciousness as a distributive phenomenon, but a fingerprint that’s quite specific. One could probably define the consciousness fingerprint based on people’s reactions to a series of pictures, unique for each one but reliable.

Conversation with Gregor, insert: Nevertheless, even the most fervently creative human mind would struggle to wrap itself around the nature of this being; it would be like a pigeon or a crow, trying to make sense out of the engineering blueprints for the tower it’s nesting in.

Consider having a clever angle to Tim/Zach’s financing (e.g. in Nolan’s film and a style you’ve thought about), i.e. these clever intellectuals pressured by circumstances into doing business with some seedy elements of society, e.g. an underground business with some financial interest in it. Maybe Tim’s uncle, that’s why he and his Dad split.

Maybe have the TSG’s form terrifying revealed and slowly, like in Phantasmagoria.

Maybe have Uncle Mitch be a ne’er-do-well who committed fraud and screwed over Tim’s Dad, hence their estrangement and Tim’s mistrust. Mitch also in some financial trouble from the costs of his obsession, had to borrow from some shady partners (as he’d done before), made false promises and this forces Tim on his quest. Tim himself needs the money, so he agrees reluctantly to go to Leipzig and find out more—yeah, this works better.

Dream records, TLD-related—interesting, in late April dreamt of guys doing Star Trek-like star observations, my mind axly invented a scale to interpret the light intensity (very regular, rigorously defined just like National Bureau of Standards).

In early May 2010, had a “Lost” dream (this was after the episode introing Jacob and MIB)—it was axly about a group of Lost fans (like the contributors to the Lost Wikis), noting an earlier episode and connecting it to the current one (as they’re wont to do, though the earlier episode was what my mind dreamt up here). There was some sort of critical electromagnetic constant related to the phenomena on the island, and it was found and devised by a Taiwanese graduate student, who was mentioned by a sentient computer on the island (I think this was mixed in from Eureka), named “Boggle” (or that was the mispronunciation). She’s very shy, but as I woke up from dream, I was seeking her out to find the nature of that constant—supposedly responsible for the EM waves turning into light as noted on the island.

Zach was drawn most of all, however, to the two beings in the foreground, clearly interacting. One was signaling from behind the arch, his arm outstretched and the back of his head visible. He seemed to have closely-cropped hair and a beard that stretched around the sides of his face, yet his ears arched outward slightly, with what appeared to be barbed ridges and a prominent earlobe below. He was addressing someone whose face was just becoming visible in the image, with long hair, eyes widely spaced— looking slightly to the side of the man signaling into the chamber—and a fleshy nose, but with unusual markings on the forehead, neck, and the bridge of the nose. The contours of a mouth were only slightly apparent at this point, while the makings of a chin seemed to protrude prominently from the rest of the face.

When Tim resurrects the Ur-Anderen, he’ll replay the actual scene.that he can’t quite recall.

“When I rehearsed for my roles on stage,” added Teréz with an interested glance,

“Susan herself once told me, when she was on duty in the child psychology wards at the hospital… that as each of us grows and matures as a human being, that our minds develop into a vessel, a voice for something that urgently seeks to speak through us. It’s as though each of us becomes a channel for a spirit, this ghost in the machine that becomes emergent somewhere within the neural circuitry that confers our consciousness of an adult. I always

{Leonhard, what I need to know is—the woman in that chamber, who looks and acts and reacts like Susan, is she really Susan? Returned from the other side? How do I know that these artifacts have actually brought back Susan, the real Susan… and not just some, some simulation, some facsimile of her?”

Leonhard sighed with slow deliberation, in the manner of a prosecutor preparing to sell a difficult case to a skeptical audience. “Tim, what exactly is each of us? What’s the stuff that makes us an individual, a unique person who stays that same person one day after another, and is accepted as such by our peers? With each new day, we’re a slightly different person than the day before. The cells and molecules of our body have a slightly different composition, we think a little differently, even our memories and personalities change bit by bit. Heck, we change with every little tick of Planck time; in a single day, about 10^50 slightly different people traverse our bodies. So how do we stay ourselves? How do we even stay accountable for our past actions, and how does each of us still love the person that we

He inclined toward Zach. “The latter, yes, it’s something that I do share with the stricken souls at Oak Ridge, but in my case there’s a context to the dream vision that I sketch so furiously when I awake, some… scene, a story that I couldn’t fathom the connection between them, even though they both started around the same time both with some link to my own family’s past and this strange inheritance that’s been handed down.”

Gregor and I were both avid mountaineers, and as he himself grew closer to Natalya, he used his customary wheeling and dealing to secure reservations for me and our two sweethearts, to tackle the Alpine slopes. Gregor led the way up, and I followed suit with both Natalya and Anna in tow. If only we’d just known about

Tim craned his neck aside in a series of tentative glances at nothing in particular, as though to distract from the half-formed thoughts that he hesitated to utter. Instinctively, he reached for his wallet and opened its folds, Finally, he sighed and addressed the magician, who was as though out of reflex, his mind momentarily distracted by a thought that refused to subside. “Jürgen, I apologize if I’m prying here but, you and Gregor…”

“Natalya, his wife,” replied the magician, with an unhesitating engagement of the topic that surprised his guests. “I was the one who introduced Gregor to her.

Perhaps a library, like your house of secrets in Borna. Or...” He spun halfway around, spurred by an irresistible whim, and feverishly shuffled through the digitized slides on his laptop. “Here, here it is,” he remarked with a bold gesture, directing the attention of his guests with an uncharacteristically manic jab at the screen, which displayed a series of blueprint-like diagrams filled with chambers cast in a variety of hues.

“Back in the days of our collaboration in Kaliningrad, Vasili often mused that the Soviet administrators hosted top-flight research facilities in museums—a sop to the artistic pretensions of a high-ranking minister in the Education Bureau. Vasili was a museum connoisseur in his own right, and he

“Or,”interjected Tim, tugging on an earlobe per his habit, as he contemplated aloud, “a museum.”

Zach craned in his direction; he suspected an update in their collective affairs, of which he had not yet been apprised. “Just before we left for the station this morning,” continued Tim, “I got a message from Heinrich Metzer. His team has been decoding the Gothic inscriptions within that chamber in the Borna library. It’s all preliminary at this point, but Heinrich’s old friend, that brilliant librarian in Warsaw—he’s already managed to cross-reference the findings with his own databases. And there was a match. A museum, somewhere in Hungary, that

He thought that one of his

It was all so difficult to digest, even for Vasili and me, so we never published any of our investigations about the Falkenei Gesellschaft; and since we couldn’t exactly work the research into our grant applications, we simply let the matter drop.

at a vaguely unsettling, Stonehenge-like assemblage of stones arranged in what appeared to be an ancient religious shrine. “They call this the Goloring, Tim,” explained the magician. “The archaeologists discovered it over a decade ago in one of Germany’s southern cities, near Koblenz. The Goloring was created in 1,000 B.C., but its particular location seems to have been inspired by an even earlier, much larger shrine nearby, about which we know very little. It was stripped bare aside from a few remaining artifacts and uncanny impressions in the surrounding bedrock, apparently a small vestige of whatever had been there before. That earlier shrine, however, appears to have been a kind of devotional to the gods, who were thought to have delivered some sort of received wisdom to the pagans of the time in about 3,200 B.C. or so.”

“Received wisdom?” asked Zach, his curious mind drawing an instinctive parallel. “As in—the tablets containing the Ten Commandments, that Moses received on Mount Sinai? A sort of old religious tale?”

“Not exactly,” responded Jürgen, with a slight shake of the head. “That’s what’s so peculiar about the archaeological evidence, at least the fragments we’ve uncovered. Most of the old Biblical tales, especially elements like the plagues of Egypt and the floods—they generally had parallels in a number of ancient faiths, as though deriving at least part of their narrative from a common ancient template. But whatever this celestial event in 3,200 B.C., it seems to have been sui generis, no parallels anywhere. The sky darkened and turned blood red one day, and then suddenly, some collection of objects just… materialized, right in the wilderness abutting the fields of some ancient farmers. They didn’t fall in from the sky, as from a comet or asteroid, and they weren’t handed on down from above

“Tim, I analyzed your prototype retinal implant in exhaustive detail, even to the point of dismantling the thing like some household artifact in the hands of an over-curious schoolboy. I didn’t find anything too telling, until I arrived at the auxiliary chip of the implant.”

“The auxiliary chip?”

“Yes. In the medical implant business, whenever we want the device to learn, to respond intelligently to both external stimuli and the modulating commands that we input—we’ll often introduce a specially-fabricated microprocessor with a specific role to do just that. It’s a neural-net processor, but unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Its circuits are arranged in a non-random grid, a pattern that seems to bear some meaning that I can’t quite tease out.”

“That’s curious,” responded Tim in bafflement. “I read the specifications for the implant back when I was serving on the clinical panel to approve it. I had thought that the neural-net functions were to be wrapped into the design of the main processor; must have been a late addition.”

“Your suspicions may have some grounding, Tim. Whenever we design new microprocessors, it’s an old-school tradition to etch a little graffiti on some used portions of the chip’s wafer.”

“Graffiti?”

“More or less. The designers and the fabrication team can stencil in their initials, their pet’s names, their favorite take-out restaurants—whatever distinguishes them and what they do, into the chip. Only a few firms and specialists have the wherewithal to engineer a device like this, and I was able to decipher the initials and scribbles enough to ascertain the source—a rather shadowy outfit called The

“Well, my congratulations to you, Zach; I’m presuming you much prefer that to Dr. Choi.” He laughed at Zach’s astonished response. “Oh, I can assure you that preference is hardly unusual among those of us in those heady days after earning our doctorate. I simply could not bear answering to ‘Dr. Semmelweiss’; even today, it’s ‘Jürgen’ with everyone I encounter, including two distinguished gentlemen such as yourselves.”

your description a little while ago—Gregor, you’re talking visible outside the And yet—Heinrich Metzer must have briefed you on the thing that’s brought us out here in the first place, on short notice from across the Atlantic. We don’t know what this, ‘Tauschreigeist’ is or what it wants, but it seems to be an intelligence far beyond both what our human minds have evolved, and what we’ve engendered in our machines, even our most complex networks.

to survey the architectural wonders that if we could link the powers of our minds together somehow, to augment what we could solve and imagine, it would likely be a specialized technology that we could turn on or off. The uniqueness of our conscious experience and outlook, the free spirit within each of us—it’s also part of what confers such a splendid radiance upon the products of the brain, and what they can do and create; who knows how much of that would be preserved in a rather literal meeting of the minds. ”

“And this… thing, is prepared to force an apocalypse on us to get it,” responded Zach with tongue nervously in cheek. “You’d think a being of such great intelligence would at least try old-fashioned negotiation and haggling first; I’m sure we could spare him a piece of the action.”

Zach tore his gaze away from the monitor, slowly motioning toward his mentor to resume their search for the elusive magician in the station. “It’s all just so tough to process, Tim,” he said, slowly advancing down the station corridor. “All those stories about vampires and werewolves we used to scare each other as kids, or of demons, machines out of control— heck, we’ve always been good at dreaming up monsters. But now we’re facing the real thing, and we can’t rely on any kind of silver bullet or stake through the heart. We don’t even know what in hell we’re facing.”

more changes to introduce: the Septego, update the extended summary, in Ch. 1 the castle “pulsated with an unearthly beat” (b/c computing devices in the background); Tim encounters Gregor’s Ukrainian wife Alexandra in the tea garden above (midway thru conversation, it’s a break for the reader), she resembles Susan (of Greek heritage) in a kimono; an awkward moment with Zach pointing out the kimono; Gregor is astute and notes Tim’s reaction with Maimonides, and with the supposed Greek name of his wife; Tim fesses up; Zach later notes how strongly he’s attracted to Renee’s penchant to embrace him after she stretches; when Zach and Renee embrace, it’s a more frank love scene between them (he kisses her neck to her mouth, undoes her slip)

The most cherished moral laws and societal policies tend to be closely linked with those that best enable sustainable (and preservable) improvement in a society’s Kolmogorov complexity, i.e. constructive behavior. Economics (sense of value) also closely linked to engendering this.

Have Semmelweiss comment that he closely follows Kant’s categorical imperative, a corollary to beget “positive self-fulfilling prophecies” with everything he does.

For Tim’s videophone conversations with Rachel and Mitch—change it so it’s 3-D, an image projected just in front of the screen as well as on it.

Semmelweiss e.g. of historical contingency—in language, “electron” and electricity, derived from Greek word for amber.

Shorten Pastor George’s sermon (nothing on resurrection yet), and split up Tim’s lxr talk at Wake, so that much of it is said when Tim talks briefly with Shelley Deloria.

Eotvos Museum in Hungary

We are the algorithms that govern our behavior.

Also with Maimonides—striving for perfection, even with our highly imperfect bodies, brings us a little closer to the divine.

Change the Planck time measurement in themes.

{deleted text from extended summary: Tim and Zach are urgently summoned to the city of Göttingen by Jürn Semmelweiss, who is able to leave only a brief, cryptic text message at first. }

Semmelweiss talks about importance of the contingent history even given apparent general laws, Zach quips “things like a Kant scholar working as a traveling musician.”

When Gregor queries about Maimonides, Tim gives some of his background—grew up in rural NC, went to a science school (maybe in DC, based on Jefferson) where he met Sammy Rosenblatt, a fellow wisecracker, became a rabbi.

Gregor (or Jurn): “In a sense, we are the algorithms that we formulate to run our behavior, whether

The reference to neural spinal learning, that German neurosurg—put that one earlier.

God’s creatures, assoc. w/ Kolmogorov complexity.

Nature requires checks and balances, poised on knife’s edge, abhors unchecked power of any form.

Mitch’s brain-scans are off—put that in there.

Pieronczyk helps them to link the discoveries in Borna with a mysterious exhibit at a Hungarian museum, with optical illusions and false walls.

Mention Hume explicitly when talking about Kant.

Mention the Battle of Cartagena in Chapter 2; Ernie had rediscovered a “lost branch” of the Shoemaker family in South America, descended from a mercenary who apparently “fought for both sides” in the battle. He settled in Colombia, then his son migrated to Brazil; that’s how the Shoemaker heirlooms wound up there.

Chapter 3—edited up to “the advent of” (originally planned as an excerpt, now may leave out initially)

Two more principles to add in—human mind has great difficulty tolerating uncertainty, and avoid simple linear extrapolations (the latter, maybe include that with Gregor’s mentioning of Licklider)—it’s why scientists spend years testing these things.

Despite what may be fundamental physical, logical laws—it’s the contingent history that intelligent beings foster, that’s of greatest importance.

Tim needs to lay out the details of his affair with Priscilla, in the talk with Gregor.

Tim’s fedora hat, it’s in part a product of his earlier technical assistance with crime labs.

The unchecked accumulation of power is itself in evil, regardless of how it is wielded by any one individual, since such accumulated power can scarcely be controlled effectively. Intelligence itself is quite powerful, and nature has a way of limiting the accumulation of intelligence, unless it can be judiciously used.

“RENNT? The acronym spelled out in German came out as something like— ‘Rekursive, Emergente… Neuralnetzwerktheorie.’”

“Impressive, Zach. At least it translates easily enough—Recursive Emergent Neural Net Theory. Sounds as though you’re familiar with it.”

“You flatter me, Chief,” quipped Zach sarcastically. “I just encountered it in passing myself; Matt Hansen, back at the Doghouse, stumbled across a few of Dr. Schmitz’s articles, and presented them in a monthly journal club we’d organized to discuss some of the more intriguing surprises in the academic literature. Although ‘presenting’ might be a charitable term here; given the amount of goofing off we always managed to work into those sessions, it was varying degrees of the blind leading the blind.”

“When has it ever been otherwise for us?” chuckled Tim laconically, with a sidelong glance, as he continued to eye the weaving road with all the immediate memories it conjured.

“Let’s see…” said Zach, drawing out the second syllable as he continued to scan the pages scrolling before his eyes. “Aha, that’s ringing bells all over. The kernel of the theory, it’s a model of how complexity, structure self-organize in nature. By extension you wind up with a new lens to view the physical world itself, on the basis of varying layers of that complexity. You take a—well, for example,” remarked Zach, grasping for words, “in our brains we have billions of nerve cells, with trillions of connections constantly evolving. Somehow, all those links and interactions among our nerve cells beget what we experience as consciousness, self-awareness, intelligent thought—allegedly intelligent, at least.”

“I just knew you could r

So the brain is an emergent property of this neural network, of our nerve cells.”

“I’m following so far,” replied Tim somewhat absently, his attention still absorbed by the bending road.

“Well, as I understand it—RENNT generalized this relationship, using the neuron-brain model to relate complex phenomena of all sorts, all their emergent properties, to the components that beget them. It’s just like what you say in your own lectures to the undergrads—the major physical theories use one physical property, considered fundamental, to derive other properties using some logical series of relations. In classical mechanics, it’s inertia: the inertial tendency of any object to resist being accelerated by a force, which defines its mass. You could then quantitate any invisible force on the basis of how much it overcomes the inertia, including for gravity—whether it’s tugging straight on an apple or keeping the planets in an elliptical orbit.” “You’re writing my lecture for me, Zach,” replied Tim gruffly, an apparently facetious remark rendered flat by his continuing focus ahead. “With Einstein and General Relativity, it was non-Euclidean geometry—the unseen curvature of space. As the space arcs around any massive object, it generates what we recognize as a gravitational pull. Which is equivalent to an acceleration.”

“Right, and for RENNT, that essential property is emergence; we could in principle derive our physical world and its phenomena, our various flavors of forces and particles, by the emergent properties that spring up each time we form a stable network among simpler components. When you integrate the constitutents of the lower level, you wind up with the emergent level with its own degrees of freedom, and thus new properties. For us humans on earth, groping about for better understanding, The brain, with our conscious mind—it’s the most complex emergent

Integration—emergent properties.

In science, we’re looking for the keys that unlock the doors—“special nodes” and logical laws that allow for special cases.

We make more explicit, and conscious, the mastery of our minds, which in its operations of With every small step we take, we make —they’ve been gradually uncovering the intricate processes that

Suddenly, a mounted figure dashed before them and whirled around, sensing an easy target. The marauder directed a soulless, aggressive stare in the direction of Maria and Karl, pursuing them as they tried to shake their tormentor. They tried to wend their way between two cottages, but the horseman trapped them on the other side, grinning sadistically as he prepared to strike. Before he had the opportunity, a vengeful elderly villager used a plow to smite the rider from behind, unhorsing him and salving his rage with a sustained series of blows with the handle of the makeshift weapon. As the old man with the plow continued to pursue the now-cowering soldier, the couple seized the opportunity to slip away.

I designed this courtyard with an architect friend of mine, shortly after I formally pulled up stakes at the University of Leipzig. A small group

Entrancing, enchanting, spellbound, intoxicating

Rachel and the others talk about an accident striking crew members on the day they find out about Tachibana syndrome.

I know how disappointing all this must be for you—being one of the top prospects across the globe for what you do, winning your current position in such a prestigious and brilliant institution for your line of work. Then putting your heart and soul into the project and seeing… all this as a result. I just want you to know that I’m with you now 100%, and I’ll make sure that you have more concrete answers soon. Just… take care of yourself, OK? I—I worry about you there, and I want you to be safe.”

“Thanks, Tim, that really means a lot. You take care of yourself out there too, all right? I’m looking forward to you, and Zach, and me savoring a joyous, triumphant picnic one day in the near future when the weather around here returns to form—reminiscing about that scary mystery at Oak Ridge that turned us all into detectives for a month.”

“Me too, Rachel. I’ll be in touch,” said Tim, concluding the exchange. As he closed the conversation window and moved to shut down his laptop in the dimmed hotel room, he lowered his head in a gesture of gnawing, almost aching anxiety. Much as he tried, he could not dispel the disquieting thought that, whatever menace they all were facing, it would not yield so readily to a resolution in any form.

“You’re bringing the implant prototypes along? Just what does this guy Gregor have in his Baltic home?”

“According to Heinrich, Gregor’s seafront home might as well be a base; he has so many

With every tick of Planck time, a person is subtly different {this is said by one of Leonhard Schmitz’s students} but sense of continuity because of direct causal linkages to the previous person. (This has legal implications—although each “person” is 10^34 different “changes” from the person of a second ago, that subsequent person has a direct and exclusive causal link to the predecessor, hence responsibility for actions.)

Intellectual rigor; subtlety, every bit of the book is carefully developed for the audience.

Thematic content: The technology obtained by the Falkenei Gesellschaft (explained to them, effectively, by the binary code provided by the Uranderen early on) enables them to interact with nature at level of Bohm’s “implicate order” (logical/data underpinnings at basis of what is observed physically). The resurrection “operation” itself is not difficult since people, as complex as they are, have an information content at any given “Planck moment” that is not too much of a strain on the resurrection supercomputer. The better-designed the supercomputer, the more “fine-grained” the data retrieval of the “former person.” In a sense, the data retrieval/resurrection is an “approximation” (in part because that approximation has also causally evolved within a particular milieu, which is obviously quite different from the one they’re brought into following the resurrection), but then, even the person that each of us “becomes” at any given moment is somewhat of an approximation due to quantal uncertainty, and the fine-grained resurrection supercomputer developed under the guidance of the Ur-Anderen is able to retrieve a prior person with high fidelity, placing them within a different milieu. This is naturally confusing for the prior “person”

Resurrection is one of the supposed “epsilon technologies” (so named by the Ur-Anderen for our “Class E Universe” with evolving states, emergent causality, and emergent complexity, with cells and intelligent beings arising as well).

Backwards time travel is inverse of resurrection. The resurrection principles also give sense to free will itself.

The abilities explain the strict secrecy practiced by the Falkenei Gesellschaft.

got so ghastly here that the executive board itself shut MOTS down during the weekdays Tim, they can’t; MOTS took such a twisted turn in the tones that it was, ‘evolving’ late last week; the executive board itself made the decision to shut it down during workdays. The guys running the musical self-evolution experiment didn’t want to abandon the project altogether—as if MOTS would magically transform its

If Leibniz was carrying on this advanced computational work in secret, so many centuries ahead of the rest of us, perhaps this Tauschreigeist is indeed just such an intelligence

Something like what Plato posited, with objects in our material world—shadowed at a deeper level, by the patterns which comprise them. But for Leibniz, far

He even tried to build a rudimentary computer himself. Blaise Pascal constructed the first such computing machine in France, and then Leibniz, inspired by his own work, built his own version a few decades later. That’s what’s so mystifying; none of those early calculating machines did much more than basic arithmetic, as far as we know, but all around us here…”

SSB—work it in.

“Well, that’s

Leszek Pieronczyk

{cite Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf p. 64 on causality notion}

Somehow, these devices are linked to a… spreading psychosis, that began in a Tennessee research facility some months but which itself seems to be tied into—something awfully threatening, that’s already

TSG lives in magnetic field! Causes h/a’s in Mitch as changes, communications problems; “scans” miners, eyes glow; on Sunday, “scans” the people in the train. Chapter 1: The Schloss is set within a valley surrounded by mountains, not seen.

“Well,” cracked Tim with a wry smile, “I’m half surprised they’re able to handle the one Pastor George McAllister they already have on their hands, so I doubt you’ll have too much to worry about in that department. Remember old friend, I still have a lotta dirt on you from the days of our reign of terror together at Northwestern, so don’t ever wind up on my bad side!”

“I was always relieved to have you around, Tim,” laughed the pastor, “it always diverted some of the heat from me. We must have pulled off enough stupid pranks and antics to be expelled from that place 3 times over, and it was then that I learned the valuable life lesson that youthful idiocy loves company!”

…

“George I, uh… I honestly couldn’t think of anyone else I could talk about this with. You know how, even now, it’s still so… almost unbearable every time I think of Susan…” The pastor nodded gently, exuding empathy without saying a word.

“Well,” continued Tim, “seems like now, all of a sudden, I can’t… can’t stop thinking about her. And I don’t mean, it’s not just thinking about her… I, I see her. Physically, I mean… uh, I’m not making any sense…”

“Don’t worry old friend, just take your time.”

Tim paused and sighed, unable to face Pastor George directly for fear of displaying any surreptitious tears welling up in his eyes. “When I say, I’ve been seeing her face… I don’t know, but sometimes when I look into TV screens, mirrors, windows, any kind of surface where you can project an image… she’s there George. I mean, really, really there, not just metaphorically, I see her face, a bit grayish and indistinct but it’s unmistakably Susan. She’s looking out, not necessarily at me but she’s looking out from the surface, cognizant somehow… And it’s not just a will-o’-the-wisp disappearing the moment I turn away, I look back and she’s still there, saying nothing but… she’s definitely there, gradually fading away before I see her image again somewhere else.”

