Puppet Dancers

René Ghosh, published 02/2017. Read the full text:

Print version (North America) Print (Europe)

Novel

René Ghosh

Prologue

Flashing, bright, colored lights that travel over and reflect off a polished dance floor, in an otherwise dark room. If Fidiory were to propose a metaphor for the world’s beginning, this would be it. It implies that the world was made to show off for an audience: a hypothetical that heightens the metaphor’s beauty and power.

He feels harmonious on a dance floor. He feels timeless, removed from the universe’s eddies. When he dances alone, he imagines being watched: it makes him perform at a higher level. In such moments, he believes in free agency, convinced that his actions are more than the mere implementation of prerecorded reflexes and conditioned responses.

This is a universal scene to him. It evokes ancestral memories that go beyond humankind’s sole focus for millennia, the struggle for survival.

A stage.

Plunged in a vast darkness.

It speaks of a distant past. It doesn’t just remind: it re-embodies, by touching on a time before mind, before brain, before awareness and sentient thought. It points to the stage that is space and the dancer that is planet Earth, engulfed in the surrounding void, spinning under the glare of the sun and the stars, twirling around its lone satellite the moon, like a prop on an invisible gravitational tether. This is the first dance: the astral dance. Though no one really remembers it, people replay it, injecting it with the specifics of their physique, with their histories, and above all their music, that hauntingly inexplicable, rhythmic, scale-abiding folly.

Fidiory takes the stage first in the robotic swerve. His forearms are rigidly set at right angles to his upper arms. His hands are open and his fingers splayed out.

His shoulders rise and fall. They pump, synchronized to the surges blaring from loudspeakers just off the stage. His feet glide over the floor, mimicking the way a robot walks, the way it will advance by minute firings of hidden pistons that jerk the body onward. His chest suddenly decelerates and his head flops forward, a delayed wave that shoots up from his feet up to his hands.

This is the irony of the robotic swerve. It is the purposefully fake action of a human imitating a robot imitating a human. Fidiory had to work at it for years to get it right, to perfect the closest, most stilted imitation possible of a mechanical behavior that is in itself a bad emulation of what his own body can naturally do effortlessly, organically: execute those fluid human movements that he was born to do, the mode of operation inscribed in his genetic code, perfected by millions of years of evolution, that somehow culminates by paradoxically setting itself aside to resemble, as closely as possible and for the duration of the dance, the way a robot moves.

After a few moments of thrusting his hips mechanically upwards to each side, he is joined onstage by Xan, whose movements are his mirror image. Though their physical attributes are fairly different, the symmetry of their movement suffices to uphold the illusion of a mirror reflection, this one not ironic so much as self-deprecating: a conscious, directed effort at silliness that forces respect by the weight of its apparent preparation and the simple fact of doing it on purpose.

The music picks up a notch, both accelerating and increasing in volume. The onstage lights brighten. In the initial astral metaphor this evokes a phase change: the planet’s trajectory is locked into some larger satellite that will inexorably draw it spiraling into its heat and light, the swallowing of a celestial body promising a bang and fireworks. Fidiory and Xan, side by side, transition from symmetric to identical movements. The music winds down and launches into one last tunnel of tightly-looped percussion and frenetically wailing high notes, then ends. Fidiory and Xan assume an ending pose: a portrait hinting at complex relations subtending their bond, a snapshot of unexpressed dissent, of opportunities regretfully set aside and forgotten in order to establish their partnership and allow it to blossom.

The audience applauds. Scattered at first then swelling, but politely so. Fidiory glances in the judges’ direction, hoping to get a live reaction, but their eyes are tactfully downcast. In any case, he needs no assistance in gauging their performance: above average but not stellar, maybe top twenty-two percent. Fidiory and Xan leave the stage, making room for the competition’s next performance.

…

Unshowered, still a little sweaty, they sit in the audience, watching the other entries from seats reserved for the contestants. A man and a woman executing an energetic couple’s dance, gliding and spinning, somersaulting over one another. Fidiory fails to see what is ironic about their dance and looks down at his copy of the contest program to read the corresponding description. Xan is sighing throughout, reacting to some implied message that doesn’t register for Fidiory. There are knowing, supercilious smiles on the faces of people in the audience, so he supposes it makes some kind of reference that he can’t find in the program description.

The next performance consists of a line of men dressed up in armor, doing a traditional battle dance. They dance with stern discipline, showing no facial emotion at all. The typical demeanor of folk dancers, people who are steeped in a tradition that they have promised to uphold and are now demonstrating onstage, deeply investing it with the sentiments that befit ambassadors of their country and culture.

For all the complexity of their contortions and the acrobatic efficiency with which they interweave, fall and jump over one another, their gestures are stilted, wooden. “They don’t own this dance”, muses Fidiory as he observes their intricate patterns and focuses on one face in particular: an older man whose movement is listless, though he is hopping and contorting as energetically as the rest of them.

“I’ve had enough of this,” whispers Xan, before getting up and executing a bashful bow/walk as he shuffles toward the aisle, hunched over and trying not to bump too many knees. Xan reaches the aisle, then straightens up and walks out of the hall. Fidiory remains slouched down in his seat and watches to the end of the war dance, taking note of how complex the dancers’ armor is, the patterns, plates and clasps a mixture of martial pragmatism and artisan showmanship, still fabricated to this day in the name of pride and tradition. He leaves after that, looking for Xan at the bar.

…

The bar is huge, as big if not bigger than the show hall. Fidiory spots Xan at a table by a wall whose windows overlook lake waters below, nearby the hotel. Xan is sitting very straight, turned toward the windows, his face illuminated by the pale light that drifts in through them.

“Battle dance got you scared?” asks Fidiory as he pulls a chair.

Xan stirs but doesn’t immediately answer.

“This is a nice resort” he replies in a quiet voice. “Did you notice there are people swimming?”

Fidiory squints and looks out the window at the lake. “It does seem like some bathers have waded out pretty far into the waters,” he muses.

“No,” answers Xan. “They’re swimming. Actually floating and moving through the water. And they’re not touching the bottom.”

“Wow. Really? Some people have no fear.”

Seen from this far up, from the tenth floor of the hotel resort, the swimmers/bathers are difficult to focus on, but they do seem horizontal in the water and moving along the placid lake surface. The two dance partners watch them, transfixed, fascinated.

“How is such a thing possible?” whispers Xan. His voice is inflected with awe. Fidiory shakes his head, clinging to the notion that no one is swimming, it just looks that way. Xan abandons himself to the sudden sensation of lightness that has engulfed and transported him since he sat at the table and looked out the window.

“They’re like birds in the water.”

“You mean fish.”

“No, birds.”

Birds in the water. Semantically, it’s unsound, but it gets the job done conveying Xan’s sense of inspiration. Fidiory glances at his watch.

“They’ll be announcing the winners in another hour,” he says. Xan shrugs, still looking out the window.

“Who knows, maybe we did better than we think we did.”

“We did exactly as well as we think we did. It doesn’t matter how well we placed.”

“Well… I’d be happy to place anyway. I don’t know why. I guess I just want a prize.”

“What for? To hang it on your apartment wall? To show your guests?”

A pause, during which Fidiory nods at Xan’s acidic tone, noting the menacing undercurrent.

“No, just to remember that, at this point in space and time, we were among the best dancers – “

“Best ironic dancers …”

“Whatever, among the best -”

“Well, it’s not whatever, it’s ironic”

“OK, what’s your point, Xan?”

“I don’t have a point. You’re the one making a point. I’m just pointing out the flaws in your reasoning process.”

…

Xan leaves.

Fidiory remains at the table and orders a drink. He is miffed and glowers at his surroundings. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he lays them on the table in front of him and drums his fingers on it. He hates to appear inactive or unoccupied.

Looking out the window, shortly, he spots Xan on the slim crescent of beach pressed against the lake below. Seen from this far up, Xan is so small that he is recognizable from the color of his clothes rather than posture or physiology. Xan has approached the water and appears to be addressing the other bathers. “That’s it,” thinks Fidiory, “just like that. He’s found himself a new activity.” He tries, from this distance, to guess at what’s being said, information exchanges, hints at their partnership’s breaking points.

1

Fidiory

I can pinpoint with laser accuracy (fact : a laser isn’t actually accurate, or rather precise, as its ray necessarily diverges even at its narrowest - this is the uncertainty principle) to the exact moment my partnership with Xan came to an abrupt end and he began his long, unnatural obsession with swimming.

Xan ended it that day, and I hadn’t expected it. In retrospect, he had never shown himself to be a passive or overly conciliatory person, but I’d come to expect that of him because it was somehow easier that way. When people follow you into places you don’t imagine them going otherwise, you project motivations onto them that are all your own. I admire Xan for proving me wrong and leaving. There’s power in that, in being the one who calls an end to a common adventure.

From the bar with the window overlooking the lake at Fandoun resort I watched him, a barely recognizable speck down below approaching the water and speaking to another speck, a female speck, the speck that would eventually become his wife and bear his children.

Xan’s attachment to the puppet dance came from a different place than mine. To Xan, first and foremost, the puppet dance was not at all ironic. It wasn’t a way of being clever, it wasn’t a wink; it held no humorous component at all. Rather, it was a transposition of an old Margolian thing, a ritual that Margolians execute by the light of campfires, a reenactment of an ancient legend. He had told me about this legend in the middle of a conversation we’d been having about universal gestures and forms at a time when he was a friendlier version of himself, curious and indulgent.

Men like Xan have a switch, a kind of trigger that gets pulled and they retract into a radically individualistic worldview. It happens very suddenly and then they no longer recognize their friends. They then focus on their differences, their divergence from what they see as their own personal normalcy, and they pull away from people and habits and look for some new, all-encompassing mission with which to invest their life.

Men like Xan will, in the space of an instant, go from being a good friend to looking upon you as a total stranger. That’s what happened. We had just gotten off the stage following a performance of our robotic swerve/puppet dance interpretation. We hadn’t been particularly good and our choreography wasn’t too inspired, but we weren’t bad either and at that stage we were still improving. Xan, however, felt ridiculous after that performance and no longer had to will to sustain the endeavor, so he quit. He just got up from the table where we were having a pleasant post-performance drink and left, heading straight to the elevator, down to the ground floor, out the back door, toward the lake where he was drawn to the bathers, those whom we had just witnessed from the tenth story bar window, who appeared to be swimming.

Xan comes from a land without lakes or ocean. Of one those countries that have always depended on trading with neighbor countries that have sea access. The very idea of swimming struck him as scary, awesome, and probably magical.

In his native Margolia, the puppet dance has existed for centuries. Margolians call it the dance of pleading warriors and the only thing ironic about it is its name (pleading warriors).

Margolian legend has it that once upon a time, some mythical monster, a hybrid creature mixing elements of snake, slug, horse, and miscellaneous, all blown up to gigantic proportion in blatant disregard of the principles of evolution, (as in, how would such a creature feed itself?), also sentient, very mean, having an eerily logical mind combined with a warped sense of humor, and to top it all off an unpronounceable name that is conveniently pronounceable in Margolian.

So this creature, let’s call it creature X, was threatening the kingdom and demanded payment of a tribute in the form of the emperor’s daughter. What creature X could possibly want of a human girl of imperial descent is not specified and I’m not sure anyone would buy the reason if it were. Nevertheless, creature X demanded that the emperor give up his only daughter and deliver her to him. It furthermore indicated, in no uncertain terms, that it would negotiate only with the emperor himself. So here lies the dilemma, and in the dilemma the opportunity for the Margolian emperor to show his mettle, his character, his ruse and cunning, because sending the emperor to negotiate with creature X is, of course, a great risk of him not coming back and leaving the empire essentially headless.

Creature X, of course, like all mythical monsters, is fickle as well as logical and is known to impose cruel conditions solely for its personal, unpredictable amusement. So the emperor is loath to go himself, or in any case his counselors advise against it and admonish him to send someone in his stead, like a counselor or a general. These men are discarded out of hand though, because none of them could pass themselves off as an emperor. Who then? Some skilled diplomat? Perhaps an ambassador? No. In the process of finding a body double for the emperor, to go face a monster born of a time long, long before man, capable of effortlessly discerning tricks and traps tended by primitive human minds, bearing the wisdom of eons, a timeless, immortal creature, one thing becomes patently obvious: even if one could find a suitable replacement for the emperor in his mission to negotiate for the life of his daughter, it would be simply impossible to admit that such a replacement were even feasible.

It would be admitting that the emperor is replaceable, which can’t even be conceptually played with. One does not simply replace an emperor.

What, then? How to face creature X and exchange information enough to agree, if any agreement is even in the cards, on a course of action?

If the answer was staring anyone in the face, that person didn’t come forward in any capacity. The Margolian empire, much like any other empire, has an emperor who enjoys power, and by extension: inflicting the consequences of that power on his subjects. It never hurts an emperor, after all, to have a reputation for blood-thirstiness. So people in his vicinity aren’t the most proactive and for the most part invest the lump of their efforts into not getting noticed.

The counselors, on the other hand, don’t have this option, and as the appointed time for facing creature X draws closer, the Margolian people resign themselves to the notion that they are in for some kind of fight, against a foe that is imbued with godlike capacities, and the outcome doesn’t appear favorable at all.

The counselors grasp at straws. One such straw that they can all agree upon is sorcery. The only way to beat a godlike foe, they reason, is by harnessing supernatural forces.

A powerful sorcerer of one of the peripheral kingdoms of the empire, let’s call him Sorcerer Y, has had his name mentioned in high circles, the circular amplification effect of which has brought his name to the emperor’s ears, a few times over, enough to grab his attention.

The emperor decides to seek out this sorcerer and have him brought to the court to provide possibilities of solving the situation with the aid of sorcery, Sorcerer Y’s cumulative lore having been handed down through generations of sorcerers, not necessarily through parental links but often so, all this wisdom and knowledge intimately bound to the geological and ecological history of that far-flung kingdom from which he hails, which has been a component of the Margolian empire since the conquests of the current Margolian emperor’s great-grandfather brought it into the fold. The emperor is showing the imperial mark of wisdom that is a strong character trait of the Margolian people and consists of using any and every resource at one’s disposal to reach the ends that one has set for oneself.

The emperor thus dispatches a small group of loyal subjects: a few soldiers, a diplomat or two, translators maybe, and lesser sorcerers, to meet sorcerer Y and escort him back to the imperial court so as to reap his advice on the grievous situation with creature X.

Only, sorcerer Y doesn’t feel like coming to Margolia. Sorcerers have a long, detailed, ancestral memory, and this one harbors bitter, resentful memories of the Margolian conquest.

It’s not that other inhabitants of the kingdom have forgotten, it’s just that the sorcerers are the heirs of the code, the set of beliefs, understandings, models and mindsets that have nourished and honed their art since the birth of the kingdom. It comes with a burden of (nationalistic, nativist) pride and a profound attachment to origins, of which Margolia is not considered a part and must therefore, somewhere down the line of time, be expelled once and for all.

The name of the kingdom from which hailed Sorcerer Y is left out of the story. The Margolian Empire was a historically brief and small affair and what counted as a ‘kingdom’ back then would arguably be considered a province today, maybe even a province of current Margolia.

Sorcerer Y violently declines the offer to come back to Margolia and help the emperor out of his predicament. He basically tells the envoys to go to hell. The envoys aren’t exactly surprised, they know the historical score, and moreover they expect sorcerers to act entitled whenever something important is asked of them. So when Sorcerer Y spits and curses at them, they smile and shrug, and through their polite smiles and clenched teeth they tell the sorcerer: of course, we understand, you don’t like us, but you will come with us anyway, so if you’re going to pack anything you’d better do it quickly, before we stick you in that cage you see mounted on a trailer behind that set of horses we pulled in on which no one was riding. They tell him: you choose, either come with us on a horse or in the cage.

Sorcerer Y chooses the cage. Or rather: it is chosen for him and he is unceremoniously packed into it. As they travel back to Margolia, he is sullenly silent.

In the imperial court, the emperor is eagerly expecting them, surrounded by his most trusted counselors, his generals, various high officials, and of course his family, including a beautiful and neurotic daughter whose natural tendency toward anxiety has only been heightened by fate singling her out for (what people are whispering will most probably be) a bloody and horrible end.

The sorcerer is led in, in chains. Only: big surprise! He’s not there.

This is not meant metaphorically, not a suggestion that sorcerer Y is there in body but mentally wandering in a parallel universe of his own making in which Margolia never invaded his native kingdom. He is truly absent.

The thing that is led before the emperor, the bodily presence rattling chains, exuding a strong, unwashed stench, emitting a rasping breathing sound, is a clothed, booted, but empty skin.

It moves, it reacts to stimuli. When questioned, it emits talking noises from the vicinity of its dry, wrinkled throat, but it is not human, not truly alive. The emperor realizes this at the same time as all of the other people present in his court, and when he orders the sorcerer’s hat to be removed, under the sun’s glare the imitation human shrivels at the surface, acquires a hideous, mummified appearance with bulging eyeballs that elicit a shocked intake of breath from the assembly. Then, the rasping voice emanating from its throat shocks them even more by addressing the emperor with familiarity, in a way no emperor has been addressed in a good few generations. The voice is mechanical and inhuman, but the words are those that one might use to insult a neighbor whose property has encroached on one’s own.

The emperor, unfazed, questions the creature, whose answers indicate that it shares the intelligence of Sorcerer Y and speaks on his behalf.

If electronics had existed in ancient Margolia one might say that the creature is remotely controlled, that there is some kind of spatial relay that sends the creature’s perceptions from far away to Sorcerer Y in his peripheral kingdom and simultaneously receives instructions on what to say and how to move.

The emperor expresses his anger. He threatens to annihilate the small kingdom, and as he roars, he realizes that this remotely controlled, humanlike puppet is the beginning of a solution to his problem. Give me the secret to this distant voice, he tells the creature. Teach it to my sorcerers, and you will be richly rewarded.

A sorcerer has no need of riches, the creature rasps. A sorcerer wants freedom for his people.

An impromptu negotiation then takes place, at the end of which the sorcerer’s kingdom is promised certain tokens of autonomy, and the emperor is promised the gift of Distant Voice, which should allow him to face the ancient beast stirring in some somber cavern not far from the imperial fortress, fidgeting impatiently but nevertheless respecting the delay it has granted the emperor for the delivery of his daughter.

There’s a catch: Sorcerer Y will deliver the secret to one person and one person only: to the emperor himself. The emperor is given the opportunity to learn the Distant Voice, but for that he must go to sorcerer Y. Alone. The counselors, of course, vehemently oppose the idea on grounds that the emperor’s going out there represents a prime risk of getting assassinated, and as the voices echo and amplify the wise, worried outbursts of the most esteemed thinkers of the empire, an odd sense of déjà-vu descends on the assembly. The emperor, going alone to face sorcerer Y? How is that better than going to face creature X? If anything, it’s worse. Creature X, after all, for reasons all its own (and go figure what can possibly go through the reasoning processes of an organism so ancient that it may or may not have a brain, maybe some kind of distributed mind), doesn’t care about the emperor at all. It just wants his daughter.

The emperor, oblivious to the swarm of protests from his counselors, chooses to go. Has he come to trust sorcerer Y after just a short conversation? Is he purposefully putting himself in danger to expiate some ancestral fault, to express regret for the way the people of Sorcerer Y’s small kingdom were treated? Or is he fascinated by this strange phenomenon, this projected specter of a human mind, this remote representation with supernatural overtones? Whatever his motive may be, he goes, giving the order to all, in front of the magical and scary-looking ambassador, that he is not to be followed in any way, nor should any action be engaged against the people of the small kingdom, but all must await his return. He calls for a horse and supplies, then takes off, following the strange creature out of the imperial fortress.

In the court, the people wait. The imperial princess counts the days left in the projected showdown with creature X, and frets. An entire empire sits headless, rudderless until the return of its leader. Days turn into weeks, and the empire grows restless. Voices begin to whisper that the emperor may not return. The princesses’ fate is debated, most people simply writing her off.

And then, the night before the scheduled meet with creature X, a weary emperor rides back into the imperial fortress. He is alone, accompanied by no creature other than his own trusted horse. This is the point that those who doubt his acquisition of the Distant Voice make when they shake their heads gravely and assert that the emperor will just have to get up and go himself if he wants to save his daughter. But they are wrong.

The morning of the meet, a creature sidles out of the emperor’s chambers. It gives orders, in the same rasping voice that the court heard some weeks before, to be clothed. Its appearance is mostly human, but with something altogether inhuman in its eyes and unblinking stare.

The servants clothe it from head to foot, taking special care to cover it so as to let no sunlight attain the skin and wrinkle it as happened to the sorcerer’s puppet in the imperial court.

The puppet walks out of the fortress under the silently awed, fearful gazes of its inhabitants, with an assured, if somewhat mechanical, stride. It looks straight ahead. It moves with economical gestures, a calculated efficiency that calls attention to the way regular humans don’t walk.

A normal person, if watched, will walk with the consciousness of it. He or she will fill his or her walk with subtext, hints and messages in the way the arms swing (or are stuffed into pockets), how shoulders are held high or stooped, head: bobbing or shifting, hands: clasped, or fingers splayed, or slightly open, back: arched or stooped, legs: swallowing long strides or small, diffident steps, or equally small nimble ones, etc. A person walking is a rich monologue that conveys various degrees of social status, outlook, potential to menace, invitation to friendliness, and so many other indicators of character that are totally absent from this puppet that only walks to move forward, the complex rhythmic synchronization of members serving one purpose and one purpose only: to propel the body and get it from point A to point B.

It occurs to the counselors, who watch the creature walk up to the fortress doors and down the road leading out of it, that a puppet body is, in many respects, the finest vessel one could expect of a negotiator: it betrays no emotion, no intention, it allows the negotiator to coolly engage in a discussion that rests on logic alone.

It is an ancient equivalent to wearing sunglasses.

Out it goes, sent by a man on a mission to save his family from a force both bewildering and supernatural. It walks over hills, through rivers, across forests. It is being guided from afar by the emperor who knows the route because, long ago, as a child with his siblings, he traveled this same path in exploring the world he was later to inherit. Creature X is waiting in a cavern he himself explored with a brother on a bold, adventurous day long ago.

In a sense, creature X is a metaphorical embodiment of unresolved childhood issues that have surfaced in the life of a grown man who has reached a sort of crossroads.

The emperor’s puppet reaches creature X’s lair, and is greeted by a thunderous voice, like great rocks being crushed, that challenges the puppet by asking that ageless question: “who are you?”

The puppet, in its rasping, scrissorlike voice devoid of any discernible undertone, simply answers: “I am emperor, child of Margolia and ruler over all worlds known and as yet unknown.”

The arrogant answer of a ruler of men who knows no other way of addressing anyone.

Creature X answers by descending on the puppet and ripping it to shreds. Not far away, on the imperial fortress, the emperor breathes a sigh of relief at being still alive and silently congratulates himself for finding this indirect means of facing his supernatural foe. The day passes, the emperor does not leave his chambers and receives no one save his worried daughter who needs to be reassured multiple times during the day that she will indeed not be given out to creature X.

No one in the imperial court has any knowledge of what has transpired between the puppet and creature X. They wait anxiously for a debrief session that does not take place. Day turns into night, and then morning. The sun rises over Margolia and a second puppet emerges from the imperial chambers, heads for the fortress gates in front of staring people frozen in their tracks, and leaves the fortress through the same route as the one used by the other puppet the day before. It traverses hills, rivers, forests, whatever, and comes to the lair where creature X booms at it: “who are you?”

Such a pregnant question, with so many different possible answers. Is it about identity? Is it a question about origins, or destiny? Is it an investigation into one’s nature, or a call to list one’s socio-cultural composition? In this case, of course, there is an element of menace, an unspoken threat that hinges on the ignominious fate suffered by yesterday’s puppet, the notion that there is a right or wrong answer, and that if you give the wrong answer, you die.

The puppet answers: “I am he who was here before you yesterday, he who cannot be killed by one such as you, one who would know what you want with my daughter.”