“Well, that horrible day… I remember it too, Tim, all of us in the congregation kept you in our hearts during that horrible time. The anniversary was… well, a few months ago, something like that, it’s never far from your conscious mind.”

“Yeah, and there have been some reminders lately, including some things I definitely would like to forget.”

The pastor winced slightly but still sympathetically, instantly appreciating the reference that his old friend was making.

“Yeah, it was Karen, she’s now a sales rep with a pharmaceutical firm out in the Research Triangle, she happened to just be there in the Medical Center when I was just grabbing a coffee after a conference… But George, still, it’s not the first time I’ve had all those awful memories flood back like that. It hits me for a few days, I slide off the grid for a little while, then it just ebbs away until I get reminded again. I’ve certainly never… these, vivid images, Susan’s face, that’s something altogether new, and not exactly welcome. It sends me right back to that day, to the road with Susan… the lump in the throat, the knot in the stomach, it just keeps coming back again, just… again and again.”

The pastor looked on sympathetically, before addressing his friend in a cautious yet soothing tone. “Tim, I of course can’t, explain the timing or why you’re seeing Susan’s face, where you’re seeing her but… She never actually left your side, Tim. Our souls, they don’t belong to us exclusively, they… they’re shared, by everyone we interact with. What after all, what is this soul we talk about so much? We all sprinkle it throughout our sermons but what do we mean? This soul of ours, it’s that unique, idiosyncratic signature that each of us imprints on the world around us, some collection of our ideas, memories, experiences, behavior, appearance, our acts and achievements that on the one hand are specific to this little nook and cranny of the world at this particular moment. But which on the other hand, also transcend this place and time—it’s the whole that’s vastly more than the sum of the parts, and it has staying power. It’s this mysterious, masterwork… this product of a remarkable creativity that’s somehow able to take this, soup of macromolecules in our cells and tissues, all that gadgetry that you and I spent years taking exams about in our grad student days, and makes an integrated, complex, thinking whole out of it. And it’s both unique and shared among everyone we interact with.”

The pastor paused momentarily and slightly lowered his head toward Tim, still glancing obliquely downward in a forlorn effort to conceal the anguish that continued to gnaw at him. “Tim, Susan never really died for you, or for anyone you’ve interacted with or anyone you will interact with. Her soul ramifies itself through you and whomever you run into, and every time you try to deny her presence… it just comes bounding back to you. Maybe that’s what happened when you encountered Karen like that. You’d gotten so proficient at clamping the lid on your thoughts, that they boiled over like a volcano when you couldn’t tamp them down anymore, because trying to deny Susan’s presence would be like trying to deny your own left arm. She’s a part of you.”

Tim finally lifted his head tentatively, still unsure of his ability to confront his old friend’s words face to face. The pastor smiled as he was again able to glimpse the outlines of Tim’s eyes, the whites bearing the slight red tinge of reawakened sadness. “It’s funny, George,” he began, “they were sponsoring these seminars at Duke a while back, between the physics, theology and philosophy departments, discussing that—what the soul is, physically and intellectually pinning down what we mean. I… it was before Susan and I took that trip to Suriname, it all just seemed like so much esoterica even to a veteran geek like myself. And since then… there are times, when I picture Susan, it’s all I think about. Susan, her soul, her… her being, she’s still with me somehow, strange because it feels, sometimes, so concrete, like she’s right next to me, engaging all my senses like before.”

The pastor smiled sympathetically. “That reminds me of Dr. O’Leary, back when Dr. Reynard and I were collaborating with his team. I was always burning the midnight oil in Dr. O’s little fief with his own foot soldiers, and good old Dr. O himself was of course reliably there with us no matter what the hour. To keep everyone sane at 2 a.m. or Lord knows what hour we were sometimes stuck there, Dr. O would start up on one of his quirky Socratic Q&A sessions about those things in the world we always take for granted… the conscious mind, the soul, that was one of his favorites.”

Pastor George chuckled gently in amusement at the reminiscence. “To my flock today,” he continued, “I’d say the soul is known and felt by all of us and of course by God. I suppose, if I were still back working late nights in Professor O’Leary’s lab, trying to ferret out the 25^th digit in some physical constant to explain the strong force in atomic nuclei… and old Doctor O was starting up on one of his bleary-eyed physico-philosophical meanderings… I’d reach for the latest lingo in whatever literature we were citing at the time for our talks. Total information content, decoherence of a Schrödinger wavefunction, those same wavefunctions transmitting and maintaining their information through a complex system… Are they the same thing at heart? I don’t know, and besides, why deconstruct it so much here? Whatever that idiosyncratic imprint is, that Susan had and still has, it’s now at the heart of your own soul Tim. And now, that part of you is awakening again, far more forcefully than before. Why? Well, that’s something I can’t answer.”

The original 13 colonies of the USA were pounded by epidemics in the 18^th century and unfortunately, the Shoemakers in Pennsylvania saw some of the worst of it. That infamous yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1762, the one that Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote all those famous monographs about—apparently our ancestors were at the epicenter of it, and then the smallpox epidemic that hit right during the American Revolution itself, the Shoemakers were right in the thick of that one too. All those old tales about our proud Shoemaker ancestors, working as the humble cobblers traveling with the ragtag Continental Army—there’s some truth to it… which also means those poor souls were constantly getting exposed to smallpox, typhus and God knows whatever else was raging through the camps at the time. So a good number of the old-timers who may have known the full story, going back to the first Schumacher to set foot in Germantown, they perished in the epidemics, probably before they could set the record straight for the younger generations. And all the wars, barnyard fires, all those disasters great and small in those days, they decimated a lot of what we had in terms of written records. Like a lot of families in that early colonial period, we’ve got a gap in our history, probably from around the mid-1700s when a lot of these calamities were hitting hardest. And whatever it is about all these items that made them so central for our family and so critical to guard and protect, across all these generations—it’s a riddle, Tim, but it’s one we’ve got to solve.”

He was even able to inveigle copies of old billboards, shingles, plaques, legal documents, and contracts, all from slides that the archivist was preparing for a conference—active research that wouldn’t have necessarily been accessible to the public. It’s with me in fact, one of the things that TJ delivered to me this morning.”

Tim reached for his briefcase again, this time pulling out the scrapbook that his uncle had bequeathed to him alongside the heirlooms themselves. He leafed through its early pages, searching through collages full of newspaper clippings, old receipts, and other relics of transactions from centuries’ past, until one page finally caught his eye.

“Ezra—do you have the passenger manifest for De Ontdekker somewhere close by?”

“Yeah, I have the print-out from the Dutch government on my desk right now, in fact.”

“Koenig,” said Tim, spelling the name out slowly. “Is that name in the ship’s manifest by any chance?”

“Koenig… just a sec, I’ll take a look. Why that name in particular?”

“I was flipping the pages here, and I came across a scanned-in image of an old Pennsylvania contract written in German which, per the notes from the archivist’s slide, is supposedly from 1692. It has a monographed seal in the lower right corner for a cobbler’s shop, and I was just able to make out the lettering—Schumacher and Koenig. It makes sense, after all, our ancestor was trying to get himself anchored in a new and unfamiliar land, so he must have partnered up. If this is the right Schumacher, which it looks like my Uncle Mitch strongly suspected, then he must have had a pretty decent rapport with this fellow to make him a business partner—maybe even solid enough to entrust him with those heirlooms.”

“I see where you’re coming from,” replied Ezra. He continued to scan the manifests as Tim waited silently on the other line, anxious to hear whether his hunch would be validated. As Ezra ran his finger down each successive page, carefully perusing the documents in front of him, he finally halted at a name that drew his attention. Confirming his initial suspicion, slowly reading the text before him, he smiled in the fashion of a long-suffering gold prospector who had finally stumbled upon the real thing. “Yeah, Tim, it’s here, two names in fact: Sara and Daniel König, the last name has, you know, the letter o with the umlaut on top—but in America, that must’ve been how they spelled it, K-O-E-N-I-G. Bullseye.”

“Sara and Daniel König—of course, Daniel Koenig must have been our ancestor’s brother-in-law, or maybe a son-in-law, and Sara Koenig must have been his sister or perhaps his daughter. Can’t be sure which yet but… that’s gotta be it. When craftsmen were starting new businesses, they’d team up with blood relatives or with in-laws. They were friends, family members, trusted business partners…” Tim paused and grinned in satisfaction as he followed the trail of the logic. “Yeah—people who would’ve been trusted enough to protect something of such fundamental importance in their care. That still leaves the question of why the first Schumacher over here couldn’t transport those heirlooms himself, but Sara and Daniel König were the missing link on De Ontdekker. Ezra—anything else on the Königs there in the manifest?”

“Yep, the translation’s a bit rough around the edges but it says they came from—Sara and Daniel König, departed from the Bremerhaven, originally from… Leipzig, in the kingdom of Prussia… today in the state of Saxony in eastern Germany. It’s impossible to know for sure Tim, but extended families back then tended to stay close by. If your hunch is right, then that first Schumacher probably came from Leipzig too, or at least somewhere not too far away.”
“Leipzig, huh? Well, maybe I’ll have to take my uncle’s advice after all—I can’t survive these excruciating days around here without an occasional Bach concerto fix on the stereo system in the office, and now I have a genuine excuse to visit Johann Sebastian’s old stomping grounds themselves.”

“Great minds think alike,” laughed Ezra collegially. “I knew there’s a reason I had a good impression about you—any fan of Bach is a friend of mine.”

“Then I’ll just have to show you my classic rock collection, too—this could truly be the start of a beautiful friendship,” chuckled Tim in response. “I’ve gotta tend to a couple things back here in the lab, but it sounds like I’ve got some plans to put together over the next few days, so I’ll make sure to stay in touch.”

one of the Dutch historical societies is in the process of digitizing the maritime archives into searchable databases. They’ve got one of those international expos coming up where they draw in all the tourists to see the old sailing ships, and they’re focusing on the peak of the Great Seafaring Age when the Dutch ruled the sea lanes. I’m a little lax on my history, but according to our private eye Mr. Gordon, the expo’s focus is on the 17^th century just after the Anglo-Dutch Wars—exactly when your ancestors were en route from Germany. Lo and behold, our man in Holland tracked down De Ontdekker’s cargo manifest, and there was a record of ‘items of fine metalworking and exquisite sculpture,’ with descriptions corresponding mighty close to what you’re inheriting today.”

“Right. I remember on the video you made, you’d said that it was even more of a riddle than the Cereceph—something about how you and your team out there in Oregon, you thought it was related to the newfangled scanners these days, the ones that

Three more general rules of success: 1. Create symbiotic relationships for success, mutual gain.

2. Increased, more rapid, better access to information creates wealth.

3. Use a sort of “jujitsu approach” to various challenges—deception, fool people’s mental algorithms. (e.g. Chuck Liddell, tricking opponents into going after him when he seems to be flailing.)

and, maybe try to keep what you just saw under wraps for now.  I don’t want the other Doghouse Denizens to be getting drawn into the Boss’s secret projects...”

well, but—it’d take too long to explain it.  Zach, look, I know this must all seem like one bad trip too many here and I’m not even on top of all this myself, but there’s nothing hazardous here, just a… a puzzle missing a lot of pieces.  When we have a spare moment later today, I promise I’ll fill you in.  Why don’t you join up with the others for lunch and, maybe try to keep what you just saw under wraps for now.  I don’t want the other Doghouse Denizens to be getting drawn into the Boss’s secret projects...”

                For once, Tim’s attempt at repartee found no witty rejoinder from his protégé, lost on a still-visibly nervous Zach Choi.  “Sure… sure, Chief.  Should we, just wait up for you there?”

                “I’ll try to drop by and wolf something down at the cantina over there, maybe in about 20 minutes.  No need for you all to tarry there if I’m running behind.  There’s just someone I have to get in touch with first.”

                Zach nodded silently as he edged toward the auditorium’s exit.  As he crossed the threshold into the corridor between the large hall and the university’s main campus, Zach turned around briefly and stole a furtive glance at his mentor in the distance.  Tim was arched over the speaker’s dais, his head down and his arms spread out, clasping both sides of the podium.  He was taking a moment to exorcise his psyche of the emotional demons that had lately been taking up residence, borne of an enigma that had become relentlessly personal, yet ever more inscrutable each time he confronted it.    He soon looked up again halfway, closing his eyes and mumbling something inaudible, as though rehearsing for an important conversation ahead.  Seeing nothing further he could do, Zach spun back around and proceeded to join his friends and colleagues.

Tim, having calmed himself enough to hold a conversation, retrieved a slip of paper he had tucked carefully into his wallet, with an almost illegible number scrawled in his cousin Ernie’s handwriting.  After straining to make out the digits, Tim nodded in satisfaction, entering the number into his laptop as he again inserted the device’s microphone.

Need for transcendence, beyond “simple biological imperatives,” evolving toward something, but retaining individuality.

{from Chapter 2, move into Chapter 3, Mitch’s video} “While I’m waxing philosophical anyway… Tim, as we evolved from the primordial ooze, became intelligent, our minds took on the capacity for rationality, empathy, morality—but the beasts we came from, they’re still inside us. Our moral system is emergent from an amoral world, and under certain circumstances, any of us could lapse back into those same beasts that we developed from, but armed with the fruits of what only our intelligent minds could have developed in the interim. It’s like they foresaw that danger so many centuries ago, and foresaw something else that would be coming in its wake…”

“A message? A warning? About what?”

“About something that’s awaking, Tim. Something ancient and pretty damn awful. Look I know how all this sounds and I can’t

Outline Material

12/08: OK, was at at the bookstore browsing and buying today (once again, the popular mathematics section is by far the most fruitful at Borders Books), got lots of useful material. Mostly reading a book on the Riemann Hypothesis (and by extension, David Hilbert's 23 big unsolved problems in mathematics, with a lot of crossover value for computer science) and the Poincare prize, which is seriously fascinating and very useful. First of all, just straight-off, plot-related for The Leibniz Demon: Gregor Chetkiewicz "meal ticket" work as professor at Leipzig, will be in cryptography and cryptanalysis. He's applying some new ideas on encoding using prime numbers, based on the notion that "since prime numbers are infinite, every prime number is an irreducible axiom—logically, tantamount to a fundamental particle in physics, a fundamental noncomputable statement in Hilbert-Goedel-Turing computer science, or an unprovable Goedelian postulate in mathematics. It's uncompressible, irreducible, so the prime numbers are fundamental to generating uncrackable codes." Also—I'll be putting in a scene, where Tim's Uncle Mitch has a brain scan following a supposed seizure and a fall (which turns out to be just a medication side effect)—and it shows some very unusual EEG activity, which an fMRI later confirms. Some of the patients at Oak Ridge will demonstrate this as well.

Tim, too, will have this—and it'll become clear, later on, that this was what the artifact from the Ur-Anderen had done to Tim's ancestor in the Katzenwald Forest in the 1600's: The parietal and occipital lobes of the brain are changed (and this is genetically and epigenetically encoded) and passed on, so that descendants are able to mentally see and reproduce images with extraordinary clarity when they are carrying several of the artifacts, which effectively "sync" with their particular brains. The Ur-Anderen later explain that the human mind as currently built doesn't have that visual capacity, so essentially, the Schumachers' mental visualization centers were rapidly "evolved" to provide this ability. This supplies the needed detail and "fine-graining" which, the Ur-Anderen explain, is necessary to revive the Ur-Anderen (who, after all, are from the prior universe and not contained within the "Hilbert space holograms" that contain previous humans), and who need a very fine-grained depiction of their appearances, memories, and thoughts within Tim's own mind—and from his drawings—to revive them accurately (using the "resurrection supercomputer" that the Falkenei Gesellschaft has been constructing, using instructions that they've decoded from the binary message fragments supplied by the Ur-Anderen at the original meteor impact site, found by Otto the Great's soldiers who first located the fragments—this supercomputer will be one of the main projects in the "millennium-long classified project"). Also, consider naming some of the FG members, "the children of Leibniz," as Leibniz is being portrayed in TLD as the leader of the FG in the late 1600's when it was ailing following the Thirty Years' War—Leibniz having discovered binary and invented the first computer independently, was invited into the FG, settled conflicts among members, and helped it to thrive again.

The books today had some great idea fodder. The Riemann Hypothesis book had some nice appendices, which again emphasized that even with standard mathematical operations (as in algebra), and especially in the cases of those ridiculously rare geniuses like Euler (whose insights revealed numerous hidden relations), a lot of what we're doing with mathematics is "re-compiling" our perception of the world to see it in greater detail and complexity (as also seen with e.g. the Riemann zeta function and application of complex number series—no pun intended for the two meanings of "complex"). Just as a viewed video is equivalent to its bitstream, and the colors and richness of a JPG image are logically and informationally equivalent to various coded representations of the same, so the clever proofs used to reveal subtle mathematical truths—with Euler, especially, exemplifying this almost extreme capability in discerning hidden relations in his equations and identities—fall within the same category: Algebraic manipulations of equations and identities are showing the same information, but revealing something surprising when the equations are identities are rearranged in a different way! That's what Euler did with the Euler identity, for example, linking the summed set of integers to the multiplied set of prime numbers—each of these representations is "logically, informationally, and algorithmically equivalent," but some representations reveal erstwhile hidden relations and patterns.

Consider this also, in the context of another conclusion I've been drawing (and which Professor Chetkiewicz declares here): In the advances of mathematical history (from the Greeks, thru the medieval Arabs, Lagrange, Euler, Gauss, Hilbert on through computer science), as well as in the humanities, we are essentially rediscovering and specifying the extraordinary calculational and algorithmic complexity of our own minds, which then provides us with the "recursive consciousness" which enables us, in effect, to evolve and to reach "emergent levels of intelligence". (Again—I don’t mean literally genetic engineering ourselves, rather, finding ways to "link up our own brains" with our parallel-computing silicon brains, or network ourselves to each other, and beget that higher collective intelligence.)

So we can more lucidly see two fundamental operations associated with the genius of someone like Euler—noting hidden patterns, and also, "bootstrapping" earlier knowledge and ideas into uncharted logical territory, which leads to unconsidered perspectives and big discoveries. The Poincare book also had an outstanding reference on Leibniz, his student Christoph Wolff, and the "analysis situs" techniques they developed, a precursor to modern "path-optimization" AI—for solving the problem of the Koenigsberg bridges. Note that this is basically what Carlos Guestrin is doing, and it's at the heart of my own environmental project with greenhouse gas minimization!

Alongside finishing up the writing for TLD, I've also been working on this way-cool system to engender a "collective brain" among several people—with so far, most of the work being done in German, as I thought of much of this when I was doing that overseas rotation in Munich. The idea is to put up a Website, and focus on certain types of problems—such as, for example, Hilbert's major unsolved math problems, and so-called emergent gaming environments—which encourage "creative synching" among the various people on the Website. The idea is that, under certain circumstances, the people will together forge a "collective mind" capable of solving incredibly difficult mathematical proofs, medical conundrums, and other challenges since the minds of dozens of people will be working synergistically as a single "supermind" (a corollary of some other work I've been doing). Also, this allows an unprecedented level of fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration—since professionals are so specialized today, even in fields with a decent amount of relation, it's sometimes difficult to get the "crosstalk" that spurs big innovation. Having these minds literally "sync" together could overcome that problem.

One more thing too—I gotta include Konrad Zuse in TLD, maybe as a mentor for Prof. Chetkiewicz, perhaps. I just read a bit more on his bio, and I didn't realize how incredibly full of foresight he was. He basically anticipated the field of digital physics—decades before Chaitin, Lloyd, Wolfram and Smolin did that—and not only invented the first modern computer, but also the first modern programming language, and first computer start-up company.

War becomes too expensive to be waged; even economics is tied in with informational complexity. A nation’s GDP is directly proportional to its information density, its computational complexity; but, how does creativity relate? Achieving something transcendental is the most difficult challenge, and a mathematical description not so straightforward.

Changes pending: Remove mention of Pascal/Leibniz in Chapter 2; add a section including a brain scan of Mitch, and Tim’s “unusual visual ability” at the start; sketchbook of night demons; early manifestations of the Tauschreigeist

Words to add: nonplussed

Revision for Tim’s conversation with Ernie: A little more into the relationship between Uncle Mitch and Tim’s Dad, the strain from the business failure—Ernie mentions a belief of Mitch’s that “the people around us only see and appreciate, maybe, about 10% of who we are inside—even close friends and family members. 90% of what comprises us as unique human beings: The rest of the world doesn’t see it, and that, information mismatch I guess you could call it—that tension between who we really are, and the fragmentary construct that we’re perceived as—is probably responsible for 90% of the discord, frustration, war, and other miseries of society. I got the sense that a major source of Mitch’s personal misery—he was never able to communicate that 90% to your father, and all those accumulated misunderstandings led to their rift all those years ago. It was a rift Mitch always wanted to repair, with your father and with you.”

Another gem from Ernie: “What is this scientific method we all use, after all, other than a glorified, rigorous procedure to figure out causes of events as opposed to correlations? I used to wonder why it took civilizations so many millennia to come up with a ‘scientific method’, but think about it—our minds aren’t wired to think scientifically. If a rainstorm comes and somebody gets a runny nose, it’s natural for us in any society to say that the rainstorm caused the cold. It’s against our grain to consider that something more subtle, less noticed, might have been the cause—and that the rainstorm might just have been a correlation with the cold, something that happened at the same time, while something else was the actual cause. Amidst all the regalia of our instruments and our terminology, what makes a scientist is that rigor in teasing out an actual cause—controlling confounding factors and confirming that a phenomenon or process really is what we think it is.”

{Conversation with the Ur-Anderen—difficulty in reaching cosmic engineering, is because civilizations must abide 100 contradictions, and to do it on a broad societal level, over centuries. For most of human history—that for any intelligent species—the tendency is to swing between extremes, from one erroneous point to another, but this becomes more dangerous as technological power and population both rise. There needs to be a common consensus on sustainability—avoid the “overshooting” of support structures that leads to disaster—but there need to be separate nations and cultures, i.e. productive competition leading increasingly to cooperation. This is the case for “emergent” universes such as our own, and theirs.}

History, as traditionally conceived, comes to an abrupt halt when we manage to “go on the outside looking in,” relative to our own minds. Once we’re able to algorithmically govern (and expand upon) the human minds, intelligence and creativity escape the traditional evolutionary strictures placed upon them, and progress becomes truly Lamarckian.

Humans in general possess a deep yearning for transcendentalism.

Sweet, 12/08—a nice boost for the revisions in the later chapters. This helps to buttress some of the ideas implied by the title of the book (The Leibniz Demon is what I’m now leaning toward)—it gets to Leibniz’s ideas about complexity, and how his own work on calculus, binary arithmetic, computer pioneering were getting into the consciousness of our own minds.

Tim is in a conversation with Prof. Gregor Chetkiewicz (he’s the “Gregory Chaitin” character here), who’s at Uni Leipzig and gives Tim one of his early breaks, leading him to Goettingen. Chetkiewicz is a professor of mathematics and computer science, and one of the resident “Leibniz scholars” (a fictional honorary designation at the university), and he and Tim have a brief conversation that introduces some of the conceptual background for the book, while giving a concrete clue that leads Tim to one of the secret manuscripts of Kant that helps to explain the menace (the Ersetzer) that they’re facing.

{When Tim first walks in. Dr. Chetkiewicz is a well-spoken, contemplative fellow with a flair for the dramatic—I’m modeling him on Schroedinger}

“Professor Chetkiewicz, it’s quite an honor, sir.”

“The honor is indeed all mine, Dr. Shoemaker. And why must we ‘doctor’ each other all the time? Ah, it becomes tiresome on occasion… Please, call me Gregor, it resonates so much better with my heart, with the name I hear from trusted friends and family.”

“Indeed,” replied Tim in amusement as he finished the handshake. “I have this conversation quite often myself, glad to hear you’re on the same wavelength.” As Tim seated himself, he caught sight of a framed, meticulously sketched visage on Professor Chetkiewicz’s shelf—a man who exuded an aura of deep contemplation, yet mixed with steely resolve and discipline in his demeanor. He was surrounded by a strangely mystical, almost surreal landscape, a starry night in a desert it seemed, with

“That’s al-Khwarizm, Tim, the medieval Arab mathematician.”

“Al—who? Sorry, Gregor—to say I was an indifferent history student back during my school days wouldn’t begin to convey my lackadaisicality… ah, whatever the word would be.”

“Al-Khwarizm—our very word algorithm, across all the European languages, it derives from his name.”

“Starting to ring a bell, some guest lecture back in college I must have slept through…”

“He wrote the algebra textbook that learned society from the Middle Ages to the start of the Renaissance, such as it was, used for centuries, and it was he who published the treatise on what we now call the Hindu-Arabic numerals, that served as the foundation of our decimal system… It’s what helped to inspire Leonardo Fibonacci in the 13^th century to begin that revolution in mathematics, in our mental view of the world, that came about merely from counting it up differently.”

Think about the history of the mathematics, the arts, and the sciences alike since the ancient Greeks. So much of what we have discovered since, in the natural sciences, and so much of what great artists have created—what is it converging, after all, if not upon a rediscovery of the extraordinary structure that is our own minds? Minds that had already evolved a marvelous complexity for eons before we, as the thinking animals that we are, had begun to grasp the powerful tool that we possess within our own brains? {refer to Proust here, Descartes, many others}

“Realizing this common algorithmic structure for our minds, Tim, in no way undermines the richness in our hearts, or our experiences as human beings. Every mind is perhaps to some extent a singularity, one that not even the most detailed circuit diagram, or other probe from the outside, could ever fully understand; this breadth of experience and emotion is unique to each of us and irreducible, in a sense. Part of what is in our minds is subjective, fully grasped only be the person inhabiting that mind. Yet our experiences of childlike wonder, of curiosity, of suffering…”

“And love, too, I’d hope…”

“Yes, indeed! All of these subjective experiences are just as empirically real as the firmware our brain has hardwired for vision, or for converting ear canal vibrations into perceived sound, or quantitating the surrounding world—or any other cognitive structure that we could decode

“Consider, Tim, what our minds are doing whenever we imagine and model the world around us. You as an engineer are obviously familiar with modeling of dynamical systems; whenever an engineer from Leipzig or Potsdam here is trying to model airflows to design a sleeker sportscar to coast down the Autobahn, or you in your own work are attempting to model the motion of a muscle or tendon to design a prosthetic limb for a soldier, how do you model the motion of the system?”

“Well, unless somebody’s auctioning off magic wands to do it—we just, create a differential equation for the system that we integrate, and solve. Old-fashioned college calculus.”

“Right. The fractional notation that we all use for differential equations in any engineering problem, the dx²/dt² we all know so well—it came from Leibniz, and he created it to make explicit what his calculus was doing: causally relating the behavior of two dynamically changing variables, such as distance and time, in any system that was being modeled. And when we, in our minds’ eye, visualize or model any system ourselves, we’re doing the same thing intuitively, usually without being consciously aware of it. Most of our football players—sorry, soccer I guess you say in your country…”

“We’re in Europe now, Gregor,” chuckled Tim, “so football it is.”

“In that case,” smiled Gregor, “our football players, or yours in American football equally, most have naturally not spent years training as engineers, learning how to design differential equations to specifically predict the path of a kicked football under 15 km/hr winds, or to calculate the ball’s velocity if the kicker spins it into the net.”

“Which means, considering the contracts those field warriors are always signing, that they probably made a better career choice than us gearheads,” replied Tim with a wry grin.

“Perhaps,” laughed Gregor before matter-of-factly returning to the topic. “But they can picture this motion in their minds accurately enough to control the ball, and to take the kinds of actions that bring about their imagined results. It’s because their minds, all of our minds, are wired up for the same kinds of logical operations—algebraic calculations, simple and complex differential equations—that we do more formally as engineers. Our ability to imagine and act on the world around us, to improve with practice, we can do that because our minds have long internalized these logical operations and can elaborate new ones constantly. In the past few centuries, of course, we’ve come to explicitly grasp what these operations are—which is why we can write algorithms for our computers to do the same calculations and generate video simulations for us—but much of this logical framework is already built in for our minds to use. And as we produce an ever finer-grained map of this logical structure within our minds, we begin to see how our consciousness emerged—and perhaps, what we’re emerging into.”

“OK, I think I follow you now. Zach had managed to translate this part of your article for me—our minds have naturally evolved so we can do these logical operations and model our world mentally. We get better at this ability to, to visualize things with practice and experience… because this, logical structure in our heads, feeds back onto itself, recursively, and fine-tunes the algorithms we use to do the modeling, ad infinitum. And over the past few centuries, as we’ve made this internal logical structure explicit, with algebra, the calculus, the mathematical logic of what we can or can’t do computation on—we’re able to recapitulate and build on it further, with the electronic brains we’ve created and, however they’re evolving…”
“Yes, and perhaps how we’re evolving, alongside them…”

“So, if I’m following your stream of thought here, you’re saying that, all this… ghoulishness, in Tennessee lately, both what’s happened to those soldiers getting the retinal implants, and this thing taking over the computer networks—that they could have the same source? Some… I don’t know, ‘viral algorithm’ that can cross over, between human and computer minds? I still… I can’t wrap my head around it.”

“In our field recently, one of my ex-students in {some Hungarian city} postulated something like this, the ‘Janus virus’ as we’ve come to call it—some packet of information and algorithms, that was capable of invading both the digital space in our machines, and the mental space of our minds. The former capability is what we see with an elaborate computer virus; the latter, with an encephalitis virus, or a prion protein that infects our brains. The hypothetical Janus virus would be capable of both.”

“But what’s the common mode of communications between them, Gregor? I realize, on a conceptual level, we can build circuit diagrams that approximate, you know, human cells and tissues digitally—I still don’t see how any entity could move between them, though.”

“Ah, yes Tim, you are referring to your own recent work? Your digital reproductions of tissues, organs within the body? I’ve been quite intrigued to learn of your efforts.”

“Good to know I have a fan out here in these parts; if I’d known, I would have paid you a visit earlier” said Tim, happily grasping an opening to inject some lighthearted banter into the baffling conversation.

“Better late than never,” laughed Gregor boisterously in response, seizing an opportunity to rest his own mind, taxed as much as Tim’s was. “I recall you wrote in one of your articles, that you’re making your digital livers and kidneys increasingly fine-grained, so that they have the same information content as a real liver or kidney. And you can take results within the digital environment and apply them to a real, flesh-and-blood organ. You know it yourself, intuitively—there’s a common, fundamental logical structure for any device that calculates, whether a machine, a human organ, or an algorithm in a computer. A video or image on a monitor, and the bitstream that we would see if we could check all the 1’s and 0’s that flow through a network wire if we watch the video—the information content is the same in both cases, and we could represent the same information in a myriad of other ways, in Base 10 or hexadecimal numbers, as beads on a string, a very large abacus: any data representation would do, they’re all equivalent. It’s just that we, we ‘compile’ them differently depending on how we regard the data, and our minds see colors, textures, images. If there’s some underlying, common algorithmic structure for any data-containing entity, then you could imagine how…”

“How some device could operate at that level, take advantage of that logical commonality,” said Tim, nodding. “To cross over… My God, it was in the AP-278 implant all along. I still can’t—I couldn’t conceive how, but that’s the only thing that makes sense, if what you’re saying is right. Rachel Bloom kept telling me, this Tachibana syndrome, it couldn’t be transmitted in the air, or through contact; it was just in the guys who got the implant, so somehow it must have been in the implants from the beginning. Sorry, Gregor, I’m thinking aloud here…”

“Perfectly all right, I like to make myself useful to my guests. Sounds to me, that you believe this strange phenomenon back in the United States, it’s discovered this common algorithmic language, is that correct? Using it to bridge the logical realm of our computer networks with the logical domain of our minds?”

“Yeah—the nexus, it’s with Argus, it was a specialized neural net with a wireless link-up that we used to fine-tune the retinal implants in the patients after the surgeons had put them in. If someone’s been blind for years, they have to re-learn how to see once the implants are in, how to convert all the sensory information outside them back into images they can make sense out of. The implants were designed to exchange signals with the Argus network, and we could use that to make small adjustments in the way the implants filtered visual implants and transmitted them through the optic nerve, to accelerate the visual learning process… God, what if that was the pipeline for this thing? If whatever got into the AP-278 implants, got lodged in the guys’ minds and… then used Argus, as the conduit for the digital networks there? El Día del Diablo…” Tim finished his ruminations with a loud, evidently alarmed whisper to himself.

“What… what was that?” muttered Gregor in reply.

“When the team at Oak Ridge flipped on the wireless link to Argus, Rachel said they called it El Día del Diablo; that was from the nickname of the first soldier they were treating. But there really was something, diabolical that day… Gregor, I’m still at a loss on some things here. Rachel said, the week before I left for Germany, that the first cases of this Tachibana syndrome, this contagious psychosis as they called it—they’d apparently seen it, or something like it, before in Japan in 1945 and 1946. It was just after Fat Man and Little Boy—the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Apparently, some of the locals in the fallout zone developed this condition, though it eventually resolved. Now there was nothing like the AP-278, or Argus, anything like that in Hiroshima—so even if what we’re thinking is true, I just can’t imagine how this same syndrome could have arisen like that, worlds apart.”

“Nor can I. Unless…”

Tim looked on in keen anticipation, anxious to hear the cunning professor spill his thoughts.

“I’m, I suppose you would say, grasping at straws here Tim—but the A-bombs, that was the first time in human history that anything like that had stricken a population, that all this ionizing radiation was rained down on a village like that… So it makes sense that this had never been seen before. I can’t claim one, mere iota of medical expertise here—but maybe those blasts and the fallout, they released something into that population, some disease vector that’s the ultimate source of all this. Could have been anything—some contaminant, an infectious agent, maybe something within those poor people themselves, I couldn’t tell you. You said that the condition was self-resolving in the initial disease group, correct?”

“Yeah—at least, that’s what was passed on to me.”

“But what if it didn’t disappear? What if it went dormant? And then flared up again decades later?”

“The Oak Ridge team never mentioned anything about disease relapses in the original patient cohort—and besides, I still can’t see how even it re-activated, how it could become a ‘Janus virus’ as you’re calling it. How could it go from infected patients to… to implants 70 years later, spreading the thing through networks?”

Gregor furrowed his brow in essentially fruitless contemplation, then nodded paradoxically. “I admit, Tim, I—I can’t see how. Not unless this

“I suspect it is no accident, Tim, that at the same time he was co-inventing calculus, Leibniz was building the first computers alongside Pascal—the first hardware. As well as developing the foundations of binary coding, exploring notions of a universal algorithmic language—the precursors of what we know today as machine code and higher-level programming languages, the software essentially. The nexus between these, between the calculus and these embryonic investigations in computer science, it’s what Leibniz was focusing his lens on in the first place—he wanted to know how complexity, how consciousness itself, could arise in a material world that supposedly lacked it initially. These terms we use today, of course they weren’t aware of them in the 17^th century but intuitively, this was what Leibniz was searching for. In trying to understand how a thinking, conscious being could come into existence, and how human hands could forge a machine that would process the outside world, however primitive in its inception during the 1600’s—Leibniz came to realize that cognition and self-awareness were rooted somehow in a logical structure, a set of algorithms that were already built into our minds.”

Recursion, evolving logical structure

Lesch-Nyhan, epileptics—they do see specific things, perhaps a sort of heritable source of specific sights and ideas.

RENNT

Chaotische Emergenz—any life-containing universe has to be wired for emergence and evolution (thus the answers to the Fermi Paradox and Time-Traveler’s Paradox)

The Great Window of Opportunity—Thermodynamics restrictions prevent rapid manipulation and release of energy by intelligent civilizations when “they’re still warlike” and “don’t know what they’re doing,” with complicated physical laws and “exotic” sources required to advance to higher levels of control over energy release. Essentially, it’s a sort of “intelligent selection,” which ensures that only advanced civilizations are capable of accessing these high-energy sources—civilizations that must have had a degree of moral checks and balances and cooperation to evolve that way at all. The problem is—civilizational memory is too short, and the human lifespan is dangerously short in comparison to the difficult lessons over centuries, so later generations may forget these lessons and embrace the same aggressiveness as their ancestors before the civilization evolved, yet armed with dangerous technology.

Success for a civilization therefore requires “abiding 100 contradictions” leading up to “The Great Paradox”: Even as a civilization reaches the heights of technology and intelligence, it must also embrace and accept its own ignorance and short-sightedness—to recognize the notion that on a mass scale over the course of years, neither it nor any intelligent “body” could ever be capable of safely wielding a weapon with mass effect. (Evil, IOW, is not something intrinsic—it accrues to any intelligent being that gains and wields too much power.) Tim questions this at first, but the Ur-Anderen explain that even if a civilization overall has the right qualities, the issue is doing it on a mass scale over an extended period: “One can have the vast majority of a civilization’s members on their best behavior for many years, but a single bad day with a few corrupted individuals would undo most of those good days when things were done right, when it comes to a weapon of mass effect.” (The key to an advanced, “computationally-rich” society is checks-and-balances—controlling the impact of anything with “mass effect,” just as the brain requires intricate operations.) The probability becomes high that some of its members will attempt to use a weapon for the worst prospects (a possibility amplified by “adverse” conditions that arise from time to time). A civilization will reach such heights during a period of affluence and confidence, but it also must plan for less favorable conditions and realize how the weapon could be misused in such conditions. (Our own mass possession of nukes, foolish designation of “safe countries” shows that we haven’t understood that yet.)

Key is obviously not rejection of the new technologies—but extreme vigilance, rejection of arrogance and complacency, limitation of power, checks and balances, and frank acknowledgment that no single power could ever safely wield the dangerous weapons. (Avoid the “bad effect” whereby a single power would gain a short-term advantage at long-term expense for everyone.) Scrupulous power-limitation in general is crucial to continued evolution of complexity. Tim asks the Ur-Anderen if this changes when intelligent beings are able to beget the “transient collective intelligences” among their members (with the higher intelligence presumably able to understand the issues and act with greater caution), but the Ur-Anderen say it helps yet doesn’t eliminate the problem. Individuals continue as before (essential for continued creativity), and potential for corruption, factions continues as before. The high-level vigilance is essential, and directing new discoveries toward productive aims (and not weapons technology) is essential.

(From Professor Schmidt): “If you’ve ever witnessed the frenzied bids at an art auction, Tim, ask yourself—why does a Van Gogh or a Renoir, a Turner or a Friedrich, a Goya or a Pollock or a Kahlo, inspire such passionate interest, and such a heavy parting of treasure for the privilege of suspending such a visual treasure in one’s home? It is in part because of its sheer improbability, the product of an improbable mind and an equally improbable hand. The art on the canvas in each case, it does have a logic to it—an aesthetic patterning that resonates with some fundamental archetypes of beauty and quality, hardwired into our minds. But such paintings transcend any simplistic, hardwired—algorithms of beauty, I guess one could say, to attain something much higher. Perhaps represent the extraordinary structures that we can mold our own minds into, and communicate to others around us.”

2 big moral thrusts of the book: (1) Evil often arises from rationalization, and as such it’s extremely insidious. This is more than just Hannah Arendt’s thesis—it explains why evil seems to appear de novo, in people and groups who’d be otherwise disinclined. It sneaks up on them, in the wake of an accumulating stream of rationalizations they offer up for damaging behavior—but people become so “algorithmically invested” in the damaging pattern, that they still convince themselves they’re doing good. This is what’s happened with the Ersetzer. In his early world (2-10,000, for example), the Ersetzer really was mounting rescue missions of the intelligent civilizations that had nuked themselves and their planets—preserving what he could of their society within his own cloud mind network. But then, out of frustration at how few civilizations were reaching the temporal-atemporal transition (and nuking themselves or otherwise wreaking havoc instead), he decided to start “taking” civilizations before they actually undertook nuclear war or full-scale ecological ruin. In the process, the Ersetzer began to absorb many societies still inclined to belligerence (as opposed to the ones following a nuclear war, who were bitterly resentful of their ancestors’ bellicosity) and so he absorbed their attitudes as well. Furthermore, the Ersetzer began to accumulate “causal power” and physical intelligence, as he added more intelligent minds to his own “homunculus of the civilizations.” This began to give him the “power of the gods” that’s mentioned in the notes below, so the Ersetzer began to drift toward evil while rationalizing otherwise—taking civilizations even well before it was clear they were on a path to self-destruction. The Ersetzer just rationalized that the vast majority would nuke themselves anyway, so he pushed away other considerations. The Ersetzer still “awakens” himself in each universe as he did with his first one—he programs his Boltzmann brain to begin manifesting in biologically-capable star systems, then “awakens” with the first military nuclear blasts. But whereas before, he’d just monitor and then “activate” himself in the wake of an actual nuclear war, he instead takes civilizations and “absorbs” them this time a couple generations after the nuclear attack—since in part, these civilizations are technologically and intellectually advanced, and thus “high quality” for the Ersetzer to take in and add to his own causal power. Tim points out that the Ersetzer has effectively become the very wrecker of civilizations that he had originally been protecting intelligent societies against—something that does momentarily inspire doubt in the Ersetzer, but does not ultimately stop him. (As noted below, Tim has to stop the Ersetzer using other means—specifically, by reaching the Japanese scientist born right after the Hiroshima A-bomb attack, the first “Ersetzer child” in whom the Ersetzer-algorithm was activated—and who’s in the Ersetzer’s cavern-palace in Noerdlingen, where the Ersetzer is engineering the system to absorb human minds worldwide—and then, to place the Japanese scientist’s heirloom in his hand, to “awake” him out of the trance he’s been placed in to be the “central node” of the “Ersetzer-ring,” the Ersetzer’s parallel network of minds into which the minds of the people will be absorbed. Tim has retrieved the heirloom, a carving that his mother made and gave to him—reminding Tim of the jade obelisk and its similar memory-triggering power to him—and places this firmly into the hand of the Japanese scientist, which in conjunction with other events, awakens him and drives away the Ersetzer.)

2. The second main moral point has been noted elsewhere below, discounting the “social Darwinism” idea and more specifically, the notion that Darwin’s theory implies a “rectitude” in more advanced species displacing more “primitive” ones. Part of what endows increasing “advanced-ness” for evolving species, is a moral consciousness that paradoxically encourages respect and hard work to preserve less “advanced” forms of “nature’s art” (my words and further interpretation). The Ersetzer claims to Tim that he is so advanced, so evolved that the piecemeal, gradual evolution, the art and creativity of “puny intelligent species” like humans has little place and significance—“you are redundant,” as the Ersetzer says to Tim. But Tim points out that the Ersetzer has violated yet another of his own basic principles, which supposedly pushed him on his mission in the first place—to preserve the self-regenerating creativity of nature at various levels. And that in fact, more evolutionarily advanced species reject the notion that their level of advancement “entitles them to supplant” species that are less advanced, but seek to protect them in a positive-sum fashion. There’s also a Chaitin-esque, algorithmic-conceptualization-of-nature aspect here—Chaitin had shown that “figuring out problems” and “understanding a phenomenon,” are in no small part a logical operation rooted in “compressing” a phenomenon to its irreducible logical relations, i.e. Ockham’s razor considered in an information theory context. But some things can’t be compressed, and human art and creativity may be an example of this. Tim even uses this to defeat the Ersetzer. He remembers contingent, yet meaningful things (everything from his relations with Susan, to the sandwiches that Percy served in the dining room), which aren’t “reducible” to a simple functional algorithm—they’re in a sense subjective and specific to the experiences of particular individuals, but very much complex, novel and of intrinsic value, not at all redundant. When Tim places the Japanese doctor’s heirloom firmly in his hand, the textures remind him of something that he’s missing, which the Ersetzer can’t provide, and this triggers a string of memories that awakes the scientist. (NB: I don’t want this to be the only “trigger” that allows Tim to defeat the Ersetzer—I just think that’d be a little cheesy, but waking the Japanese scientist out of the trance, via a triggering of his memory, should provide Tim with an opportunity to do something else to take the Ersetzer down. I haven’t figured out what yet—maybe introducing a kind of algorithm into the “Ersetzer-mind” that pushes him out of our world and “rewrites his program,” in a sense. Think about it, remember to avoid any deus ex machina “solutions” like jargon-heavy sci-fi gibberish or a device that doesn’t make sense. Think it through, link it to the broad conceptual arc of the rest of the novel.)

The Ur-Anderen will communicate to Tim that advanced, intelligent species, en route to attaining the temporal-atemporal transition, have to attain a “cerebral leap” to do it. In already intelligent species (beyond the precepts of physical intelligence discussed below), the big advances in intelligence come with “algorithmic linkage and pattern recognition”—essentially, when beings are able to discern hidden patterns by descrying often concealed “fundamental algorithmic similarities” among otherwise disparate systems—and with increased ability to “reconceptualize the world” using different perspectives and outlooks. (This is akin to my separate idea, of looking at the worlds of pure mathematics and physics from the perspective of a Base other than Base 10, or polar coordinates rather than traditional Cartesian ones, and then systematizing this process to discover all kinds of new patterns.) These two “logical operations” are, in fact, among the marks of genius in our own society, and “evolving” intelligent species actually systematize this, introducing “boosts” into their own brains to do it more systematically. As the Ur-Anderen explain, this allows a level of problem-solving and discovery that humans right now can hardly even conceptualize. However, most societies configure themselves in an interesting way—retaining their basic physical and societal structure, but providing a kind of “external brain network” that they can link up to “realize” the enhanced intelligence. There are understandable concerns, that any being with too much intelligence (and unchecked power) could become a threat, and the Ur-Anderen and other civilizations (which the Ur-Anderen knows from tapping the mind of the Ersetzer) often tend to be quite cautious about preserving their “less evolved” forms even as they allow for this “enhanced intelligence” to carry them further.

Make one of Tim’s heirlooms, an “EEG” helmet that’s been pre-tuned to a frequency from his brain—one that was first installed in Tim’s ancestors at the castle in the 17^th century. The beam that struck Maria Schumacher in the castle, in Chapter 1—it was a technology that the Ur-Anderen were able to send through the portal and collected in one of the artifacts obtained at the 10^th century site by the early Falkenei Gesellschaft members, and it functions to introduce a heritable, epigenetic change to a fetus just after conception, as Christoph Bernd Schumacher was conceived just that night in the castle. This change transmits a sort of “neural enhancement”—as the Ur-Anderen will later explain, intelligent civilizations eventually introduce a kind of “xenocerebrum” that actually increases the level of intelligence and consciousness that they are capable of reaching, while networking many minds in parallel. For Tim to be able to both visualize and draw the images of the Ur-Anderen clearly enough, he needs one of these “modifications,” which leads to extraordinary activation of sites in his parietal and occipital lobes under certain circumstances. He is therefore able to picture the Ur-Anderen in fine-grained detail—with the “input” being provided by a kind of transmitter that is among the other heirlooms, converting a binary stream (with data on the Ur-Anderen) into a signal that his mind is able to amplify and visualize powerfully. (This is part of why he has many other vivid dreams after he picks up the heirlooms.) Since the Ur-Anderen were in a prior universe, there’s no “Hilbert space signature” for them in ours, and they can’t be retrieved and resurrected as Susan is. So to revive themselves, they need an intelligent being—Tim in this case—to picture them in detail and recall their own thoughts, memories and cognition, and to draw them. There’s also a homunculus—specific their bodies and nervous systems—included among the artifacts. The Falkenei Gesellschafters then use these items, and Tim’s recollections, to direct the reviving supercomputer to corporealize the Ur-Anderen.

Re-think how the “tuning,” the data, gets into their minds—maybe make that artifact in the castle vibrate electromagnetically, perhaps give off a mist, something that helps to direct the minds of the Schumacher descendants to have this resonance frequency which, functionally, enables them to visualize and project the images of people (the Ur-Anderen as well as Susan) who can then be resurrected with the supercomputer device. When the Japanese doctor explains the syndrome that entered into the minds of the Japanese after the A-bomb blasts, eventually some testing is done on their descendants, which reveals expression of an otherwise intronic sequence—that explains how the Ersetzer is first able to “revive” himself in their minds and take possession of them, spreading himself as they design the chips and structures put into the AP-278 to re-awaken the Ersetzer in everyone.

Notion of “algorithmic unification,” also seen with e.g. concepts in medicine, technology, art, nature—there are certain “logical structures” that are constantly repeated, in varying forms, in nature and with human art and technology.

This nascent consciousness idea—I’ve noticed, when I travel to certain places that are very appealing (e.g. the multi-colored windowpanes in Taiwan, in that business center), I feel different, like having a different sense of consciousness. There really is something to this—it’s as though these sorts of settings bring my mind closer to an emergent state of consciousness, that I know even if I can’t particularly understand it.