It’s the wrong answer once again, and creature X throws itself on the puppet and rips it to shreds, even more violently than the day before. More violently, perhaps, because today the puppet has succeeded in making creature X doubt its strength, as it sees that the puppet is the perfect copy of yesterday’s puppet, so perhaps it is the same, raised from the dead by magical means? Does the emperor command some power that is superior to that of creature X?

Of course, it doesn’t prevent creature X from ripping furiously into the hapless puppet, with fangs, talons, and spiked tail. All the killing implements that nature stumbled upon during the long climb of evolution, creature X had found first. Creature X was tearing into and through living organisms entire geological eras before it became cool to do so. It is a salient point made in Margolian legend, that creature X was interested in a Margolian princess, that in one form or another, somehow, its happiness and prosperity depended on this human life of Margolian origin.

The day passes, but this time, before night has arrived, as the sun sets forebodingly over the edge of the Margolian mountain chain that faces the imperial fortress, over a vast expanse of desert rock and sparse bush (there are forests at lower altitudes not far from the fortress, but the higher altitudes are basically desert), a third puppet appears from the imperial chambers. The emperor has received no one all day, not even his daughter, whose anxiety is muffled by what is now pure and paralyzing fear, and who keeps herself shut up in her own chambers in the rather vain hope that everyone will just forget about her. Her thought pattern involves a good deal of self-pity and she quite mistakenly thinks that her life would have been much better had she been born a simple servant.

The puppet goes, watched by the gathered people of the fortress, who in this very short period of time have developed a system of alerts and relays so that mostly everyone is warned of its passage. It goes with its mechanical cool, its insectlike drive, out the fortress gates and down the road. It reaches the cavern.

“Who are you?” booms the voice of creature X as the puppet enters at its unhurried, unworried pace.

“A voice of Margolia, eternally standing, and I should be the one asking the questions.”

Wrong answer. Shoot. Rip/stab/gnaw.

This time, the puppet tries to defend itself. It draws two swords, one for each hand, and aims for the countless eyes of creature X as its multiple heads descend upon it from wildly different directions. It lasts out all of a few fractions of a second before succumbing to the formidable, ancient predator.

Back in the fortress, the emperor calls his aides into his chambers. He is exhausted, haggard, his face fraught with tired strain. He gives instructions to round up a group of Margolia’s fittest men: the wrestling champions, the strongest archers, the fleetest runners. He has them led to his chambers for a lightning training session. The men arrive shortly thereafter, and behind the closed doors of the imperial chambers, they are soon trained in the strange dance of the Distant Voice.

The emperor doesn’t know how much time he has before creature X will decide to leave its lair and descend in fury on the fortress. No one knows why it hasn’t already done so. The thing is invincible, isn’t it? That being the case, it could take the princess by brute force if it wanted to. The fact that it hasn’t done so hints that it isn’t totally invincible, even if it is remarkably powerful, and that some final bluff could arguably work to allay it indefinitely. But time is running out, however much of it there may be left. So the training session is short, sweet, and pretty ineffective.

The diminutive puppet army, a ragtag band of fifty or so creatures, emerges from the imperial chambers a few short days later. Mixed in with the puppets are actual soldiers, those who failed so thoroughly at building or guiding their puppet that their punishment consists of acting as the puppet.

The people gathered to watch the procession of puppets from inner chamber to fortress gates wonder aloud why the emperor is sending puppets instead of his real army. It was one thing to dupe creature X with a puppet representing the emperor; it is quite another to send (mostly) puppets instead of men.

For one, the puppets aren’t there for representation purposes: creature X is expecting the emperor, not a band of soldiers. Also, and just as obviously, the emperor doesn’t and shouldn’t care about expending soldiers, because that is their purpose, and going to battle with little or no hope of return is what they do.

The people wonder this alongside another glaringly obvious assessment: that this is the ugliest procession of puppets they could ever have imagined. The emperor’s puppets had weird eyes and a mechanical gait as sole differentiating factors from a real human body. These puppets, though, are clearly the work of amateurs. The bodies are lopsided, misshapen, half finished. They are missing mouths, have miniature cylinders for fingers. They look like real live implementations of children’s drawings. The actual soldiers interspersed in their midst look like gods in comparison.

Even more glaring is their gait. They stumble, they walk stiffly on unbending joints, they swing left and right, awkwardly balancing themselves with arms jutted out at almost right angles. Frequently, they fall forward and sprawl out heavily over their whole length. Those that fall bring down one or two others with them as their panicked limbs strike out blindly and flail at any standing object that might prevent their fall. Once down, they precipitate the fall of those behind them that step over them unaware and trip, or attempt to swerve too abruptly and lose their footing, sending ripples of instability through the entire collective moving procession.

Once down, their efforts to get up are pitiful to watch. They start by maneuvering onto an all-fours stance, then put down a knee and try to push off the ground with their hands while extending the legs. Often they fall right back down again, putting all others in their vicinity at risk of falling, too. If they don’t fall outright, they spend a few moments swaying back and forth, left-right and front-back, and only when the pendulum motion abates and ceases do they begin to move again.

Those watching are cringing from this pathetic display. Some, too, are laughing. As it turns out, the cringe sentiment is prime material for transitioning to laughter in turn, because the laughter catches and spreads like wildfire, rapidly propagating through the onlooking crowd. The roar of snorts and guffaws accompanies the motley gathering of make-believe soldiers as they stumble and trip their way to the fortress gates and through, making the slowest of progress on the road leading away toward the hills and forests. They pick up a little speed on the way but not enough to reach the creature’s lair before creature X itself has left the lair on its own way to the fortress. No one can know creature X’s mind, but suffice to acknowledge that a) it demanded a sacrifice of the Margolian people, one that would cost them where it hurt and b) it offered some sort of respite should the emperor offer a valid answer to the “who are you” question about his identity, and by extension that of the Margolian people.

That a stumbling bunch of mock-marching dolls is on its way to meet this formidable creature is evidence that the emperor has probably screwed up, and though back at the fortress people are still joking about the puppet procession, the laughter masks a sentiment of real fear, borne by the apprehension that creature X is probably by now descending on the fortress, which is powerless to defend itself.

Somewhere between the fortress and the cavern, creature X meets the puppet army. Creature X advances by leaps measuring a Margolian land unit.

A Margolian land unit is the distance that a man will walk while breathing in and out thirty times. This is recalibrated each time there is a newly crowned emperor, whose first walk out of the palace would traditionally be measured by scribes listening intently to the emperor’s breath and then measuring the thirty breath’s distance on a length of silk cord. The cord is held in safekeeping and is be upheld as the standard according to which all distances in the empire are registered. Each time an emperor is crowned then, the whole measurement system changes. The Margolian word for ‘old’ is a short one with a clipped final consonant that can be repeated multiple times to staccato effect. Measures dating back to previous generations would be labeled ‘old-measure’, ‘old-old-measure’, ‘old-old-old-measure’ and so on, leaving cartographers and land surveyors to execute (what to them are) complicated acrobatic feats of mathematics converting between the land units of different generations, if they bother to convert at all (given that the measures are all approximately the same anyway).

Big leaps by creature X, then. Big, powerful, hungry lunges that would have sailed it straight over the puppet’s heads had it not seen them first. It lands in front of the first of them and booms, “Who are you?”

This creature was born before man walked the land of Margolia. It took no notice of such paltry creatures for ages and saw no intelligence in these primates worthy of any interest. It surpassed them in every way imaginable. And yet, to the ears of these puppets who are transmitting their perceptions to their controlling human counterparts holed up in the fortress, and to the ears of the unlucky, underqualified soldiers that accompany them, creature X’s voice sounds petulant. It sounds like it doesn’t understand why no one will answer such a simple question.

The puppets and soldiers look at one another, only realizing at this very instant that they have no appointed leader. If they did, it certainly wouldn’t be one of the soldiers, who are present by sole virtue of their incompetence, and as for the puppets: none of them have mastered the Distant Voice enough to control their puppet’s actual, physical voice. Talking is difficult. So no one answers.

Creature X, flustered, clearly expecting some specific answer to its repeated question, trying to make some kind of philosophical point and teach the humans something that transcends their worldview, reacts to their silence exactly as it did to the emperor’s puppets beforehand: through gross inflicted violence. The puppets defend themselves as best they can, with their clumsy gestures and erratic, sudden movements devoid of grace or focused intent. The soldiers do a little better, managing a sword swipe here and there and a few shot off arrows that graze the surface of creature X’s rough hide. One by one though, they are torn apart, dismembered between powerful jaws that bite through flesh and bone as easily as through water. After the first few fall, they attempt to scatter, banking on creature X losing interest in them individually, but creature X bounds upon them in rapid succession, tearing into them and leaving them no chance of escape.

When the last of the puppets and soldiers lies in bloody tatters at its feet, creature X sinks down and squats, seething in frustration. It experiences a bitter sensation in its stomach that it initially identifies as existential angst, then hones it further and guesses it might be indigestion. As another puppet appears over the edge of the rise ahead, and its graceful gait and self-assured stance signal that it is the emperor’s, creature X understands exactly what the sensation in its stomach represents: it has been poisoned.

The emperor’s puppet walks up to creature X and stands there silently. Creature X, already mourning the loss to the universe of such a highly evolved organism such as itself, voices its anguish at a strong volume that bellies its dying state. “Why…how?”

The emperor explains, “By accident. When you ate the first of my puppets, I felt your insides cringe, fleetingly as the puppet was digested in your insides, but enough to perceive that something in the composition of the puppet was thoroughly indigestible to you.”

A pause, then: “who am I? I am your end, ancient creature, as you in a sense have been my beginning.”

Creature X dies.

Since then, Margolians have enacted the puppet dance to reminisce on the beginnings of their greatest emperor, their most enduring legend. To them, there is nothing ironic about the puppet dance.

The story is supposed to illustrate the essence of what it means to be Margolian. It’s unclear if this essence is that Margolians are wise, tricky, lucky, persistent, or just indigestible.

…

Following our last performance, as we sat in the audience watching the other dancers, when the folk dancers in battle dress appeared on the stage, my guess is that Xan took one look at those battle dresses and immediately felt like a fraud and a traitor to his people’s longstanding tradition.

2

Xan

The lake at Fandoun resort is timidly set at the base of encircling mountains and seems to be perpetually apologizing for being someplace it shouldn’t be. That, in any case, was my first impression of it, a sole body of water in an otherwise lakeless region, as though it had been inattentive when the other lakes collectively decided to get up and head off to the sea. So to see people actually swimming in it, apart from the wonderstruck sensation of seeing humans do what only fish, amphibians, and on occasion certain hungry mammals do, I also felt that in a sense the people were validating the lake’s presence here. They had to be good people.

I approached it from the small beach, unsure of how to initiate a conversation but determined to speak to the swimmers, or at least one of them.

I gazed around at the lake, taking in the beauty of its placidly rippling surface, the blurry reflection of the mountains in it some distance away, and tried to pick a swimmer to talk to as I mentally surveyed potential conversation starters (“how’s the water? Cold?”, “Where does one go to learn to swim?”, “Aren’t you afraid of drowning?”). There were perhaps a dozen swimmers crossing from one side of the lake to the other and then back again.

Fate would have it that Tinora would be the first one out of the water, heading for a nearby wood table on which were piled a collection of colored towels, one of which she grabbed and began drying herself off with a series of quick, efficient pats. I approached her and blurted out: “How does it work? How can humans glide so effortlessly over the top of the water? Doesn’t it contradict the laws of physics?”

Tinora, still toweling herself off, emitted a short chuckle and answered, “I hope not! I don’t get into arguments with science.”

“I would love to be able to do that” I said, making no effort to hide the wonder in my voice. I was really quite struck. I turned once more to watch the swimmers and noted how regular their movement was, with small kicks and windmilling arms. I noticed the conic waves forming just ahead of them as they glided forward. I noticed, too, how the different swimmers were engaged in different modes of swimming. Some were kicking out and back, their arms thrusting first forward then out to their sides, their head bobbing down under the water then up again, and as they pushed up from the water their backs appeared to rise straight up. Others advanced lying face forward in the water, kicking lightly with alternating feet, swinging one arm forward then the other, turning their head sideways every second or third stroke long enough to suck in some air. When they came close to the beach they would fall back, face up, then spin around onto their stomachs and head back out again. One of them stayed on his back and moved forward, not looking where he was headed, alternating strokes with one arm then another, his feet kicking up a white churning mound of water, his face staring up into the sky.

“Are you here for the dance contest?” Her voice cut through my reverie and awoke a pang of guilt regarding Fidiory, the partner that I had left up at the bar to await the result of a contest I had suddenly given up caring about the instant I’d left the stage. It now seemed silly.

I shrugged, “Yes.” Her gaze lingered on me a moment as though she expected me to say more, and I thought Fidiory might look at me the same way, if he were down here at the lake instead of up there at the bar, a look of curiosity but that could cloud with suspicion, even accusation, if I were to reveal too flatly with what ease I had already set myself on a new page.

There is a problem inherent in partnering oneself with a friend, which is that one draws the friendship into the same lifecycle as the partnership, and though a friendship should last longer than a partnership, in such cases it will decay at the same rate. But a young man doesn’t harbor such considerations when he allows his enthusiasm to carry him into a venture with a friend. The way is there, it’s open, and so he goes.

…

I met Fidiory in a robotics lab in university. Fidiory cared for robotics, I did not. University to me was a four year opportunity to immerse myself in mathematically expressible, universal truths, and to structure my brain with as many of them as it could hold.

Fidiory just wanted to have fun.

I was fascinated by his whimsy, and I was amazed that someone could live in a context where (universal) truth was there for the unraveling, yet care more for making mechanical contraptions that imitate human movement. His silliness drew me in, made me want to emulate this grown man who, like many of his compatriots, had maintained a childlike attachment to playing around. I sensed a hidden strength in it, an appetite for discovery, an ageless will to pursue things that show no practical value. Seen through my Margolian eyes, it was a luxurious outlook, a serenity that exists only in societies bathed in surplus and excess. So, though initially we were only lab partners, we became friends. We had lunch together regularly.

Fidiory questioned me often about the Unwanters, that Margolian tradition of people who ceaselessly travel and are fed through the charity of villagers and city dwellers. Margolia has had Unwanters for as long as it has existed. Social scientists speculate on their social function as creators of trust and bearers of wisdom, as well as cultural relays. Because Unwanters intervene in situations of interpersonal conflict as mediators, sometimes arbiters, they are viewed from beyond Margolia as upholders and maintainers of a certain moral code and ethical culture.

Fidiory had read about them in a comic book.

From what he told me, this comic book was part of a series revolving around an intergalactic travel quest. The narrative was as follows: the heroes arrive on a densely forested planet where their space vessel is damaged during landing and they are taken in by villagers who manifest a deep suspicion toward the ‘sky’ people, going so far as to threaten these travelers with death unless they leave immediately, which they can’t because their vessel is damaged, and furthermore can’t properly communicate to the villagers because of the intergalactic language barrier. As the tension between the parties increases, reaching perilous proportions, a Margolian Unwanter steps out of the nearby thicket that encircles the village and calls for calm and quiet. The villagers know him well, and the travelers are shocked to discover a Margolian Unwanter so far from Earth. The Unwanter acts as both translator and negotiator and brings a swift conclusion to the emerging conflict. The comic ends with a fireside discussion between the travelers and the Unwanter, during which they question him doggedly yet receive only evasive answers as to how an Unwanter got so far away from Earth and how long ago he left. As the travelers eventually leave the planet, it’s hinted that the Unwanter is a recurring character that will reappear later in the narrative, thus cloaking him in foreshadowing mystery.

The character had triggered an emphatic reaction in Fidiory, who had resolved to find out all he could about Unwanters.

From his initial account, I had supposed that he had read the comic as a child. He later revealed that he had read it just a year before. An adult reading a comic book.

In just that year he had accumulated a good deal of knowledge regarding Unwanters, enough to embarrass me in any case. He obviously knew more about Unwanters than I did, making me regret that I didn’t know more about my own culture and heritage.

Margolians are no longer actively taught about the Unwanters tradition, at least not in my generation. Their very name, ‘Unwanters’, those who literally want nothing, is considered a cultural obstacle to Margolia’s advancement, not in keeping with the tenets of the modern world.

in Margolian classrooms, when the Unwanters tradition is touched upon, the teacher will pause, draw a breath, appear to gather his or her thoughts, look upwards, smile ruefully, and explain how these brave people were (in another context) a key element of Margolian culture. Margolian people today, however, are guided by objectives, goal-driven as the modern paradigm requires, and the Unwanters with their random appearances and aimless wandering, their non-measurable economic contribution, their vague and even reluctant participation in society, are considered superfluous, an embarrassment.

Moreover, Margolian society feels a keen sense of regret when considering the plight of the Unwanters. They were dependent on charity to survive, and the charity dwindled out as Margolia modernized. The Unwanters were expected to give up their ways and integrate, but they failed to do so. They didn’t even have the tools to begin.

They disappeared. Many of them simply starved. And what provokes the strongest regret in Margolian society is that, as their numbers dwindled, as they lay hungry in streets or stumbling weakly forward on roadsides, they never stole, never resorted to crime to survive in a world in which they no longer fit. They were like a vestigial organ submitting to an organism’s antibodies.

Fidiory, of course, thought they were very ‘cool’. He saw them as true philosophers, following the dictates of the wind and the earth, insensitive to cold or hunger, immune to feeling fear. Unburdened by Margolian responsibility, he looked freely at the tradition and saw it as inspirational.

…

One evening, Fidiory and I went to a student dance. The music cycled between different genres as is the custom during these dances that try to please everybody with their different attachments and preferences. The dance was held in a popular student café in which the tables and chairs were pushed up against the walls on certain evenings, the light bulbs replaced with special ones that shed colored, sensation-inducing light all around, and geometrical objects with glittering reflective surfaces were hung from the ceiling to bewilder and transport.

Not knowing the moves to the dances, I would mostly hover near the rear of the dance space with a drink in my hand. Fidiory would dance and shout gleefully at people.

At one point in this particular evening, the music changed and I noticed that, along with a few other students, Fidiory was doing the puppet dance! Surprised and delighted, I joined him on the dance floor and launched into the puppet dance alongside him. Fidiory glanced at me curiously and shouted, “You know the robotic swerve?” I answered, “What?” and he repeated, “you know, what we’re doing, the robotic swerve!” I shook my head and shouted, “In Margolia we call this the puppet dance, it’s traditional!” Fidiory shook his head, indicating that he didn’t understand what I was saying and gesturing that we could talk later. We then fell in sync executing the puppet dance along with maybe five or so other students, all of us in a line, to the encouraging whoops from the other dancers who had thronged around us and pumped their fists in time to our mechanical, rhythmic gesticulations.

I was amazed that a traditional dance that up until now I had only executed to a beatless, monotone horn rumbling, fit in so well with the electronic dance music I was now hearing, the pounding throaty beat, the eerie, unnatural, shrill cries, the wailing strings and forlorn voice samples.

As we left the bar later that night, our ears ringing from the prolonged impact of the high volume thudding, I felt strangely elated in thinking that our respective cultures somehow overlapped, that with the differences in our histories stripped away under the glare of the dance-floor lights, we found modes of motion that were dictated by our sole biology, that implied a universal language of dancing. “So! You do the puppet dance!” I exclaimed, jumping up on Fidiory’s back, my hands pressed down on his shoulders and arms stretched straight out and down, so that his head was at my waist level and I stared directly down at him as though I were vaulting over him. Fidiory shrugged me off and answered, “What puppet dance?”

“That thing we did in a line,” I said, “in Margolia it’s called the puppet dance. It’s a reenactment of an old legend, it was invented by this emperor…”

“Well, resembles, OK maybe, but we don’t call it that here,” Fidiory explained, “it’s what we call the robotic swerve, and no relation to your Margolian dance, sorry. It was born right here in Baguetel.”

If anything, my mental imagery of universal human vibrations that were discovered-not-invented was strengthened, but I nevertheless felt dismayed. Whatever this robotic swerve was, it was obviously a recent creation and had yet to withstand the test of time.

We felt the late night chill keenly in the cold wind that blew through the Baguetel streets announcing an upcoming northern winter. Our shoulders curled inward to conserve warmth, we made our way to a local eatery that served greasy food to fatigued customers well into the night.

My gait had changed since arriving in Baguetel as a student. I had developed a certain swagger, my head bobbed forward as I walked. In Margolia, walking like that would have been considered arrogant, extravagant, antisocial even. Here in Baguetel however, it was the norm, an ostensible rite of passage into manhood.

The eatery smelled of cooking oil, youthful inadequacy and screwed-on ideals. Fidiory sat across me at a table that, like all of the other chairs and tables in the establishment, had outlasted the designer’s planned obsolescence by a considerable margin and had the dull sheen of hard surfaces that scratched easily. As we ate, Fidiory told me the story of the robotic swerve. We both wore the oversized, colored caps that were the fashion of the time and rendered it so difficult to take anything we said seriously that we compensated in our speech patterns by lacing them with a strong emphasis on every word, making conversations sound like two-way speeches.

As Fidiory explained around mouthfuls, the robotic swerve was born in a robotics lab, much like the one where Fidiory and I met. A group of students, as a joke, had constructed a dancing robot that could detect music in its vicinity and spontaneously react to its tempo. They had articulated it in a way that was similar but not identical to human joints. From an academic standpoint, the result was merely satisfactory. However, from the entire class gathered in the lab, it elicited the enthusiastic support of a student body determined, as student bodies often are, to create legends in its own time and of its own members. Through their active and constant promotion, the dancing robot became a kind of mascot, put on display in and around the school to highlight the students’ know-how and sense of fun.

“Then, the weirdest thing happened,” Fidiory told me, “people started imitating the robot dancing. It was a joke at first but it caught on rather quickly. Soon it became a thing, the most ironic of the ironic dances.”

I nodded. ‘Ironic’. I felt two ways about it. On one hand, it allowed one to feel two ways about something. On the other hand, I really didn’t know how I truly felt about it. In any case, I hadn’t known until then that it was even possible to dance ironically. We Margolians aren’t big subscribers to irony, as a culture we eschew irony for outright sarcasm.

“You want to know what’s disturbing?” I asked him, my own mouth full of fried food that I knew would later burden my sleep with troubled, confused dreams. “You and I, and the other people, were doing the same moves. Only, all of you were doing them ironically and I, sole chump, was doing them in earnest.”

“I don’t think there was anyone not dancing in earnest,” Fidiory replied thoughtfully, “irony doesn’t preclude earnestness. In fact, if you want to dance well, ironically, you have to be totally earnest behind the irony. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.”

I shrugged. Dancing the puppet dance, coupled with the fatigue of the late night awoke the melancholy in me, of the sort only young men feel.

From that evening on, when we’d go out dancing, every time the music came on for the robotic swerve, Fidiory would do the robotic swerve and I would do the puppet dance, two friends converging on the same spot from different directions.

We didn’t enter any competitions during our student years. At the time, dancing was nothing more than a pastime for us, an outlet for pent-up energy. More importantly though, we both still thought our lives lay elsewhere, on that perfidious trail of academia. We had plans.

Such is the nature of school that it fashions one’s worldview, sculpting it into something like a meritocracy. Get high marks, show potential to conduct research and gain insight into the laws of the universe as expressible in the language of one’s field, get peer recognition and a post as a graduate student. And perhaps, statistically, in healthy academic ecosystems, this is correct. In unhealthy ecosystems, of course, the system is gamed by politics, in which case the question of meritocracy remains whole: if one can work one’s way up the pyramid by developing one’s network and building off mutually beneficial transactions, is one not worthy of participating in the mechanics of that same pyramid on a permanent basis?

Whatever the case may be, either we weren’t members of the right groups or we were on the wrong side of statistics, which is to say bad luck. We graduated from Baguetel University and awaited the second part of the graduate-with-honors/obtain-prestigious-graduate-post narrative, unfruitfully. Fidiory’s phone calls and interviews ended in polite promises to get in touch with him should some post become available, and my letters to the department heads of Margolian universities went mostly unanswered. Neither of us had sufficient resources to pursue this game for very long, so after a few months of it we each started looking for jobs. At this point we also lost touch with one another.