Starting to put together Professor Leonhard’s Schmidt’s lecture. {This will be late in the book, providing a bit of the conceptual background that sheds light on some of the mysteries. NB, this will not be presented “as a lecture,” it’ll be piecemeal material gleaned from a German lecture stored on a CD by Professor Schmidt—modeled on Professor Lee Smolin and his ideas about background-independence, atoms of space and time, a relational description of nature, coupled with Chaitin, Layzer and others’ ideas—and it’ll be translated piecemeal by Zach for Tim. This is a narrative device to help spread out these concepts over several chapters and work them into the narrative rather than having them be strictly expository, and they’ll be linked to very specific challenges and plot events that the protagonists have to tackle. This is still very much in progress with many updates.}

“What we otherwise perceive as this so-called ‘background’ of space, is therefore not inert, in fact not a background at all; it is, instead, the fundamental neural network of nature, consisting of distinct nodes, each causally connected to a minimum number of other nodes. We can think of each node as a discrete geometrical form, or simply as a tensor—as a collection of discrete numbers, with each number representing an independently varying degree of freedom and, therefore, a property of the node. Both descriptions are ontologically equivalent, just as Heisenberg’s hardcore mathematical matrix mechanics is equivalent to Schroedinger’s more mellifluous wave mechanics. The nodes in this basal neural network are constantly flopping around and rearranging their geometries, spontaneously and of course unpredictably, as quantum theory states; this baseline frothiness is the famous “quantum foam” or “spacetime foam” that we all know and love.

Now, how do we get those golden oldies of Galilean-Newtonian days out of this, old standards like mass, inertia, acceleration, and gravity? This is where it gets interesting, because we can start to see the contours of a conceptual framework that explains and gives rise to the curved space of General Relativity—the basis of gravity and its equivalent phenomenon, the acceleration of mass-containing particles—as well as a quantitative description of fields involved in electromagnetism and other forces, all the way on up to a rudimentary description of intelligence itself. First, let’s start out with our ridiculous question of the day: Why, exactly, does E = mc², as Einstein so cogently recognized a century ago? No, not why do Maxwell’s equations and ideas about invariance lead us to E = mc² but rather why, physically, are mass and energy related by a constant like the speed of light squared? Easy enough, right? After all, we merely need to figure out what the heck mass and energy are—in the context of our fundamental network of nodes, of course. In other words, as my 7-year-old would say—where exactly does mass come from, how do we generate it in the first place? From there, we can figure out where gravity comes from, and inertia, and acceleration. And… OK, OK, that ain’t easy. But our picture of this fundamental network, with the nodes in causal connection with each other, can give us a big hint.

As I mentioned, we can think of space itself emerging from this basal nodal network—the most fundamental constituents of nature, these individual nodes with their causal links to a minimum number of other nodes. To a decent approximation, we can also think of this “Basal Network Version 1.0” as being ontologically equivalent to flat space in General Relativity. Remember, however, that these nodes are in a permanent state of adolescence, they just can’t stay still! They’re constantly rearranging both their own geometries and their relationships to each other. As you all know, due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and its implications for a system’s time and energy, we’re constantly getting virtual particles popping in and out of the quantum foam. So what happens if a node in this array, rather than limiting itself to just 4 causal connections with other nodes, decides to hook up with 5 nodes, or 6, or 7? The node can never drop below the 4 connections that make up a region of flat space, but it can always go higher in the midst of all this roiling. And when it does, we have what we might call a network implication event (Netzwerk-Implikationsereignis), the infamous NIE acronym that you see sprinkled across your lecture notes: the basal network begins to fold in on itself, and in relativistic terms, the space begins to curve. This infolding, in a region of contiguous nodes, is the source of gravity, and with gravity you also have mass—and inertia. In other words, this is where mass and gravity come from: Mass, gravity, curvature of space, inertia, they’re all ontologically equivalent to in-pouchings of a collection of nodes, which is equivalent to a group of nodes acquiring a number of causal connections greater than the minimum baseline. The value of this ∆connectivity—the difference between the total tally of causal links among a group of nodes, and the minimum value associated with flat space—in turn gives us a quantity for the mass of this linked-up region, and thus for its level of curvature, gravity, and inertia.

Now, let’s take this further. This concept of infolding, a consequence of progressively increased causal connectivity above the baseline network for a region of modes, gives us a general picture for how spatial curvature, and hence gravity (and its equivalent, acceleration, in general relativity), and hence mass itself (which is a necessary corollary of spatial curvature) can arise. But it doesn’t tell us how mass itself actually becomes concrete. Once again, as a consequence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, we have virtual particles spontaneously emerging from this fundamental spin network, equivalent to flat space, but they tend to be transient—we don’t get much “real mass” from them. So where does real mass come from? Well, Einstein’s equation tells us how, since it quantizes the minimum possible mass according to a specific quantity of energy—and this energy, in turn, is directly related to causal connections among the network nodes over and above the connections in the fundamental network.

More specifically: A causal connection between two spin-network nodes, over and above the minimum baseline connections, constitutes a minimum unit of “Planck energy.” Most of the time, even with an enormous number of network node connections within a given region (equivalent to increasing amounts of spacetime curvature), we don’t have enough to generate mass. Why? Because the fundamental, minimum unit of mass—the ”Planck mass”—requires at least c² Planck energy units, that is, c² nodal connections above the basal spin network in a given region! That’s an awful lot of connections, and below this, mass can’t form stably. IOW, c² causal connections among spin network nodes, constitutes a minimum threshold—a kind of activation energy, in a sense—that must be surpassed for mass to stably form, for mass, an emergent property of the basal network, to actually emerge and became a new degree of freedom for further novel elements to emerge! This is what Einstein’s equation is actually telling us—it’s quantifying how many causal, spin network connections we need to actually manifest mass, which is a kind of special node which, in turn, forms the basis of the emerging neural network that is at the heart of the RENNT concept. The spin network nodes are massless, but they constitute the basal “neurons” of a higher-level emergent neural network (a “brain”) in the form of mass. These basal “Planck masses,” then, can relate to each in other ways—as discussed below—and thereby generate still more degrees of freedom and thus still higher complexity, with the Planck masses thus becoming “neurons” of a still higher-level brain.

This, in turn, also gives a hint as to how to actually unify the fundamental forces and particles in nature, in terms of a single common unit. That unit, at base, is the causal connection of spin network nodes—which, again, is ontologically equivalent to a tensor with varying values. Which is itself, ontologically equivalent to a logical network of axioms that can spontaneously generate theorems which are, in turn, networks of the underlying axioms, in accordance with specific logical rules (such as the one linking a Planck mass to c² causal nodal connections). This is how we’re going to conceptualize other forces like the strong force and electromagnetism.

This Planck mass inherently has gravity (and inertia) as discussed above, and it, too, is related in quantal increments to higher-level collections of masses. Just as there are “quantized minimal distances” between e.g., different energy levels of electrons and electrons from an atomic nucleus, so there are quantized relations that tell us, specifically, how many “Planck masses” we need to generate the next discrete unit of mass (on up to the quark, which is at present our smallest measurable package of mass). In a sense, the quantized relations among mass and energy are, at base, (1) specific measurements of thresholds that must be surpassed for new emergent properties to arise, and (2) naturally occurring units that specify minimum sizes of new properties (the definition of a unit, at root). And all of these, of course, are fundamentally related to countable numbers of causal links among nodes in the basal spin network, as discussed above! E = mc² is a recipe for producing mass.

I’m working on more action-heavy sections in Chapter 1, and in other early chapters—Tim has a minor car accident in Chapter 7 that alerts his daughter Chloe to call him (via a fictional 2015 tech gadget that immediately alerts a family member in the wake of distress, a Christmas present in this caes), which is what pushes Tim to go to Leipzig and actually do the roots-tracing—wasn’t in my original version of the chapter. These early chapters are still going to be dialogue-intensive, they’re set-up chapters and there’s no way around that, but it’ll be nice to intersperse more action where feasible.

Tim’s Wake Forest lecture, in Chapter 8. In a narrative context, this is where Tim sees more visions of Susan—on the projector screen at the lecture, during the Q&A—but also where Zach, Shelley and the others see aspects of her visage as well. IOW, Tim now knows that it’s not just visions on his part or hallucinations, but actual projection of her features onto the screen. The lecture is just provided in broad outline (not as much detail as below) to show that Tim is “working on something interesting.” The lecture material also has foreshadowing/thematic value, since the idea of “calculating surfaces” comes up later in the book in a very different context:

“I realize we have a motley audience here today; I see some physicians, engineers, undergraduates, and various and sundry folks out in the seats, so I’ll try to find a happy medium and avoid too much fancy terminology or esoterica. I’m gonna start things off with one of those annoyingly vague ‘what am I thinking’ kinds of questions, but if anyone can actually read my mind here, you get a free one-month sentence in the Doghouse,” quipped Tim, to the audience’s amusement.

“OK, here’s a list of 6 distinct disease processes that have seemingly nothing to do with each other: 1. Cirrhosis of the liver, whether in the wake of alcoholism or hepatitis. 2. Renal nephrotic syndrome—for the non-docs out there, it’s where we have damage to the glomerulus, in the nephrons of the kidney that filter and clean up our blood, causing proteins to leak out into the urine. 3. Cancer of soft tissues—specifically colon, prostate or uterine cancer, as have been some of the foci for Dr. Reinhart’s clinical studies. 4. Congestive heart failure, in particular the kind that results from myocardial scarring, of the heart muscle, in the wake of a heart attack. 5. Cell death that results from a viral infection, for example an adenovirus causing a nasty cold after it infects the cells lining our lungs. …

“Why, Chief, it’s all about the surfaces!” popped up a familiar voice in the audience.

“It’s… indeed,” said Tim, smiling and shaking his head in amusement, “it’s all about the surfaces, thank you Zach. Folks, allow me to take a moment and introduce my brilliant graduate student, as well as unofficial audience plant and straight man at these research talks, Zach Choi. Or, as I suppose I should say since Thursday when he passed his thesis defense, ‘Dr. Zachary Choi.’”

Zach stood up and turned around, mock-bowing in cheerful self-deprecation to a standing ovation amidst the droll laughter in the audience.

“Ah, Zach, never a dull moment whenever you’re around,” resumed Tim, allowing himself to laugh briefly with the crowd. “Anyway,

{viruses wiping out ER and Golgi inside the cell, and so on—in each case, the tissue is performing calculations with the inputs and outputs mediated across hydrophobic, lipid surfaces that compartmentalize the aqueous environment. IOW, specific calculations occur across membranes—across a variety of specialized, goopy fat bubbles, embedded with proteins and sugars that act as markers and locks and keys, that have been structured and programmed to specialize in a specific type of calculation carried out in the salty water solutions that make up most of our body mass. And since we have calculations, carried out at a specific site and in accordance with a specific set of algorithms, we can recapitulate these same calculations within our computers. … cryptographic, seeking out passwords… The keys are having ‘translators’, things that can convert the calculations within cells and tissues to accurate digital equivalents that can be played around with to study pathophysiology and develop treatments—and then, to also convert the calculations in computis, back into the kinds of calculations that occur in living cells and tissue, across lipid membranes. These are DNA computers, specialized protein sensors, and synthetic lipid rafts. Use them to reverse-engineer cells and tissues, tweak the digital equivalents so that they closely resemble what happens in the body. Then, use the digital equivalents, to synthesize DNA computers, lipid rafts that can restore ‘the lost calculation’ capacity.}

{Again, this is still in progress—Tim’s latest projects have veered away from the eye implant research he’d been doing earlier, focusing more on “recapitulating human tissue systems in a digital environment” and using evolutionary algorithms to fill in developmental steps, to produce tissues that conform to known physiology. This is based in part on my own actual work and in fact, this very clinical focus is what spurred a lot of the conceptual explorations that led to The Leibniz Demon as a spin-off: Human physiology to a large extent can be summarized by fine-grained systems to perform calculations in solution across lipid membrane surfaces—e.g. the cell membrane, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi complex, the nephron, synaptic surfaces—and pathophysiology results when there’s a disruption of the available calculational surface area. All of this can be readily modeled in a digital microenvironment, with the physiological algorithms in cells and tissues transposed into the programming. The technology indicated here represents a collection of systems to study this physiology—essentially, by using the digital models as a sort of “guidance system” to look for things in more wet-lab analyses. It also has practical applications; a sort of “liaison” is needed between the actual computing that occurs in tissues in aqueous solution, and the digital models, and things like lipid-raft computers, DNA computers, various biological systems rigged up to ‘calculate’ the algorithmic functioning of surfaces involved in disease, can essentially function as diagnostic proxies—in comparison to traditional histological/pathological measurements—to show when a tissue isn’t functioning optimally.

In essence, each tissue is modeled in the form of algorithms containing routines and subroutines, just as in a working computer program, and tested just as the program is—by ensuring it can perform the complicated calculations expected of it. The DNA, proteins, and the ultimate teleological calculating-membrane surfaces can all be modeled via these routines and subroutines. In tissue dysfunction, there are “algorithmic deficits” that can be modeled and precisely identified, by use of e.g. these DNA/lipid computers that measure the “functional calculation capacity” at these tissue surfaces. This can be used as a basis for defining disease itself. Moreover, even treatment innovations may be feasible, since therapy for many conditions—e.g., post-MI or nephrotic syndrome—amounts to “restoring lost calculational surface area.” The trick is to identify where in the “algorithmic tree” the dysfunction is occurring—in the nucleus, or at the membrane surfaces themselves—and to “program” either viruses or these “synthetic lipid rafts” to supply the calculational surfaces that are missing. The key to the entire arrangement is “letting nature figure it out”—i.e., ironing out the details—by designing clever evolutionary algorithms that rapidly evolve those types of lipid rafts and other tools that can reliably restore the missing calculation capacity.

11/11/08: Some nice material today, on the theoretical background for the later chapters. Ref: “The clock doesn’t measure time; time measures the clock.” The fundamental clock consists of the “flops” of a node in Smolin’s spin network (which are perhaps conceptually like vibrations of the strings in string theory). Each nodal flop is a Planck time—Smolin’s atom of time—and in effect, any other unit of time is defined on the basis of, i.e. “normalized,” on the basis of a quantized (integer) multiple of these nodal flops. (Remember that, when we refer to a unit of anything—and Chaitin, as well as Livio in The Golden Ratio, both made reference to this—we’re referring to a discrete multiple of the base unit, however it’s defined. Thus, a “unified field theory” in any form—with its various symmetry transformations—is at root, seeking to express the fundamental forces and particles in terms of a common unit.) A second, then, is defined as “w # of spontaneous nodal flops.”

Note that this also gives us a definition of the speed of light c in a vacuum; it doesn’t exactly “reintroduce the ether,” but it does give us an equivalent way of representing the movement of a photon, i.e. the travel of a photon through the vacuum is equivalent to the consecutive changing of contiguous nodes on the basis of the photon tensor—that is, when a photon travels a given distance in the vacuum, this is equivalent to a contiguous series of spin network nodes temporarily taking on the value assigned to a photon-node interaction. In essence, if we use Smolin’s background-independent, relational description (which is tantamount to a matrix of interacting neural network nodes, each node containing a certain number of bits), when we “send a photon across a certain distance,” this is equivalent to saying that we “introduce a value into spin network node #1” (just like assigning a numerical value to a variable in an equation)—with this value, again, defined by the tensor (collection of numbers) assigned to a node inhabited by a photon—and then this value propagates along contiguous nodes 2, 3, 4, 5 and so forth. IOW, the movement of a photon is equivalent to the propagation of “the photon node” along the spin network, just like the movement of a wave on a string—so, the idea of propagation in a background is restored. It’s essentially just a mathematical description—we don’t even need to picture physical distance, since changes within a mathematical matrix would be equivalent.

So, the speed of light c in a vacuum is defined as follows: In 1 second (as defined above, in terms of discrete # of flops of a given node in the basic spin network), a specific number of contiguous spin network nodes—equal to 300,000 km, whatever that comes out to as a multiple of the Planck time—will be assigned the defined value of the photon.

The fundamental forces are defined in terms of nodal connections, and this also provides a means to quantitate the effects of fields and understand how special nodes (in this evolving neural network) in turn arise. In Smolin’s fundamental spin network, each node has a certain basal number of connections to other nodes—and it’s these connections which define distance (not the other way around). However, the network can evolve so that a given node gains more connections to other nodes. When a collection of nodes gains a series of connections over and above the baseline, then that nodal collection acquires mass and, in turn, gravity, which can help to further increase the nodal connections. EM is a different matter.

More on the question of “affecting a universe from the outside” (ontologically equivalent to backwards time travel)—again, at issue here is that anything “affecting” a universe from the outside, would by definition be external to the self-contained, evolving causal network (on the basis of specific algorithms) which defines a universe itself. By definition, then, such time travelers or factors outside the universe would be outside of the evolving causal structure of the universe, which is why we haven’t had such changes before—the ultimate physical laws are logical laws, and such “external” effects would be outside our universe’s evolving causal, logical structure. The relevant question then becomes how much the governing algorithms of our universe’s causal structure can evolve. This could potentially provide an opening for such time travelers, or external factors to impact our universe in some way (albeit in a limited way), since then, the causal narrative would admit such factors. This is a fascinating concept, because it suggests a place where intelligent beings could have a basic impact on physical laws (and hence logical laws, and algorithmic structure itself). But most likely, this could occur only when such intelligent beings have already reached the point of the “temporal-timeless” transition as discussed before, when they’re able to control and guide the generation of “eternal spacetimes” with certain characteristics where they can send themselves (their own consciousnesses), as well as parallel temporal spacetimes if so desired, in conjunction with the continued timeline here.

Similar to this concept—intelligent beings are moving toward the point when they can generate these spacetimes intelligently. It’s essentially a constantly ramifying, emergent family tree of universes, with physical laws varied from our own. And when the beings are able to manage this (such as very tech advanced humans), they acquire “write privileges” for the new physical laws, and produce a wide diversity of such novel spacetimes. (This is also a good device for other sci-fi, since things like “fairy-tale worlds” would then, still in some limited sense, become more feasible.) They also link these new spacetimes to contingent historical events in their own spacetimes (the ones in which they evolved). In this sense, alongside the sci-fi concept of “humans are earth’s way of making other earths (modified terraforming),” so humans are this universe’s way of making similar, modified universes with special characteristics. The question of conscious experience still lingers as an interesting facet of it. (Note that the Ersetzer wants to go far beyond this capability. He wants to be able to produce a “natural universe” with temporal evolution and fully control it—to fully control the evolution of its initial wavefunction, i.e. its evolving algorithms. Also, as Tim, Zach and the others ascertain later, the Ersetzer of course isn’t external to our universe at all, which is why he’s able to exert his effects even before humans have advanced to the point of being able to ‘evolve’ the physical law algorithms to permit a limited ‘external element’ from having such an impact. The Ersetzer entered our universe at its very initiation, from the prior universe when he took over the Ur-Anderen’s world—and was thus able to write himself in as a ‘background intelligence’ within our own universe, and thus as a Boltzmann Brain programmed in such a way that he would coalesce and ‘reawaken’ in planetary regions that supported biology.)

Before Thanksgiving, 2008—another nice concept to work into the later portion of the book—physical intelligence I’ve defined as a capacity to reproducibly alter the probabilities of a system (quantitatively, an entity’s intelligence lever is the number of bits of a qubit system in spacetime that it can reproducibly change—this can actually be measured). Such intelligence is in turn proportional to the capacity to model/map the “algorithmically unique” contents of a system (i.e., all the distinct elements that can’t be “compressed” into something algorithmically equivalent, per Chaitin). This is why an intelligent entity has to be so much more complex than the system it’s modeling, since it has to have a dedicated “algorithm space” (in essence, a mind) in which to create the map of the system

More on the chapter in which Susan is brought back—from the Beckenstein article in Sci-Am, we have the notion that effectively, information about a non-black-hole system is contained on a holographic sphere enclosing that system, and that the sphere containing the information can be projected outward. It’s something like moving shells of information. (Recall prior mention of something like “the saved game” in FPS shooters, except that in this case, it’s more like emergent gaming, where the evolution and information content of a given system cannot be anticipated in advance.) Reviving a person, then, involves two steps: 1. “Locating” a relevant information sphere, which contains the information specific to that person and his/her thoughts (at least essentially) at the time, and 2. Locating a fingerprint which can serve as a locator for the special network which is that person, mind included. The “fingerprint” or “signature,” as one of the characters later explains, has the quality of being in part “algorithmically compressible” (as the general concept of a human fingerprint is something generated using a developmental algorithm) and yet, simultaneously, of being fully unique, which makes it easy to locate—just like a unique string in a search engine. The supercomputer that brings back Susan—let alone the Ur-Anderen—requires a lot of power, and this can be measured on the basis of how far back the supercomputer needs to go (i.e., how many spin network flops have occurred), how complex the revived being is (apes and elephants need more than cats and mice), and also how much input data is provided to generate the unique fingerprint (with pictures, hair strands containing DNA, being immensely helpful in locating that fingerprint on the information sphere).

Tensors, matrix mech = wave mech, new d.f. leads to complexity, axioms à theorems; covalent bonds, resonance start to make sense.

A very interesting, high-value example of Chaitin’s “algorithmic compressibility” notion—that comprehension of a phenomenon, solving a mathematical problem, providing a mathematical proof with known theorems and axioms, is an analogous process to the compression of an image, of finding “common and repeated logical threads”—is in use of the Japanese causative to learn new vocabulary. In improving my Japanese, the sheer range of Japanese vocabulary has made it tough, but I recognized that many words which in English (and most other languages) are distinct verbal “quanta,” in Japanese use the simple “generative algorithm” of the causative: e.g. miseru, “to show” = “to make someone see,” and noseru, “to pick up (a person in a car)” = “to make ride.” Essentially, the number of “quanta” one’s mind needs to devote to learning the new vocabulary, is compressed by virtue of the “causative mnemonic.” In KP, when Susan is brought back later in the book (a precursor to the Falkenei Gesellschaft using their “neural-scale supercomputer” to bring back the Ur-Anderen), this concept will be a part of it. A human mind itself—in the context of the physical milieu a person experiences—has too much data and complexity to fully replicate even with the high-powered supercomputer the FG uses. However, there can be some algorithmic compression (which I represent, in the book, in the form of specific tokens—such as the jade piece that Tim keeps with him, the picture, all examples of “algorithmic compression” which the supercomputer is able to use in bringing back Susan from a point before the accident in Suriname).

There are memory cues that redound later in the book, and wind up being critical in the climactic confrontation: The jade piece of course, Percy’s sandwiches, Shelley’s Celtic proverbs,

Note that, in my definition of physical intelligence (the ability for an entity to reproducibly alter a priori probabilities for a system, i.e. causal power), that our very perception of economic value is itself keyed into this concept of physical intelligence. Items or products that are rare, or more difficult to generate (everything from precious metals to very fine art), are attributed a high value essentially because they represent higher causal power. A painting by Van Gogh or Friedrich, a concerto by Bach—higher causal power, greater alteration in a prior probability, so higher economic value thereby attached.

Dream last night: Out in some kind of broad school zone and traveling a lot, in urban and rural areas. Interesting scenes in general; I was with Spanish families a lot, there was a billboard announcing things in English and Spanish, vaguely like those scenes in HL2. Spanish books on the table. We traveled in buses (including school buses) together.

Went to Barbados—it was a big tower, cylindrical—vaguely like that picture I saw on an African news page.

I’ve been having dreams about mysteries to be solved, vivid dreams about vacation spots—it’s interesting how engrossing they are. Again, it bespeaks and confirms Kant’s ideas about the phenomenon vs. the noumenon; the brain is reconstructing and imagining images at a sub-conscious level (without the active engagement of the full frontal lobe machinery involved in conscious thought), and in the dream itself, there’s no noumenon—just the phenomenon generated internally. The phenomenon in this case has been inspired by noumena perceived and reconstructed a priori.

In considering the regulatory “algorithms” used in human cells, keep in mind the “fine-tuning” done by RNAi, along with protein signal transduction pathways, lipid rafts—there should be a model for these calculational networks. This is the work that motivated KP in the first place (initially as a sandbox for ideas), so work a section into the book for it. (Also, for another essay—note the need for basic science!)

When Chloe contacts her Dad, come up with an idea for a “2014 trendy technology” for it.

NB: Since our brains control our bodies (voluntary as well as ANS) in accordance with a set of self-modifying algorithms (and in concordance with the homunculi, the maps that allow fine-grained control), the question for treating a large set of diseases involves how much our voluntary capacity can modify these algorithms. This is obvious for things like addiction which are inherently neurological, and where we regularly “introduce new programs” and re-write the mental algorithms. But what about processes under mostly autonomic control? Breathing sits in the middle—mostly autonomic but with substantial voluntary input, so it’s a unique system in that respect. Most other systems, we have what we think, is very little capacity for voluntary “algorithmic reprogramming,” although some studies do suggest some mechanism for modulating this somewhat (and not just in regard to e.g. hormonal modulation). This suggests some ideas for better treatments overall—by effectively “homunculizing” our organs via external control. IOW, algorithmically modeling our organs in fine-grained detail (eg using what we know from developmental biology, then using evolutionary algorithms to impel the digital model to “sniff its way” to a functioning organ). With this system in hand, we can use DNA computers, synth lipid rafts to glean info, study physiology, and maybe to treat—since we can fine-grain homunculize organs, we can exert some control over them. Essentially, physical intelligence = causal power = fine-grained mapping ability = homunculization (essentially the ultimate map/model of any system) which, in a medical context = treatment capacity.