I couldn’t go back to Margolia. Though I had few prospects in Baguetel and still felt very much a foreigner, I held a strong conviction that to go home, to resume old friendships and frequent the same old places, would kill my drive. You go home a success, or don’t go home at all.

A company on Baguetel’s South Side was developing algorithms to automate electronic investment strategies. I had no knowledge in this field, but my math skills were good enough and in the interview I persuaded them that I was quick to adapt and learn, so I was offered the position.

The first job out of school. The routine, the overarching thought: could this be what I will do for the rest of my life? Observing colleagues, comparing one’s nascent trajectory to theirs, wondering how much of their experience transposes to one’s own life, wondering: is this what I’m going to become? A young man’s self-styled, self-produced drama, the mourning of myriad lives unlived, potentials unfulfilled, brainpower gone to waste. A silent panic, like a sudden hush in a crowd that signals an accident taking place in plain sight, like someone slipping off a nearby building or a bus braking too late to avoid a car stranded at an intersection. Such was the mental underpinning of my first week on the job.

However, after the initial repulsion for this new life, I was provided with that gradual surprise that greets a person when he finds that he fits into a setting that initially appeared prohibitively arcane. Even more so as a foreigner: too easily one can fall into a pattern of self-exclusion from social webs on the basis of not having been born into the culture in which those structures blossomed. One observes the new group, one listens to the conversations, one finds that a lot of it is incomprehensible, that the attitudes seem inauthentic, the opinions indefensible.

There were four of us in my work group, along with a fifth person who was in charge of coordinating our work with that of other groups.

Berfmon was a portly man in his forties, with a strong nasal voice that gave the impression of being permanently in a state of indignation. He was mostly bald and he squinted at computer screens with an intensely furrowed brow.

Lemina was slightly younger, in her late thirties, very vocal in pointing out other people’s shortcomings. Her appearance was disheveled and she frequently called attention to signs that those around her in the workplace and the world at large were purposefully ignoring certain unspoken rules of hers and were therefore collectively responsible for some obvious, implicit catastrophe.

Krauknew was closest to my age, though furthest from what attitudes are imputable to youth. His face was a permanent mask of expressionless rigor, a display of economy, a relentless lesson in all-engrossing rationality.

Then, there was me. And then, the coordinator, Mancia, who seemed both to pity us and hate herself and appeared among us intermittently during the day for short sessions of questions, during which she nodded much and departed with some self-deprecating remark that cast her as incompetent and hopeless. Though I am not of a nature to worry much about others, Mancia nevertheless managed to elicit in me some feeling of solicitude.

After a few weeks’ adjustment, I slipped right into the routine. I worked on the investment algorithms, coded them up on the computer, and submitted them for testing on the simulation engine. I knew nothing about investment and still, to this day, don’t know enough to hold a conversation on the subject with anyone who has even a passing knowledge of it. Of my co-workers, Berfmon perhaps understood best how such things work, but was loath to share his knowledge with anyone. I suppose I could have opened a book. My ignorance didn’t matter, though. I was getting the job done and earning money for the first time in my life.

I was also lonely. Berfmon and Lemina’s toxic personalities were too much to bear at lunch, Krauknew never had lunch and Mancia was never available. I eventually came to spend my lunch hour outside, on a bench near the office overlooking Baguetel’s south river. I found it calming to watch the slow flow of water. I reflected much there, mentally retraced the sequence of events that had landed me on this bench overlooking the river, and wondered where to go from here, or if it mattered at all in the larger scheme of things. I speculated on whether the universe was just a program executing a set of rules with certain initial conditions like the algorithms I submitted into the simulation engine, or if a person’s will to act held some vestigial magic. I wondered if, deeply seated within the convoluted workings of the human brain, there lay some reason to do more than just perpetuate existence.

By this time I had been working for the company a little over a month.

Watching the water flow, hearing it bubble at its edge, seeing the play of sunlight at the surface of its waves and ripples, somehow recurrently got me thinking about dancing, and about Fidiory. I recognized and acknowledged my loneliness, realized that he was my only friend and keenly missed him, yet had no will to contact him, not in my present condition of failed scientist. I recognized that it might be the same for him, though I imagined him netting a better job than the one I had, and I may have refrained from contacting him also to avoid the inevitable feelings of envy that would arise should he have succeeded better than me and thus mar the good memories of our student days.

One day, Mancia joined me on my bench overlooking the river at lunchtime. It was unplanned, and the bench being situated a good fifteen minute walk from the company building, just at the outskirts of the urban industrial district, made it was a rather improbable place to accidentally run into one another, but I here was sitting and eating a sandwich, and she sat down beside me and said “hi” as if it were a crushing social obligation to do so. From her handbag, she pulled out a plastic recipient containing a pasta and vegetable salad. She picked at it with an overly large metal fork that didn’t entirely fit inside her mouth. I felt no reason to speak and we sat there silently, munching our food and staring at the river.

The next day, as I headed out to lunch at noon, I passed in front of her desk. She looked up and called out, “you going out to lunch? Wait for me.”

Outside, we walked in the direction of the bench, of a common accord and without discussion, as if drawn to the river by invisible forces. Mancia, I found, disregarded the distinction of sidewalk and street and went carelessly from one to another. Also, she cut diagonally across intersections, leaving me to follow by unspoken cue. I noted it as a mark of leaders, who move forward without looking back to check on those behind, naturally expecting to be followed and creating an obligation to do so by their very inattention. I realized that if I didn’t follow her diagonally across the intersection, if I first crossed the street for which the traffic light was green, then turned to wait for the light to go green on the perpendicular street, I would be effectively breaking company and would thus provoke an incident, probably even one that placed the onus of explaining on me. I could imagine myself awkwardly justifying, “I’m afraid I can’t, won’t, follow you diagonally across intersections. I consider it bad form, regardless of the real danger it might or might not represent given the level of car traffic, or maybe I’m just a chump who follows rules blindly, but I cross the streets one at a time, it allows me to cross by looking only left and right, not behind me to the left and in front of me to the right and behind me again to the right and so on at weird angles, imprudently,” so awkward that it was easier to just follow her diagonally across the intersection, to allow her in effect to win, and realize that by this subtle mechanism she had placed me in a follower position. I began to question her ethics and her habit of proclaiming her self-deprecating comments, to which I had never failed to protest that she was not deserving of such (self-)criticism.

Only now did I begin to conceive of it as the clever manipulation that it was. It was too late, of course. By now, we were enjoying our second lunch by the river, therefore it had officially become a habit, and being colleagues we couldn’t back out of it without provoking an incident. So it was that every day we had lunch together, watching the river’s water flow past our bench in dreamy fascination, me munching on store-bought sandwiches and her on homemade salads and making small talk, relating office gossip and commenting current news events.

One Monday, out of the blue, with no connection to the current topic, Mancia said, “I’ll be moving this Saturday. Could you help me move?”

I quickly answered “yes”, happy to have something to do on the weekend and eager to see Mancia in a context outside of our professional setting. She handed me a slip of paper with her address and phone number, and I didn’t fail to notice that it had been written beforehand, not waiting for my answer at all and presuming that I would be free come Saturday. It also occurred to me that she couldn’t be unaware that I would notice how her address had been written down for me previous to me agreeing to her request, and that her manipulation was very much overt and constituted a message regarding the balance of power in our burgeoning relationship.

Saturday came around. Grasping my crumpled slip of paper with her address scrawled on it, I found Mancia’s apartment in Baguetel’s East Side. It was a small top-floor affair that she had ostensibly occupied as a student and was now exiting thanks to increased revenue. It occurred to me that I could probably do the same, being in a similarly eased financial situation. It also occurred to me that my lack of inclination to do so was revealing.

Mancia had gathered a group of seven or so friends, all male, to help her move. They greeted me politely in turn. They bantered amongst themselves, signifying that they knew each other well and formed an integrated group. They stationed me at the bottom floor of the five story building and I was handed the task of carrying boxes and furniture from the first floor down to the building entrance and outside to a moving van parked nearby. I barely caught a fleeting glimpse of Mancia’s apartment before being sent down, so I felt disappointed. I’d expected the view of her layout and decorative choices to further reveal her character and outlook on life. Toward the latter stages of the move I made up a pretext of having to use the toilet and climbed the staircase to the apartment to get a look around. Mancia was drinking tea with one of her friends and offered me a cup, which I accepted. I sipped the tea and moved through the two rooms and bathroom, assuaging my curiosity. By now, however, the walls were bare and the floors empty save the remaining sealed-off boxes, so I gulped my tea and headed back down to the first floor to resume carrying things to the van.

Almost immediately, I felt the need to use the toilet, for real this time. I suppressed the urge, not wanting to call attention to the flimsiness of the excuse I’d offered to each helper stationed on the floor landings.

By the time we’d finished filling the van and were ready to transition to her new address, my toilet need had become pressing, urgent even, and leaving aside my hang-up regarding credibility, I bounded up the stairs to her now-empty apartment. I was horrified to find Mancia shutting the door. She informed me that the keys were inside, as per her landlord’s instructions. So I said I’d meet her at her new address after finding a café where I could use the toilet, instead of catching a ride with her group of friends as planned. Mancia handed me a slip of paper with her new address. I set out to find a café.

I walked around the block.

Nearby, I found a charming hangout with homestyle furniture that displayed no interest in any overarching vision of form, color or functionality. I sat down with an oversized and oversweet coffee that I had ordered just to justify using the toilet. I gazed despondently at the slip of paper containing Mancia’s new address and wondered if she had scrawled it knowing beforehand that I wouldn’t be riding with her and her friends, maybe suspecting that I’d need to use the toilet after her door had been locked. Glancing up momentarily, through the grimy front window pane, I caught a glimpse of Fidiory walking by. I recognized him from his gait rather than his appearance.

I jumped to my feet immediately and bounded toward the café entrance, suddenly possessed by an exuberance that I hadn’t known for what now seemed like a lifetime. I reached the door, jumping over a chair that had been pulled back too far from a table near the entrance, and cleared it handily. Unfortunately, in my recklessness I still carried my coffee in hand. It slipped through my fingers during my otherwise graceful landing and struck the door. It fell, pivoted over the door handle as it spun downward and crashed to the floor. My body was still in automatic mode and my left foot jotted upward, my right leg bent at the knee and my arms splayed out, palms turned downwards for balance. Not a single drop of coffee touched my clothes or shoes. However, it now lay splattered across the floor in a large, dripping puddle configuration. I made a mental note to contact Fidiory later and trudged back to the bar to request a mop to clean up my mess.

…

I reached Mancia’s new place, also on Baguetel’s East Side and actually just a few blocks away from her previous place, just as the move in was getting into full swing. I was again posted on the bottom floor, the new apartment being on the seventh floor and three additional male friends having joined us by now.

Once I had the last box out of the van, I took it up the steps myself. On the seventh floor, on the landing in front of her new apartment, Mancia was waiting along with the other movers. One of them pried the box from my arms and sent it slipping inside the apartment. It made a whizzing sound over the wooden floor. He then pulled the door shut. Mancia thanked everyone for their help with the move and asked who would come with her to take the moving van back to the rental company. I left.

…

I walked around Baguetel’s East Side for a few hours.

I entered a library. The sight of the staggering amount of books inside gave me a kind of nausea. My scientific foundation whispered that, in the immense volume of words contained in the pages of those books, the level of redundancy must be enormous, that clearly the enterprise of accumulating human knowledge and understanding was haphazard, tentative and uneven. Nevertheless, I picked up books at random and read a page here and there, not pursuing any one book and allowing myself to wander, until a librarian announced that the library was closing. At this point, I left the library and just stood in front of it for a while, feeling embarrassed at having nowhere to go, and a kind of resentment welled in me toward Mancia. Mancia who recruited me to help her move but kept me from seeing her possessions and thus robbing me of the insight it could provide into the kind of person she was. The resentment welled up so much that I headed back to her new address and stubbornly climbed up the seven stories to her door, rapping firmly on it with clenched knuckles. I was determined to get myself invited in.

A friend of Mancia’s opened the door and left it ajar, walking back inside without even a greeting. I walked in. The boxes and furniture had been pushed against the walls. There was music. A party was underway.

In the living room corner, I stacked up three boxes and sat down on top of it, uncaring of my intruder status. The party was mixed, with all the male friends who’d helped move being joined by her female friends. A couple was dancing, executing a slow circle around the room and drawing a few appreciative stares.

In my reverie, I didn’t immediately recognize Fidiory. I may have unconsciously attributed it to some mental projection. But then, I focused and saw that it was indeed him.

His face was as expressionless as that of his female partner. Their dance, I realized, appeared to be a couples’ version of the robotic swerve. There was some kind of energy transfer at play here, a pendulum action. First, her movements would show dominance, and then the control would shift to him, before coming back to her. This back-and-forth was like a conversation, each body responding to subtle hints and cues from the other. A wave effect was at play here on different levels. Sometimes a hand would break at the wrist, then roll, the elbow popping out and ducking in as the shoulder rose. Then, the chest would rise and swell. At that point the wave would propagate to the partner’s body and manifest as a swing of the hips and popping knees. In another scenario, one of the partner’s feet would shift so as to be in the configuration where the toes were pointing at one another, then the whole body would gradually spin, upper body following the lower body’s movement, and the partner would spin as well but with a second and a half’s delay, making it appear as though the spin effect was moving from one body to the other through some invisible tug. They touched at different places, sometimes clinging to each other in a full-length embrace, sometimes having nothing more than fingertip contact, sometimes facing one another with hands down, palms hovering very close to one another yet not touching, like magnets that both pushed and pulled at one another. Their faces betrayed no emotion whatsoever, neither smiling nor frowning in concentration like dancers often do, nor squinting to relax and enhance attentiveness. Just faces frozen in inexpressiveness.

They spun about each other as they circled around the room, like twin planets spinning strange days and revolving around some shifting axis or central sun. A few people watched intently, while others sipped their drinks, talked amongst themselves and ignored the dancers. I couldn’t see Mancia anywhere.

After a spin, Fidiory found himself facing me. Our eyes locked and I smiled as if to say, “Yeah, I’m here, sitting on a pile of boxes in the living room of a newly moved-in apartment watching you dance, where else would I be?” Fidiory broke off with his partner and came over to me, bemused. We shook hands and nodded to one another. I said, “I shouldn’t be here. I was invited to help Mancia move in, not to attend the post-move party. Apparently, that’s just for her real friends.”

“Is she like that? I hardly know her. I’m just here with my dance partner.”

“I see you’re taking the robotic swerve to unprecedented levels.”

“This? Well… It’s not the robotic swerve.”

3

Fiora loved couples’ dancing and hated what loving couples’ dancing said about her.

In essence, the problem was the whole lead-follow thing. A couple is the fundamental partnership. It is to a dancer what a molecule is to the atom, the privileged and ultimate congregation mechanism. Molecules, however, form two different kinds of bonds. There are the ionic bonds, with a hungrier atom hugging the partner atom’s electron to its bosom, and then there are covalent bonds in which a more egalitarian sharing of electrons between ostensibly consensual atoms takes place. The universe expresses diversity in partnership at this basic molecular level. Oxygen, for instance, is a covalent bond, two oxygen atoms partnering by sharing an electron. On the other end of the spectrum, table salt is ionic: it forms when the predatory chlorine atom wrests an electron from the placid, easygoing sodium.

The bonds that dancers form, however, are all ionic. Relationships are deplorably one-sided. It’s all yang and yin, male and female principles. Female follows male. Male plans the dance moves and makes all the decisions. Female lends beauty and grace to the unfolding enterprise. Take any ballroom couples’ dance, it follows this model. It’s inescapable. It’s a statement on the foundation and organization of human society. The man has a vision, a project: he recruits the woman to partner in its implementation of that vision and essentially allows her to communicate on his architecture of movement and pose. The language used to convey this vision varies between dances, the vocabulary of tugs, pulls, leaning in or away from her, the stances, the basic steps, the complex arrangements. Her job is to pick the small stuff. Spectacular stuff, to be sure: flourishes, bounces, kicks, all eyes are on her but really, she’s doing it on cue. Isn’t there a dance in which a woman can be as much a part of the decision process as the man?

Egalitarian partnerships rely heavily on communication, they are less instinctive, less hard-wired. They require the partners to be thinking all the time. Less instinctive, however, doesn’t mean they don’t speak to a deep longing in all individuals to control and shape their destiny, independently of their sex. Shouldn’t there exist a dance that has this simple human yearning baked into its very structure? Isn’t that an answer to an authentic, universal need, a true market opportunity?

Before she even got started on the project, Fiora felt the paralysis of looming failure. It manifested itself through imagined testimonials from disgruntled, virtual former clients of her (as yet) hypothetical dance school.

First imaginary case: forty-something mother of two, long hair neatly held back in an elegant braid, preparing some diversified lunch spread with a slightly less confident, slightly less attractive, ostensibly single female friend, confiding why she had given up on this self-proclaimed equal-partners couples’ dance:

“I really liked it at first. Not necessarily the dance itself, which I knew next to nothing about, but rather the idea of it. I’d wanted to take a dance class with for some time and I wanted the type of dance we would be engaging in to reflect the type of couple that we were: just two people involved in a relationship that wasn’t based on any separation of tasks, not restraining us or placing arbitrary culturally inherited constraints on the way we do things. That was the idea, and the dance seemed like a perfect fit, but having gotten into it we both found that it tried to erase the couple aspect. I’m not a man, and he isn’t a woman, for sure. It made us realize that we’re actually attached to a certain specialization. He likes me as the seductive, receptive woman that I am, and I’m not afraid to admit that what I want is a strong provider in my life, especially now that I’ve quit my job to devote myself full time to my writing…”

Fiora’s reasoning was that the first pioneering wave would necessarily be composed of such people, people professing the need for a novel way of dancing but falling back on tired stereotypes at the first possible moment, though a few sticklers would help sustain the dance through its lean years, long enough for it to become its own trusted stereotype.

Still, such imaginary scenarios were difficult to dismiss. Mental ghost case number two: the disgruntled children of her future former students, grown up and stacking complaints. In this case, her mental image was a man, wiry and anxious, sitting on a park bench in a dirty coat and frayed cap and talking on a phone.

“Yeah, I didn’t go to the interview. Couldn’t, really. Tried to go and failed. I couldn’t get myself out the door just to go there. I was all dressed up, I had my best suit on, and I had prepared for this interview intensively. I’d graphed out the answers to any and all questions they could potentially ask me. I knew all the paths the interview could take. I knew where they led and I was prepared, I was so very prepared, but when I reached the door of my apartment I just froze. I stopped and walked back to my bedroom and plopped down on my bed, I curled up, wrinkling my good suit and waiting for the anxiety attack to pass. I wondered why, why? Why can’t I man up and go out there and achieve success in work and business? Why? And the only answer I can come up with is that achievement just isn’t compatible with my identity, my self-image, I just never had a role model in my environment on which to base myself. This might sound like a cliché, but it’s really is my parents’ fault. I couldn’t tell you which one of my parents is the father figure and which one is the mother. Everything was mixed-up in our house. My parents did this couples’ dance in their free time. This weird dance. I’ve forgotten the name of it, it disappeared a long time ago and it was just awful, a hideous, sexless exchange between partners, with no fixed lead and follow, just this constant negotiation taking place through subtle hints in the body language, my parents did this dance every Saturday evening and sometimes on Fridays too. It structured them, it sculpted their relationship and exerted this massive, pervasive influence on our whole home life. The thing is, on the surface they did this dance just one or two evenings a week, but the truth is that they were never not doing this dance. In everyday life they were still permanently, relentlessly negotiating, negotiating everything from who was to go do the shopping to who should clean the toilet, with the responsibility of taking decisions always switching from one to the other. There was no distinction of male and female in my home. And that is why I’m such a mess today.”

The success scenarios were more difficult to envision, Fiora thought, because success stories are mostly unique whereas failure is universally recognizable and scientifically unavoidable (as verified by the entropic principle). Nevertheless, she did harbor a few mental scenarios of success. One such scenario was a woman in a radio interview expounding on the history of the dance, in the buildup to some public event.

“I remember when we started doing these dance nights in the basement of a local cultural center. Sometimes we’d be pretty much among ourselves, with absolutely no one from outside the dance lab showing up. Z’s mother baked cookies and there was a bowl of punch on the table in the corner and it didn’t have that festive feel we were aiming for at all, it felt more like a charity event, like our dance hadn’t grown organically and stood no chance of surviving in the real world and we were just here to show troubled youth, local delinquents, a model to emulate or something. I told Z more than once, look, we have to get out of here, we have to showcase this dance somewhere where it can inspire people, show them it can be, that it is, fun and challenging and always evolving. And it was always evolving, no doubt about it. Every week we had new moves to show, we’d develop them in the lab and try them out in that cultural center basement, and of course some of them would stick and others would have to be abandoned. The ones we abandoned we often did so not because of their level of difficulty, necessarily, though they could be extremely complex, sometimes ridiculously so, but rather because they didn’t fit the personalities of the cultural center crowd on precisely the night we tried them out. There was randomness about what worked and what didn’t, which is why we needed as many people as possible at these events, so that the moves that could potentially stick would do so and not suffer the arbitrary cuts that come with small sample spaces. Of course, filling that basement on Saturday nights was no easy feat. It didn’t feel like a dance venue, it wasn’t dimly and tastefully lit, there was none of this husky, smoky, seductive atmosphere that you find at clubs. At first we’d gotten good crowds, mostly thanks to the goodwill of the family and friends who came out to encourage us and learn our dance, but of course that only lasted so long. Eventually, it trickled out and so we had to recruit people outside the circle of family and friends. We put up flyers at cafés and small businesses around the student neighborhoods. We wanted students for their youth and their knack for embracing experimental things, their need to think of themselves as precursors, pioneers of some movement, to get bragging rights to state that they were among the first to be doing something. In retrospect, I can’t say for certain that it was the best strategy. It seemed to work, given the regular apparition of new faces on the basement, but alongside that flow of people coming in there were a lot of people not coming back. The turnover was huge. The kinds of personalities that are drawn to a new, experimental form of dancing are also, to a great extent, rather fickle.

We survived, though. We stuck to our dance and we formed a core of regular dancers that helped us develop and grow. Eventually, we moved out of that basement in the cultural center and into proper dance venues. To create a brand, to be recognizable, we’d have all our dance event locations named ‘The Basement’ in reference to the original place where we’d started out. It became our concept, anywhere a dance event was held became ‘The Basement’ for the evening, and people would say they were going to ‘The Basement’ to announce they were going to one of these dances, and it was funny because it was almost never really an actual basement. In fact, these events were often held outdoors and calling it ‘The Basement’ made no sense at all, it was ironic.”

In the ‘success’ scenario, the person’s face was vague, fuzzy, out of focus, which explained why this was a radio interview: the person talking was faceless, a hypothesis, an abstract speculation.

Fiora supposed that the facial fuzziness had to do with it being, in this scenario, her own face.

She supposed that when the time came that she could let this imaginary scenario unfold and visualize her actual face on the protagonist, features and all, she’d be ready to bring her project to fruition.

…

She took Balango class Tuesdays and Fridays at a dance studio nearby where she worked. After Tuesday’s class, people went home. However, Friday’s class often ended with a communal drink at a pub next to the studio. There appeared to be two kinds of people at Balango class: those who had a partner and attended as a couple, and the singles. Of the couples, no one struggled with the sexually polarized nature of the dance, the model of an upright, rigid, erect man guiding, pushing, and directing his female partner, who in turn decorated the little pauses and halts with spins and poses. The couples just shrugged and said, that’s the way it is, take it or leave it, it wasn’t the way they were together the rest of the time, it was only during the dance that they borrowed from that model, for pragmatic reasons. Because they enjoyed the sensuality of it. Because, though that’s not the way men and women interact today, it is the way it used to be, and going through the motions of it elicited strong feelings from one’s core ancestral memories. Because the idea of an equal partnership was a veneer on the real way nature determined men and women to complement one another. Because, if there wasn’t one role for the man and another for the woman, then why bother at all to have a couple’s dance? Why not dance between men, or between women, or alone or by threes? If another form of dance was possible, wouldn’t it have evolved naturally from the music? No, they argued, if anything, today’s music had people dancing alone, on crowded dance floors but by themselves, because the world of today was built upon the individual, who assembled with other individuals when it came time to build something durable or play around and who was otherwise disengaged.

Some among the singles agreed with this line of thinking, others proposed that it didn’t matter, that the couple’s dance was a means and not an end and that, regardless of what form it took, it was just a conversation starter, a flawed, clumsy initial gesture beyond which sprang more meaningful dialogue.

Fidiory, who seldom spoke first but never failed to jump into the conversation once it got going, compared it to a handshake during one of those Friday post-dance drinks.

“Why do we shake hands? Does anyone here know? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s the preferred way of saying hello, of showing goodwill, and also of showing that you trust the other party and that you’re worthy of being trusted in return. But: that’s not how it came to be, or not exactly in any case. Originally you’d shake someone’s hand to make sure they weren’t armed, to make sure they weren’t carrying a knife, and you’d give their hand a good shake, so that if the other party was actually carrying a knife, if it was concealed high up inside the sleeve of their garment, the shake would make it fall out. This goes way back to ancient times and it has no bearing whatsoever on the present. We have metal detectors and full body searches for that today and we rarely have to resort to them other than in courtroom entrances and airport security spaces, but people nevertheless shake hands. It’s how we do things. We haven’t found a better way of greeting one another or concluding a business transaction and it doesn’t matter, it gets the job done and no one thinks of concealed weapons anymore when they shake someone else’s hand. Well, it’s the same for Balango.” And he took a sip of his drink and made a snorting noise with the straw.

Later, as everyone was leaving the pub, there were handshakes all around and Fiora shook Fidiory’s hand differently, grabbing his wrist from underneath. “This is how we shake hands where I come from,” she joked, “it’s used to be to make sure that the person’s sleeve wasn’t damp from wiping their mouth on it. That way you knew the other person could afford a handkerchief.” She giggled. Fidiory smiled politely back at her, then walked away.

Fiora was mortified at her own joke, so embarrassed that she skipped the following class. When she did show up for the class following that, Fidiory asked about her absence, ostensibly out of mild curiosity.

“Oh, I’ve been working on a new dance,” she answered.

“Really? Is that something you’ve been doing for long time?”

“Oh yeah. It’s an ongoing project I’ve been developing for some time now.” Fiora heard herself speaking and couldn’t identify why she felt compelled to fabricate such a lie. However, as she continued to talk, the ‘project’ gained substance and momentum.

“It’s sort of based on the Balango, which is why I take Balango lessons, but I change a lot of things about it too. It’s much more fluid, for one. Lead and follow can easily switch from one person to the other, it’s not an I’m-always-lead and I’m-always-follow deal, so to be able to signal the shifts in lead-follow, there’s a whole language to be developed, a body-language really, though certain transitions are more coded. That’s the part I’ve been working on recently, the language. Language is super important, you can’t have a couple’s dance without it, and couple’s dances as we know them rely mostly on steps, on the recipes of movement. They give little or no attention to signaling and communication in general. This thing I’m putting together, it’s language-intensive. You couldn’t just show up and learn a few steps and become a beginner dancer with a small repertoire. You couldn’t fake your way through this dance. You’d have to invest some time, initially, just to learn the language aspect, the finger pressures, the neck and shoulder stances, leg distance, leg configuration, poses, and so on. It’s really complex, maybe not as immediately spectacular as traditional couple’s dances as far as I’ve developed it so far, but it allows for a very large set of signals. The whole language aspect empowers the dance to be super evolutive. It allows for building up complex steps and sequences. I’m not aiming for spectacular anyway, I think a good couple’s dance should be fun for the people doing it, not as some vehicle for showing off… Showing off isn’t excluded, either, though, I guess… Well, at this point, nothing is excluded.”

“Wow.”

Class was set to begin and so the conversation was adjourned. Fiora attributed the spontaneity of her speech to her subconscious mind having worked on the problem of reciprocity in couple’s dancing without her conscious mind knowing about it. Her desire to be recognized, to shine, was a means for delving into this rich subconscious subsystem, to extract notions and formalize them into speech, hauling it all into her conscious mind.

“The will to show off can be a positive force,” she told herself as she half-listened to the Balango teacher’s instructions and mechanically executed the evening’s new steps with various partners in the rotation.

Fidiory was inspired by Fiora’s ideas. A formal language in couple’s dance! During Fiora’s explanations, his mind had spontaneously traveled back to the robotics lab. If a dance was language-based, it could reach unimaginable heights of complexity, each partner providing their input and programmatically reacting to the other partner’s.

…

After class, Fidiory proposed to the group that that they all go out for a drink. However, Being a Tuesday class, mostly everyone declined except Fiora and Elmier, an older man who thought that Fidiory and Fiora were brother and sister.

“Your names are so alike,” he insisted as they sat at a table in the next door pub, “are you sure you’re not related? Fiora, Fidiory, if I say them fast enough they sound almost identical. Fiora - Fidiory - Fiora - Fidiory - Fiora - Fidiory -”

“No,” replied Fidiory, “if we were related, someone would have told us by now.”

“We’re not related,” added Fiora, “not by a long shot.”

“You sort of look alike, too.”

“We don’t, we don’t look alike at all.” Fiora snapped, her voice tinged with an edge that surprised both Elmier and Fidiory. Fidiory changed the subject.

“So what drew you to the Balango, Elmier? Did your family doctor recommend it as a workout?”

“Just how old do you think I am?” scolded Elmier. “A doctor’s recommendation, come on! I shouldn’t even answer that.”

“Hey, there’s no age for a doctor’s recommendation,” replied Fidiory, “a healthy heart requires frequent, semi-intense stimulation of the cardiovascular system.”

“Cardiovascular system? In the Balango?”

“Well, not the dance itself, rather the fact of being around so many young female bodies. I imagine you’d find that stimulating. You’re grimacing, OK, maybe not then. So you don’t find it stimulating, my mistake. Oh wait, are you scowling? Are you scowling at me? What did I say?”

“I just think Balango is a lot of fun. Well, fun’s not the right word. Do you know about the history of it? Oh, you’re grimacing, I can tell you don’t know the history at all.”

“I’m not grimacing. At all. My face is perfectly impassive. You’re not making any sense at all.”

“I know a little of the history of Balango,” offered Fiora.

“You see, your sister knows more than you do,” quipped Elmier.

“She’s not my sister. You’re being an old manipulative poop. You think your tricky machinations go unseen by others, but you’re wrong. And you’re a bad actor.”

“So the history, as you know,” Elmier turned to address Fiora, pointedly ignoring Fidiory, “starts in the island colony of Hamankia, which had two things: yeast plantations and prisons. It was set up so that people convicted of a crime were exiled to a prison there and remained in prison for as long as their term required, or else they could leave the prison if they accepted work in the yeast plantations. So you had two different populations on this island, those who worked on the plantations and those who were in prison. The rule was that once you left the prison, you couldn’t go back, so all decisions were irrevocable, final.”

“Easy decision,” interjected Fidiory, “get out in the fresh air. Do some light yeast harvesting.”

“Harvesting yeast would literally take years off your lifespan, in those days.”

“’Literally’! I doubt you truly know the meaning of that word, otherwise you wouldn’t be bandying it around like that.”

“The fine powder from the extraction process would get into your lungs, blocking off minute alveoli…”

“So you cough. That’s what coughing is for.”

“…taking root, taking root deep inside your lungs and actually feeding off of them…”

“Honestly, a little morning jog, by the sea, with the brisk salt air, totally clears up one’s congestion -”

“…Gradually cutting down on your capacity to breathe, to pull air through your lungs…”

“Hey, why weren’t these convicts sent directly to the yeast factory, anyway?”

Fiora cut in, “I know the history. I know all about it.”

“If they could have sent them directly, they would have!” exclaimed Elmier.

“I’m not sure who is this ‘they’ you’re speaking of,” replied Fidiory.

“By law, the state couldn’t send you directly into yeast harvesting. A prisoner couldn’t be forced into labor…”

“In my opinion, that’s more an indictment of the state’s capacity to show some balls than anything else…”

“I read all about this before signing up for the Balango,” interjected Fiora, “the whole historical aspect is absolutely fascinating, it’s a compelling argument for the necessity of dance as an outlet…”

“The state should have sent these people directly into yeast harvesting. I mean, they’re eating, aren’t they? Why shouldn’t they be contributing to society through their work?”

“So those who remained in the prison could watch the others working from the windows on the prison walls…”

“I’m just playing devil’s advocate here…”

“Dance finds its voice when people shrug off their suffering,” said Fiora.

“At the end of a day harvesting yeast, night would descend on the island and the yeast harvesters would assemble around large bonfires, playing their music, an ever changing style that borrowed from the different cultures of the freed prisoners, who came from so many different places, playing their music but remaining seated, exhausted from their workday of harvesting all this yeast…”

“Back then, people were supposed to be so much more robust than today. So I beg to differ. Just goes to show that biology is biology and lazy-bum is a universal human ailment -”

“Their backs aching as though broken, their lungs like a bush fire, both burning and stifled like underwater lava, their hands swollen, the joints stiff and numb, their skin itching and crawling as though infested by invisible lice, and still they beat their drums and stroked their violins, while a short distance away behind the prison walls, the convicts heard their plaintive melody, broken yet hopeful, both an admission of failure and a call to freedom…”

“Toughness: you either have it or you don’t, there’s just no faking it, those who have it do and those who don’t invest in an artistic outlet…”

“And then, within the prison walls that often appeared to be closing in on them, they began to dance, even as their minds were occupied by a single, pressing question: do I stay or do I go? Life was unbearable in the confines of the prison, and the music wafting over the prison walls announced that it was near unbearable outside too, but the two were vastly dissimilar and so these contradictory forces were keeping them inside the prison and drawing them out. Now: a single word murmured to a prison guard or a chief and they would be brought before a special committee, a single signature to be set on a release contract, most of the time just a few scratches in ink instead of a proper signature because a good number of them were illiterate or didn’t know or couldn’t remember their real names, and suddenly they’d be released into the yeast plantations. This question of being released into yeast harvesting was constantly present. Their indecision manifested itself in this strange dance, the Balango, almost like a conversation. The word, ‘Balango’, actually means ‘question’. It’s danced with a partner with an unspoken yet present question hanging between the partners, a question they danced around and sometimes danced through…”

“The notion of lead and follow takes on a whole new dimension when the dancers are dancing around a decision,” nodded Fiora.

“These prisons… they were mixed?” asked Fidiory.

Elmier shrugged. Fiora drew in her breath, mouth open and eyebrows raised, as if to answer, then closed her mouth and lowered her eyebrows.

“I guess you must see your life as a prison,” said Fidiory to Elmier.

“No, you see, the prison is a metaphor for life in general.”

“Wait, aren’t we talking about actual, historical, stone wall prisons?”

“Well, yes, but the meaning, the weight of the dance…”

“Because if your story is accurate, the prison must have seemed pretty real to the people inside them -”

“To us, today, the persistence of it, owes to the original metaphor…”

“Too bad all those people are dead now, wouldn’t it be great if you could tell them, to their faces, to their emaciated, vitamin-depleted, sallow faces, that they’re being confined by a metaphor? That’s it’s a metaphor that’s giving them tuberculosis?”

“This original basis, by its metaphorical weight, ensured that the Balango would be relevant and of universal interest for years to come.”

A silence fell around the table and the three of them sipped their drinks and looked around at their surroundings.

…

After they left the bar, Fidiory accompanied Fiora to her apartment. They walked slowly, their shoes clattering on the wet sidewalk that faintly glistened, post-rain, under the dull light of Baguetel’s yellow-orange street lamps.

“How’s your dance coming along?” asked Fidiory.

“I’m pretty happy with it, I think I’m going about as well as other people in the class.”

“No, not Balango, the other dance, the one you’re developing.”

The clop-clop of the next steps resounded through their silence.

“Yeah, well. It’s going well enough. The process is iterative.”

“Iterative, that’s good. That’s the way things should be, right? Taking small steps is a sure way of moving forward.”

“Yeah, it’s iterative, but then, it’s non-linear.”

“OK?”

“It doesn’t move forward. In a straight line.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.” Clop-clop. “My apartment is right here.”

“You’ll have to show me your dance sometime, I’m really interested.”

“Really?”

Fidiory considered. Fiora inwardly fretted that he might add, “actually, no” but he was simply gathering his thoughts.

“You see, the problem with the Balango, or my problem with it anyway, is that it’s so bleak.”

“Bleak? A lot of people say that it’s imbued with hope and longing.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s not what I meant by ‘bleak’. It’s just so backward-looking. So ‘this is where we come from’, so ‘reality as it should be is behind us’, it’s as if it were saying, ‘everything about the world is known’, it’s deeply distrustful of change. Change can’t come from a dance with fixed lead and follow, any more than societies evolve under a dictatorship.”

“Well, I can’t show you anything tonight, I’m working tomorrow.”

“Me too.”

“And I have to get up early.”

‘Yeah, I get it, you don’t have to explain anything.”

“I’m on a big project at work right now, it’s very stressful.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“A lot of people are depending on me. It’s a lot of responsibility.”

“Yeah, you can’t let these people down. I mean, they’re depending on you.”

“Yeah, they’re depending on me, I’m a link in a chain.”

“Strong links make strong chains. So, what is it you do, at work?”

She evaded the question with an exasperated shrug and invited him up to her apartment.

…

They sipped tea while Fidiory looked over her head at the wall decorations. “You have a nice place here.” Then, “is this where you develop your dance?”

Fiora sighed.

“I have nothing,” she admitted. “A dance should really invent itself, it should just derive naturally from the music, from the spontaneous moods of the dancers, from their synergies. But: I have nothing. I don’t even have a partner. I don’t see how it’s possible to do this thing alone. So there. There you have it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s too bad.”

Fiora shrugged, got up from her seat, a big, amorphous bag that folded into the shape of whoever’s buttocks were last on it, like a print. She walked over to a sound box that jutted at eye level from a nearby wall and put on some music. The room filled with a slow chord progression, synthetic strings moving solemnly down a scale from minor to major, a pressing bam-badam drum, a few plaintive, tightly looped high notes. She walked back to the bag and plopped down. “This is the kind of music I thought the dance would be set to. It’s sort of sadly triumphant. It flows. It’s slightly nostalgic, but at the same time it’s sort of expectant, too.”

“Is that even possible? Being nostalgic and expectant at the same time?”

“Of course it is. Just listen to it.”

“I know, I know, it’s just, I tend to think it has to be one or the other. Individually or as a people, you either remember your past fondly, that lost empire your people had, or the house you grew up in, or else you close the door on your past and just look forward.”

“You can do both. You can feed on good, strong memories and then rely on them for the courage to look resolutely forward.”

“Yeah, the memories have your back. So to speak.”

“Really, just listen to this music, it’s saying that. It’s proving it because when it says it, you believe it.”

Fidiory stood up and initiated a few shoulder shrugs and boxing-type fist pumps. “This is good music for the robotic swerve,” he said. “But, in any case I can dance the robotic swerve to pretty much any music. The robotic swerve is universal, it’s the one dance that can fit any music style. It’s a paradox, because we had to wait for the invention of the robot to discover it. Isn’t that weird? Hey, look at this.”

Fidiory spun and tossed his head. “You can retrofit this dance to music that was written before there was even such a thing as formal science. The world had to take a technological leap forward so that dance could take a giant leap backward.” He spun again, then bowed his legs and slid them alternatively in and out to each side, resulting in an illusion of slipping on ice in slow motion.

“Is this robotic swerve always danced alone? Can’t robots dream of dancing with other robots?”

“There’s no reason why not, but as far as I know it’s never been safely attempted. Maybe it just hasn’t been around for long enough. Or maybe couples’ dancing is like a vestigial relic of a discarded time.”

“You don’t seem to be really into the whole couples’ dancing thing.”

“I’m not. I came to Balango class because I thought I’d learn about myself and my body movements by adding a degree of complexity to my dancing. But I’m really quite disappointed. It just seems like this obsolete, normalizing, submissive…”

Fiora stood up and came to stand next to Fidiory. She emulated his movement for some time until Fidiory, embarrassed at finding himself aped, stopped and rested his hands on his hips.

“What, why are you stopping?” Fiora asked.

“I don’t know, it’s just weird is all, you imitating me.”

“Let’s do the Balango and mix in elements from your robotic swervy thing.”

“That’s just silly.”

“No one’s watching.”

“Even when there’s no one watching, I still feel like I’m being watched. I think there’s even a term for that, for people who are always under the impression that they’re being watched. For instance, in this case, the cameras are here, here, and here.” Fidiory pointed to two upper corners of the room as well as to the back of his head.

“Come on! Let’s try this,” insisted Fiora. “This is research and development. Of course it’s going to feel awkward. Nothing new is ever built so long as the builders remain in their comfort zone. Awkward is good. Awkward means that you’ve reached somewhere where no one has been yet. You can wade through the awkwardness, you just need to forgo that expectation of immediate results that hounds anyone embarked on a journey of invention.”

Fidiory got the sense that she was reciting.

“Forgo expectation of immediate results,” he said. “Yeah, I like that. It’s like investment. I really need to start thinking long term.”

“Long term is good. It shows vision, intelligence.”

“Of course, we can’t ignore the archetype of the man who plans so much in advance that he’s never tasted any of the fruits of his labor, then he gets hit with a terrible illness and dies alone in bitter regret, only compounded by the loneliness brought on through having alienated his loved ones through his rigid intransigence.”

They moved into Balango stance, his right hand clasping her left and left hand clasping her right, their fingers interlaced, facing each other in seven-eighths position, legs slightly bent and springy, weight resting on the forward foot, the other foot set behind and bent such that the toes were lightly resting on the heel of the front foot. The music reached its end just as they settled into the stance. Fiora whispered, “The next one will work too, just wait for it.”

“Any music works for the robotic swerve,” said Fidiory with assurance. “Wait and be amazed. The robotic swerve is universal.”

The first notes of the next track appeared, growing in volume and carrying a restrained tension, like repressed desire tinged with foreboding. Fidiory pushed off at the shoulder and sent a wave down his arm, which rippled through his hand and stopped at Fiora’s hesitant fingers.

“What do I do now?” she asked, diffidently staring into his eyes.

“I’d say, let the wave propagate up your arm and through your body, course down your spine and then down to your legs.”

“I’m not sure I can. This is really new…”

She executed a brusque snap at the wrist and then an elbow bend, the wave appeared to have passed from water to some brittle material such as wood or copper laminate. Fiora bit her lower lip in concentration and tried to express a wave heading down her spine toward her legs, but only managed what seemed like a failed attempt to take a deep breath. Fidiory chuckled.

“Maybe we should start by teaching you the robotic swerve.”

“OK, let’s do that.”

Fidiory swiveled and stepped to her side. “The thing about the robotic swerve is: you have to engage very complex degrees of motion just to execute movements that are outwardly simple. It’s beautiful to watch because the person watching knows that these movements that would be trivial on, say, a piece of rope, are fascinating simply because they’re being executed on a human body. The human body wasn’t meant for a lot of these movements. Just take the wave, for instance. You see wave propagations in the animal kingdom. You can see it on a caterpillar that’s moving forward. First, its hind will rise and fold underneath itself, then this fold will move forward on the caterpillar’s body, and it looks flawless because it’s intimately bound to the caterpillar’s physiology, the caterpillar having a ringed body like a series of hinges evenly distributed all along its length. But: say I was to propagate a wave along the length of my arm, it’s not in the arm’s nature to allow for such a movement at all. I have joints at the shoulder, the elbow, the wrist, and then at the fingers, and nothing in between. To provide the illusion of a wave traversing my arm, I have to subtly activate the different muscle groups in such a way that a wave center appears to move fluidly from the shoulder all the way to the fingertips. To the spectator, it’s as though I were saying: ‘I can be anything I want to be, my nature is not an obstacle, and my mind can implement any nature that I want to acquire’. It’s ironic in form, but when you think about it, it’s a powerful affirmation…”

4

“It’s not the robotic swerve? Then what is it?”

“Just something we’re working on, Fiora and I.”

“You’ve been dancing seriously, then. That’s good.”

“Bah! It’s just a pastime. Now that I’m out of school I thought I should maintain some kind of…” Fidiory gestured vaguely in the space in front of his face as though typing on a sideways keyboard. “Hey, Xan, I meant to call you, man…”

“I don’t think I would have called you.”

Fidiory showed surprise at Xan’s candor. “Wow. Go to hell, man.”

“No, seriously, I’m terrible at maintaining contact. I’m always worried that my reasons for wanting to meet up with other people are silly and shallow. But this here is fate, we just met by coincidence, so it was meant to happen. Are you working? I suppose you’re making money?”

“Yeah… I guess. I’m doing predictive algorithms for this company.”

“No way! Me too!” Xan grew animated. “Another coincidence! What company?”

“It’s not really a coincidence, actually. I’ve been in touch with the other graduates from our class, and everyone’s more or less working in the same sector: building algorithms for predicting this or that. From what I can tell, our lives are on rails. The money in this business is huge, and it’s swallowing up all the graduates. I’m, well, I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

Xan shrugged. “Yeah, I don’t keep abreast of the business news. I just go in, work and go home.”

“A lot of the other graduates are self-employed too. They work as consultants or they partner up in small firms. More responsibility, higher commitment, bigger money.”

“I get the impression that, as machines get smarter, intelligence gets cheaper. If you look at things from a historical perspective, it used to be physical strength was the thing to have, then came devotion. Then, with the development of science: smarts. The core of our value has moved from our legs up to our brain right, then straight to the frontal cortex. Eventually it won’t matter, we’ll all just be sitting back watching a self-regulating, fully automated world just take care of itself. Then we’ll just go through the motions, simulating the conditions that made humans what they once were, just for fun.”

The conversation, instead of re-weaving the easy familiarity that the two men had known until just a few months back, drew focus to their current lives. Evoking their current jobs in the unfamiliar setting of Mancia’s apartment, though they shared a good deal of common professional ground, had only chilled the initial emotion of their chance reunion.

Fidiory asked, “Have you been back to Margolia?”

“No, I can’t go back. I came to make it here. If I go back with nothing to show but a diploma, I’ll be a kind of failure.”

“Don’t you miss your friends and family?”

“Of course I do. But they’re part of the reason I have to stay here. I was something of a big-shot back home. I netted a scholarship to study in Baguetel, that’s why I came over. In the eyes of the people over there I’m the quintessential success story. My very absence in Margolia is proof that there’s a way out of Margolia, into foreign academia or business. I’m the vacuum that’s supposed to pull another generation through school and bolster achievement. In a sense, I’m doing my job. I’m accomplishing things by my very absence. The fact that no one there sees me or hears from me is immensely encouraging to them. If I were to go back, I’d be asked whether I left university voluntarily or whether I just didn’t make the cut. If I answered that I didn’t make the cut, it would be admitting that I was beaten out by people who didn’t need it or want it as much as I did. And that would be shameful. The heart of the current Margolian narrative is that, as a people, we simply want it more, that we’re prepared to make sacrifices on our way up and we’re never distracted on the path to success. I could say that I left the university voluntarily, but I’d have to show that I came back with know-how, with foreign contacts, and I’d have to set up some kind of business, employ people, innovate and grow.”