{Nascent consciousness—put this into the cover letter. The ultimate map is a fine-grained homunculus—it enables very specific control of the homunculized region, and thus very high “intelligence” over it, via very precise “setting” of the bits in the affected system. Our bodies have such homunculized control over our muscles and limbs. That statement, about how people only see about 10% of us, the other 90% of us, stays inside, easy to misrepresent—a cause of so much tension and conflict—introduce that into the conversation with Tim and Ernie, about how even close families members do that, and how Tim’s Dad never fully understood the other facets of Uncle Mitch.}

11/1/08: The Ultimate Zone—Epiphany Day. I don’t normally write diary entries, but something extraordinary, unprecedented, splendid has happened this morning. It’s been a cloudy, rainy morning here in LA (the second such day), and I just got back from a productive, contemplative walk outside. I’m in a zone now, as I strive for in general, but it’s not just any zone—for the first time perhaps ever, I have the unusual feeling of being reborn today, and it’s not just a flash in the pan. Things that used to be bother me, hold me up, drag on my attention or emotional wherewithal, don’t do so anymore. Everything feels smooth—my cognitive faculties, perception of the world, retention of languages (especially all the new Chinese/Japanese vocabulary I’ve been absorbing), it all just seems so obvious. A part of the reason for this Zone, oddly enough, seems to be my epiphany about why it’s here.

When I was walking, it finally occurred to me: Many elements of my milieu, my work environment, where I focus my projects, I’ve had an intuition about them before, I’ve known that they’re important and useful to me but never seemed to comprehend why. Now, it’s become clear why, and I latched onto this when I thought about how in many instances before, I had an inclination, a mysteriously strong hunch to do something but didn’t know why—until the reasons became apparent later. It’s network emergence inside the mind of a single person, analogous to the emergence that occurs with the “Wisdom of Crowds” phenomenon when many intelligent people get together and produce a ”group intelligence” that is vastly greater than the sum of the parts, even though at an individual level aren’t aware of the coalescing intelligence. It’s the same way that individual neurons in our brains aren’t aware “individually” of the mind that they create collectively (ref. Hofstadtler and Cairns-Smith), and it fits in with the general “RENNT” theory I’ve been fostering (see elsewhere in these notes).

But here’s the catch: While writing more chapters in Kant’s Precipice/The Leibniz Demon, including that German poem that headlines the start of Chapter 1, I openly wondered if on some level, “lower-level” (less complex) “node” components that collectively form a higher-level, more intelligent, and potentially more “conscious” network (if the intelligent network is capable of modeling/mapping itself—an example being the way the collection of neurons in brains collectively engenders what we experience as our unitary, conscious mind)—if these lower-level nodes may have some nascent, vague awareness of the “consciousness” that they will engender collectively. IOW, do the simpler components “sense” what they’ll be emerging to become? It’s not altogether an unusual idea—how do ants in a herd collectively “know” what to do even when they don’t communicate directly? Seems like the collective intelligence formed by the group of interacting ants in the mound, corresponds to some higher-level “algorithmic structure” that individual ants may have some vague perception of, and that the collective then begets as a group.

This is in essence what RENNT is about—recursively emergent neural networks, with lower-level components (all the way to the level of Smolin’s spin networks) recursively interacting to generate “minds” at higher-level networks, each of which in turn becomes the “node” or “neuron” for a still higher-level network. With, of course, lower-level nodes perhaps being “subtly aware” in some fashion, of what they’ll be emerging into. When smart people get together and beget a “collective intelligence” together—even though they themselves aren’t fully aware of that intelligence, they do have an inkling of it.

But there’s another corollary here, and it’s what I caught onto today. This “higher consciousness,” higher-level network that we forge as a group of smart people (in analogy to atomsà molecules, macromolecules à cells, neurons à brains), it’s not just something that emerges in a group of people—it’s something that can emerge within a single person! We all know, of course, that as we gain experience, maturity, and knowledge, that we look at the world differently, even though the evolution tends to happen gradually enough that the change usually feels imperceptible (in the absence of an epiphany). In fact, during child development when we’re still myelinating our nerves and forging our neural infrastructure to make sense out of the world, we’re constantly “emerging” into new people with a higher consciousness. But there’s something more to this, and I realized it when I had the experience of constantly “having a predilection” to work, write, think up experiments under certain conditions, in a certain environment, to “prime my thinking” with certain techniques—even when I didn’t have any real idea why these things helped, or even any inkling about why I should try them. They only became obvious to me later, when my mind had taken in a broader “big-picture” perspective of the relevant factors and thus reached a higher consciousness.

Yet—even before I’d reached this “higher-level consciousness,” I still had an initial, if more diffuse, sense of what I would more explicitly grasp later; in other words, my mind at a lower level of consciousness was “nascently aware” of what I would emerge into. To many, this sounds like psychic ability or clairvoyance, but to me, it represents the “preconscious” grasp of a higher-level complexity and consciousness before it’s set in. That is, just as individual people in a group who are forging an emergent “collective intelligence” working together, seem to have an “inkling” of that higher-level consciousness—so does an individual person seem to have a “preconscious inkling” of the higher state of consciousness and level of understanding that he/she will emerge into. It’s an amazing kind of insight.

What’s even more interesting is what seems to have begotten this. I’ve been more relaxed lately—certainly more healthy, the post-pertussis RAD has been under better control both medically and through biofeedback. But it’s a lot more than this. I’ve been in a meditative state, a “zone” where in general I think less and do more. I don’t have to outline every single algorithm, step-by-step recipe for what I do and how I solve each problem, don’t have to transfer it into language—the “shorthand” for all this seems to be better “wired in” and accessible. I’ve also been maintaining a sense of humor about the assorted challenges these days (supplemented with some occasional tuning into MXC and other goofy fare), more persistence and being less prone to frustration when e.g. I forget new vocabulary, and just more in tune overall. I had a recent conversation with Gloria on “specialized search” ideas that I’ll be presenting to a Google employee, and I noticed that all 4 of my big ideas were much easier to elaborate when I vocalized them to her—just one on one brought out that “emergent consciousness.” Last night, I did a lot of work on this, wrote more on the book, played a little Doom 3 (and thought about the fictional exposition in it)—but in general, I have a good deal more confidence in my ideas now, since I know they really do seem to be leading to something valuable and concrete, even if I don’t quite have the whole story.

Perhaps even more interestingly, this raises the question about how to get into one’s zone, in fact in general—it raises the question about how we are evolving these more intelligent networks, both the “elevated conscious state” in ourselves individually, and in network with other people. There really do seem to be consistent, fundamental rules and patterns that govern this emergence process, while other aspects are individualized. (FWIW, rainy and cloudy days are big-time helpful for me—I really, probably should move to Oregon or Washington!)

As Tim and Zach are hunting down some of the “lost” Falkenei Gesellschaft artifacts later in the book, they receive a clue referencing artifacts that have been concealed behind Italian Renaissance paintings—”where the fine sculpture of the mind betrays the earnest

The secret society (Falkenei Gesellschaft) and the almost millennium-long project referred to in the book, have as one of their objectives: Reviving the Ur-Anderen, to get specific instructions on how to tackle the still-unclear threat (which turns out to be the Ersetzer). Due to some specific limitations on the amount of information the Ur-Anderen could send through the portal from World #46,006 (and the previous universe) to ours, they couldn’t send themselves through the portal intact and just materialize on earth; but they could send instructions about how to regenerate themselves. They’d go through the portal as the Ersetzer did, as a Boltzmann Brain, and then send what information they could (limited as it was) to earth as advanced civilizations began to evolve. Hence the meteor carrying them and their “instructions,” which the Falkenei Gesellschaft must decipher to revive them. The FG has been gradually constructing a kind of supercomputer, an advanced brain in fact, which has the calculational complexity to rematerialize the Ur-Anderen. The Ersetzer has a similar problem, interestingly; since he is so complex, it’s more difficult to get his entire being through the portal (though with his greater intelligence, he is also increasingly capable of getting more and more of himself through the portal). Even though the Ersetzer has the technological capability to connect into (and thus open up) a naturally inflating universe from his current one, the Ersetzer can’t create a complex universe itself, let alone control its laws and evolution. One of the Ersetzer’s main aims, as Tim and Zach figure out later, is to increase his intelligence enough that he can map/model an entire universe—and thus create it, and guide its evolution, ad hoc. Both the Ersetzer and the Ur-Anderen introduce “optimization algorithms” when they enter the new universe, so that their Boltzmann brains “coalesce” in regions of the new universe that are most conducive to new life, such as in Earth’s solar system. That’s why they come together here, at just the right time.

The chapter on Kant’s Precipice (if this doesn’t wind up being the book’s title itself) has to do with Kant’s Ding an Sich considerations—the noumenon vs. the phenomenon. As we now know, the 3-D world we “see” around us is a neural reconstruction of the various inputs that our sensory mechanisms receive on (mostly) 2-D surfaces. Our receptors “perceive” raw reality (the noumenon) and then reconstruct it within the brain (the phenomenon)—for example, Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde’s article in Sci Am talks about how our optical system uses physical facets of vision (perspective, sfumato, convergence angle, chiaroscuro among others) to reliably perform these calculations. (It’s similar to the way Valve and Id Software use advanced graphics engines for their current projects, which actually construct their game environments on the fly, rather than having them pre-loaded.) Our brains are thus compilers that perceive the data stream of the environment and process it, using the categories we intuitively recognize.

So, Kant’s precipice refers to a fictional “lost manuscript” which Kant supposedly wrote after he had been invited into the Falkenei Gesellschaft. Kant was specifically wondering there, as a corollary to the noumenon/phenomenon debate—if human minds are reconstructing the world as subjective phenomena from objective input, then in theory, what kinds of other “minds” could be brought into existence, and to what extent could they process outside phenomena? How did our minds come into existence, and why do they create the subjective reconstruction that they do? Are there alternatives? What are the variations in this construction of the world within different minds? Furthermore—could our intelligent minds themselves somehow evolve into even more intelligent perception and cognitive instruments, to see and perceive the world in a radically different way? (Kant would’ve written this before knowledge of stimuli, or of electromagnetic waves, but he would have been surmising that other potential sources of information were available that could be perceived. Also, that information itself could be encoded using any physical substrate—a corollary of Leibniz’s monads—with Kant wondering further, if there is an “ultimate” information source, or if instead, there is only an underlying “logical superstructure” onto which all kinds of physical information constructs are engrafted, and thus algorithmically equivalent.) In the manuscript, Kant mentions “the Leibniz demon,” which turns out to be a conjecture by Leibniz about whether there could be a being with enough evolved intelligence to not only perceive the world differently from the way our systems do—but to visualize, construct, to innately be able to process far more. In fact, Leibniz had wondered—could this intelligence effectively be integral to the physical structure of the universe itself? Could it encompass a universe, or at least enough of it to function as a broad “mind” that would perceive events as “simultaneous,” which we humans perceive as happening in sequence? IOW, rather than being limited by perceptual faculties as we now conceive of them—could this intelligence come closer to unifying the noumena and phenomena, to grasp the outside world at the level of its fundamental processes, whatever that may be?

Back to the year 2014, in which the book takes place—these “fundamental processes” are information exchanges which take on a physical “shroud” as we witness it, a shroud of different types of distinct physical phenomena self-organizing themselves. IOW, there’s a basic “logical atom” like Leibniz’s monad (which may be equivalent to the most basic, Planck-length node of Smolin’s spin networks), and these “logical atoms” then produce the networks with emergent properties that become ever more complex. Tim encounters several professors in Germany who are tackling the quantum gravity problem, with some of them wondering about the “fundamental algorithmic atom,” like Leibniz’s monad, which supposedly represents the purest form of what becomes matter/energy and thus is invoked in some unified field theories. As the theories go, the fundamental forces and matter/energy “differentiate” from this fundamental “logical atom” (i.e., spin networks) and evolve into more complex networks. Information can then be borne, or represented using any component that can be arranged combinatorially—voltage switches, photons, DNA, whatever. But all such information-bearing systems use the same algorithmic rules as the basic network (i.e., are algorithmically reducible). The specific information components “look” different to us on the outside, but at heart they’re “united” on the basis of being elaborations of the “basic nodes and network” that is the most fundamental kind of information exchange across the RENNT (recursively emergent neural network) and, thus, the source of physical processes.

One of the characters at the fictional biotech corporation—the one discovered by Tim, Zach and a friend when they’re trying to trace down the origin of the alteration to the AP-278 implant (which they do be examining the “graffiti” on one of the microchips)—is interested in “xenoneural extension,” and he specifically asks, “What if we could perceive the world around us, not according to the picture that is reconstructed in our brains—but on the level of the most fundamental information exchanges themselves? What if we really could perceive the Ding an Sich?” This, essentially, is what Kant had been wondering—what would “perception” be like for a being that could process stimuli about the world at the level of this supposed “fundamental information exchange”—this most basic neural network—itself? And could such a being attain a point of being able to “comprehend” the universe itself, by becoming intelligent enough to “span” the entire neural network that comprises the universe? (Recall, a universe is defined as a self-contained, evolving causal narrative here.) This is the “Leibniz demon” that Kant was referring to, even though Tim and Zach don’t know what he’s referring to at first—and as they learn later, the Leibniz demon is real, in the form of the Ersetzer. The Ersetzer doesn’t yet have sufficient intelligence to map/model the universe as a whole, but because he (as well as the Ur-Anderen, in this case) enter the new universe at the outset as a “latent intelligence,” the subjective “phenomena” that, for us humans, are neural reconstructions of physical input from the outside, are (for the Ersetzer and Ur-Anderen) equivalent to the “noumena,” i.e. the Ding an Sich—the Ersetzer and Ur-Anderen perceive nature at the level of the most fundamental elements of information exchange, “the unseen, evolving, basic neural network of pure logic that is at the heart of the physical world itself.” Again, they’ve both programmed their own algorithms to “materialize” (something like Boltzmann’s brains) within a point in the universe where conditions are favorable for intelligent life, hence in our solar system. They both have instructions, then, to revive themselves. The Ur-Anderen do so with the Falkenei artifacts, while the Ersetzer—who obviously needs a lot more “reconstruction”—requires a high-level network of millions of computers and human minds to “reconstruct” himself.

The Ersetzer, in fact, is able to take over both human and computer “minds”—starting from the epicenter at Oak Ridge—because, as a “Leibniz demon,” he’s able to manipulate information at its most fundamental level of the “logical atoms” (the monads) which, in fact, are shared between human and computer “brains.” The logical, algorithmic operations are the same even if the substrates are different, which gives the Ersetzer enormous power over a variety of physical processes. (He is telekinetic, for example.)

Kandel discussion on unconscious, how remembering re-creates the memory slightly each time, adding more detail

Notice how most books that discuss the evolution of complex human traits (physical but especially cognitive abilities), generally rely on old-fashioned hunter-gatherer explanations about how levels of cleverness, interest in music, and so forth would be associated with better food-gathering abilities. I think it’s more than this though, and it goes above the very basic, rudimentary, obvious Darwinian advantages. It’s not Lamarckian either, but individuals and societies seek out complexity and build upon examples of it, to generate even more complexity.

Think about ganglang organizations—very interesting. Members of e.g. motorcycle gangs like Bandidos, or even the urban gangs in LA. They consist of ex-cons, street fighters, bar fighters, yet they can be surprisingly well-organized and disciplined despite this tendency toward ultra-individualism and lawlessness—something like military and fraternity organizations. They have a leadership system with a Presidency that rotates from city to city (w/ VP, Secretary, Treasurer), and replicated in microcosm at lower levels of leadership, with local chapters. They attend mtgs per Robert’s Rules of Order, and they pay dues. Structured like an effective corporation. (See Sons of Anarchy for some e.g.’s). As I’ve said before, during the Middle Ages, what passed for government was basically powerful gangsters who were able to accomplish the best kinds of organizations, and even many of our modern governments evolved out of these kinds of organized gangster precedents.

Rachmaninoff was incredibly accurate when he played the piano, “music built into his constitution”—also, he could hear a new piece of music, e.g. by Brahms, and play it back perfectly 2 days later. He’d basically created an algorithmic structure in his mind, optimized to “sync” with the flow of the music and to create it fresh.

Linguistic cues to “algorithmic compression”: Japanese causative, French forcement, Swedish similarity to German.

Some sweet new material on 10/25/08—I took a long, brisk walk today to help make sure my right lung continues healing and improves exercise tolerance. I wandered down to the newsstand on Kinross, then walked up around some of the nice houses up by Montana, Sunset and Greenfield. (Very sweet house up on Greenfield BTW, winding walkway and helical shape.) High-quality: Read Pop. Sci., Sci. Am. incl the Mind issue and Conde Nast magazine, did some quality thinking afterwards while walking up by Montana and Greenfield. I’ll be putting out plot points today and tomorrow on the weekend and Monday.

Role models: Kepler’s toughness, Pasteur/von Behring initially thought mediocre

Piezoelectric crystal (transducer), electromagnet, tablet with Gothic script, the brain object; an ancient supercomputer, an EEG reader; differentiation; the eqns for each organ are suggested by the differentiation pattern of the germ layers, which in turn result from the signals provided by the direction-deciders in the early gastrula. Livio’s example of that traffic flow around an accident as an analogy for the density waves in a spiral galaxy—i.e., the idea that the pattern is transmitted and maintained even if the individual components vary—that’s also being applied here. (Recall what that is…) Symmetry groups, unifying forces. Evolving neural net itself.

New ideas for the “treatment scheme”: The livers, kidneys and other organs aren’t just evolved digitally… they’re guided. After all, the question arises—how in the world does one model the function of a kidney when we still have such a partial understanding of it? (Even though that team at the IBM Almaden Research Center has done some amazing things with modeling the brain, it’s still very incomplete.) The trick: 1. High-resolution scans of the renal anatomy down to the nephron are imported, 2. An evolution protocol (from the cellular level) is “differentiated” until it resembles the anatomy of the scanned structure, 3. The function of the “digitized kidney” is tested by pushing through solutes and checking for “calculations” (i.e., filtrates) that resemble the functional kidney. When we’re in the ICU, we are the livers and kidneys—we’re doing calculations, just as the kidney itself is. Our minds give us the conscious ability to model the kidney and calculate—to do what the kidney already does “intelligently” without being conscious of it. So if we want to restore kidney function to one that’s damaged, we’d need to 1. Ascertain the “failed algorithm” and then 2. Restore it. What if in fact, we had the entire kidney modeled algorithmically like this? We could then restore the algorithm in the digitized kidney—essentially, to “redifferentiate” the kidney.

Roentgen, Kepler as inspirations—Kepler b/c he was dealing with so much s—t when he was doing his best work, and Roentgen because his work had such tremendous importance not only for physics, but directly for medical applications.

Tim will later get in touch with Sanjit Khan—the engineer who was filming reactions in the laser lab on Feb. 5^th, when the connection first went live—and obtain copies of the tapes on that day when the strange sounds and power brownouts seemed to hit the laser lab. There, he’ll encounter flickering monitors, which he’ll pause… and see a frightening “proto-image” of the Ersetzer, resembling some of the images that Pablo had been sketching on the canvas.

Our mental protocols that are involved in learning, calculation, even decision-making to an extent, rely on recognizing a kind of “logical resonance”—that is, when a neural network array (representing a concept or an idea) is recognized as “correct,” is “syncs” independently with another array: either an internal (e.g. pre-learned) concept already in place, or with an experience, or perhaps with a logical structure that is “pre-imprinted.”

The “Marvel Superhero” concepts like teleportation, telepathy and esp. telekinesis, essentially they involve extending the “command-and-control network space” that we possess over our own bodies, to a region normally regarded as outside our bodies (that is, outside the fully command-driven network of our own nervous system). Whenever we move or send an instant communication across our nerves—the command originates in the brain, and it has an almost instant effect on a distant point in space (e.g. our hands or knees) since our hands and knees reside within the “common network space” governed by the brain’s command and control. What if we could “extend” this command-and-control space? IOW, rather than relying on strictly neuron fiber-based network connections from our brain—if instead, our brain could also directly establish a command-and-control domain over regions of space outside of the neuron-fibers themselves? This would allow telekinesis, telepathy. For story-writing purposes here, if we think of this in terms of the RENNT conceptualization—our nervous system constitutes a “higher-level emergent neural network” compared to garden-variety space that’s not “wired into” our own nervous system. So normally, objects around us are outside our own neural network. But if we could “extend” our own neural network to “plug into” the other (lower-level) neural networks around us, and transmit signals that don’t rely on just neurons—then essentially we can “animate” the surrounding world and exert physical effects on it. Teleportation is analogous within this paradigm. In this case, the human mind would have to be “plugged into” and have direct communication with, the surrounding neural network of the environment—IOW, a region around us would essentially have to be “mapped into” the command-control systems of our brains (in contrast to just our bodies alone, which are mapped by the sensory and motor homunculi). An available “teleportation domain” would essentially involve having the relevant domain, “contained within the neural map” of e.g. a human brain (or a computer brain), and then the regions normally “outside the human body” (or the computer network) would essentially become like extensions of the body itself—and thus able to moved from one region to another the same way we’d move arms, which would “appear like” teleportation to an outsider.

A couple pretty fascinating, generalizable concepts emerging here. One is this notion of “recursive causality,” “looping emergence” or “bottom-up-bottom structure,” or colloquially something like “The presence of the chicken changing the egg from which it hatched”: It’s the idea that complex structures do indeed emerge from increasingly intricate interactions of simpler lower-level components, but that once the higher-level structure emerges, it both sheds light on the simpler components and fundamentally changes the nature of their interactions. Causally speaking, the lower-level interactions generally “cause” the emergence of the more complex, higher-level structure (the egg hatches into the chicken) but, the emergence of the higher-level structure in turn imposes a kind of “logical structure” upon the prior components—as though, in a sense, “retrospectively causing” the interactions that gave rise to it or, more metaphorically speaking, “the chicken knew that it would eventually be hatched even when the chicken was an egg and had not itself coming into existence.” By extension, this raises the question about whether components that are initially “primitive” or “constituting a simpler neural network,” in fact have a nascent sense of the more complex, sophisticated structure (and neural network, in effect) that they’ll give rise to. (In a sense, this would represent an unusual logical structure outside of the terms of old-fashioned Boolean logic, though perhaps within the purview of Frege’s logic and Leibniz’s logical system as well—effectively, perhaps the evolved, emergent higher-level structure paradoxically “imposes a causal condition” on the very factors that supposedly preceded it.) This is one of the ideas that prompts one of the conversations in Kant’s Precipice, with one character starting out by saying, “So, has God created humanity, or is humanity constantly creating God?” Which prompts the other character to respond, “Or, in fact… are we both creating each other simultaneously?”

Notion of an “ancient guild” to which the migrating Schumacher was connected (I took out a reference to it in Mitch’s monologue—I’ll slip it in later).

Think of how music can be “imaged” in color (e.g. on WMP) and images can be turned into music—this is high art, but it’s also an exemplification of how interchangeable data is using different physical media and representations.

OK, here’s the provisional “jacket description” for the hardcover book jacket (or the back cover), a basic version at least: “A spreading madness on the heels of a cure. A mysterious inheritance. An ancient evil of unimaginable scope and power. Dr. Tim Shoemaker, a wisecracking, hotshot professor of engineering, is called on short notice to a military treatment facility in Tennessee by a former colleague, desperate to unravel the truth behind a bizarre series of events afflicting soldiers who had been receiving an innovative vision restoration therapy. Meanwhile, his ailing uncle bequeaths Tim a baffling collection of heirlooms, including a medieval clay tablet with a cryptically apocalyptic warning, and presses Tim to track down their origins hidden deeply somewhere in the family tree. Teaming up with Zach Choi, his equally quick-witted student and protégé, Tim traces his long-buried ancestral roots to a humble German village, and from there they uncover references to a shadowy secret society and a classified project spanning the better part of a millennium. As Tim is haunted by remarkably concrete visions of his recently deceased wife and the eerie recurrences of an otherwise unremarkable number—46,007—the news from back home grows increasingly ominous, as the still-inexplicable phenomenon in eastern Tennessee begins to overwhelm the surrounding regions. Tim suspects that the object of his quest in Europe, and the alarming developments across the ocean, share a connection with a nearly inscrutable, long-latent menace that is rising from its ancient slumber. As he and his protégé race across the continent and beyond to put the clues together, Tim must confront the dark heart of a mystery older than time—and at the genesis of consciousness itself.”