He hesitated. “You know, it’s the Margolian universities that rejected me. I wanted to go back. But you see, Margolia doesn’t believe its own rags-to-riches story.” He added, almost as an afterthought, “You know, our music is terrible. It’s really shit.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, music isn’t just a product like any other, it’s the intimate way a people see themselves. And Margolian music is so bad that Margolians don’t even listen to it, like they’re avoiding their reflection by not looking in mirrors. All of the music you hear today in Margolia is foreign, so the Margolian people are looking for a new picture of themselves. But, you see, when we were dancing, I was dumbfounded to discover that our puppet dance was the same as your robotic swerve. It implies some kind of meta-convergence in the way cultures evolve.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Fidiory got up to get himself a new drink, and Xan sat there marveling at how so many words had simply tumbled out of his own mouth, and whether or not he himself believed any of it. It was one of those moments of inspiration in which he blindly followed a verbal process because he allowed himself to be carried along by its rhythm, by a string of ideas that sounded Baguetelian in form. That’s what being a foreigner is, he thought. It’s knowing that your new persona is a mask, while suspecting that the old one, from the old country, was probably, certainly, also a mask. It’s suspecting that fundamentally, no one has a true persona at all.

Had he really made the argument, somewhere among his self-pitying complaints of academic rejection and socially enforced exile, that his true reason for staying in Baguetel was for music and dancing? These weren’t a man’s thoughts. Men made sacrifices for family and country, they didn’t discover themselves in music and dancing unless the occasion called for it.

He got up to look for Mancia and found her in the kitchen, leaning her back against the refrigerator. Her eyes registered recognition at seeing him, followed by a veiled, embarrassed shock.

“You made it!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know how to reach you! Anyway, as you may have noticed, the move-in has turned into a party!”

“Yeah, I suspected that there was still work to be done, so I came back,” he explained. “Glad I did too, I just ran into a good friend from university. A good friend.” He made direct, insistent eye contact at the end of the sentence. Mancia shrugged and turned to her other friends in the kitchen, rolling over on the refrigerator to rest her shoulder instead of her back.

Fidiory, who was leaning his buttocks against a countertop, motioned him over. “I want you to meet Fiora,” he said, indicating the woman who stood beside him. Xan recognized Fidiory’s earlier dance partner and approached to shake her hand.

“That was very interesting, that dance you did earlier,” he said. “It was like… a controlled whirlwind. You have a lot of very good ideas.”

“Thank you!” exclaimed Fiora. “Are you one of Fid’s friends from school?”

“Fid- Fidiory? Yeah, we studied together.”

“Xan is from Margolia.” explained Fidiory. Xan felt a wave of irritation at being branded a foreigner, at being reduced to origins, but Fidiory was only introducing a favorite subject of his. “That’s where Unwanters used to live. Have you heard of Unwanters?”

Fiora shook her head.

“They’re these people that walked up and down Margolia disseminating wisdom and news, acting as intermediaries in situations of dispute or conflict.”

Fiora asked, “What were they called? Unwanters?”

“Unwanters, or those who don’t want. Because they trained themselves at not wanting anything. They were free of lust and greed, so they were pretty much incorruptible. Anywhere in Margolia, when the Unwanters were still around, if you needed someone to impart advice, or act as a go-between in a dispute, or listen to a confession, all you had to do was find yourself an Unwanter, they were the quintessentially disinterested party.”

Fiora shrugged and shook her head. “Everybody wants something.”

Fidiory insisted, “It’s in their training. They could train themselves into this Unwanter mold. Apparently, there’s an Unwanter in each and every one of us, sometimes embryonic but always there. It’s like our inner witness. Only through training can you dig deep enough to develop your inner Unwanter.”

“How could you train yourself to not want anything?”

“By brain training. You access your Unwanter through concentration and exercises in mental immobility.”

“What if accessing your inner whatever works for a lot of things. Maybe we have inner bakers and inner some kind of profession that hasn’t been invented yet.”

“I had a great-uncle who was an Unwanter,” ventured Xan.

A silence ensued. Fiora and Fidiory waited for him to continue. Xan waited with them.

“Hey, you never told me that,” prodded Fidiory.

Xan shrugged. “The man basically starved. Not literally, of course, but the life he led, bad food and sleeping outside most of the time, it took years off of his life. We don’t discuss it much in the family. My memories of him are rather hazy, but I do remember a smiling, kind man. He looked both young for his age and at the same time prematurely old, as though he were somehow outside of time, or perhaps borrowing from all ages young to old. His face was childlike, but deeply wrinkled. The skin on his face looked thick. We didn’t see much of him. It’s not like an Unwanter to be very close to his family, he has to be dedicated to people in general, he can’t be drawn into obligations like helping or providing for his relatives. The few memories I have of him are drawn from annual family gatherings and the occasional visit, I suppose.”

Xan fell silent and looked around at the bare kitchen. A light fixture hung from the ceiling, covered in some kind of electrically isolating black guck. A single light bulb was screwed into it, emitting a stark white light that was blinding to look at directly. Mancia was leaning against the fridge a few steps away, sheltered behind a cluster of her friends who chatted excitedly, but Mancia was alone, talking to no one. She had been listening to Xan’s story, a bemused yet critical look hanging on her soft features. When their eyes met, she said softly, “‘Unwanter’ is such a load of garbage. Everybody wants something.”

Her speech was partially masked by the hubbub of the other people’s conversations in the kitchen. Fiora said, “What?” and Mancia repeated, “garbage, everybody wants garbage! I mean, something.”

Fiora repeated “What? We can’t hear you.”

Mancia shoved herself off the fridge with a shrug of her shoulder and screamed, “Everybody wants something!” Her outburst provoked a hushed silence in the kitchen and faces turned to stare at her. She shrugged and staggered out of the kitchen. A moment later her voice was heard booming from the living room, “I want to see everyone dancing, this is a party!”

In the kitchen, Fidiory said, “I don’t care what anyone says, the Unwanter is a very cool concept and, mark my words all of both of you, the world will always need Unwanters. It’ll be proven beyond doubt by social scientists someday that they fulfill a definite role in society and that they’re irreplaceable. In fact, I’d like to be one myself. I’m tired of wanting things. I want to want nothing.”

“It’s nowhere as glamorous as it sounds,” replied Xan. “You’ve been struck by a comic book character, you’re extolling the virtues of something out of a comic book. Really, you have no idea.”

“No, no-no-no, I initially, learned about Unwanters from a comic, but since then I’ve really, thoroughly, documented myself on the subject -”

“You should have grown up in my family, heard the way everyone always talked about my Unwanter uncle. They had nothing good to say about him, nothing! Just scorn and contempt. They’d call him weak, a non-participant, a perpetual stander at sidelines. They went as far as to suggest that he’d abandoned his family. That he gave up on life before his had even started.”

“Well, no offense to your family, but those are pretty stupid, lame-brained things to say about a man whose life is devoted to others.”

Xan’s eyes widened considerably and he leaned his head forward, jaw open and hanging. “Look, Fidiory,” he said, “I understand that you’re… wait, what is your problem anyway?”

“My problem,” boomed Fidiory, measuring every syllable with hand gestures as though he were pinching a taut length of string between the thumb and index of each hand, “is with ignorant people mouthing off about something they obviously know nothing about.”

“Are you dense? You’re not Margolian, you’re just a guy who read a comic book one time, and who thought ‘wow, this is a good comic book, this is really interesting, wow Unwanter I should do that, that sounds really cool.’”

Fiora interjected, “I don’t read comic books because I get through them too quickly. They’re such a fast read.”

Staring straight at Xan, Fidiory said, “Isn’t it wonderful how Margolians are so keen to forget what it is to be Margolian, how all of you just want to be like everyone else in the world? Actually, I don’t think it’s wonderful at all, I’m saying ‘wonderful’ ironically.”

“Ooooh, ironically,” spat Xan in a mocking sing-song voice, “that’s your thing, isn’t it? That’s what we’ll all remember Fidiory for, we’ll write it on your grave stone. ‘Fidiory, dash, lived ironically, ironically died.’”

From the living room, Mancia’s voice whooped, “whoooo dancing!”

Fidiory, still staring at Xan, squinted in contempt. “Irony is what Baguetel brought to the world, at least we’re not ashamed of our culture.”

Xan raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t invent irony! No one invented irony?”

“We made it into an art form.”

“No, no-no, you didn’t, you may have convinced yourself of it, but the rest of the world just thinks you hide behind it, that you don’t mean a single thing you say, and that you’re so ashamed of feeling authentic emotions that you sprinkle everything with a strong dose of irony as a permanent escape route.”

“Why don’t you go back to Margolia?” shot Fidiory. “If living here is such a burden, surrounded by people hiding behind irony, I’d say the best thing for you is just to turn tail and head straight back the way you came. I seriously don’t know why you’re sticking around, there’s nothing keeping you here, if the culture is so painful to bear, just go.”

Their raised voices had attracted the attention of the other people in the kitchen. There were three other circles of gathered individuals, who remained in circular formation though their conversation had ceased. All faces had turned toward the two flushed-faced friends staring intensely at one another. The onlookers’ gazes mostly locked onto Xan. A few angry mutterings arose.

“… comes here thinking it’s just a big open buffet …”

“… if it was up to me I’d load the whole lot of them on a …”

“When you’re a guest somewhere, you act like a guest, not like you own the place…”

“I don’t get irony, personally, it really escapes me…”

“Where is Margolia anyway? Never really knew, to be perfectly honest…”

“… Load them on what? You’d never find a boat big enough to fit all of them …”

Xan felt their words as much as he heard them, felt his heart beat with embarrassment at being the center of the spectacle. Fidiory, apparently unconcerned at receiving such attention, stood waiting for Xan to make the next move.

Xan pointed a finger at Fidiory’s face and said, “You’ve changed, man.”

The ultimate challenge to a friend, the suggestion that he used to be good and worthy of admiration, and somehow allowed some insidious corruption to alter the state of things.

“Whatever you say, man.”

“Yeah.”

Xan trudged out of kitchen and lurked in the living room entrance. The passage had no door and he remained visible from the kitchen. He watched the guests dancing. Informal circles were formed and unformed as people strayed on and off the dance floor. Some dancers strove to smile and maintain eye contact with their circle partners, as if to say, ‘we are dancing together and enjoying ourselves, will you confirm this by sustaining my gaze?’ Fiora was in this camp. Others looked resolutely elsewhere, at the walls or at their feet, publicizing their moodiness and atmospheric attunement. Mancia was in this latter camp.

Xan approached Mancia and danced in front of her, doing a shiftless shuffle consisting of merely transferring his weight from one foot to another, bending ever so slightly at the hip, hands curled up into limp fists that bounced at chest level. The minimum required movement, the bare necessity required to remain on the dance floor legitimately.

“You have a lot of friends,” he remarked.

Mancia wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “What?”

“I said: you have a lot of friends,” he shouted above the din of the music, his voice slipping into a choked falsetto. With his sudden increase in volume and pitch, he realized that he now sounded accusatory. Mancia shrugged and stared downward, arms windmilling, the fingers of her hands touching at the peak, mimicking the form of a bird’s beak.

“Do you want me to leave?” asked Xan.

“What? Why?” she protested, “Where did that come from? Do whatever you want!”

“I’m only asking because I wasn’t invited. Or at least I was invited to help you move but then I wasn’t invited to the party.”

Mancia shrugged again and resumed windmilling her arms. “I didn’t think you’d get along with my other friends.”

“What?” Xan replied. Then, in the delay during which she took a deep breath to repeat it louder, he understood her remark. “Why not?”

“What?”

“Why not?”

Mancia made her way toward her bedroom, through the door at the end of the living room. She motioned for him to follow. Inside, the bedroom was bare just like all the other rooms in the apartment, with boxes stacked against the walls and a bed in the center on which were piled the guests’ extra layers of clothing, hand bags, back sacks, a cloth doll and an empty rusted metal coffee container with old-fashioned painted inscriptions on its faded surface. Mancia plopped down on the edge of the bed. Her face was flushed with a sheen of sweat and her hair was in calculated disarray.

“OK,” she sighed, “I’m sorry that I didn’t invite you to my party. I was pretty sure you wouldn’t get along with my other friends, but in retrospect I regret it, I bitterly regret it, OK? Is that enough? Do I need to do more?”

“Why would you think that I wouldn’t get along with your other friends?”

“Because that’s how you are, Xan! Like the way you are at work. You don’t talk to anybody, you just work. All morning, then you head over to the river to eat your lunch. And then, when you’re at the river, you stare off at the water like it’s your only friend in the whole world, like you’re some tortured prisoner enjoying a brief respite from his prison cell or something. And then you get back to the office and work, work, work, until it’s your time to leave, and you always leave at exactly the same time, to within seconds. Which is pretty suspicious behavior. It signals to your coworkers that you’re leaving because it’s that time, not because you’ve reached any sort of apex or milestone in your work. During all the time you’re at work you don’t socialize, you don’t engage in small talk, which, I’ll grant you, isn’t the most meaningful conversation you’ll ever have but to most people it doesn’t matter, it’ll do, it’s just a thing you do to create an agreeable work environment. But you don’t go for that, you actually prefer to infuse the work environment with this sullen hostility, to make it resemble a kind of muted battlefield, some crossfire of unspoken, imagined criticism. No one at work knows anything about you, and it’s pretty clear you haven’t retained any positive understanding of your coworkers. OK, Xan, that’s just the person you are, no problem, but can you at least see why I’d think you wouldn’t get along with my other friends, why I wouldn’t ultimately invite you?”

Xan pointed a finger at her face. “Whatever, man.”

“Look,” she replied in a quiet voice, “you asked. Don’t get angry. I mean, I’m trying to apologize. You were very helpful with the move, and I don’t know how we would have managed without you. I’d have had to carry boxes myself, I wouldn’t have been able to coordinate things properly. We’d have been without coordination.” Her voice trailed off.

Xan, uncertain how to react, stood on one leg and folded the other one behind him, holding the heel of his foot to his buttock to stretch his thigh muscles. He stared off into the distance, as though he were standing on a plain and not inside Mancia’s bedroom. Mancia leaned back on the bed, her weight supported by her arms, hands pointed backwards toward the wall, shoulders jutting upwards, collarbone revealed beneath a slightly open shirt. Xan continued to stand on one leg, staring off at nothing, his gaze unfocused, until the silence became uncomfortably expectant. He then continued to stare. Mancia puckered her lips in a gauging, ascertaining fashion, nodding her head as though Xan’s persistent absence of reaction or activity confirmed her low opinion of him. At last, Xan muttered, “If that’s the case, why do you eat with me.”

Mancia threw up her hands in exasperation, resulting in her losing back support. The top of her body fell backwards. She tried to throw her hands back behind her in time to catch herself, cutting short her gesture of exasperation. She failed to catch herself and toppled backward onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Xan dropped his heel, spun around, and left the room.

Fidiory was still in the kitchen. In front of him stood a man whose name he had heard, then instantly forgotten. The man chatted excitedly, moving his head often as he talked, in a jerky, almost violent motion. He waved one hand, palm upward, toward the ceiling. “If I’m dizzy, if I just stood up too fast,” the man explained, “I have no sense of myself. In those few short moments during which the dizziness takes over, I have no words”.

“M-hm, yeah” replied Fidiory.

“In that moment where there are no words, I get a sense that we use multiple languages. Let me ask you a question: have you ever tried putting into words the emotion you get from a music track? Let me answer that for you: you can’t. You can describe a general impression, but you can’t describe, at the level of individual notes, the path down which you’re being led.”

“Uh-huh, yeah,” replied Fidiory.

“You can try. You can break your head trying. Ultimately though, you’re trying to translate things from one language into another in which it simply doesn’t translate. The language where music operates is much more physical. It’s a beat, that follows the heartbeat, then it’s chord progressions or a bass line, that’s context, and then there’s a melody. The melody uses notes, from a scale. Go off scale and suddenly you’re not speaking any language anymore. Why is it that a minor note in a chord will be sad, and a major one happy? A minor third interval means something, at a physical level, it’s the sadness of some missed goal, like a major interval that failed. In songs, you find word-words and music-words mixed up, and that’s the hardest synergy to achieve. But good song lyrics aren’t whole thoughts, they’re just lingering… fragments of thoughts that bind at the physical level. Music really acts at the physical level. The only real test of music is if it can be danced to. The fascinating thing is, dances are rather simple, even when the music is flowing through a complex narrative.”

Fiora, coming in from the living room, face flushed from dancing, approached Fidiory and asked, “Hey, how does Xan know Mancia?”

Fidiory turned from the man to her and answered with a question, “Who’s Mancia?”

“This is Mancia’s apartment,” explained Fiora. “I introduced you to her when we came in.”

The man talking to Fidiory asked, “Is this your sister?” Fiora said, “No,” then turned to Fidiory. “What happened between you and your friend earlier?”

The man said, “I could have sworn you two were brother and sister, even though in all honesty most brothers and sisters don’t look alike at all. Just look at me. I don’t look like my brother at all.”

Fidiory shrugged, “I don’t know.”

“You’ve never noticed that?”

“I don’t know your brother.”

“People don’t resemble their siblings, it must be a subconscious effort to differentiate yourself from the people you grow up with, who share your household.”

“Hi, I’m Fiora.” Fiora stuck out a hand and the man shook it.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Tiermon.”

How long before I forget that name, thought Fidiory. Then, he’ll be a face associated to a id that I’ve forgotten, a source of embarrassment, someone to avoid at parties even though he has so much interesting knowledge. Brothers and sisters don’t look alike, that’s so true! Though sometimes they look very much alike, but maybe we only notice the ones who look alike because it reinforces our ideas about sibling resemblance. It’s a confirmation bias! I should bring up this point with… Fidiory realized that he had already forgotten the man’s name. Xan trudged into the kitchen, looking disappointed. Fidiory noticed him come in, but remained facing Tiermon.

Xan approached Fidiory. “Well, I’ll be going now. It was nice seeing you. Sorry about earlier.”

Fiora asked, “How do you know Mancia?”

“We work together,” replied Xan.

“Mancia never mentioned you.”

Xan nodded.

“But then, she never mentions anyone from her workplace,” Fiora added, “she never talks about work at all. I don’t even know where she works, it’s all very mysterious, maybe even secretive, is what you do a big secret?”

“No. Oh, I don’t know. Nothing I’m working on is very secret. It’s secret to the company, obviously, because the competition is strong, but it’s not secret in the sense that the public mustn’t know what we’re working on. But maybe there are secrets, maybe the other people in the office are working on secret stuff. I don’t know. I’ve never been told explicitly to keep what I do a secret.”

Tiermon asked him, “What is it you do, exactly?”

Xan said, “I’m off. See you around.”

“I’m sorry I told you to go back to where you come from,” offered Fidiory.

Xan laughed. “You should come to Margolia. It’s what you want, to follow in the footsteps of the Unwanters. Maybe one day I’ll take you there.”

Fidiory nodded. Xan turned to Fiora.”It was nice meeting you.” He then left. Tiermon watched as he disappeared from the kitchen on his way to the apartment door and asked, “What is it he does, exactly?”

Fidiory shrugged, “everyone does the same thing.”

…

The party ended. Fiora remained behind to help Mancia with cleaning. The mess was intriguingly straightforward. Because the guests had found the apartment spare and geometrically neat, with boxes piled evenly onto one another, with every box precisely the same size as the others and bearing the same trademark and color, and also because a large fraction of the guests had contributed earlier to stacking those very boxes, everyone had shown great care as to where they left their empty bottles and plates of food. It was like a tended garden whose harmony no one had wanted to disturb. Bottles were arranged in different formations on top of boxes: square formation, star formation, birds heading south for winter formation. Plates were piled one on top of the other, the remnants of food and scrunched-up napkins having been extracted from each plate and loaded onto the top plate like an offering to ancient gods. Because the cleanup was so simple, Fiora and Mancia took items one by one to the kitchen, putting bottles on the countertop and plates in the sink after being scraped above the garbage can.

Fiora looked around the kitchen. “You’ll be much more comfortable here, there’s a lot more room than at your old place,” she said.

“You don’t think maybe it’s too big?” asked Mancia.

“Why would it be too big? Because it would be a real pain to maintain or because it would be time-consuming to get around?”

“I don’t know. I think I wanted more space because, deep down, I wanted to share it with someone.”

Fiora opened the tap to fill the sink with water and watched as the rising water level progressively engulfed the dishes with opaque soap suds, until the top dishes appeared to be struggling for air. “The question you need to ask yourself,” she called to Mancia who had left the kitchen to make another clearing trip to the living room, “is what would you do with unlimited resources. That takes a lot of parameters out of the equation and really simplifies the thought process. If you were immensely rich, would you live in a gigantic place, hire servants, install a miniature train that chugs between the rooms? Probably not, because this is your home, not some fun-park. The size of the home where you would live with unlimited resources is your starting point. You just peel away from that until you reach something attainable at your current income, and there you have your equilibrium point.” Fiora’s had lowered her voice now that Mancia had walked back into the kitchen carrying an empty bottle in each hand that she plopped on the countertop.

“You’re really smart,” she said. “But that doesn’t address my longings at all.”

Fiora laughed. “Once you’ve gotten everything out of boxes and put up the shelves, the place will lose its echo.”

Mancia leaned back against the countertop. “I hope so. I hope this move means big things for me. It’s my way of announcing that I’m ready for big things. You have to step up and be noticed for good things to find you.”

Fiora nodded and looked downward, her hands on her hips and thumbs pointing forward, stretching her back. Mancia looked at her askance. “Like you and your invented dance. That was pretty amazing, what you and your partner what’s his name-”

“Fidiory.”

“-right, how could I forget, were doing on the dance floor.”

“No, it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid. I don’t know how you can say that, it’s not stupid at all! Why is it stupid, because it didn’t come out of a book, because it hasn’t been acknowledged by experts? Because it’s new? Because it doesn’t have a business model?”

Fiora threw her hands up. “It will never have a business model, it’s just something I’ve worked on for fun.”

“So?” Mancia was adamant. “Fun is a business model! Your fun today can be someone else’s fun tomorrow, that’s how things come to be. Not on corporate writing boards or in round-table discussions, but like that, a simple, pure yearning for tangible fun!”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Mancia sighed and appeared to deflate for a moment, then held up a teacher’s finger. “Put it to the test,” she suggested, “run it by people in the field.”

“It’s just that-”

“What?”

“It’s just that I can’t see it from outside, I don’t know what my dance is saying at a subconscious level. A dance should do that, beyond looking good and fluid and complicated, it should be messaging on a subconscious level. Do you see what I mean?”

“Like subtext.”

“Yeah, like subtext.”

“Well, it definitely has subtext, I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is, but there’s definitely some kind of subtext involved. I know it because, when I was watching you two, I was transfixed. It was like I was held there by some kind of spell.”

“I don’t know.”

“Stop saying that, ‘I don’t know’, of course you don’t know, how could you? You’ll know later, impulses only make sense in hindsight. Just put it to the test, find some venue that will appraise it. Don’t be afraid to fail. In any case you won’t, I promise you that.”

“Like a show.”

Mancia shrugged. “Or whatever. It needs to be seen, judged. Just move forward on this, trust me.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

Fiora nodded slowly, her face pinched at the sides of her mouth, eyebrows arched. “I should be going,” she said. “Will you be OK doing the rest of the cleanup?”

Mancia nodded. Fiora left to get her coat from the bedroom. She returned to the kitchen as she put it on, a careful, practiced gesture that intimated a sensual attachment to the garment.

“I met your colleague,” said Mancia. “Xan, who it turns out is a friend of Fidiory’s. Small world, right?”

“Oh, Xan…” Mancia pressed her face into her hands in a gesture of embarrassed capitulation. “He wasn’t supposed to be at the party, I just recruited him to help me move. There was an hour’s delay between the end of the move and the beginning of the party. A calculated gap, which I’d planned to give me time to prepare and filter out elements like Xan.”

“If you don’t like him…”

“No, no, it’s not that at all, it’s just that I tend to feel responsible at my parties for the enjoyment of everyone I’ve invited, and I knew beforehand that Xan would just sit somewhere and stare off into space like an abandoned puppy. We have lunch together at work, almost every day, and he just stares off into space, I don’t know what it is he’s looking at, but it’s nowhere in front of him, that’s for sure, he’s either staring into his memories or into some elaborate fantasy. He’s adrift, or else he’s fascinated by flowing water. We eat by the river, you see. You’d think that they didn’t have flowing water where he’s from.” Mancia grew silent and let her gaze become distant in a satirical emulation of Xan’s stare.