The evolving description, for the publisher: “Kant’s Precipice {or The Leibniz Demon, whatever the title becomes} is a high-concept science-fiction/thriller novel written for a mass-market audience. Although it does fall within the general sci-fi rubric, KP has a different feel from the vast majority of the sci-fi genre; its mood and atmosphere are generally more in line with suspense, metaphysical mystery, and mysticism, while also incorporating elements of psychological horror and a quest-driven plot. While the mysterious clues and plot strands are gradually and subtly unraveled on the basis of some cutting-edge scientific theories—so as to satisfy traditional fans of the sci-fi genre and to hopefully supply enough idea fodder to be featured in college or high school seminars—the book has been crafted to appeal to a mass audience. It features a near-future setting, a roots-tracing quest that drives much of the plot, and a thematic focus that tackles topics of longstanding and universal human interest, such as resurrection, Judgment Day, consciousness in space and time, memory, lost love, and the “chicken-and-egg” conundrum between a creative force and its creations. The novel makes extensive use of the fictional exposition technique to produce intriguing “background” for a number of ancient mysteries—both genuine historical enigmas in human societies, and the fictional puzzles that appear in the story arc. Furthermore, since this novel has derived in part from my own professional interests as a doctor and researcher (with a background in both the physical and biological sciences), KP introduces a number of accessible yet thought-provoking ideas—disguised as plot movers that the main protagonist must urgently resolve—whose originality provides high discussion and social “buzz” potential for the novel to reach a wide readership.

Although the novel tackles themes of longstanding and extraordinary significance, I’ve structured the plot and the characters so that the book does not feel too “heavy” for its readers, but is fun and fascinating even as its topics are thought-provoking. The characters have been written so as to be generally witty, on-the-ball personalities rather than somber people overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what they are facing. As the plot unfolds and the protagonists realize the scale of the threat they are facing, they take a “paradoxical matter-of-fact” attitude, in which they face mind-boggling events—such as resurrections, the discovery of an entity transcending the universe itself, and the unveiling of a classified project initiated over a millennium ago—with initial bafflement and incredulity, but subsequently with a professional poise and focus as they begin to decipher how the bizarre phenomena are connected.

“Magician’s principle” for mastering the challenging concepts myself, so that I provide mind-teasing and baffling demonstrations for the audience, without ever fully revealing the underlying concepts (just as the magician conceals the full technical details).

The meaning of the book’s title is very slowly and subtly revealed as the plot progresses.

The German poem (which, like the plot itself, is slowly revealed in 4-line rhyming segments at the start of each chapter) functions both to inject further mystery and curiosity, and as a “buzz-generator” to entice early readers of the novel to discuss one of its mind-teasing aspects with their friends, and thus effectively market the novel on Blogs and forums, personal Websites, and social networking sites. As far as building the audience, the poem therefore has a similar impact as the “level secrets” that video-game designers often subtly introduce into their maps, to spark curiosity among players and increase sales. The poem itself also provides a stylistic contribution to the novel, while its substance provides further subtle hints about the novel’s mysterious themes to those who translate it (and post their results on Websites). Its rhyme and meter are reminiscent of the poetry of Schiller, Goethe, and other contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Kant and Leibniz

Chapter and section headings have specific times and locations, which contributes to the building sense of dread and menace that arises as the main protagonist continues to unravel the dark mystery.

When the chief protagonist enters new locations, the book “paints a picture” to provide a strongly visual quality, something like a scene in a film.

The feel of the book might be roughly described as a cross between The Matrix, the Shining, the Harry Potter series,

As Tim is increasingly tormented by visions of the battle between the Ur-Anderen and the Ersetzer in World #46,006 (visions unveiled via “an integrated cerebral routine” that, as discussed later in the book, entered into the budding consciousness of Tim’s ancestor Bernd Schumacher when he was conceived in the castle in the Katzenwald), he starts to paint the images that he sees in his mind’s eye, with growing and disturbing detail—analogous to the drawings sketched out by Pablo Acevedo and the other patients at Oak Ridge, a fact that increasingly chills and upsets Tim. The images on Tim’s paintings, then, are used by the “revival supercomputer” which is assembled with Tim’s heirlooms and further items retained by the Falkenei Gesellschaft, to materialize the Ur-Anderen before them, getting the most crucial clues about the Ersetzer and the coming danger. Tim later uncovers evidence of additional drawings by his great-grandfather—stored in an old archival vault—which also show rough images of the Ur-Anderen (though, interestingly, not quite the same things).

Think about the show The Mentalist, magician shows like Mindfreak and Mind Control—how they use suggestion and misdirection, also how they ascertain information in general (information from a previously established set, or info de novo without prior clues, e.g. the name of someone having been somewhere). Is this information “reflected” somewhere, e.g. in an EEG, that can be ascertained?

On how to express the factors leading to the appearance of Tim’s deceased wife Susan (and later, of course, the special soldiers of the Ur-Andere civilization, as I’m now calling them as of 10/08)—can think of 3 “routes” to express some kind of explanation for this. One is from that Sci Am issue on the Holographic principle, and how there are methodologies to effectively “retrieve” the information in a given 3-D space on the surface of a sphere at some later timepoint, on the basis of the projection of the earlier “data” onto that sphere. (Again, in the framework that I’m using here—we don’t necessarily require a “physical hard drive location” in nature to retrieve that earlier timepoint, since effectively, these events are taking place in Hilbert space which is a “logical space”—retrieving the earlier timepoints is then just a matter of having the right mathematics.) A second route is some variation of what Chaitin wrote when he was citing the Jorge Luis Borges story, about how after the flower was burnt—that flower is still there, it’s just “changed into a different form.” IOW—the initial “data” is still present, but the data “appears different” to us because of the way we compile the information (in this case, after the burning of the flower which would “decohere” the flower’s original structural information and carry it off onto a different collection of information-bearers). We could conceive of a kind of intelligent observer that would “compile” the information in our environment differently, to essentially “mark” the data contained in the original flower (its appearance and composition) and thus be able to restore it—even without being able to conceive of every detail in the flower, it would be able to retrieve “marked packets of the decohered data” and restore the flower. Interestingly, this resembles somewhat the process in TCP/IP whereby a message is broken up and sent out in packets in many directions, then reassembled later, reviving the original message. The “packet-reader” isn’t aware of the message’s contents themselves (essentially, “the message’s subjective awareness of itself,” however it differentiates itself from a genuinely self-aware mind), but it’s able to use the message fragment markers to reassemble the message. In Kant’s Precipice, Susan is brought back maybe in a similar fashion—her consciousness and physical complexity are contained on “packets” that have since decohered and, even though the contents of the packets themselves can’t be fully comprehended (IOW, it’s not feasible to read Susan’s mind), they can be brought together again so that Susan is effectively revived. One subset of the devices that Tim carries in his inheritance, functions effectively as a kind of “fine-tuned spectrometer” that has been trained to recognize the “fingerprints” characteristic of evolved neural structures—again, in the “logical space” of mathematical relations to which our physical universe is algorithmically equivalent—and then to put them together again. The third route—human and computer memory are just systems (with various inefficiencies) to remodel and retain configurations of prior computing states, and also to “compress them” most efficiently (sort of a reference to Chaitin’s ideas here) as in any kind of filezip protocol, to retain the essentials to reconstitute later. We could extend this “memory protocol” into a natural analogue, which also imprints prior states (in the most efficient, “compressed” form) into a data storage mechanism that can be easily retrieved later. Again, with this occurring in the “logical space” of Hilbert space, even though future events (decoherences) can’t be predicted, the path of previous decoherences (using any two or more prior events in history) can be used to reconstruct events in-between, and thus to “revive” portions of a prior state, even if they can’t be “fully understood” except through the framework of subjective experience. (Incidentally, maybe some computer applications could emerge from this—imagine a kind of computer memory that could be constructed without having to explicitly plan for a future “data state.” This is already done to some extent, in e.g. some streaming video and PC games like Half-Life 2 and other Valve products—but how far can we extend it?)

Special numbers such as pi, phi, e (root of the natural logarithm) may derive some of their “algorithmic specialness” by analogous “logarithmic necessity,” such as the way that the Golden Ratio is the “most irrational number” and thus algorithmically special and essential in nature, since it tends to “compact items most efficiently.” Look back at some of the notions of the ancient Greeks, the German topologists, and then some of the more modern ideas like those of Chaitin and Smolin.

Interestingly, some of these concepts fit into an “update of old Stoicism” to some extent, with ideas on things like improving society and creating a better world—being unveiled in the sense of “logical jumps” from one logical state, to another more efficiently put together.

The Ersetzer says to Tim that “the Grand 37” (that is, the prior intelligent civilizations—the few among the 46,006—who were able to reach the “temporal-atemporal” transition, when they were able to generate parallel universes including atemporal ones where their societies would branch off) were able to do so because they could abide so many contradictions, which even the most intelligent civilizations have generally been unable to do. That’s because the very technologies that the intelligent civilizations generate become so easily self-destructive (either through accident or deliberate application) if misused, and advancing to the temporal-atemporal transition requires innovating these technologies, while simultaneously restraining and controlling them. A root belief for the Grand 37 was the contradictory ability to maintain an intelligent and rational enough civilization to innovate the technologies, yet frankly accept their own fallibility and tendency to slip into irrationality—and thus to introduce safeguards that would minimize these self-destructive tendencies when “things fell apart.” Essentially, those societies have to elaborate an extraordinary degree of “algorithmic complexity” in how they ran themselves—similar, by analogy, to the way the evolution of the human frontal lobes (which control mechanisms and an ability to conceive of a moral structure)—and not just at an individual level, but a societal one. It’s an extremely delicate and difficult “dance” that very few civilizations master.

Tim retorts to the Ersetzer—in one of the moral themes of the book, ideas as of 10/14/08—that while the Ersetzer may be correct about this difficult need to “abide such contradictory notions,” that the Ersetzer’s motives are questionable, and that even he doubts them. Tim realizes that what the Ersetzer is saying, is that intelligent civilizations are inclined to build ever more algorithmically complex networks, that they act essentially to autocatalyze upon the increasingly intelligent neural networks that brought themselves about. That eventually, this capacity to generate increasingly complex neural networks, results in the capacity to also make the temporal/atemporal transition. Since a universe is at root just an emergent causal narrative—with serially self-amplifying, and increasingly intelligent (and eventually, self-aware and conscious) neural networks) neural networks formed (the RENNT theory that’s gradually laid out in the book, as a basis for some of the events that occur)—that as civilizations become more “collectively intelligent,” they also increase their specific causal capacity. Civilizations that accomplish the temporal/atemporal transition, subsequently come to grasp the network structure and algorithmic rules of expanding spacetimes, and they subsequent initiate “novel spacetimes”—again, just causal narratives in logical space, i.e. Hilbert space—with “special rules and structures,” including their own consciousnesses and aspects of their experience and their physical surroundings, which essentially evolve in parallel to their own (if they’re temporal), or become a kind of “state-fixed world” (if they’re of the atemporal variety), e.g. a sort of ongoing, permanent version of a town from 18^th-century Italy that people dwell in. {NB—this is a great idea for a sci-fi short story by the way, with a corporation generating these “bubble worlds” for people to transport their consciousnesses into, either for permanent relocation or “just renting.”} This sort of spacetime inflation into new universes is constantly occurring naturally, anyway—intelligent civilizations that reach the temporal-atemporal transition, acquire the ability to intelligently and specifically guide and plan such new spacetimes, for example as something for themselves, for their animals (e.g. a kind of ideal world free of predators for pigs, cows and chickens, as a way to honor farm animals for providing sustenance to people over generations—another one of the sci-fi ideas I’ve considered before), many variations on this theme.

(In the book, “physical intelligence” is partially defined by Professor Leonhard Schmolke as “the ability to reproducibly alter initial probabilities for the evolution of a given network state,” which in turn—as Tim later realizes—makes intelligence a kind of causal power. This intelligence and causal power, in turn, is a direct result of the ability to “algorithmically model and map” the systems that one is attempting to have a causal effect on—that is, to map the essential algorithmic characteristics of the object. The linchpin breakthrough is the capacity for increasingly intelligent networks to “algorithmically map and model themselves,” IOW for the algorithmic mapping/modeling to become recursive, which leads to self-awareness and genuine consciousness in higher animals with rapid-impulse nervous systems who are able to acquire a sense of themselves. This is part of what Douglas Hofstadter and others were getting at. As this recursive ability becomes more sophisticated, as intelligent animals are better able to model and map themselves and even their own minds—to the point of being able to “extend the convolutions of their brains” to sync with outside networks and thus magnify their problem-solving capabilities, one of the things that a character in KP is attempting—they’re then able to rapidly increase the algorithmic complexity of the neural networks. At this point, and especially as the intelligent animals are better able to map the algorithmic complexity of their own minds (i.e. their own neural networks), the process of amplification essentially becomes autocatalytic. This auto-amplification of causal power, via increasingly accurate modeling and mapping of already intact high-level neural networks, is the “raw material” for increasing intelligence and eventual self-awareness, as well as further amplification of the networks’ sophistication. As atoms “map each other” via covalent bonds, they generate the increasingly complex neural networks of molecules, which then increase their causal power and thus physical intelligence (guiding the behavior of other atoms). Molecules then do this with other molecules as they generate macromolecules like proteins, DNA, and carbohydrates, also with increasing causal power in the process.

Tim realizes that the Ersetzer wants something far more than the expanded networks that intelligent animals are increasingly able to generate. Since intelligence is causal power, and causal power for any system requires the ability to provide a detailed and accurate algorithmic map of the system, then the Ersetzer would need to reach a level of algorithmic mapping power greater than the universe itself to be able to have “causal power” over a universe. This is one of the conceptual themes that the book addresses, and one of the things that’s been discussed in these notes in a few places already—a time-traveler going back in time to change events of the past, or a being outside the universe affecting that universe, would be “algorithmically equivalent events,” since they would both involve a neural network that is initially “external to the causal structure of the universe,” with the universe again being a causal narrative following an evolving and self-amplifying collection of causal principles, nonetheless suddenly coming in to change that universe in a manner that is outside the causal narrative (and the basic logical rules and algorithmic structure) that provide a somewhat rational basis for that causal narrative to evolve and emerge. This would, in other words, generate “a different universe,” i.e. a different causal narrative with a sudden change in those very causal principles (i.e., incorporating an intelligent/causal capability that lay initially outside the algorithmic framework of said universe) that had guided that universe’s emergence before. Again, this is elementally different than, e.g., restoring an original version of an ancient plant, or a painting, since this would be merely using a prior, emerged state of the network to restore a “data domain” from that prior state (which is actually quite common), in increasing detail and accuracy. The causal structure itself is entirely unaffected, and in fact the prior “data domain”—e.g., the original painting or the plant—is already “non-equivalent” to the original by virtue of its new milieu.

This, in turn, brings Tim to realize what the Ersetzer is trying to do. The Ersetzer happens to be internal and endogenous to this particular universe—since the Ersetzer had managed to “engraft himself onto the primary bud” from the prior universe that gave rise to this one—so he is able to manifest himself later when intelligent civilizations arise. But the Ersetzer’s power is still limited, and he can’t “form a universe from scratch” or otherwise impose himself on an existing universe. That’s because, again, different universes—which are different, evolving and emerging causal narratives, or more essentially, evolving and self-amplifying neural networks following an algorithmic “toolset” that is itself evolving and changing—aren’t suspended in some kind of common “background space.” Rather, they just exist independently in “algorithmic” or “logical space,” similar to the Hilbert space in which functions can evolve. They don’t “know about each other” per se, and they don’t have a causal impact on one another since they’re all too complex to model one another. (While intelligent animals within a given universe can of course conceive of other universes, and are motivated to reproduce conditions that produced them—the “higher animals are earth’s way of generating another earth” principle”—even as a networked intelligence, they don’t have the capacity to accurately model separate universes to a tremendous degree, and even their own as a challenge. While they can produce “offshoot universes” at the temporal/atemporal transition, with natural laws emerging from “modified algorithms” as well as their own consciousness generated within—and with the offshoot universes containing features of the original universe—they have very limited power over those universes once formed. While an atemporal universe maintains its initial state in essence, including the consciousnesses of the people therein—the parallel people in the original universe have only limited power over that new universe. The more complex that new universe, the less actual control they have, even for very intelligent networks in the original universe. “They can generate it, but they can’t control it.”)

To have any hypothetical ability to even slightly control “an outside universe” that formed independently of one’s own, an intelligence would have to be able to model it in all its complexity—since again, there’s no common background space in which different universes are rubbing up against each other. In the background-independent, relational space of Hilbert space, different universes are causally-independent, evolving structures. To affect an already evolving universe, then, a being not already within it would have to be able to map that entire universe’s algorithmic structure at a given point, at which point he could hypothetically integrate himself as a “causal element” within that universe and affect its evolution and the emergent neural networks within it. This would thus hypothetically cause a splitting event like the time traveler going back in time—one universe evolving as before, without the (initially external) causal element, and the other universe with the external causal factor integrated in. Such an advanced intelligence could even generate a new and complex universe de novo and essentially control it. To do this, of course, once again—that level of causal power would require the fundamental ability to map a complex universe-sized neural network, and to do this, an animal would need the causal power (and thus intelligence) of a universe itself, in fact, of an even more complex universe than the one this intelligent animal is trying to model.

Tim has already learned that the Ersetzer is, for all practical purposes, a universe in and of himself—he has incorporated the minds and backgrounds of billions of intelligent beings amid the almost 46,000 civilizations that he has incorporated previously. The Ersetzer thus evolves independently, using his own unusual algorithmic structure (which is also why the Ersetzer’s “mind” is effectively faster than light and not consonant with the standard physical constants of our universe—the Ersetzer’s “mind” or “neural network” has been interwoven into the neural network that constitutes this one, but he’s one small causal element within this network, and his mind is effectively independent of it). The Ersetzer is working to reinforce his causal power further and further, since this would enable him to self-amplify sufficiently to become essentially more complex than even very complex universes—which would then enable him to map those universes, and thus to enter in as a causal factor within other universes (in the manner noted above), as well as to self-generate and control new universes themselves. Tim thus notes that the Ersetzer is seeking to become one of the gods through acquisition of this causal power, which in turn he achieves by taking in more and more conscious minds within distinct universes. As he absorbs more and more such minds, the Ersetzer amplifies his causal power further and further toward this point. The Ersetzer, in other words, is gaining increasing sophistication to perform the kind of “cosmic calculus” that would enable him to form and control worlds.

Tim quickly recognizes that the Ersetzer erred as a result of how he first came about, his initial objectives, and the corruption that befell him as he became increasingly powerful. The Ersetzer saw the self-destruction of his own civilization just at the point of the temporal-atemporal transition, and resolved to then “rescue” other intelligent civilizations within the universes that he entered as an endogenous, intrinsic agent. He would be awakened with the first use of an atomic bomb, observe the civilization, and then—if the civilization nuked itself out—would absorb what was left into his own mind (i.e., bringing them into his own universe), in a sense as a “secondary plan” with that civilization being unable to advance to the temporal-atemporal transition. (The Ersetzer would absorb the minds of the people, as well as their cities, the natural world, IOW the range of complexity, intelligence and “varied neural networks” within that world.) He’d then do this successively for other universes formed from the prior one, intervening as necessary for civilizations in the same manner as before.) While the Ersetzer’s objectives indeed seem to have originally been noble like this, at some point, the Ersetzer became corrupted as he became increasingly powerful. He began craving the increased causal power in its own right, without even considering the civilization’s course. And absorbing the civilization at some point shortly following the first atomic bomb, proved to be convenient, since it would provide a guaranteed “complexity peak” before a global thermonuclear war—which, in the Ersetzer’s calculation, becomes likely with extremely high probability.

The Ersetzer, in other words, is rationalizing—he claims his initial, noble objectives, but in practice he has been corrupted by the power that he is increasingly accruing. Tim also realizes, however, that the Ersetzer has thereby broken one of his own algorithmic guideposts. Part of the process of increasing intelligence and complexity, also involves an increasingly sophisticated, emergent morality—and of the “paradoxical contradictions that must be abided,” as it turns out, is that increasingly evolved, sophisticated minds (and neural networks) must preserve and protect the unique complexity of the “lower-level” neural networks. The Ersetzer was indeed doing this at first, but as he became corrupted, the Ersetzer also fell into a classic “Darwinian misinterpretation trap”—as he became an ever more algorithmically complex, sophisticated being, the Ersetzer began to think that he had a basic right to supersede, to “replace” the naturally less-sophisticated networks (e.g., the intelligent civilizations on the planets on which the Ersetzer is awakened). It’s the old corruption of the “survival of the fittest” idea, sometimes assumed as meaning that more evolved beings would have a “natural right” to effectively “take out” the less advanced animals—instead of a more nuanced, “morally intelligent” notion that they should work to protect and preserve those that are supposedly less advanced.

Since the Ersetzer is just rationalizing, using his prior claims to justify his current aggression, as Tim catches onto, the Ersetzer also becomes vulnerable. His own algorithmic guideposts are in conflict and, moreover, Tim recognizes one of the reasons that the Ersetzer has become corrupted—in absorbing so many civilizations before an act of global thermonuclear war, the Ersetzer also absorbed an awful lot of their hatred, their aggressive mindsets. Despite the Ersetzer’s supposed “evolving” past this point, that very lust for power begins to infect and take over the Ersetzer himself. This also means, of course, that the various “minds” the Ersetzer has absorbed, are also in conflict. (Again, the idea of 7-9 “individual” minds within each person.) And so the Ersetzer’s network, in this world, is vulnerable to being disrupted and falling into conflict. Tim uses scenes and backgrounds from some of the Japanese individuals that the Ersetzer has absorbed. The Ersetzer first awakened within these “children of Hiroshima” and supposedly absorbed them into his overall being (i.e., his universe), but his hold over them is partial and tenuous, as they’ve been brought in so recently before the Ersetzer has himself fully materialized on this world. At the caverns beneath the Noerdlinger Ries, where the Ersetzer is completing the absorption process—and simultaneously preparing to “transport himself” again to a progeny universe budding off from this one—Tim finds the children of Hiroshima, together with other people that the Ersetzer has already started to incorporate into his own mind. But Tim is able to reveal to them who the Ersetzer is and what his actual, ruinous objectives are, and moreover, to re-instill the individual distinctiveness into the minds of the people there, distinct and separate from “the Ersetzer network,” by flooding them with memory cues from their own distinctive experiences as separate from the “network mind” that the Ersetzer is trying to incorporate them into. Tim completes the process by providing tangible memory cues to them, physically, within the caverns site—obviously something at a more palpable level than what the Ersetzer can provide within his network—and is thus able to awaken them out of the “Ersetzer trance” and fully restore them. This thereby severs the Ersetzer’s “network link” within this world—he no longer has a causal connection to the people here—and he’s driven out. While the Ersetzer still has an existence outside, and he’s still able to hop into new universes budding off from others he’s been in, he’s nonetheless in disarray—the very conflict and rationalization that Tim forced onto the Ersetzer (and which Tim ultimately used to defeat the Ersetzer at the site), now plagues him. World # 46,007 is a sequence in “Ersetzer time,” of course—although different universes don’t have a temporal “before and after” relative to each other, they do have a temporal sequence in the form of any being that’s able to traverse from one to the other, like the Ersetzer. (In ”Ersetzer time,” of course, there’s a causal series of events that clearly have a before and after, and thus in the context of his neural network, the different universes are indeed correlated in a cause-and-effect fashion.) In other words—time itself is intrinsic to a particular neural network (of any size or complexity) on the basis of discrete, causal events that map out the evolving and emergence of that neural network. (This also sheds some light on relativity theory—different events in very distant sites, can be compared to each other temporally only via a shared causal element, or via a separate neural network that causally interacts with, or takes particular notice of, both of those said events.) However, in any future worlds with which the Ersetzer interacts, he’s going to be affected by the doubts in his own algorithmic guideposts that were brought to the fore by Tim in #46,007—it’s a moral conflict that has a direct, tangible impact on the Ersetzer’s own plans, on what he does. Like any other complex, intelligent, self-aware neural network, the Ersetzer’s mind cannot operate without a clear set of algorithmic directives—which naturally include moral considerations, considering his level of evolution—and since the Ersetzer has now been “taken down” by this very conflict, and his own rationalization for his ruinous acts been laid bare, he can no longer simply “absorb” advanced civilizations as he had been doing before.