“So then why eat with him?”

“Well, at least he’s not negative,” Mancia replied spontaneously, snapping out of her reverie. “He never complains, unlike the other people in the office. So, at some disturbing level, I appreciate his company.”

Fiora laughed and left. Mancia loaded bottles in large plastic bags for a moment, then left everything in the middle of the kitchen floor, walked to her bedroom and let herself fall, face first like a tumbling, freshly-cut tree, onto her bed. She lay there unmoving, breathing through the covers.

5

Fidiory arrived at the office and had just enough time to help himself to a cup of coffee and sit down at his desk before his supervising engineer Caxior appeared. The brawny, energetic man leaned over him, placing a large hand on the back of his chair. “Don’t sit down,” he snapped, cheerfully, “We’re off to a meeting.”

“Too late!” replied Fidiory, squinting sourly at the presence that loomed above him, too close for comfort. “I’ve sat down for the morning, come back this afternoon.” Caxior grabbed him by the collar and jerked upward. Fidiory had to scramble up hastily to prevent his shirt ripping. He furrowed his brow in disgust. “What’s the matter with you?”

“We’re off to a meeting, I just told you.” Caxior smiled voraciously, the smile of a man who believed he was imparting a valuable lesson in drive and motivation. Fidiory regretted having left the door open to it initially by stating his intention of remaining seated.

“If you had ripped my shirt,” he simmered, “I’d have made you pay for it. Can I at least turn on my computer? It’s Monday morning.”

“No need. Follow me.” Caxior spun on his heel and made his way past the other cubicles in the open space toward a partially shuttered booth at the far end. Inside, a man could be seen through the shutters to be standing, feet planted, looking out through the man-sized exterior windows. Fidiory, in a sullen voice, called out to Caxior’s retreating form, “hey, is that the client?”

Caxior didn’t slow down or turn, so Fidiory followed, entering the booth twenty or so steps behind his supervisor. The man at the window turned to them, smiling, and nodded as they entered.

“This is M. Fiandus”, said Caxior to Fidiory, in a grave and portentous voice, indicating the distinguished man with a deferential gesture of his hand. Fidiory looked from Caxior to Fiandus, then back again, realizing he was expected to express some form of awe at being introduced to the ‘F’ of ‘OLFC’, the name of the company they worked for. He cleared his throat and murmured, “OK”, feeling rather than seeing Caxior scowling silently at him. “Please,” breathed Fiandus, gesturing toward one of the chairs surrounding the simple conference table inside the booth, “sit down.” All three sat down. Fiandus’ voice was barely audible. Fidiory remembered learning about the power dynamic through which powerful men keep their voices barely audible so as to force people to lean forward toward them to understand what they’re saying, a dynamic owing to who controls valuable information and therefore establishes the direction in which power flows.

Now, if a complete nobody were to speak in a low voice, people would just ignore him. A man of authority speaks in a low voice and a total hush around him ensues so that he may be heard. In between those two extremes lies an equilibrium point where the talker is neither ignored nor particularly heeded, and no one notices that you can hardly hear what he’s saying.

“Can we count on your discretion, Fidiory? This point is key.”

Fidiory noticed how Fiandus had used his name like he was doing him a big favor, and also that in his reverie he hadn’t listened to what the man was telling him. He was surprised at the surge of panic that he now felt.

“Of course,” he answered with a reassuring close of his eyelids that signaled, ‘I am so trustworthy that I close my eyes in your presence, you could attack me in such a moment if you liked, I couldn’t defend myself with my eyes closed.’ He opened them and gazed at Fiandus with a placid and fatuous smile. Fiandus looked at Caxior, who was staring hard at Fidiory. Fidiory turned to Caxior, arching his eyebrows quizzically. Caxior turned to Fiandus with an uncertain nod. Fiandus cleared his throat and turned to face Fidiory, looking worried. “Discretion is of utmost importance,” he added.

Hard consonants, thought Fidiory. He speaks with voluntarily hard consonants like he was spelling out everything he says. He realized he was drifting again and willed himself to focus.

“The project”, Fiandus explained, “is one of tracking more so than analysis, though there is a good deal of analysis involved. I’ve managed to obtain a meeting with a prospective client with whom I am acquainted from having previously collaborated with them outside of a professional capacity. That is to say that the confidence they would be placing on us is not unshakable: we will have to prove ourselves through this project. But, if we do manage to conduct ourselves well, it could lead to a significantly heightened level of collaboration in the near future. For the duration of this project, I urge you to give it your complete attention. No distractions. Any legacy work should be handed to someone else in the office. This project must succeed. I will leave you this -” he delicately pushed a thumb-sized memory stick toward Caxior across the table, “a series of patterns that were relayed to me by my contact at the client’s site. This is a first-level pattern. If we can find the recombination key that links the patterns, in a timely fashion, we will be shortlisted to pursue the next step on the project. We have a few days for this. We have been invited to meet with the client on Monday, if and only if we have found the recombination key by then. The data on this memory stick is highly sensitive, it goes without saying that it should not only leave the office, it should be restricted to one, or two computers maximum, and all data should be encrypted while you worked on it. I will now answer any questions you may have regarding the assignment.” He paused and looked from Caxior to Fidiory.

Caxior turned to Fidiory. “Fidiory, do you have any questions for M. Fiandus?” Fidiory shook his head, thinking how rehearsed and complicit Caxior sounded, arguably to display a reassuring taking charge of things in front of Fiandus.

“Well then,” Fiandus smiled, “please devote your undivided attention to this matter. Caxior, would you be so kind as to accompany me to the front desk?”

They’re going to talk about me, thought Fidiory. He grabbed the memory stick and ludicrously pretended to study it intensely as Fiandus left the booth with Caxior on his heels. He then made his way back to his desk. Caxior met him there shortly afterward, clearly agitated.

“Can I talk to you?” Caxior asked.

“You can go ahead and try.”

“Not here, back at the booth.”

Fidiory looked up from his computer screen. “The booth is reserved for important business.”

Caxior leaned in rapidly toward Fidiory, speaking through clenched teeth. “What do you think this is? Have you been listening to anything since you woke up this morning?” His voice was a contained, whispering storm.

“Yeah, I know it’s of the ‘utmost importance’,” said Fidiory, mimicking Fiandus’ supercilious manner, “but do we want everyone to know that?”

“The booth. Now”.

Fidiory sighed and followed Caxior back to the booth. Upon entering, he made a show of closing the shutters, one after the other as Caxior stood and looked on. When the last shutter was closed, Caxior spoke.

“Look, you’re not my first choice for this job. You’re not my second choice either. You wouldn’t be my third choice, except that I only have three people on my team and the other two are on vacation.”

“Together,” smirked Fidiory.

“What?”

“They’re on vacation together. If you had proper authority and control of your team, you’d apply the office code that stipulates that employees should not engage in relationships of a sexual nature. With one another.”

“That’s none of your business,” Caxior snapped.

“Actually, it is. It becomes everybody’s business when it starts to impact the work flow in such a way that fourth-rate team members are affected to high level projects, bringing their fruition into peril, jeopardizing the reputation of the entire company and shedding doubt on the integrity of the internal organization and the hiring process.”

Caxior held his hands up. “Do you realize the opportunity that has been handed to us here?”

“Opportunity? What opportunity?” answered Fidiory. “Do you really think the ‘F’ in ‘OLFC’ is going to fondly remember you when the mission is accomplished and the time comes to debrief? He’ll forget you as soon as it’s done. In his mind your work belongs to him and that’s as far as he cares to conceive.”

Caxior sneered back at Fidiory. “If you want to get ahead, you have to work, you have to take your shots. Some hit, some miss, and you keep getting better. I want to go all the way on this, pull no stops. Give it my all. This is important, this is a chance that doesn’t come around very often, so when it does you have to reach out and seize it. I’m reaching out on this, Fidiory. Don’t trip me up.”

His voice was imbued with both supplication and menace. Fidiory felt oddly impressed by his supervising engineer’s steely determination, and replied, “OK, but this could be evil. The mission might even be secret because it serves some shady end. It might involve human sacrifice, the road to progress, something like that. I don’t know. OK, I’m on board. Whatever, I just appreciate the challenge, you know? Yeah, you understand. Getting better is what it’s all about, right?”

Caxior was staring hard at him, as though trying to determine if he was serious or not. “Don’t spoil this,” he said, pointing a thick, powerful finger at Fidiory’s chest. “So. Where do we start?”

Fidiory shrugged. “Take a look at the data, I guess.”

…

The data was an inextricable mess. Pointers jutted out of it at odd locations, without rhythm or predictability. Long sequences would appear totally disjointed, then other segments would briefly distinguish themselves from highly disordered background noise before they’d coalesce into one another. There was signal, but no single, clear signal, and the various composing signals were wholly different from one another, with little or no discernible edge.

Fidiory stared at his screen, his chin supported on his hands and elbows resting on the edge of his desk. Caxior stood behind him with arms crossed, occasionally looking from the screen to the back of Fidiory’s head to and back again. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

Fidiory replied, “ehhh…. libraries. Get me access to the best, largest sample databank you can find, it there’s any correlation to banked forms we need to find out as early as possible. It’ll affect how we go about searching for the recombination key.” He paused, thinking, then added, “If there is one to be found.”

“I’ll get on that.” Caxior reached over and gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder that Fidiory found surprisingly encouraging. He swiveled on his chair and turned to Caxior, saying, “We’ll crack this.” Caxior, however, had already turned and left, so his solemn declaration fell into the office void. Fidiory looked around in embarrassment, but no one in the adjoining cubicles was paying the slightest attention to him, so he swiveled back to stare at the screen.

Shortly afterward, Caxior appeared with a chest-sized databank that he carried on his hip. “This is the largest one I could find,” he explained. “Will it do?”

Fidiory arched his eyebrows. “How old is that thing?” he asked. “Does it even interface with our computers?”

Caxior set it down on Fidiory’s desk with a grunt. “The archivist said it would. He gave me some cables that will hook it up to the computer.” He pulled a small tangle of cables out of his back pocket and held them out to Fidiory. The cables, dangling from his thick fist, were caked with a crusty-looking film of dust, and most of them displayed frayed and gnawed connectors that had rigidified over time. Fidiory sifted through them until he found one whose connector corresponded to one of his computer front panel outlets. He plugged in into the databank and switched it on. “This databank hasn’t been accessed in fifteen years,” he said in a wonderstruck voice. “Do you have any idea of how old that is? The last time anyone accessed the data on this thing, the Nautical Museum still stood on the hill.”

Caxior shifted from one leg to another. “I still remember where I was when the earthquake hit,” he said. “In fact, I was right here, in the room just behind the conference room. I was having an afternoon snack and this guy Danook came in and told me I needed to listen to what was being announced on the radio. Wow… Danook. I wonder whatever happened to him. It’s a wonder I can even remember his name. We had just the radio, no images to go with what we were hearing, and I remember I had the hardest time convincing him that it was possible for a crater to form spontaneously in a dormant volcano and engulf an entire building so fast.”

“Wow,” breathed Fidiory. “You are so very old.” He looked up deliberately at Caxior before adding, “I was still in high school and disappointed I wouldn’t have a Nautical Museum to visit.” While calling attention to their age difference, Fidiory programmed a sweep of the databank’s memory. The sweep initiated and the characteristic whir of the databank arose from its dust-caked case, mingling with an intermittent whisper that suggested age-induced internal friction within the device. A few moments later, the sweep abruptly ceased and the databank emitted an alarming ticking sound.

Fidiory frowned. “That’s not right,” he said. “It shouldn’t just stop like that. There’s something wrong with the connectors.” He examined the cable connecting the databank to the computer, then disconnected it and scrutinized it, holding it close to his face. After being disconnected, the databank stopped clicking. “The cable seems to be intact,” he said, “I don’t think it should have stopped the sweep like that… Unless there’s a bad connector on one of its ends.” He plugged it in once more and initiated another memory sweep. The databank began to whir, then clicked once again. Fidiory clucked his tongue and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he lamented. He pushed a few keys on the keyboard and a graphic appeared on the computer screen, consisting of a dot that hovered between two rectangular stops. He initiated another sweep. As the whir arose from the databank, the dot on the screen rose and fell, eventually hitting the top stop, upon which the databank’s whir was abruptly replaced by the clicking sound. On the screen, the words ‘dataflow/feed rate imbalance error’ appeared in haunting yellow. Fidiory stood and picked up the databank, cradling it at chest level. The dot on the screen dropped slightly away from the top stop.

“Maybe, if I…” he ventured uncertainly. Transferring the weight of the databank from both arms to just the left arm, he bent toward the keyboard on his desk and pushed a few keys, initiating another memory sweep. The whir resumed from within the databank and the dot rose toward the top stop. He compensated its onscreen movement by flexing at the knees, saying, “If I get it to the right height, I should manage to get it to the end of this segment…” He stood straight once more, then bent once again toward the keyboard. The databank slipped out of his left-armed embrace and crashed loudly to the floor, with a din that echoed in the open space.

“Oh!” cried Caxior. “What have you done!” Fidiory stood with his hands on his hips and shook his head ruefully. “Let’s try another databank,” he proposed.

Caxior nodded. “The archivist told me that there are two other databanks in the stockroom. She did mention that this was the best-working one, though, and the least old. It’s like the company lost interest in updating its databanks when the earthquake swallowed the Nautical Museum,” he said quietly. “A lot of investments came to a full stop when the volcano opened up. It was as if the city had suddenly become quarantined, like no one wanted anything to do with it out of fear that it would be there one day and gone the next, like they thought it was on the verge of just disappearing.”

Caxior left and returned shortly afterwards, carrying two more databanks. They plugged them in and attempted, unsuccessfully, to get a memory sweep from them.

“How are we supposed to work?” complained Fidiory. “We’ve got a memory stick and nothing to compare it with.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “How long would it take to get more databanks?” he wondered aloud.

Caxior shook his head. “It’s almost the weekend,” he replied. “There is no way we could get anything worthwhile before Monday at the earliest, and then, of course, it would be too late.”

Fidiory grunted. “It’s kind of strange to be given a mission like this to do so close to a deadline.”

“Well, actually… We’ve had the mission for a week. M. Fiandus was just waiting for Misz and Diaga to come back from vacation to assign them to it.”

“What? Why? What an idiot thing to do! Why wait for Misz and Diaga?”

“Because I recommended it?”

Fidiory blinked at his supervising engineer.

“You… recommended waiting for Misz and Diaga to come back. I don’t understand.”

“They’re so thorough, so rigorous. They have so many ideas. It’s just an inspiration to watch them work. They agree on everything. They complete each other’s sentences. They bounce ideas off of one another. They epitomize what we expect from team members.”

“But I could have started it!” protested Fidiory. “I could have done the initial groundwork until they came back, just get things into swing… At the very least I could have put in an order for a new databank…” his voice trailed off and he sighed.

“Well,” summarized Caxior, “what’s done is done. No sense going back on it now, burying oneself in bitter regret and self doubt and whatnot. If the occasion does arise in the future, we will have learned from this, and arranged it so that the work will be transferable from one worker to another. Though, I know you’ll have to agree with me that Misz and Diaga are kind of irreplaceable, just real data wizards. There’s really no basis of comparison.”

“You’re in love with these people,” snarled Fidiory. They’re in love with each other, and you’re in love with them. You’re like an old woman charmed by some old-fashioned storybook romance. Worse than that, you’re like their pet. Their dog. That’s you.”

Caixor scowled at Fidiory. “That’s enough. Get to work. Get one of these databanks to work.”

Fidiory sighed and stared at the databanks for a moment. “Well,” he said, thinking aloud, “the first one was still sort of working. All we need to do is ensure that the tension differential adapts to the memory load delay when the sweep reaches the friction-heavy segments. In real terms, that would entail getting the apparatus to move up and down to keep the differential in the safe zone during the sweep. I’d do it, but I need to steer the databank away from faulty memory during the sweep, and that requires all my attention. It’ll therefore have to be you. You see that graphic that appears on the screen, with the dot that floats between the two stop? Well, if the dot is falling near the bottom stop you need to raise the databank higher, and inversely if the dot nearing the top you have to bring the databank into a lower position. You have to react fast, but at the same time you can make no sudden movement. When the dot starts to move up or down, you immediately move to compensate: you get the dot back to the center again but without allowing it to overshoot. Do you understand?”

Caxior nodded uncertainly. Fidiory plugged in the databank and brought the dot-and-stops graphic onscreen. “Ready?” he asked. Caxior nodded again, but Fidiory had his back turned, and had to swivel in his chair to face Caxior. “Ready?” he asked again.

“Go,” nodded Caxior. Fidiory initiated the memory sweep and the databank emitted its characteristic whir. On the screen, the dot was at first motionless, then as the sweep progressed, it began to vibrate slightly up and down, then the vibration gained amplitude and the dot rose, approaching the top stop menacingly.

“Lower the databank!” barked Fidiory. Caxior bent at the knees and lowered the databank to waist level. On the screen, the dot came back toward the center of the graphic. “Good, good”, said Fidiory, nodding, his brow furrowed in concentration as he stared hard at several other graphics that had appeared on the screen since the beginning of the sweep.

The dot rose again, approaching the top stop. Fidiory gasped, “Down!” and Caxior bent at the knees, stooped his back and straightened down his arms, holding the databank close to the ground. The dot slowed down but continued to rise.

“Lower!” choked Fidiory as Caxior brought the databank all the way to the floor. The dot appeared to hesitate, then rose again and reached the top stop. The databank stopped its whir and began to click, and the sweep came to an abrupt end. Fidiory breathe out, disappointed. “Let’s try again,” he proposed. “I’ll steer away from that segment. Could you maybe hold the databank initially a little higher?”

“I can try,” ventured Caxior.

“Don’t try, do it,” replied Fidiory, unaware of the ensuing hard stare that Caxior directed at his back. He initiated another sweep just as Caxior brought the databank up to his chin, struggling with the awkward position and the weight of the databank. The databank resumed its whir. Soon afterwards, the dot began to rise toward the top stop. Caxior compensated gradually, bringing the databank to chest level, then waist level, then below the waist. As it reached knee level, the dot changed direction on the screen, heading back toward its initial center position. Fidiory nodded, saying, “good, good.” Then, the dot crossed the center point and began to approach the bottom stop. “Bring it up, bring it up,” called out Fidiory as Caxior hoisted the databank back up to waist level.

“Higher, higher, ” insisted Fidiory. Caxior held it up to his chin. “Higher.” Caxior brought it to eye level, then over his head. The dot continued to approach the bottom stop.

“Bring it up higher,” insisted Fidiory.

“I’ve got it up at arm’s length,” protested Caxior in a strained voice.

“Higher! Stand up on the desk!”

Caxior put a foot on the desk and kicked off from his other foot, attempting to jump up on the top of the desk, but developed insufficient momentum and fell back on his grounded foot.

“Get up on the desk!” pressed Fidiory.

Caxior heaved off of his back foot and managed to get his center of gravity above the desk. Holding the databank above his head with both hands, he strained to straighten the leg planted on the desk as the other leg rested at thigh level on the edge of the desk, the foot hovering in empty space. Caxior grunted with the effort, his leg slowly straightening out as he rose above the desk, shaking and emitting a contained wheeze like air being released through the pinched neck of an inflated balloon.

By now, the commotion had drawn a few onlookers from the adjoining cubicles. They stood around Fidiory’s desk as Caxior stood up on it and Fidiory repeated “higher, higher!”

Caxior strained to straighten his arms and rose on his toes, his face flushed with the intensity of the effort, emitting his high-pitched wheeze. Fidiory called out, “higher, higher!”

Then, Caxior lost his balance and toppled backward, slipping off the edge of the desk, still gripping the databank in both hands. The onlookers jumped back to avoid Caxior’s falling figure, though one man shot his hands forward, too late, to attempt to catch Caxior’s head before it hit the floor and cushion the inevitable impact.

Caxior fell directly on his back, the sound of the fall muffled by the much louder crash of the databank, whose base shattered. A yellowish liquid spurted from the now open databank, gushing upwards and spraying around it.

“The memory matrix is ruptured!” someone yelled. “Everybody stand back, that stuff is toxic!” Fidiory swiveled on his chair and watched, horrified, as the viscous yellow droplets sprayed in a perfect arc and amassed on Caxior’s prone head. He noticed that a gash had opened up on his forehead, probably from a shard of the databank case cutting him as it broke over the top of his head. “He’s cut!” he cried.

He jumped up off his chair and kneeled beside Caxior’s inert body. The man who had warned everyone against the danger of the matrix gel put a restraining hand on Fidiory’s shoulder. “You should get back,” he warned, “if any of that stuff touches your bloodstream, you’ll get sick.”

Fidiory shouted, “I don’t know what to do! Do I wipe it off his face?”

A woman removed a scarf and tossed it toward Caxior. It landed on his face. Fidiory seized it and began to wipe away the mix of gel and blood. Caxior’s eyes opened and he blinked a few times. “What happened?” he asked. Then, “I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying,” replied Fidiory, “it’s just a reaction triggered by the matrix gel. It affects certain transmitters in the brain and gives you the impression that you’re dying, but you’re not dying, you just hit your head and ingested matrix gel through a gash in your forehead.”

“Rationally, I know you’re right,” replied Caxior, “that the facts concerning matrix gel toxicity support what you’re saying, but I can’t shake the absolute certainty that I’m dying. Also, when you really think about it, we’re all dying. I don’t think I can get up. It’s like, I know my body’s fine, but it has forgotten how to get up, you know? Has anyone called an ambulance? I’m going to need medical attention, as soon as possible.”

“Call an ambulance!” Fidiory shouted at the coworkers. The coworkers looked around at one another, silently questioning, negotiating, determining whose job it was to call for the ambulance. One of them nodded and quickly made off to her cubicle to place the call.

“Those databanks,” mumbled Caxior, “we should stop using them.”

“Most of them no longer work anyway,” nodded Fidiory.

“They’re so dangerous, one drop of memory matrix gel in the bloodstream and your life is finished.”

“That’s actually true for a large collection of everyday objects, but I agree with you. We should just use memory sticks to host our data libraries. So what if you have to maintain a lot of them and switch them around a lot during a memory sweep? It’s a small price to pay for safety.”

“Fidiory.” Caxior grabbed his wrist with a weak hand.

Fidiory responded by prying Caxior’s fingers off, one at a time. “What is the matter with you?” he protested. “You might have matrix gel on your hands, I don’t want to ingest any…” His eyes widened. “Hey, you just used your hand! You’re recovering your motor functions!”

“Fidiory, I’m dying.”

“No, you’re not. It’s like I explained.”

“I’m dying and I know it. I have a deep, unshakable conviction of it.”

“That’s an illusion brought on by the matrix gel.”

“I have a deep and unshakable conviction, I’m telling you! I can’t explain it!” Caxior mustered his ebbing strength to emphasize his words. “Listen, you should work hard on this project, it’s just this one weekend, and everything we know about the project hints that the rewards are potentially huge.”

Fidiory gnawed the inside of his mouth uncertainly. “This could be another effect of the matrix gel,” he ventured.

Caxior grimaced in disgust. “It’s just a weekend, it won’t kill you to work a weekend. But do what you want. What do I care, I’m just a dying man, my brain is flooded with a toxic chemical, and it’s all for nothing if you don’t pull through on this project.”

“You’re right!” gasped Fidiory. “I’ll slog through on this project. All weekend, if I have to. For a dying colleague, whose last wish was for the company land this contract.”

“It’s more than a contract,” sighed Caxior. “It goes beyond money. You see, I have a deep conviction…”

Caxior shut his eyes.

Fidiory clambered to his feet and hopped briskly to the nearby washroom, through the door and straight to the first sink, where he set the hot water flowing at full burst, then rubbed his hands and forearms vigorously with soap and rinsed them thoroughly under the water. He repeated the process, scrubbing his hands all over, in between the fingers, under the fingernails. He rinsed them again and would have done so a third time had it not occurred to him that excessive scrubbing might create minute tears in the skin. If any remnant of the matrix gel were left around any of those minute tears he could ingest microscopic amounts into his bloodstream. Instead, he leaned forward toward the mirror above the sink and inspected his face closely, looking for traces of the gel.

When he returned to his desk, someone had found a blanket to throw over Caxior, who had not regained consciousness. His form was intermittently seized by fits of convulsions that would make his limbs violently tremble. His gnashing teeth had foamed the saliva spilling out of his mouth. Tuencam, the managing director, was standing at Caxior’s head with his hands on his hips. Fidiory approached him.

“Has anyone filled you in on the details of what happened? We were working together, using one of the old databanks. He was holding it above his head, standing on my desk, when he lost balance and fell. Be careful where you stand, there’s matrix gel all over the floor around the databank. I’ll clean it up as soon as the ambulance takes him away.” He gestured toward Caxior’s inert form.

“What was he doing standing on your desk holding a databank? Above his head?” asked Tuencam in a quiet voice, apprehensive of the answer.

“It was the only way to get a full sweep of the databank, to compensate for the differential, you know. Otherwise, the databank would just begin to click away and the sweep would stop.”

Tuencam shook his head. “I can’t believe you were so careless, Fidiory. I’m going to have all of the databanks in the stockroom destroyed. They’re just too old, it’s too risky to keep them around.” He added, as an afterthought, “Sometimes people bring their children into this office.”

“Well,” Fidiory ventured, choosing his words carefully, “you may want to delay that order. I’m working on something rather big. M. Fiandus himself entrusted me with this project.”

“What? I wasn’t informed.” He sighed and shook his head. “I’ll postpone the order until you finish your project, then. Do you have another databank to work with?”

Fidiory shook his head. “No, none of them are working. You can go ahead and have them destroyed.”

…

Fidiory worked throughout the day breaking up the data by common algorithms. As far as he could tell, the data wasn’t directly encrypted, showing too much regularity for that to be the case. He transformed it to display in graph form, in various configurations that he then fed to the screen, looking for visual patterns. At certain times he felt close to identifying one, though the overall, unifying pattern clearly eluded his scrutiny.

…

Toward the end of the day, Misz and Diaga walked into the office. “We came back early,” they explained. “We received a call to return this databank before the end of the week.”

“You took the databank with you on vacation?” Fidiory asked them in an incredulous and disgusted tone. “Like a pet? Did you take pictures of it on the beach? Did you take pictures of it having fun with the other vacationer’s databanks? Did you show it how to swim, or did you leave it at the Databank Day Care?”

Misz and Diaga exchanged a look that appeared to convey, ‘how long will we have to tolerate this man’s idiosyncrasies?’ Diaga explained in an excessively patient voice, “We had it at home to assist in a campaign of simulations we had launched just before leaving for vacation.” As Diaga spoke, Misz looked away, making eye contact with the other people in the office and silently greeting them, as though the concentration of both members of the Misz-Diaga couple were a waste of focus, something they could always debrief about later.

“Well, you left nothing but the obsolete databanks behind,” Fidiory said. “We were forced to use one of them, and because of that Caxior got in an accident involving databank matrix gel and he could very well die. There are zero guarantees that he’s going to make it. Maybe you should think about that.”

“There’s a memory stick that was provided in the context of a new project,” Diaga said, ignoring Fidiory’s comment. Please make a copy of it for us.”

“Look, I don’t have time to participate in your dirty little games -”

Misz cut him off peremptorily, suddenly giving him his undivided attention. “Make the copy, Fidiory, and be quick about it. We’re working on this now too, there’s very little time left and we are definitely going to have results come Monday.”

6

The next day, Fidiory paid a visit to Caxior in the hospital. The nurse in charge of the ward admonished him not to speak of death in Caxior’s presence. She was reading the admonishment aloud from a clipboard and appeared to be surprised at what she was reading.

“What do I say if he brings up the subject himself?” Fidiory asked her. She scanned the clipboard and didn’t find any satisfactory answer, then looked up at Fidiory and replied, “Exercise your best judgment.”

That’s what Caxior would have said, he thought, and made his way down the corridor of the neurological disorders ward, doing his best to ignore the strange noises that issued from the rooms, the strangled voices and jumbled words.

Caxior was sitting on a large leather seat beside his bed, staring out of his room window. He had to crane his neck to see outside and doing so appeared to put him in some discomfort. In front of the bed were two more chairs, of which Fidiory pulled one up and set it down facing Caxior. “Hello, Caxior,” he said.

“Fidiory. This is a surprise. Thank you for visiting.”

“You’re not wearing a hospital garment,” Fidiory remarked. Caxior was wearing regular clothes. They were a close approximation of his work attire.

Caxior shrugged. “I don’t have to,” he said in a quiet voice, and resumed looking out the window. He bore no sign of injury save a bandage that covered his forehead over the gash he had sustained the day before.

“So how do you feel?” asked Fidiory.

“OK, I guess. But, I can’t stop thinking of death.”

Fidiory threw up his hands as if to defend himself. “We’re not allowed to talk about that. The nurse at the head of the ward told me so.”

“No, you’re not supposed to bring the subject up, but if the subject is broached, I can talk all I want about it,” explained Caxior.

“Uhh, no, I don’t think that’s what she meant. I really think she intended for me to make a conscious effort to steer the conversation away from… you know. The opposite of life.”

Caxior shook his head and sighed. “I know the thought of death is on my mind because some chemical triggered a reaction in my brain, which set off the self-assessment that I’m dying. I just can’t will myself not to think about it. But, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, you see. Thinking about death is just another way of thinking about life, about what I want to do with it with the time I have left. It could be one year, it could be fifty. No one knows, yet we plan for the long term. It’s the only way we can approach life with any optimism…”

“So, I’m making progress on analyzing the data from the memory stick…” interjected Fidiory.

“This realization that I, the object we think of as the self, am finite…”

“There’s this repeating pattern. Each repetition shows a certain divergence, a slight divergence but enough to render each repetition wholly distinct from the others…”

“But we are limited by a dimension: time. A dimension that we can only apprehend indirectly, through its effect in an infinite world that it contains, piecewise. Concentric cycles that mark our existence: a year, a week, a day. Little rituals of everyday life: waiting for a bus, eating a meal…”

“And of course, I realized that this variability could only mean one thing, that the data represents a population of living organisms. I’m pretty sure, given the complexity and relative degree of variability, that it’s a human population, which explains the secrecy with which the data was given to us…”

“Through those concentric cycles we take a measure of ourselves and our bond to our environment. We fabricate meaning just as we fabricate the bond, which we ceaselessly strive to renew…”

“Obviously, the data is extracted from some kind of profiling program, either directly from a laboratory or extracted from measurements in the world at large. I haven’t found what the data represents exactly, but it could be genetic material or it may even be an assortment of body-function indicators, arbitrarily chosen…”

“Ultimately, we reconcile ourselves to facing the void of what the universe becomes when we are removed from it…”

“Hey Caxior, do you think the data is taken from some kind of human experiment?”

Caxior paused a long moment in his droning monologue. “Anything is possible,” he eventually said with a noncommittal shrug.

Fidiory nodded. “If I take that hypothesis, I’m sure something will eventually click in my analysis. I just hope it clicks before Monday. But, I didn’t come here just to talk about work, I wanted to express my regret at making you stand up on a desk carrying a databank at arm’s length.”

“That’s alright, it’s not your fault. Anyway, it did me a favor. I see things much more clearly now.”

“Or, alternatively, one might say you’re brooding.”

…

On his way out, Fidiory stopped by the front desk of the ward and spoke to the head nurse. “The man I just visited, Caxior, did he receive any other visits today? Like friends and family?”

The head nurse appeared surprised at the question. “We don’t share that kind of information,” she replied in a curt tone.

“I could just ask Caxior, I just wanted to save myself a trip back to his room.”

“I can’t tell you about any other visitors.”

Fidiory nodded and left the hospital. He went back to his office, which was empty save for Misz and Diaga who occupied adjoining cubicles situated at the opposite end of the open room from where he worked. He walked past their cubicles on the way to his desk.

“I just visited Caxior at the hospital,” he said, to neither of them in particular. Diaga turned around on her swivel chair, but Misz kept on working.

“How is he?” asked Diaga.

“He talks about death incessantly.”

“Well, that’s to be expected, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t lessen the poignancy any.”

Diaga nodded. “We took the databank back from your cubicle. We had a few sweeps to run.”

“But, I hadn’t finished with it,” frowned Fidiory.

“So we surmised. You had it under your desk, buried under a pile of equipment. It was hard to find.”

“I work in a messy way. You know, demonstrably intelligent people are prone to being messy. It’s not that I make a conscious decision to be messy, though. It just naturally turns out that way.”

Misz turned from his desk to face him and said, “One might think that you were hiding the databank.” He turned back to his computer without waiting for an answer.

“Well.” said Fidiory. “Doesn’t that just put us all in a cooperative mood.”

Diaga turned back to her computer. Fidiory waited a moment, then added, “I’ll be needing the databank back again, a little later.” He walked to his desk.

He worked for a few hours, segmenting the data in various configurations, analyzing random chunks.

Tuencam made an appearance in the office late in the afternoon. He spoke at length with Misz and Diaga. Fidiory watched them from his cubicle. He had to swivel his head a quarter twist to do so. He mentally debated joining them, then decided it was best to wait for Tuencam to come speak with him personally. He noticed Misz staring in his direction of his cubicle while speaking to Tuencam and wondered if he was the subject of their discussion. He willed himself not to look at them and tried to concentrate on his work, unsuccessfully.

Eventually, Tuencam came over to speak with him.

“M. Fiandus will be passing by the office some time tomorrow. Can we expect you to be here?”

“Of course I’ll be here. There’s still work to be done.”

“Well, I’ll just leave you to it then.”

Tuencam made to leave, then noticed Fidiory’s intent stare. “So…have you made any progress so far?” he asked, turning back toward Fidiory, though not completely. His body language conveyed contradictory signals of simultaneously wanting to engage Fidiory in discussion and walk away.

“Oh yes,” replied Fidiory. “I’m making giant leaps.”

“So. What do you have so far?”

“Well… nothing I that can actually show yet, but I expect a breakthrough very soon.”

“Any conclusions yet?”

“Conclusions. No. But, a complete set of hypotheses, which show definite promise.” He did a few short nods of his head, as though inviting Tuencam to imitate him.

“Well, that’s good, then.” Tuencam turned to leave.

“It’s probably from a study on human populations,” Fidiory hastily added, before Tuencam could leave. “I determined that by isolating certain patterns and comparing their variability.” He allowed a tinge of pride to creep into his voice and knew that Tuencam would react favorably to it.

Tuencam and other managers in the office appreciated people who implicitly bragged about their work and skills. Even when the bragging was empty bluster, he was never dismissive toward people making exaggerated claims about themselves and never used derision to remind the person of exactly where they stood in their colleague’s esteem. He didn’t resort to sarcasm or irony. He was now nodding gravely. “That’s good, that’s very good news,” he said, “and do you think you’ll be in a position to pinpoint what the data is with more precision by the end of the day?”

Fidiory leaned back in his chair and cupped his hands behind his head with a smug smile. “I’m pretty sure, yeah. And what do they have?” He signified the Misz-Diaga couple by nodding his head in their direction, before looking back at Tuencam.

“They?” Tuencam asked. “Do you mean Misz and Diaga? I was given to understand that were working with them, that you were contributing to their plan.”

Fidiory stopped smiling. He arched his eyebrows. “Contributing? You mean like working for them? I’m not even working with them. In fact, it’s near impossible to work with them, they don’t share information. I don’t know why management allows them to work as a couple, it really hinders the work dynamic in here. We’re all interchangeable until it comes to them. They’re always working together.”

Tuencam sighed and looked gravely downward before responding, as though it pained him to continue. “Listen, Fidiory…” he paused and bit his lip. “Misz and Diaga are… our most incisive elements here. They take the work very seriously and they systematically give it their all when it’s called for. When the situation occurred with Caxior I called to ask them to cut their vacation short, because I knew that we were going to need the working databank. All I asked was for them to bring it back here so that you could use it, because we have this project and the project is important. But, they weren’t merely content to bring the databank back, to cut short their vacation. They offered to work on this project, on the weekend following their vacation. They insisted that they wanted to bring this mission to fruition because they immediately recognized its importance. That’s a level of commitment that I don’t require from the people in this office, but for those who do provide it I will do everything I can to facilitate it and promote their work. Honestly, Fidiory, what I’m hearing from you is criticism in their regard, when I really should be hearing emulation.”

“I can’t be two people at once.”

“No one is asking you to be two people at once. Maybe I’m not making myself properly understood…”

“Did you even hear what I said about the work dynamic? Sure, maybe Misz and Diaga are contributing beyond what’s expected of them, maybe. But that doesn’t mean they’re working well with the rest of us. Do you know where I was this morning? I was visiting Caxior. In the hospital. That’s what I mean about team dynamics. It’s a question of realizing that we’re all in this together, and that our individual efforts are useless if we don’t pull together, as a team.”

Tuencam blinked at Fidiory, momentarily dumbfounded.

“It’s all about the team effort,” Fidiory added.

Tuencam licked his lips. “Caxior is in the hospital because your carelessness put him there. Now, you’ll excuse me.” He turned to leave.

“Very mature! Not at all the cheap accusation that just serves to disembowel a team,” Fidiory called after him in a surly tone. Tuencam spun toward him and threw him a hard, cold stare, then turned back and walked briskly away, his shoulders set in anger. Fidiory watched him leave, and saw that Misz and Diaga had paused in their work and were staring at him directly. He turned to his screen and resumed working.

He worked all through the afternoon and late into the evening, promising himself that he wouldn’t be the first to leave the office. Misz and Diaga would occasionally break from their computers and convene for a brief update, during which they would bring their chairs close together, lean forward facing one another and speak in hushed tones. During these brief synchronization sessions, one or the other would look up and make eye contact with Fidiory across the room. These silent stares were perceived violently by both parties. Any words exchanged at that moment would have been incongruous, a pretense of cordiality painted over the shifting, animalistic turmoil of the stares locked across the open space.

Eventually, Misz approached him to inform his that they were leaving to go to supper. He invited him to join them. Fidiory was surprised by the friendliness in Misz’ tone and readily accepted. They shut off the office lights and closed the door on their way out. “No going back in,” remarked Fidiory as they heard the sound of the door lock.

“We have a key,” replied Diaga. “They gave one to us because we sometimes come into the office at odd hours.”

They walked a few blocks and stopped at a restaurant. Misz and Diaga walked in first and were greeted by a warm salute from the owner. They headed toward a four-person booth. Misz and Diaga slid in first, on opposite sides of the table. Fidiory slid in beside Diaga, thinking it would be more fitting to be facing the male of the couple, though he would have been incapable of articulating the reason for it.

“We come here a lot,” Diaga mentioned as she opened a menu.

“We’re ‘regulars’,” added Misz. Diaga giggled. Fidiory remarked on the familiarity they entertained with the establishment. If he hadn’t known them and saw them here, he would have immediately recognized that it was somewhere they spent a lot of time. Misz allowed himself to slump down on his seat and Diaga leaned wearily on an elbow resting on the table. Fidiory felt a certain admiration for these people, pragmatic and available, who organized their lives around the workplace.

“What should I order?” he asked no one in particular, his question directed toward the open menu he held.

“Have the breaded sea fish. It’s copious,” proposed Misz. Fidiory nodded and closed his menu without looking at it any further, silently professing confidence in Misz’ suggestion. Diaga closed her menu as well. “I’ll just have the same thing I always have,” she said. They ordered and drank water from tall glasses filled with clinking ice cubes while they waited for the food to be delivered.“This is nice,” said Diaga, crushing ice between her teeth. “We don’t spend enough time with our co-workers outside the office.”

“That’s because no one likes you,” replied Fidiory.

A silence ensued. Fidiory realized, horrified, that they had correctly perceived that under the pretense of humor, his remark was no joke. They saw that he really believed what he had just said.

Misz and Diaga exchanged a look. “We’ve noticed that,” said Misz, resigned. “What are we supposed to do? Pretend we’re nothing more than co-workers when we’re at the office? We work well as a team.”

“Lots of couples can’t work together,” added Diaga. “They use their jobs to maintain a space that the other can’t enter. We’re not like that. We don’t need space from each other.” She smiled at Misz, who reached across the table and placed a hand over hers. “It’d be nice to see more of our co-workers, though,” he said to her. They gazed tenderly at each other, the image of complicity.

“So, what have you been able to do with the data?” asked Fidiory. Misz and Diaga reluctantly parted hands at the mention of the project.

“We suspect that the data doesn’t belong to those who gave it to us,” said Misz. “It’s far too well jumbled to be a test of our analysis capabilities. Their goal is not for us to show them what we can do so that they can entrust us with other work, what they want is for us to do their work for them on this particular set of data. That much is obvious. My guess is that they got this data from a competitor and are looking to build some kind of advantage by gaining insight into what the competitor is currently working on.”

Diaga added, “they’ve given us no tips, no hints to help us along on our work. Why? It has to be because they can’t provide any such tip without incriminating themselves. They didn’t even take the risk of showing us who they are. They went through a close-knit network of people who are part of some sort of business group. Fiandus knows the client on an intimate level and he’s shielding their identity. That’s why he’s coming into the office tomorrow, in part to check on our progress, but also to ascertain whether we’ve discovered who the client is, or if we have uncovered evidence that the data is in fact stolen.”

Fidiory nodded. “I must admit I hadn’t thought of all that.”

“What did you think the data was about, Fidiory?” asked Misz. Fidiory shrugged and shook his head.

…

The next day, Fidiory arrived early at the office and found Misz and Diaga already working. He saluted them and headed to his computer. From his desk, he saw Misz and Diaga’s turned backs, Misz’ large shoulders hunched forward, Diaga sitting very straight with her arms stretched out to her keyboard. They presented the exact same picture as the day before and so many others, but his perception of them had been subtly transformed. They had lost the aura of invulnerability, and he felt reassured that they harbored doubts and reservations similar to his own. He tried to mentally picture them in the haughty, contemptuous light he had previously projected onto them and found that the exercise was futile.

We’re all just delicate assemblies of carbon and water entertaining some weirdly self-sustaining chemical dance, he thought, and turned to his computer screen.

He conducted a few sweeps with the databank that revealed no new innovative approaches susceptible to pierce the data’s secret. He hauled the databank over to Misz and Diaga and told them that he wouldn’t be needing it for the rest of the day. They thanked him graciously. He returned to his computer and stared at the screen, sighing frequently and tapping at the keyboard listlessly.

Fiandus arrived in the middle of the afternoon. He was dressed as for a regular work day, sporting expensive clothes that looked as though they tore easily. Upon entering the open space, he greeted Misz and Diaga, then made his way to Fidiory’s desk.

“It’s Fidiory, isn’t it? We’re very happy to have you working on this project. I insisted that Tuencam put all our best people on it.”

“Will Tuencam be coming in today?” asked Fidiory.

“No, I didn’t want to disturb him on a weekend. I’m confident that we can manage without him. Will you join us in the conference room? I’d like to get a picture of where we stand ahead of tomorrow’s meeting with the client.”

“Oh, of course. I forgot to ask you, who is the client exactly?”

Fiandus laughed gently. “I prefer to keep that information to myself for the time being. Knowing it would introduce bias to your analysis. You understand.” Fidiory didn’t answer. Fiandus smiled and walked toward the conference room, the same shuttered booth where they had met two days before.

Misz and Diaga walked past his desk on their way to the booth. “Come on, let’s go!” whispered Misz in a playfully fake-panicked voice that Fidiory wouldn’t have previously imagined him using.

In the booth, Fiandus sat with his hands crossed in front of him on the table. Misz, Diaga and Fidiory had open notebooks, Fiandus had none. Whatever this meeting is about, thought Fidiory, he isn’t interested in the finer details.

“Well?” Fiandus asked, when everyone was seated. “What do we have?”

Misz and Diaga looked at Fidiory, cueing him to start. He couldn’t decide if it was politeness or if they were establishing a gradation of importance. He cleared his throat.

“This data was…complicated. There was an accident and Caxior fell off the desk where he was standing. He’s OK. But anyhow, he’s in the hospital because he got databank matrix gel into his bloodstream and, as you know, it triggers a cycle of thoughts about death…”

“Have you found the right algorithms to extract meaning from this data?” Fiandus cut him off.

Fidiory paused and consulted his notebook before answering. “I found a recurring pattern that occurs in similar repetitions but with a certain degree of variability,” he started, then looked up to see Fiandus nodding slightly. “The patterns show enough complexity that I determined that they must represent living organisms.” Small nod from Fiandus. “Humans.” Another nod. “But it’s not solely genetic signatures, or behavior profiling. It’s an accretion of indicators from various sources.”

Fiandus nodded. “What sources?” he asked in a quiet voice, barely audible.

“That, I have yet to determine,” replied Fidiory.

“We don’t know what sources,” interjected Diaga, “and we probably won’t find out one way or another. The data is normalized, which means it was extracted from a structured base by a simple copy. It’s not encrypted, exactly, beyond basic data storage encryption methods. Rather, it’s copied from a storage format, a format not meant to be read directly, which explains why it has given us such trouble.”

Fiandus turned to Diaga. “Then we can crack it,” he said with relish.

Misz and Diaga exchanged a look, a look that said that they had anticipated this moment, that they had expected to be put in this situation, that they had discussed it at length together, respectful of their shared values and common aspirations, and had come to a decision which they now confirmed silently in this shared, probing look. Misz cleared his throat and took a moment before replying “We have narrowed down the possibilities to a few algorithms that could produce this format,” he said. “There exists a series of values to cycle through to test for data entropy, and one of them will certainly allow for reverse-coding the data. We can provide the algorithms, the key values, and the transparency tests.”

“So! We have a breakthrough,” stated Fiandus.

“We’ll give you the algorithms, the keys and the tests,” pursued Misz, “and then our intervention on this project ends. We will have no knowledge of the final data, no notion of what it represents, and no contact with the client. We have come this far with you, but this is as far as we will go. You can give the project to any data engineer and it will go forward. You can give it to Fidiory here, or you can give it to someone else. It doesn’t matter, and in any case we don’t care. We want to be taken off this.”

“I see,” replied Fiandus. “Well, give me these keys you spoke of, and a copy for Fidiory here, and then you may consider yourselves released from this project. You will destroy any copies of the data that you have made, as well as any notes, algorithms, anything. I will remind you of the confidentiality of the project and enjoin you to make no future mention of your intervention in it once you have transferred your findings to Fidiory.”

Diaga said, “Everything about this project indicates to us that the data is toxic. You shouldn’t have brought it here.” She turned to Fidiory. “And you shouldn’t take it, if you know what’s good for you.”

Fiandus twisted his face into something between a grimace and a smirk. “Maybe my friend Fidiory recognizes that a heightened level of risk will in all probability translate into a heightened and commensurate level of gain. Some of us see opportunities and pounce on them. We don’t dwell on that moment after we will have pounced, when our feet have left the ground, when we are sustained solely by our momentum, when our calculations of stability are voided because we have left the zone where these calculations apply, when we allow our entire being to be taken over by an instinct that is constrained by no considerations of ethics, economics, or even mathematics, when all of our vital forces coalesce to support this leap, not because the target is necessarily enticing, but because circumstances have conspired to allow us to make this leap, because the trajectory is perfect and in that brief moment of suspended understanding, when forces beyond our comprehension are negotiating our trajectory, when we have traded control for a hint of destiny, we are overcome by a sensation of absolute and unimpeded freedom. That is my clock, and I suspect I recognize something similar in Fidiory, who sits here before me.” He nodded toward Fidiory, moved by his own words to the point that his cheeks tensed to contain his emotion. Misz and Diaga turned toward Fidiory, who now felt the weight of their collected stares concentrated on him. He realized that there was a discussion ongoing between the parties, and by the sole fact of his presence at this table as potential substitute for Misz and Diaga he had been erected into a kind of arbiter. His gaze darted from Fiandus, to Diaga, to Misz, then back again to Fiandus. Deliberately, feeling the dramatic weight of the moment, he leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. He only now noticed the low rumbling sound in the room, ostensibly coming from the ventilation system.