Central to the process of the sped-up neural network amplification that occurs in intelligent animals, is the way in which we use narratives—e.g., metaphors, which are simple “capsule narratives”—to deduce underlying algorithmic principles themselves. Language, for example, is a “metaphor-generating” device in its abstract words e.g. (impression, insult, dovetail, explicate, project, correct) that are formed from metaphors, i.e. little stories, involving simple, visualizable, concrete concepts that our minds are built to understand. As these simple templates are then used in stories to generate the abstract notions, our minds use the stories to then deduce basic “algorithmic operating principles” for the world around us, for both the natural world and human relations.

As Montague was saying in his book—thoroughly contemplated notions give rise to more automated protocols, and we rely on this whenever we consult professionals: the originally learned algorithms “become automatic” and thus useful as routines, which can be efficiently called upon later on.

Another interesting concept—in general, increasing the power of causality (and thus “physical intelligence”) involves not only “modeling” a system that one wants to have a causal effect on, but mapping it. The map is starting to emerge as the best analogy (as of 10/10/08) for what’s going on here, in RENNT, as one neural network gives rise to another higher-level neural network (though “effective neurons” or “special nodes” in the lower-level neural net), and as intelligent, consciousness, and self-awareness (all of which involve recursive logical relations) emerge. Intelligence in the sense of “causal capacity” requires modeling and accurately mapping the system that one wants to affect—the more detailed and intricate the map is, the higher the causal power, since there emerges a greater “logical equivalence” between the Ding an Sich and the informational structure used to represent it. Since there are multiple “logically equivalent” representations of a particular Ding an Sich, these more detailed maps get ever closer to the Ding an Sich itself. (They’re not exactly equivalent since, in general, the map exists in a different micro- and macro-environment compared to the Ding an Sich, and this environmental discrepancy also changes the logical composition of the map, even if just to a small extent.) Self-awareness and consciousness themselves represent a “special case” of such mapping and modeling, since they essentially involve the neural network mapping itself to varying degrees. The higher the degree of such self-mapping (and thus recursion), the higher the degree of self-awareness and consciousness, essentially.

To map a neural network of lower complexity (and thus to reach the necessary level of “intelligence” to causally impact it), a higher-level neural network obviously needs to be more complex than the lower-level algorithmic structure. But not just slightly more complex—it needs to be “head-and-shoulders above” the lower-level network, an order of magnitude higher. The scale of the necessary “complexity jump” is something that can be quantified, and Tim uses this to gain a sense of what the Ersetzer would need to accomplish various objectives.

Our own minds naturally learn/think in terms of narratives, exemplifications of principles (which can then be deduced back from the narratives). In a sense, this is part of the unique intelligence of the minds of higher animals that we recognize as “consciousness” and “self-awareness”—we’re able to use the way that particular algorithms play out, to seek out regular patterns and thus deduce the underlying (though hidden) algorithms themselves. Moreover, we’re able to observe our own behavior to draw similar conclusions about our own mind’s workings, to mirror our minds, essentially.

A later conversation, Tim with the German professor: The speed of light c is essentially a reflection of the signal architecture of the communications and neural network that we call “spacetime” (itself constructed out of nodes rooted in Smolin’s spin networks). As c is itself defined on the basis of Maxwell’s permittivity and permeability of free space, it’s essentially just one of the parameters of the network itself. Usually, conscious minds communicate using the same communications network based around speed of light c. Some types of consciousness don’t—including the Boltzmann Brains, like that of the Ersetzer. Since in a sense, the capacity for consciousness predates the physical network of spacetime (which is itself an evolving neural network), then other types of “conscious neural network” can overlap with our spacetime neural network. An example being the Boltzmann Brain of the Ersetzer—even very distant and discontinuous points of our spacetime, can communicate instantaneously since they’re part of the same conscious mind, i.e. the same neural network, that of the Ersetzer (with its own network architecture).

A guiding concept for the writing—consider how our current “common sense,” experiences and rules we take for granted in terms of biological function and even many concepts of physics, are easily “superseded” when some keys about evolution and intelligence are understood, at which point “some once-intractable mysteries have a logic and start to make sense.” So—what is that “wavelength” we need to be on, what’s that “frame” or that “alignment” that we have to be on?

Companies—turn a company’s function into an essential standard (e.g. Nielsen and its TV ratings) or a trademark (e.g. Rollerblade with its inline skates).

Trust your ”mental algorithms” dude, like always staying cool, returning to a central core, writing down duties and checking the lists, avoid holding useful things in reserve too much, don’t overfocus on peripheral “aids” to a central objective.

The mixture of Runic symbols, Latin/Greek alphabets and ideographic glyphs on the ore tablets (both the one that Tim inherits and others that he sees) is reminiscent of the “universal language” that Leibniz was seeking.

When Tim is facing down the Ersetzer later on, he realizes that the Ersetzer has “drifted into evil”: The Ersetzer began his “quest” with an honest desire to save intelligent civilizations that were hurtling toward self-destruction. But the Ersetzer later became drunk with power, essentially, as he absorbed more and more intelligent minds—souls, basically—and thus reached a higher peak of intelligence. (Conversation with a professor from Leipzig later in the book—“in physical terms, intelligence is tantamount to the power of causality. To have causal power, of course, it’s necessary to be able to model the system where one is seeking to be a causal agent. Since nature is, at root, an evolving and complexifying series of neural networks, up to our own brains, a higher-level network acquires this causal power and thus this intelligence, only when it is sufficiently capable of modeling the lower-level networks—i.e., when it has the “recursive capacity” to model the lower-level systems.) Tim figures out that to have “the power of the gods” to effectively control the massive calculational complexity of an entire natural universe, the Ersetzer needs to continue absorbing billions more intelligent souls—only then will it acquire the “parallel computing power” necessary to model a natural universe, a god-like power that the Ersetzer now earnestly seeks.

(Again, another conversation Tim has with a professor later, notes that “an outside being affecting our universe, would be the same kind of thing as a time traveler going back in time to supposedly ‘change the future’”—in both cases, you would have an agent that is exogenous to the fundamental causal fabric of our universe, which is at root an evolving neural network after all, fundamentally changing the logical content and structure of our universe, and thus producing a different universe with a different causal structure. It’s this causal structure after all, this logical evolving with regular laws, that in one way defines a universe [“an independent zone of calculations for a specific, evolving neural network”], and if this causal structure—including the causal laws themselves—were to be altered by an exogenous agent, then it would be a different universe altogether, by definition. Stated slightly differently—it would then become no longer the same universe, after all—a universe is fundamentally defined as an evolving logical and neural network with an evolving, but still defined causal structure which is itself a product of the logical, algorithmic rules that construct that causal network. Even the causal laws can be slightly altered but without discontinuities or singularities [i.e., with a still logical transition]—even things like “re-acquiring and partially re-introducing earlier causal states” such as when Tim’s wife Susan returns, that’s merely importing portions of an earlier and well-defined causal structure into a later timepoint, not essentially much different from re-copying and re-constituting a work of literature or a painting from an earlier century that otherwise hadn’t been available before. The fundamental causal structure remains intact.) Tim has an earlier encounter with the Ersetzer where he, along with the Ur-Schatten aliens (“We were #46,006”) who are revived in Goettingen later in the book, do sense the part of the Ersetzer that feels “benevolent” in what he’s doing. But Tim also realizes that the Ersetzer has become corrupted—as the Ersetzer comes closer to achieving the intelligence capacity to effectively model and control a full universe himself (rather than the “unwieldy” method of creating an uncertain universe that the Ersetzer is currently stuck with), the Ersetzer has come obsessed with that aggrandizement.

Tim openly wonders why, if the Ersetzer has become powerful enough to import himself into a newly expanding universe and set himself up as a “an emergent intelligence” there—why the Ersetzer has to effectively mow down (and absorb into himself) an intelligent civilization if the Ersetzer indeed feels that civilization is “determined to nuke itself back to a Dark Age.” Why couldn’t the Ersetzer basically just revive an earlier timepoint for the civilization and find a way to steer it against such self-destructive acts? (The Ersetzer argues that this would “interfere with the causal laws and free will” of the intelligent civilizations who have endangered themselves, but Tim doubts this—isn’t the Ersetzer doing this anyway by taking and absorbing a civilization before it has even undergone such a calamity, before the Ersetzer could even be certain that such a civilization were bound to do this?) Tim realizes that the Ersetzer, in fact, isn’t sure—he still convinces himself that his “original objective” of rescuing self-destructing civilizations is intact, but Tim senses that the Ersetzer is just rationalizing—that his original objective, however noble, has been corrupted by the attraction of the causal power and thus the growing intelligence, and that the Ersetzer, in fact, doesn’t really care much about rescuing civilizations hurtling toward such disasters. Instead, the Ersetzer uses this as a rationalization for absorbing the massive collective intelligence of such a civilization during a particularly “ripe” period of its development. That the Ersetzer “awakens” himself in the civilization after the first nuclear weapons uses, i.e. Hiroshima and Nagasaki on earth, still does not mean that the Ersetzer is really acting to “rescue” the civilization, since it is far from certain that such a civilization inevitably would self-destruct itself with these tools. The use of such nuclear weapons also corresponds to an era of high population and technological advance, and just the mere probability of nuclear and/or environmental catastrophe—a high probability, granted, but one that can be confronted—seems to suggest to the Ersetzer, that his best “gains” would be obtained by absorbing that civilization then rather than waiting a century longer, when a nuclear exchange might wipe out much of the “collective intelligence” that the civilization holds.

So, the Ersetzer (or perhaps the “Seelesammler” as I’ll start calling him) falsely claims that he “knows” a civilization after a Hiroshima-like event is about to take itself out, when in fact he’s just using that as a rationalization for his real objective deep-down—which the Ersetzer himself doesn’t acknowledge—to absorb more conscious minds, to gain causal power. (“Rationalization is perhaps the ultimate root of evil—it’s what enables otherwise good people to commit evil without compunction and continue committing it, since they deceive even themselves into believing that their acts are righteous.”) In fact, the Ersetzer does have both and is thus conflicted even though he openly doesn’t acknowledge it. Tim then uses this to take down the Ersetzer—since he realizes that the Ersetzer is basically a conglomerate of otherwise independent, intelligent minds (that the Ersetzer thought he had “aligned” into a common interest before taking them over), Tim “revives the consciousness” of many of these minds so that the Ersetzer is no longer to act as a “unified causal force.” (As another professor had told Tim earlier—our minds are “collections of otherwise independently-acting, thinking, conscious causal agents, that we are able to unify toward common decision-making and thinking. Effectively—every human mind is a composite of billions of neurons and trillions, quadrillions or perhaps even more independent nodes of calculation, that we draw together. In fact, if we were to peer inside, for every single “person” we’d probably find 7, 8, 9—perhaps even more—separate “individuals,” that is, distinct, thinking entities with their own emotional tendencies, thoughts, and decision-making capacities. This is why we so often feel conflicted and unsure—it’s because our various “selves” are in genuine conflict with one another, and they can’t come to a consensus.) The Ersetzer, after Tim awakens the independent, conscious minds within him, is paralyzed—those independent minds obviously were not in agreement with the Ersetzer’s acts against them! So the Ersetzer can no longer act as a causal force on earth, and he’s thwarted.

Principle of one person’s mind having 7 individuals… the Brodmann walk.

When Tim later learns about the “ausserzeitsprinzip”—the push for intelligent civilizations to be able to “set rules” for generating their own little bubble worlds, atemporal ones, where they’re able to “port” portions of their civilization and themselves at different points—he quips that “When the local community college starts offering course credits in the Cosmic Engineering Department, then feel free to give me a call.”

Hero of Alexandria, ancient tools.

Interesting—in seeking out collective intelligence, there seems to be a facet of our own minds that selects out the most valuable information and retains it in memory, even a slight detail that’s not pondered much later (e.g., “the heretic is more dangerous than the infidel” and the like).

{Chapter 7—Paster George to Tim, in the church after the sermon. Pastor George is an old friend, an ex-physics grad student in NC who washed out, and whom Tim knew, became a pastor later. Tim hears his sermon—which is about resurrection, mainly metaphorically—and brings up his issues with Susan, his deceased wife, whom he thinks he’s seeing visions of.}

“Well, Pastor George, still prince of the pulpit I see!”

The pastor turned toward Tim’s voice, surprised and warmed by its unexpected familiarity. “Tim?! My goodness, Tim Shoemaker! Never expected to spot you among my flock today!” He turned quickly toward the choral director. “Janice, I’ll uh… I’ll join you and the team in the chapel in a few minutes to iron out the details, this place seems to be raining unexpected visitors these days.”

The choir director smiled and nodded silently before leaving the pastor’s company, as he turned toward Tim and gently slapped his shoulders in welcome. “Tim, my goodness, how long has it been? Even since I left Durham for the head pastor job here… we’re just down the freeway but it seems like worlds away. How have you been old friend?”

“Oh, the usual madness, just with more company these days I suppose. The way the grant funding’s been drying up of late, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the budding propellerheads back in the engineering departments back in Durham, turn around and decide to follow in your career footsteps soon.”

“Oh, Tim, don’t tell me that! Prior to today, I was firmly convinced that I’d cornered the market on the washed-up, drunken ex-physics grad students-turned pastor crowd in these parts. I’m not sure the synod can handle more than one of us around here!”

“Well,” cracked Tim with a wry smile, “I’m half surprised they’re able to handle the one Pastor George McAllister they already have on their hands, so I doubt you’ll have too much to worry about in that department. Remember old friend, I still have a lotta dirt on you from the days of our reign of terror together at Northwestern, so don’t ever wind up on my bad side!”

“I was always relieved to have you around, Tim,” laughed the pastor, “it always diverted some of the heat from me. We must have pulled off enough stupid pranks and antics to be expelled from that place 3 times over, and it was then that I learned the valuable life lesson that youthful idiocy loves company!”

…

“George I, uh… I honestly couldn’t think of anyone else I could talk about this with. You know how, even now, it’s still so… almost unbearable every time I think of Susan…” The pastor nodded gently, exuding empathy without saying a word.

“Well,” continued Tim, “seems like now, all of a sudden, I can’t… can’t stop thinking about her. And I don’t mean, it’s not just thinking about her… I, I see her. Physically, I mean… uh, I’m not making any sense…”

“Don’t worry old friend, just take your time.”

Tim paused and sighed, unable to face Pastor George directly for fear of displaying any surreptitious tears welling up in his eyes. “When I say, I’ve been seeing her face… I don’t know, but sometimes when I look into TV screens, mirrors, windows, any kind of surface where you can project an image… she’s there George. I mean, really, really there, not just metaphorically, I see her face, a bit grayish and indistinct but it’s unmistakably Susan. She’s looking out, not necessarily at me but she’s looking out from the surface, cognizant somehow… And it’s not just a will-o’-the-wisp disappearing the moment I turn away, I look back and she’s still there, saying nothing but… she’s definitely there, gradually fading away before I see her image again somewhere else.”

“Well, that horrible day… I remember it too, Tim, all of us in the congregation kept you in our hearts during that horrible time. The anniversary was… well, a few months ago, something like that, it’s never far from your conscious mind.”

“Yeah, and there have been some reminders lately, including some things I definitely would like to forget.”

The pastor winced slightly but still sympathetically, instantly appreciating the reference that his old friend was making.

“Yeah, it was Karen, she’s now a sales rep with a pharmaceutical firm out in the Research Triangle, she happened to just be there in the Medical Center when I was just grabbing a coffee after a conference… But George, still, it’s not the first time I’ve had all those awful memories flood back like that. It hits me for a few days, I slide off the grid for a little while, then it just ebbs away until I get reminded again. I’ve certainly never… these, vivid images, Susan’s face, that’s something altogether new, and not exactly welcome. It sends me right back to that day, to the road with Susan… the lump in the throat, the knot in the stomach, it just keeps coming back again, just… again and again.”

The pastor looked on sympathetically, before addressing his friend in a cautious yet soothing tone. “Tim, I of course can’t, explain the timing or why you’re seeing Susan’s face, where you’re seeing her but… She never actually left your side, Tim. Our souls, they don’t belong to us exclusively, they… they’re shared, by everyone we interact with. What after all, what is this soul we talk about so much? We all sprinkle it throughout our sermons but what do we mean? This soul of ours, it’s that unique, idiosyncratic signature that each of us imprints on the world around us, some collection of our ideas, memories, experiences, behavior, appearance, our acts and achievements that on the one hand are specific to this little nook and cranny of the world at this particular moment. But which on the other hand, also transcend this place and time—it’s the whole that’s vastly more than the sum of the parts, and it has staying power. It’s this mysterious, masterwork… this product of a remarkable creativity that’s somehow able to take this, soup of macromolecules in our cells and tissues, all that gadgetry that you and I spent years taking exams about in our grad student days, and makes an integrated, complex, thinking whole out of it. And it’s both unique and shared among everyone we interact with.”

The pastor paused momentarily and slightly lowered his head toward Tim, still glancing obliquely downward in a forlorn effort to conceal the anguish that continued to gnaw at him. “Tim, Susan never really died for you, or for anyone you’ve interacted with or anyone you will interact with. Her soul ramifies itself through you and whomever you run into, and every time you try to deny her presence… it just comes bounding back to you. Maybe that’s what happened when you encountered Karen like that. You’d gotten so proficient at clamping the lid on your thoughts, that they boiled over like a volcano when you couldn’t tamp them down anymore, because trying to deny Susan’s presence would be like trying to deny your own left arm. She’s a part of you.”

Tim finally lifted his head tentatively, still unsure of his ability to confront his old friend’s words face to face. The pastor smiled as he was again able to glimpse the outlines of Tim’s eyes, the whites bearing the slight red tinge of reawakened sadness. “It’s funny, George,” he began, “they were sponsoring these seminars at Duke a while back, between the physics, theology and philosophy departments, discussing that—what the soul is, physically and intellectually pinning down what we mean. I… it was before Susan and I took that trip to Suriname, it all just seemed like so much esoterica even to a veteran geek like myself. And since then… there are times, when I picture Susan, it’s all I think about. Susan, her soul, her… her being, she’s still with me somehow, strange because it feels, sometimes, so concrete, like she’s right next to me, engaging all my senses like before.”

The pastor smiled sympathetically. “That reminds me of Dr. O’Leary, back when Dr. Reynard and I were collaborating with his team. I was always burning the midnight oil in Dr. O’s little fief with his own foot soldiers, and good old Dr. O himself was of course reliably there with us no matter what the hour. To keep everyone sane at 2 a.m. or Lord knows what hour we were sometimes stuck there, Dr. O would start up on one of his quirky Socratic Q&A sessions about those things in the world we always take for granted… the conscious mind, the soul, that was one of his favorites.”

Pastor George chuckled gently in amusement at the reminiscence. “To my flock today,” he continued, “I’d say the soul is known and felt by all of us and of course by God. I suppose, if I were still back working late nights in Professor O’Leary’s lab, trying to ferret out the 25^th digit in some physical constant to explain the strong force in atomic nuclei… and old Doctor O was starting up on one of his bleary-eyed physico-philosophical meanderings… I’d reach for the latest lingo in whatever literature we were citing at the time for our talks. Total information content, decoherence of a Schrödinger wavefunction, those same wavefunctions transmitting and maintaining their information through a complex system… Are they the same thing at heart? I don’t know, and besides, why deconstruct it so much here? Whatever that idiosyncratic imprint is, that Susan had and still has, it’s now at the heart of your own soul Tim. And now, that part of you is awakening again, far more forcefully than before. Why? Well, that’s something I can’t answer.”

New ideas 8/08:

1. Tim’s investigation about halfway through, brings him to a company working on tissue engineering (for transplants) and a new kind of viral gene therapy-mediated cancer drug. The ex-chief scientist now lives in Mauritius—he had demonstrated that at heart, the function of all bodily organs merely involves a series of rapid calculations. The filtration of the kidney, the function of the liver, the beating of the heart, “all of these are merely tantamount to a series of subroutines carried out in the massively complex calculating apparatus of our body. Our genetic code supplies the ‘software’ for generating this calculational system, and normal physiology, in turn, entails the processing of inputs and the carrying out of these routines. A high level of calculational surface area is required for this—I mean, you see it everywhere, in the nephrons of the kidney, the lipid rafts and ER of the cell. The function of the body is equivalent to the elaboration of these surfaces on which to conduct the calculation. And when we encounter human disease, that, in turn, involves a loss of the calculation networks needed to carry out the routines—and a loss of the calculational surface area in particular. Think about it—cirrhosis of the liver, the myocardial scarring after a heart attack, the acute renal failure that occurs after a glomerulonephritis in the kidney, the de-differentiation of mature parenchymal cells that you see in virtually any cancer, the flattening of the normal grooves in the cerebral cortex in an advanced alcoholic: What’s the common thread? It’s that, in each case, you lose the calculational surface area that’s required for the complex calculations that constitute human physiology. It’s the same idea, you know, if you run a key over the surface of a microchip, or fry a motherboard—you lose that textured, complex topography that’s required for complex calculations. The same motif in nature, too—information capacity, the surface of a black hole and all that theory, this motif you see at galactic scales, atomic scales, the physiological scales of human organs alike: Advanced calculations require this evolving surface topography, and in a sense, biological evolution itself, involves a seeking out of this increased topography. And ultimately, the informational networks and the coding that you see, whether in a complex human organ like the liver or kidney, or the complex routines carried out on the motherboard of a computer—they’re all equivalent, Dr. Shoemaker.” [This is used to explain how the “Ersetzer gene,” once activated in the minds of the Marines getting the visual implants, took over their minds and also took over the computer networks. The “data manipulation” principles are at root, analogous in the brain as well as a computer network’s hardware. A rogue scientist from the company had left earlier to conduct tests in “xenoneural extension,” in which his own brain and intelligence would be rapidly expanded through thus increasing the convolutions—both through tissue engineering and through connection to a network. Elements of this network were added to the implants.]

2. When the Ersetzer later confronts Tim—and explains what he believes to be his mission—the Ersetzer delivers one of the central moral thrusts of the book: “Protecting your civilization, Tim, and ensuring that it survives to the point of propagating its heritage into the timeless realms—it requires surviving the civilizational bottlenecks that your species, and the tens of thousands before yours, have all faced and almost always failed. It requires the embrace of contradictions that seem to be beyond the capacity of an evolved mind to accept. All intelligent species in these 46,006 worlds before yours, they all had to evolve as you did, often from creatures that resemble the reptiles and mammals that dwell upon your earth. They had to survive a cruel and amoral world and evolve as all animals, in a seemingly chronic war for survival. Yet when intelligence evolves and begins its process of self-amplification, somehow your battle-born minds have to climb out of their own origins. They must assemble a moral code in a seemingly amoral world, to temper their arrogance, to gain power and further intelligence and yet—to simultaneously understand that power is greatest in its own voluntary limitation. That the highest evidence of an evolved mind is not the elimination and replacement of beings lower on the ladder, but in their embrace and protection. The apotheosis of intelligence, comes in the form of doubt and the embrace of uncertainty. And all of these lessons, Dr. Shoemaker, must descend upon the collective psyche of the society.” “No Dr. Shoemaker, it is not merely that you are always at war with each other; you are at war within yourselves, within your own mind. You must build upon and moderate the impulses that well up within your ancient hindbrain, yet plan your societies

3. A critical ingredient as the story unfolds, is the Ersetzer’s first awakening on Earth, which in turn is connected to secret alterations of the AP-278 implants conducted by one of the companies partnering with the Oak Ridge team. The Ersetzer programmed himself, when he first hitchhiked on the meteor eons ago to strike earth, to integrate near the human brain, and for his expression cassette to be awakened only in the presence of high levels of ionizing radiation—the signature of the first use of nuclear weapons. His awakening is a stochastic event, occurring in one of every 5,000 people exposed to the radiation. Moreover, the Ersetzer can be “awakened” in this process, only in fetuses during an early stage of development, shortly after gastrulation. From this pool, some fetuses are so damaged that their minds can’t function, or have mental illnesses—but a few, a very tiny number, grow up to be extremely intelligent people, who are dedicated to fully awakening the Ersetzer if he gives the command. The Ersetzer’s awakening doesn’t occur in adult minds very well, and when it does, most of those adults are too badly damaged for their minds to function well at all—that’s because the “Ersetzer gene” encodes a prion-like protein that, ultimately, has to be carefully modified in an adult mind to awaken the Ersetzer while preserving mental function. The Ersetzer observes the world through these kids as they grow up—several of them becoming anti-nuclear peace activists, incidentally—and it is in the decades after the A-bombs in Japan that the Ersetzer concludes, based on his past experiences with intelligent civilizations nuking themselves back to Dark Ages, that human civilization on earth will likely do the same, leading him to set in motion the “Sammlungsplan”—activating himself and collecting the minds, memories, art, creativity, and complexities of earth by around 2015 A.D., incorporating them within his own supra-cosmic intelligent entity. His power is still limited and even he has to conjecture about the appropriate nature of his actions, or lack thereof. The Ersetzer thus “kickstarts” himself in a couple dozen “Hiroshima and Nagasaki babies” born about 6-8 months after the first atom bombs were dropped. He then becomes a part of these children’s brains as they grow—possessing them, in a sense, though the kids otherwise seem just to be just normal, albeit highly intelligent kids—and one of these kids then grows up to found a company interested in neural implants and “xenoneural extension,” the process of creating highly intelligent minds by connecting the human brain with evolving intelligent networks (essentially brain convolutions) outside the brain itself. This person, Akitoshi Takayama Lives in Iowa, Zip Code 43007. Other scattered clues—paper published showing unusual intronic sequence (turns out to be the Ersetzer sequence); in finding out the source of what made the implants alter the soldiers, Tim is frustrated by classified access blocks to his searches. But a friend notes that chip designers often etch their names on the chips (“like graffiti, or an artist hiding his initials on the canvas”)—this is what leads him to a company that’s working on tissue engineering and cancer treatments via “restoring calculational surface area,” and this then leads him to the xenoneural extension company, founded and led by Akitoshi Takayama. Other clues—(Chapter 5) Rachel calls Tim and notes that they finally have a break. A consulting Japanese scientist, a pharmacologist working on stroke treatments, happened to attend a conference on Monday morning and explained that he’d seen rare cases like those afflicting Sgt. Pablo Acevedo and the other Marines.

{Pretty wild event, BTW—I was trying to think of a name for the Japanese character in whom the Ersetzer is first awakened at Hiroshima. The name that popped into my head—Yasuhiro Takemoto, who turns out to be a well-known and respected anime artist!!! I must have seen the name before yet not been consciously aware of it. Interesting implications for suggestibility of the mind, including my own.}

4. Ersetzer’s brief backstory, in this universe and reaching the earth—each universe is essentially just a “zone of independent calculation and evolving intelligent networks,” with new such zones budding off each other. (The Ur-Schatten of course coming from our parent universe.) The Ersetzer is a “cloud intelligence” that permeates this universe (along with his others, of course)—he’s essentially wired into the “weaving fabric” that constitutes this universe’s spacetime at its most elemental level. (Here, taken to be Lee Smolin’s quantun spin networks.) As each network “evolves” via Smolin’s “special nodes” according to the RENNT theory (recursively emergent neural network theory—spin networks to quarks to nuclei to atoms to molecules to cells and so on), the Ersetzer’s intelligence begins to coalesce. However, the Ersetzer’s intelligence is “written into” the new universe so that he has a much higher probability of coalescing as an intelligence than any human-like mind on earth or other planets. IOW, the Ersetzer doesn’t need slow evolution on an earth-like planet; he is periodically able to rapidly coalesce as an intelligent “Boltzmann’s brain” at various points in the universe, at intervals of approximately 250,000 Earth years. Because the Ersetzer is “trans-universal,” moreover, his own intelligence is not limited by the speed of light (which is essentially a property of the universe’s “infrastructure” for transmitting signals via EM radiation, in any case)—he can see many points in this universe simultaneously when “coalesces.” (In fact, one of the characters quips that “Ersetzer time” would provide the ideal cosmic clock, since the Ersetzer is effectively a constant permeating the universe and experiencing events simultaneously, even though beings present at different points by the Ersetzer’s various “Boltzmann brains” would perceive the flow of time differently.) One of the Ersetzer’s Boltzmann brains coalesces in our solar system and then in the early earth. He soon realizes that earth is capable of supporting advanced, intelligent mammals and decides to transmit his “software” (the information and “nested instructions” that will ultimately incarnate him, in the form of DNA sequences eventually activated in human neural tissue and the resulting technologies of xenoneural extension and silicon-based intelligence) to earth. He needs to “incorporate” his instructions into a large number of mammals simultaneously to ensure transmission, and to spread over a large geographical region, so he customarily “hitchhikes” onto a large meteor to ensure this. The meteor that creates the Nordlinger Ries, in turn, spreads the Ersetzer-data as a herpes-like retrovirus to infect early mammals on earth, which integrates as a “cassette” in a region near the mammal’s developing mind, lying dormant only to be awakened later by ionizing radiation in the form of the first A-bomb. (This is one of the appeals of KP, this interdisciplinary element—drawing together virology, particle physics, information theory and so on.)

5.

6.

Perhaps, the most fundamental evil at the core of the human heart, stems from a most unfortunate logical fallacy: The tendency to stretch ideas, even good and correct ones, to lethal extremes. It is a failure to accept complexity and nuance, to accept the limitations of what we can ascertain and comprehend—to accept that even a remarkably successful and effective system of thought, will nonetheless have even its own caveats and counterbalancing factors, even if initially unforeseen. It is the failure of kings and revolutionaries alike, dictatorships and even many democracies—the assumption that they and only they have the true and correct path, in its entirety and to the exclusion of all others. Thus are even mass murder and centuries of oppression merely rationalized away. And so it is with this grotesque miscomprehension of our own evolution and the survival of the fittest.

And for two weeks, it was Cloud Nine city for us. Pablo kept making strides, and the team then introduced the implants into 3 other patients.

Rachel talks about problems, the neurological issues, the tapes—the weird breaks in the surveillance tapes, the numbers on the wall

Feb 27

Questing, gates, adventurous interactions (as in Angel, at Boardwalk in Rehoboth)

My fundamental principle: Every physical system is elementally indistinguishable from the numerical relations among the nodes or tensors (collections of numbers in essence) that describe it and collectively give rise to the “evolving neural network” at the heart of nature, in the background-independent, relational system of Smolin and my own modification of it—and our minds and other observers “compile” this elemental data-driven reality into the “physical” reality we see. In Smolin’s conceptualization, space and time have no independent, continuous existence—they are only the outcomes of the “ticking” i.e. state-changes of the interacting spin networks, and the geometric relations between spin networks, and I’ve taken this further since in essence: Without the background, it’s only the relations between the data/number groupings that constitute the nodes, that has any physical significance, there is no “in-between” space, just integer multiples of #’s of spin networks as they relate to each other.

A corollary: Matter and energy all arise out of special interrelations of these nodes, and in essence, each step of organization constitutes a “brain” that in turn becomes a “neuron” for a brain at a higher level of organization. Fundamental quantity is the level of organization and intelligence (and consciousness potential) within a given system. Thus, atoms are small “brains” that in fact have functions that, fractal-like, resemble the more commonly-recognized “brains”—they take in info (e.g. photons), process it, generate outputs, preserve memory of prior interactions based on e.g. their state. On the one hand, atoms themselves represent specialized collections of the “nodes” that derive from Smolin’s spin networks or, in my conceptualizations, the nodes are just those tensors (number groups) that have degrees of freedom to indicate their relations to other nodes (e.g. what we call distance, energy state and so forth)—and every collection of such nodes constitutes the evolving neural network of nature.

In turn, atoms associate in molecules, bigger “brains” of which the atoms are now “neurons.” The collection of atoms represents a similar set of “nodes” in a higher-level neural net, with the rules of association in turn deriving from the rules and associations of the lower-level neural nets (e.g., the fundamental nodes of spacetime itself, below the atoms and their subatomic particles). The molecules in turn become another “neural net” as they relate to each other, the molecule “brains” now becoming the “neurons” of still higher levels of organization, e.g. macromolecules (such as proteins), which in turn can form cells.

What’s the central theme here? The fundamental property of nature is the presence of nested sets of evolving neural networks at increasing levels of organization, starting with Smolin’s spin-network “atoms” of space and time themselves constituting the primary “nodes” or “neurons” whose interrelation generates the primary neural network. In turn, small subsets of stable interacting patterns among primary “nodes” then become the new “nodes” or “neurons” for higher-level, more complex neural networks at higher levels of organization, with rules and symbology from the lower levels being amplified to the higher ones as well. At heart, nature’s nodes are these data points defined by their relations to other nodes, as in the neural net, and the rules governing their relations can be represented in terms of natural number relations, per Goedel—but, we compile these relations with our own integrated networks, even though what we see is functionally equivalent to the tensors, just as e.g. a collection of blue and yellow light is ontologically tantamount to assemblages of particular wavelengths of EM radiation.

Look up: Venn diagrams and tensors for this; neural network calculation and evolution principles; changing numerical bases and coordinate systems for the “discovery device.” Get this to specifics, and answer: How do the most elemental neurons (i.e. the atoms, molecules), which are the “special nodes” in the spin networks/primitive neural networks, arise and communicate? How does gravity, the most basic force, arise out of these intelligent networks? Where do E = mc2 and so forth come from? If essentially the neural networks give rise to precursors of consciousness and intelligence—describe. The ether, from the neural networks?

Since distance, and time, are just mathematical relations essentially in a background-independent theory, define them and how they evolve. Relativity should “arise” from this—differential time advancement just represents different numbers of “events” as defined by Lorentz contraction. So, define an acceleration that leads to different reference frames—this process should just alter the number of spin network evolution events, one grouping relative to the other. If gravity, accel are the same—then this is just altering a “calculational surface” which, in turn, just alters the network of interacting nodes that calculate the neural networks—which, in turn, is something that sentient beings “compile” into what we see. A germ of consciousness here. Think about these “special nodes” that evolve into neural, intelligent systems, and use this as a bridge to grasping aesthetics as well. Value, quality closely linked with difficulty in creating something, as Lloyd notes.

Aesthetic production, the most challenging endeavor, is “novel” yet also “constrained” in some way—there’s some wiring in our brain that admires certain types of patterns, related to the Golden Ratio and other natural phenomena. Yet novelty is appreciated. It’s not just any novelty—random noise could be novel, but not appreciated without indicating an underlying pattern. If it’s so easy to produce, and doesn’t hit on some pattern recognized as important or special, our minds don’t recognize it as interesting. But something that’s difficult to produce, something that reflects underlying patterns, “compression” as Chaitin would say, is interesting, has aesthetic value. Why does our mind think certain things interesting, beautiful? Because our minds are preloaded somewhat—the very patterns and recursive “strange loops” that give rise to intelligence in the first place, these are special patterns b/c they evolve intelligence, give rise to higher-level nodes. And our minds are wired to notice that. So novelty, that gives rise to new recursive loops, with the potential for higher intelligence—we catch on to that.

Sucessful nations, institutions essentially develop an “ant-like” collective intelligence in which individuals benefit, but a tacit understanding permeates the group and achieves a greater good. Debate is necessary to make essential reforms, but it is fundamentally civil. It is firm, but not polarized.

“Atoms of intelligence” per Leibniz-- define them and how they evolve. Note that the rules that enable us to use e.g. geometric proofs in a mathematical system to use a theorem as “shorthand” for the logically proven principle, are similar to the systems that enable our brains to use skills that we gain and build up through practice. As we practice sth, there’s a natural selection process for the series of thoughts and actions that produce a desired result and, essentially, the “conclusions” become our shorthand to use that collection of thoughts/practices for later on. It’s like writing a subroutine that can later be accessed merely be mentioning a label—the hard work with practice is creating those subroutines, which can then be packaged, hooked up, labeled and conveniently accessed later on. This is getting closer to the nexus between mathematical logic (per Hilbert, Cantor, Goedel, Turing/Church, Chaitin) and intelligence itself. Their questions about number and set theory, labeling and enumeration of programs using simple binary (Leibniz through Goedel and Chaitin), transcendental numbers and computability on the basis of cardinality—these things lead us to the basic computers and programming languages like LISP, which in turn lead us to the basic neural networks. The implication here is that such mathematical logic structures also led to the natural evolution of simpler neural networks from atoms, to molecules, to animal nervous systems. Each step involves an increasing ability to generate these subroutines and also to model phenomena in the environment using internal calculation mechanisms, i.e. to make the process recursive.

Medical models to introduce into the novel—the de-differentiation that occurs with cellular transformation, and thus the loss of “calculational surface” in tissues, and especially the oto-nephric conundrum whereby these two very different tissues, nonetheless share perhaps a germ-layer connection from their origins, which makes so much of their pathophysiology similar.

Notion of resonance, in music—think about that, the guitar strings have resonant frequencies that are natural to the strings, and the chords themselves represent different integer combos of it. So why does music hit our brains as it does? Why provoke certain emotions, mental states? B/c that’s how our brain is organized—resonant frequencies, we’re tuned like that. Our minds, emotions, intelligence systems are tuned on the basis of these integer arrays that musical combinations recapitulate and stimulate.

People mature in large part when they become more aware—more self-aware, more empathetic, also just cognizant of things they might be missing in their environment themselves. In a sense, they *step outside of their routines*, the ones that are stuck in their brains, and rewire them—that aspect of detached analysis, of stepping back and evaluating on the basis of deeper axioms, even formulating new axioms, seems to be at the heart of intelligent operation. Awareness is taken to ever higher levels. (We know this when we reflect back on events when we were younger, saying, “how could we have possibly been so unaware of this?”)

Our minds are equipped to learn and remember in narratives. Even elementary particles have a story, a history, and minds at ever-increasing levels of complexity are geared toward teasing out these narratives.

As Niels Bohr said—you often get the most subtle, fundamental insights by abiding contradictions, by becoming an impossible person. Things that should contradict each other, nonetheless co-exist and shine light into unilluminated, unseen corridors otherwise ruled out.

When Tim is reviewing one of the notebooks, he sees a chilling note from one of the soldiers: “It’s a truly peculiar and wicked form of torture, these nightmarish fever-scenes that afflict my dreams like this, repeatedly If Hell, or some Hellish purgatory doesn’t already exist… we’d have to create it, just to house this entity that haunts the subconscious recesses of my dreams,. (Have Tim be shown pictures—one of the patients scribbling messages on the walls in blood, with

The capacity for mind and consciousness, is itself inherent in the very structure of space and time itself. If we follow this fractalization of nature down from the highest scales of complexity—from the intricate nervous systems of the mammalian brain, down to molecules, atoms, subatomic particles and ultimately to the fabric of spacetime itself, what we see in these spacetime atoms

A universe is simply a zone of calculation, but it gives rise to other universes—other, independent calculation zones—constantly, through the inflation process. Thus a “family tree” of universes is thereby created, and when something exists, it essentially always exists because the info pattern is always there. (Ref Lloyd, Chaitin)

NB: One can do a kind of “Wikipedia walk” to get at least an overview sense of where basic mathematical questions about set theory/number theory, cardinality, countability and so forth lead into the foundations of computer science itself. Leibniz got the ball rolling himself with his own attempts to define formal language structure and mathematical logic, binary arithmetic in the 17^th century. The linchpins are David Hilbert and Georg Cantor—as indeed, their successors (Goedel, Turing, Church) were mathematicians directly involved with the logical underpinnings of computer science. The first comp-sci departments, after all, were headed up by professors who transited over from the math departments. (Friedrich Bauer is another example.) When we look at Cantor’s diagonal method, we see it applied to the Entscheidungsproblem (formulated by Hilbert) by Turing, Church and others, who in turn based their own work on Goedel’s fundamental proof of incompleteness—Goedel, naturally, having also used Cantor’s diagonal method. Mathematical logic, algorithmic complexity, formal

In Tim’s dream, which the Ersetzer enters to communicate to him, late in the book—the Ersetzer informs him that he has seen

There are many different “times” to consider, since time itself is merely the quantized evolution of a particular system, i.e. the procession of state changes of the neural network that constitutes the system. So there’s time for a planet, the people on the planet moving at particular speeds, a solar system, a galaxy and so forth—at a basic level, Einsteinian relativity and the spacetime notion itself represent nothing more than the discrete evolution of overlapping neural networks. The slowing of time for a rapidly accelerating object makes sense—it “evolves less” (has fewer state changes) relative to something at rest. The Lorentz contraction is thereby a quantification of the state-change rate

Define a thought, what it means, and work with the transition from inanimate to animate. Figure out a physical, quantifiable definition of what we normally consider brain functions—intelligence, consciousness, memory, cognition in general. Intelligence at a basic physical level, has something do (one definition at least) with the ability to reproducibly bring about an otherwise improbable configuration. In this sense, even inanimate objects, e.g. machines have intelligence, though they don’t have consciousness. The latter comes with the strange loops—with modeling of the outside world using an internal “replica” or “homunculus”, and particularly with such internal modeling of oneself. When one takes this further—when one is able to even model other individuals internally as “superpositions” onto the self-model—then one has empathy, the basis of morality.

Intelligent systems are able to reproducibly change the a priori probabilities of a QM wavefunction of whatever they manipulate.

HOX controller genes, Sean Carroll on Disc Channel—common vertebrate toolkit. Just 8 HOX genes, and 1,000 genes control body plans of vertebrates. Small changes, single genes with big effects. Humans with just 20,000 genes total, similar to other mammals, reptiles, birds. In butterfly—a gene responsible both for legs and spots on the butterfly—old genes take on new roles. New features, new species, use old genes in new ways. Change when and where genes turn on/off, epigenetics. Choreography is different, between birds and dinosaurs. Small entry set, big variations and complexity.

Basic motifs for selective industrial processes, and intelligent filtering in general: sorting (e.g. by size), cleaning, etching, engraving, molding, shaping on a master, silkscreen printing processes, repeated cooling—as Lloyd/Chaitin showed, information content increases with difficulty of a particular process, hence price increases with e.g. handmade items. Refinement, e.g. pliers being heat-treated and laser-treated to gain strength, insertion of rivet with heat and pressure to put it in right, laser-engraving, treatment with a rust inhibitor, liquid vinyl coating.

Being and becoming—overlap. Did God create humanity? Or is humanity creating God? Or are we creating each other somehow, simultaneously? After people die, their consciousness switches off so they experience no time—but if this consciousness were retrievable, then the moment after dying, they’d wake again somewhere, almost like rising from a nap.”

“Where my poor, exhausted students, where in the realm of physics do we look to shed light on these, intractable mysteries? Well, think for a moment—in what branch of our illustrious field did Max Planck look in the 1890’s when he founded the quantum theory? Remember, the words of Albert Michelson, words I’m sure the great man would want to retract—‘all we need to know in physics has been discovered, there’s little knew to learn, just getting a few more numbers after the decimal point for the constants.’ Yet Planck and his colleagues blew it wide open again with the quantum theory. Where did Planck’s epiphany come from? And then in the 1970’s, in the wake of the Standard Model for particle physics and superstring theory, again we were mired in confusion. Mired, that is, until we started to look at black holes from a different perspective, to realize they had a temperature, to realize that they were carriers of information—and thus was physical information theory born. So I ask you again, my friends, what was the inspiration for quantum theory and physical information theory, those wonderful wellsprings that we nervous physicists today thank for enabling us even today to beg with occasional success for research grants from our governments? The wellspring, my friends, was thermodynamics.”

The professor’s next slide juxtaposed a steam engine with a computer—and then a bright red question mark of equal size. “Thermodynamics, and in particular its sub-branch of statistical mechanics as developed by Ludwig Boltzmann—this is what came to the rescue. Remember, Max Planck pioneered the quantum theory after studying how the blackbody, the perfect absorber of radiation, could avoid reaching infinite frequencies and energies, thereby giving any poor soul in the same room as a blackbody, a rather awful case of sunburn.” The audience laughed. “Planck surmised that the available frequencies of the blackbody weren’t continuous—they were discrete, quantized, and only certain frequencies were available to our blackbody. This thermodynamic insight from Planck, this is the same motif in a nutshell that Niels Bohr used to figure out the discrete energies available to electrons in an atom. All of the wonders of the quantum theory flowed from this thermodynamic question. Then fast-forward to the glorious 1970’s—or not-so-glorious, depends on where you were I suppose—when our great predecessors in your chosen field, realized that black holes have a temperature, that they emit radiation. That this temperature, in turn, was a function of the area of a black hole, that this area in turn, was directly proportional to—yes—the entropy of the black hole. And once again, it’s thermodynamics that opened up the world to us again, when we realized that this black hole temperature, proportional to area, also defined basic rules of information as a physical entity. Old Boltzmann back in Austria had the kernel over a century before, and then in the 1970’s it came together for us. Thermodynamic questions have linked this chain together, made us realize that physical laws are information laws at heart.”

The professor continued. “This of course brings us to the poor, maligned, abused Second Law of Thermodynamics, the one that so many people deride as a downer, the one they mistakenly believe says that things only get worse, more random, less ordered, more chaotic. My friends, as much as the daily increasing traffic and confusion in Goettingen might make that seem true to all of you—ah, do not despair! For the poor misunderstood Second Law and its demand for rising entropy, is in fact the physical law we should all be most thankful for. The Second Law is what stabilizes our world, it’s what smooths out the effects of powerful phenomena and balances the powers that be. The original conception of the Second Law defined it for an isolated system, but of course nothing is a true isolated system in nature, and in our real world, what does the Second Law tell us? Dr. David Layzer noted to us that in an expanding spacetime, such as the universe that we all know and love, maximum entropy increases far faster than actual entropy does, and that gap between them—well, it has something to do with the capacity for calculation and information for grow, for novelty, perhaps even for thought and creativity. And we know that for black holes, where the entropy is proportional to the area of the event horizon that constitutes the shell of the black hole—well, that entropy and therefore that area must always increase by the Second Law. And we know based on the mysterious Holographic Principle, that the information contained within the Black Hole is in fact, a function of the surface area of that Black Hole, not the volume—and that entropy, and thus that surface area, and thus that information of the Black Hole must always be increasing. And if we can extend this principle from Black Holes, to any bounded n-dimensional region y, to say that the information contained within y is proportional to the n-1 dimensional ‘film’ that surrounds y—well, things get very interesting. ”

He continued further, “Ah, but I have been teasing you all relentlessly, tossing out coded words and sound bites—thermodynamics, entropy, information, increasing area, the holographic principle, even thought and intelligence. Well, let’s go back to that slide from before. Thermodynamics and entropy—the steam engine on the left, that’s how Clausius and Carnot originally conceived of these thermodynamic concepts, and in turn the steam engine, the quintessential mechanical device, churning its gears and making a few well-placed industrialists filthy rich—well, that device was our model for nature, for the physical world. As we learned later,” he continued, while moving his laser pointer to the computer in the middle of the slide, “the steam engine and other such mechanical gadgets, well, weren’t quite all they were cracked up to be as physical models. They get some of the basics right, sure, but they were poor models, oh so poor, for describing the complexity of biology and the information-rich world around us. So then we moved to the computer as our model. The ancient Chinese abacus, the calculating machines of Pascal and Leibniz in the 17^th century, the Jacquard loom in France, all of these things gave a foretaste of the powerful data-processors of the 20^th century. So we started to adopt the computer as our model of the physical world, and that’s sort of where we are now. And you know, it works pretty well. Nature as a big computer, crunching and computing its own evolution—that starts to help us make sense of biological phenomena, understand how complexity arises, give some context for the way information crops up in such odd places in quantum theory and the area of black holes.”

He moved his laser pointer to the large question mark on the right of the slide, “But what about thought? Consciousness? Intelligence? Surely these are physical phenomena? The computer is a wonderful model for us, but what’s the next step? What would be the next device, beyond a computer, that we could use to model our physical world, to make sense of how consciousness, memory, intelligence could arise and even flourish here? A bit hard to answer since, well, we ourselves haven’t even figured out what the next big device would be. We’ve had our Industrial Revolution, our Information Revolution—what next? Here’s a hint for you: For a Black Hole and perhaps in principle any bounded 3-dimensional region, the information increases with the area that bounds the region. What object in nature, can you think of, has evolved so that its area grows? What’s always trying to maximize its functional surface area? Always trying to maximize not just the information that it holds but its ability to process that information—to give rise to intelligence?”

The professor advanced to the next slide. “Ah, yes, of course—the brain. ‘Evolution in the convolutions of the brain.’ As the brain has increased the surface area of its cortex, increased all the crazy folds and bends and creases within it, it’s also increased all the connectivity of its neurons, boosted up its information- and memory-carrying capacity, allowed for the emergence of consciousness and intelligence. And these days, the best way for computer scientists to pay their rent, is to outline a project in cognitive engineering—attempts, basically, to construct devices that mimic actual thinking and reasoning processes in the brain, if in a limited sense. So that’s where our technology is going, and perhaps these cognitive models in turn, will become the new model that we use for nature in general. And what if that’s true? What if the Second Law of Thermodynamics is ultimately saying this? That what’s increasing in nature, in effect, is the information-containing area of any bounded region, and that these information-bearing bounds are all linking up themselves, in a growing, natural cognitive network, like the cerebral cortex of our own brains?

Thought itself is an advanced logical operation that involves serial and parallel modeling/mapping of phenomena.