He let out a long, thoughtful breath before speaking. “So who is the client?”

Diaga exploded. “We don’t want to know who the client is! Have you been listening to absolutely anything we’ve said so far?”

Fiandus threw up his hands in a placating gesture. “I wasn’t going to tell him anyway!” he protested.

Diaga was by now on her feet. “We don’t want to be involved in this at all. The data is toxic! We don’t want to be around when it explodes!”

Fidiory leaned back in his seat, nonplussed. “You’re confusing metaphors, toxic and explosive,” he said. “But more importantly, why are you still here?”

In the ensuing, stunned silence, Fidiory finally saw Misz and Diaga react differently. Diaga was livid, incensed. Her face was flushed with emotion. Misz, however, was cool, sitting behind an appraising stare, appearing to finally understand something he deemed fundamental to the way Fidiory functioned, Fidiory and men like him. Misz slowly got to his feet and pushed his chair all the way to the table, as though that sealed off his participation in the project, for good. “Diaga, let’s go,” he said.

Diaga hesitated, appeared poised to unleash a venomous tirade, then followed Misz out of the booth. They approached the door, having to pass behind Fidiory to do so. As they reached it, Fidiory said without turning around, “we’ll be needing the algorithms, keys, and tests.”

“Shut up, Fidiory,” replied Misz.

“You piece of shit,” added Diaga.

They both left and Fidiory found himself alone with Fiandus. “I won’t be giving you the client’s name,” said Fiandus, looking directly at Fidiory and making a point of sustaining eye contact to an uncomfortable degree.

Fidiory nodded slowly, indicating that the remark had been expected. Fiandus added, “I’m sorry that they quit this project. They have quite brilliant minds, and they work well together.”

Fidiory shrugged. “They only work together. It breaks up the group work dynamic in the office. Being in a team means you don’t work in a team within the team, you work in the official team. A sub-team is not a team. They don’t understand that. Being brilliant isn’t everything.”

Fiandus pushed a slip of paper over the table to Fidiory. “This is the address where we will meet the client tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock. You must not be late. We won’t debrief beforehand, there’s no point. Whatever you know, whatever you have found out up until the meeting, you will present. Everything. Conjectures, hypotheses, hard facts. The goal is to impress the client with what we have been able to find out in so short a timeframe. Impress them sufficiently and we stay on the project, otherwise someone else will take our place.” He stood and removed wrinkles in his clothes by pressing down on them with open hands. “That is all,” he added. He appeared poised to add something else, then changed his mind, then changed it back again and said, “I wish they had stayed on this.” He walked to the door of the booth, opened it and said, “Are you going to sit here by yourself?”

…

Fidiory approached Misz and Diaga’s desk. Well, if it isn’t my favorite risk-averse sub-team,” he said. “Have you prepared my package?”

“I feel sorry for you,” Diaga said as she held out a memory stick to him. “They’ll find your dismembered body somewhere after you’ve started to brag about everything you know about this data.”

“You don’t sound sullen at all,” he replied, and grabbed at the memory stick. Diaga hung onto it a moment, making him work to wrest it from her fingers, which were white and sweating from the effort of pressing on the memory stick. She wanted to fling some scathing rebuke at him, but it failed to materialize before he managed to rip the memory stick away. When it had left her grip, she looked genuinely hurt, retracted into herself, prey to some distant yet resurfacing memory. Her eyes brimming with tears, she spat, “you piece of shit.” Misz placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. Fidiory, taken aback by the emotional rawness of her display, could find no words in reply and just stood there gaping, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Misz said to Diaga, in a soft, low voice, “Let’s go.” Diaga nodded. They brushed past Fidiory on their way out. He stood a while, looking down at the memory stick that rested in the crease of his palm, then walked back to his desk and plugged it into his computer.

…

Misz and Diaga’s work bore the characteristic traits of their common personality. Everything was labeled, neatly organized and accompanied by notes that explained where everything fit into everything else. He had no trouble loading up the algorithms and set them to sweeping over the data with the provided key values. A set of bell chimes was programmed to sound off if any of the transparency tests were to achieve a positive result. He settled in to wait, making a trip downstairs to the café for food and drinks. The algorithms swept over the course of the next few hours. He was ready to give up and go home when the sound of a bell emitted from the computer, announcing that a set of data had been rendered transparent enough to be humanly readable. He had only a key to push on the keyboard to visualize the data on the screen, but he hesitated a long moment before doing so, mentally reviewing the meeting with Fiandus, Misz and Diaga’s solemn decision which had cost them so much pride to reach.

He pressed the key and watched as his screen filled with symbols attached to one another by lines, each line labeled with a numerical value. The algorithm had automatically chosen the most appropriate way to display the data, and this type of graphic was wholly new and unfamiliar to him. He debated calling up Misz and Diaga to ask them about it, then decided it wasn’t a good idea. He found documentation regarding the graph type and pored over it, paying special attention to the examples and the real-life situations in which these examples occurred. Then, he loaded the graph once more on the screen and stared at it a few moments, squinting at the values fixed to the lines, alternately moving his face close to the screen, then backing away from it. He then shook his head, deciding that taking a short walk around the block would clear his head. He left the office.

Night had fallen, the weekend was almost over and the neighborhood around the office was mostly deserted, being a commercial neighborhood where few people frequented outside of work days. He felt as though he were the last person alive and that understanding the graph that was displayed on the screen of his computer back at the office was key to bringing everyone back from the void.

His walk around the block finished, he prolonged it by veering and extending his circuit, choosing to traverse the entire commercial district. The clatter of his shoes on the sidewalks and the street resonated between the hulking, silent buildings. He knew that, just outside of the commercial district, a minor bustle attended on the end of the weekend, but in the emptiness here he couldn’t shake the feeling of desolation. The few people that he saw appeared lost, stranded, abandoned. Eye contact was mutually avoided.

I wouldn’t know how to recreate civilization by myself in the advent of some far-reaching disaster, he thought, which only accentuated his feelings of loneliness. He mentally pictured the graphic from his computer screen and superimposed it on the backdrop of the dormant city. His breath felt shallow, as though his breathing rhythm were sustained by conscious thought and would cease should he stop thinking about it.

He stopped at a large intersection at the center of which stood a monument: an abstract statue. The statue was caked with some dark grime and seemed to be contradicting itself in its depiction of modernity.

He remained motionless a moment, listening to the sound of his own breathing, and was suddenly struck by a revelation regarding the data.

7

Berfmon, Lemina and Xan sat in the lobby of the Teranz building. The lobby was spacious and largely unadorned, but nevertheless conveyed an image of power and accumulated expertise. It held four identical couches. They sat on the one closest to the glass wall. They had been waiting ten minutes when their company’s head of sales walked into the lobby and waved them over as he walked toward the receptionist’s booth.

“Well, let’s go,” grunted Berfmon, and he heaved his heavy frame up from the couch. He was wearing his best clothes and his only tie. Lemina was wearing the same functional clothing she wore every day to work. Xan had bought himself a suit for the occasion. They had worked all week decrypting the data from the memory stick and had been briefed by the head of sales on the high importance of this project and the necessity of impressing the client, both with what they had managed to glean from the data and what experience would allow them to do with it.

Lemina had stated flat out that she wouldn’t be dressing any differently for this meeting than for any other work day. The head of sales had suppressed his irritation, preferring to let it pass. Berfmon carried the report in a binder under his arm. The head of sales asked to see it, then all four of them took the elevator up to the twenty-seventh floor. The elevator opened onto another lobby and another receptionist’s desk. They sat on another couch.

“So, Teranz is the client,” remarked Lemina. “I don’t see why it needed to be such a big secret.”

“Teranz isn’t the client,” replied Berfmon. “They lend meeting rooms to partners and clients that need to conduct meetings anonymously. It’s a service they provide.”

Lemina snorted.

“I’ve been here before,” pursued Berfmon. “In another few minutes, someone will come get us and lead us to a room in the wing over there.” He pointed a stubby finger in direction of a corridor that led away to their left. “This person won’t be wearing any identification, like the receptionist over there. She’ll just say ‘follow me’, and walk off like we’ve got nothing better to do then follow her around without explanation. And also, she won’t answer any questions. If you ask her any questions, she’ll just ignore them, not awkwardly like she doesn’t know the answer but purposefully, like ‘I acknowledge that you’ve just asked me a question but I’m just going to ignore it because that’s what I do,’ and we’ll follow her into a meeting room and she’ll tell us to sit, not politely, more like ‘you do as I say because that’s the only way this meeting is going to happen’, and while you sit she just stands by the doorway and stares at you, looks you right in the eye and shows absolutely no emotion. Don’t you just know that they train these people in the art of looking you straight in the eye and showing no emotion. There’s a valuable job skill for you, go put that on a resume, ‘I can stare at you for extended periods of time and show no emotion,’ it’s part of some package that you pay for in order to set up anonymous meetings, but it serves another purpose, it makes the other party feel inferior, it creates this psychological advantage for the organizer right from the start.”

Lemina remarked, in a bored voice, “Mind games don’t work on me. I just do what logic dictates.”

“They work on everybody,” replied Berfmon. “We’re all basically animals.”

The head of sales interrupted to remind them that they shouldn’t be discussing this kind of thing openly. He added that there would be time enough to evoke questions of form when they debriefed afterward. Lemina replied that she didn’t see the point of debriefing afterward and would be making her way back to the office because she had a lot of work waiting and she needed to get back to it as soon as possible.

A group of people emerged from the corridor Berfmon had previously indicated, led by a woman who walked very upright, with a stilted gait, like a mitigated version of a soldier’s march. Berfmon smiled knowingly.

Xan recognized Fidiory in the group of people walking behind the woman and rose to greet him.

“Fidiory! We just keep bumping into each other. Is that fate or what?”

The marching woman said, in a curt tone, “The parties will refrain from addressing each other.”

“You don’t have to listen to her, you can do what you want,” sailed Berfmon cheerfully from the couch. Fidiory and Xan exchanged an uncertain look, then looked at the guide woman, then at Berfmon. “Go ahead and talk among yourselves,” insisted Berfmon.

Fidiory addressed Xan, but looked at the guide woman as if for confirmation. “I don’t know… fate is such a strange concept, it’s both comforting and anxiogenic…”

“The parties will refrain from addressing each other,” the guide woman repeated, in a more insistent tone.

“You can say what you want, nothing she can do about it,” said Berfmon, getting up from the couch.

The head of sales got up as well, and said, “Xan? Maybe you can talk to your friend a little later?”

“What are you going to do to prevent that?” Berfmon asked the guide woman. She didn’t reply.

Xan said to Fidiory, “well, it was nice to see you. You don’t have to believe in fate or determinism, it’s like the universe’s placebo effect, it works anyway, even if you don’t believe it.”

The guide woman gave instructions to Xan’s group to sit down and to Fidiory’s group to take the elevator down to the lobby. When the elevator doors had closed, she turned to Xan’s group and said, “Follow me,” just as Berfmon had predicted. She led them to the far end of the corridor into a meeting room that held a long, heavy-looking table with a shiny reflective top surrounded by a dozen high-backed, plush chairs. Two men and a woman introduced themselves as representatives of a company that ‘wished to remain anonymous’, explaining that they were provided with a mandate to take certain decisions based on what would be exchanged during the meeting. Everyone sat down. The head of sales said, “We were told we could present our results, that there would be no time frame.” The female representative shook her head firmly, saying, “No, that’s not the case. We have an hour here, after which we’ll stop the meeting. This is independent of any progress we will have made by that time.” She pressed a button on her watch to indicate that the hour had officially started.

The head of sales nodded and turned toward Berfmon as a silent cue to get started. Berfmon opened his binder and stared at its contents for a moment, appearing to collect his thoughts. He cleared his throat. “We spent the week decrypting this data,” he started.

“The data wasn’t encrypted so much as normalized in a storage format,” interrupted Lemina. “We got that result by applying certain techniques derived from chaos theory. Are you familiar with chaos theory?”

One of the male representatives leaned forward. “We’re not data experts,” he explained. “We’ve been given a mandate to negotiate –”

“Chaos theory goes beyond data analysis,” snickered Lemina. “Everyone should know at least a little about it. It’s common culture.”

The representatives waited for them to continue. Berfmon resumed speaking, his eyes riveted to the contents of his binder. “We discerned a noticeable pattern, a repeating pattern. Complex, with a strong correlation to living organisms, the entropic index of which led us to conclude that it’s a representation of a human population. The salient feature of the data is that a certain signature is present in certain repetitions of the pattern and not in others. We take this fact as a strong indication that the data represents the propagation of some disease in a human population. However, because we have no information regarding the nature of the indicators from which the data was extracted, we can only speculate as to what the disease is, though it stands to reason, given the propagation pattern, that it’s the signature of a virus or bacterial infection.” He stopped speaking and looked up toward the representatives’ faces, as if for confirmation.

The representatives shared a look between them, then turned toward Berfmon. The male representative who had spoken earlier said, “Your findings are altogether consistent with our expectations. However, an important element is lacking from your analysis. If we are to retain you, on this project, it is crucial that you show that you have covered this additional element in your analysis.”

Lemina snickered again. The head of sales shot her a venomous look on the tail end of her outburst. It wasn’t clear if the look contributed to ending it.

Berfmon continued to stare at the contents of his binder with pursed lips, showing ostensibly intense concentration. It was evident that he had no idea of what to say next. The head of sales pitched in, “I think we’ve established a solid basis for the continuation…”

The female representative cut him off, brusquely, almost savagely, going as far as to make a horizontal chopping motion with her right hand as though cutting that idea down at the root. “We will require the additional element,” she said. The two male representatives nodded gravely.

Softly, Xan said, “there is a shield.”

All faces turned toward him, in a communal flood of relief and expectation that included both parties. Emboldened, he cleared his throat and spoke with assurance.

“There is a disease propagating across a human population. The nature of the contagion is not known to us. Berfmon evoked the possibilities of a viral or bacterial source, but these are only hypotheses. What the data is telling us is that, like a spot of antibiotics in a petri dish, there exist zones where this infection cannot propagate, where it is effectively nullified. These zones are difficult to pinpoint because they have no spatial or temporal anchor that we can discern, but they do exist at certain points of the infectious flow. We extrapolated this from the data, but we also suspected that it was due to our imperfect algorithms, given the intangibility of this shield. Provided that it does exist, we can suppose that the party who mandated this meeting has a strong interest in the shield and needs expertise in data analysis to find ways of identifying where it will next show up. They want help finding the shield.”

The female representative nodded. “That is correct. We have all we need here. Give us the report you’ve brought. We will send it to the client. You will be contacted for the next segment of the project.” She held out a peremptory hand for the report.

The head of sales took Berfmon’s binder from his hands as though keeping it from the representative’s prying grasp. “We should talk numbers,” he said. “What I would like is for us to establish a contractual agreement for our participation in the next step of this project. This initial phase was on us, and though it was certainly interesting, posing challenges to the team and such, we’re a business and we don’t maintain teams on projects that aren’t making money.”

“This was just the prospecting phase. Think of it as a bidding process,” the female representative said. “The client will make you an offer for your participation in the next phase.”

The head of sales was about to speak when Lemina turned to him and said, “You don’t need us here for this, do you? We can probably leave you to it.”

…

Outside the Teranz building, Berfmon and Lemina stood in front of Xan, effectively trapping him on a street corner as though anticipating his will to escape, to disappear in the wake of the meeting’s big revelation.

“How did you know about this… shield thing?” Berfmon asked him, in an eager tone that Xan had never before heard him use.

“There was nothing there to be found!” piped Lemina.

They milled about him, punching him joyously in the arm, laughing outright. Xan was touched by their display of ebullient warmth. He couldn’t remember ever seeing either of them so excited. The format of the project, structured as it was like some thought-out game, had somehow awakened their inner child, and though they habitually hid it under layers of bored cynicism, it had now surfaced and escaped them, powered by this unexpected result, the victory in the meeting.

Xan chuckled. “I didn’t know. I had no notion of any shield until the words starting spilling out of my mouth. Really, I’m as surprised as you are.”

“But the shield?” insisted Lemina. “You didn’t see a shield in the data? How did you know?”

Xan shrugged. “It was written all over their faces, really. And the context, the secret client. The anonymous meeting room. It suddenly occurred to me that if someone was to go through so much trouble, they must have an interest in the contagion, either in speeding it up or shutting it down. I decided the latter was more probable. And then I remembered little glitches we’d seen in the data, which we attributed to failed convergence, which could have been something else, so I gambled that the something else was somehow counteracting the contagion, containing it in very specific places. Mostly though, it was obvious we weren’t going to land this project without a big leap forward. So, I leapt.” He shrugged again, then chuckled at the way Berfmon and Lemina were now beaming at him.

“You know what?” Berfmon asked, to no one in particular. “I don’t feel like working today.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets, closed his eyes and lifted his chin to face the sun.

“Neither do I!” exclaimed Lemina as though stumbling upon the realization. “Let’s not go back to work, let’s celebrate!”

Berfmon nodded, smiling, eyes still closed. “You’re right!”

Xan looked from one to the other. “So how do you propose we go about celebrating?” he asked.

“You do whatever you like. I’m going home to celebrate!” said Lemina. She turned and left. Xan and Berfmon stared at her departing form as it shrunk with distance and resolutely disappeared around the corner of a building.

“Well,” resumed Berfmon, “I’m not surprised. I’ve been working with that woman for years, and not once have I witnessed her genuinely exist within a group of humans. Let’s go have lunch somewhere, Xan.”

They walked a few blocks heading east, then Berfmon spotted a restaurant whose appearance enticed him to push the door open. When they had been seated and were flipping through menus, Xan nodded. “I’m going to have the cucumber salad. I’ve never had cucumber before, it’ll be my first time.”

Berfmon raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You’ve never had cucumber?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“In Margolia, it’s considered base to eat cucumber. It’s a classless vegetable. Only people who find themselves in desperate economic situations will eat it, or people who’ve given up on any prospect of social advancement. People who have fallen off the rungs of recognition. Those are the kinds of people who’ll eat cucumber.”

“Seriously!” exclaimed Berfmon, eyeing him in mock skepticism.

“Yeah.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Of course it does. It has to do with our history.”

“Well, in all societies, and Baguetel’s is no different, the economically fortunate have always distinguished themselves from those below them by showing themselves to be either cleaner or more select. That’s how they’ve lived longer lives, historically. Better hygiene, choosing what to eat instead of settling for whatever is available. Now, the definition of what constitutes ‘dirty’ is fuzzy, but it’s often linked to stuff that’s stinky. Garlic. Certain meats. Seed oil. Either that or widespread and highly accessible edibles. If they’re common, if anyone can have them, the fortunate classes will make a big show of not wanting them.”

“There you have it: there are cucumbers all over Margolia. They grow everywhere. We even have an expression, ‘to grow like wild Margolian cucumber’, that refers to something that spreads rapidly but has no intrinsic value, a pollutant, a useless afterthought that pervades a landscape and requires a lot of work to get rid of it. Margolian cucumber will grow anywhere in Margolia, and where it grows, no Margolian ginger root can. It’s one or the other. Now, our ginger root is a delicacy. Long ago, it was basically the only plant that grew in Margolia that could be used in cooking to flavor a dish. It was very hard to come by. Generations of the imperial family were absolutely crazy about it. However, it was fragile. If the climate favored the development of cucumber certain years, the ginger root would be all but wiped out. It would disappear for years, hinting that it was extinct, then it would resurface, all of a sudden, to the joy of the Margolian people. Fortune tellers were consulted about when the season of the ginger root would return. It was said that the Margolian people would survive so long as the ginger root kept coming back. So: eating cucumber was an act of giving up, it was seen as allowing for the ultimate disappearance of the ginger root. Avoiding cucumber was, in a way, a patriotic duty.”

“Well,” laughed Berfmon, “I won’t tell anyone you’ve been eating cucumber.” Xan shrugged. “I don’t care. I’m not going back to Margolia anyway.”

“If that Mancia girl is any indication,” Berfmon said, in an unsubtle tone, “I’d say you’ve got some good reasons to stay.”

“Mancia? What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Just silliness.” Berfmon signaled the waiter that they were ready to order.

…

Fidiory contacted Xan a few days later. His phone voice had a nasal quality that Xan had never noticed in person. He gloated about securing the contract following the meeting in the Teranz building.

“We got it too,” replied Xan. “There’s nothing exclusive about it, apparently. Any rabid dog walking off the street answering their questions correctly got it, so if you’re calling to rub my nose in it, don’t bother.”

“Actually, I’m calling to ask you how you were, but we can hang up if you like.”

“No, no, let’s talk some more, then hang up.”

“I also wanted to invite you to a dance exhibit that I’m participating in. Do you remember Fiora? She heard about this exhibit that takes place every year to showcase new dance styles, or new variations on old dance styles. I thought it might interest you, since we were both into dancing back in our student years.”

Xan mentally noted that, in Fidiory’s view, they had been independently attracted to dancing. Nevertheless, he accepted the invitation.

…

The next day, he arrived at work to find Lemina seething in the break room. Berfmon was there as well, listening to Lemina’s sporadic, angry outbursts and nodding knowingly. Xan hovered at the break room entrance, debating whether or not to get involved, when Lemina spotted him and addressed him directly.

“Guess what?” she called out to him. “I just lost a day’s wages!”

Xan instinctively pulled a leg up behind him in a stretching pose, pulling on the thigh muscle.

“What are you doing?” prodded Lemina with an air that was both inquisitive and disgusted.

“I’m stretching my leg,” replied Xan.

“Why?”

“It relaxes me.”

“Do you know why I had a day’s wages cut?”

“No.”

“Because of our celebration after landing the contract! Apparently we work for a company in which celebrating team efforts is punished.”

“You lost a day’s wages because you went home after the meeting.”

“We were celebrating!” spat Lemina. “Why did you two go back to work after the meeting anyway? All it accomplished was for me to be noticed!”

Berfmon said to Xan, “Tuencam is waiting for you in his office.”

Xan dropped the heel of the foot he was holding up to his buttock and left.

…

Tuencam greeted him noncommittally when he entered his office.

“Lemina says you cut her out a day’s wages,” said Xan.

Tuencam shrugged. “She took the day off. There’s no reason we should pay her.”

“But with the contract-”

“The contract. Yeah. You’d think with all their secret meetings there’d be a lot of money involved, only there isn’t. And the mandate doesn’t play to our strengths at all. They basically want us to track down this ‘shield’ that you mentioned. Congratulations, by the way. We debriefed after your meeting, you know, the one Lemina used to take the rest of the day off? I heard about your little stroke of genius. Very well done. If you feel like working on this, we’ll take the contract, otherwise we won’t. No one else in this office feels like doing field work. Do you?”

Xan considered carefully. “M. Fiandus will probably want us to work on this. It has to do with his business relations…”

Tuencam but him off. “M. Fiandus was as surprised about this as the rest of us. He’s already written it off as a promising opportunity that turned out to be a dead end. He’s probably already forgotten about it by now. Now, don’t think that I’m judging him for it, I’m not. It’s just the way he’s wired, he doesn’t get attached to any one opportunity. That’s what’s put him where he is. So what do we do, Xan?”

“What do we do?”

“Uh, yeah. Now, there’s enough remuneration on this contract to support a single person working on the project, but no more than one. Like I said, it’s field work, and we have no one here who does field work. Are you up to it? We take the contract if you are, otherwise we pass.”

“What would I be doing, exactly?”

“Basically, you try to find the shield. The contract is strangely worded, like it was written by a little kid playing grown-up. Apparently, it’s a form of writing that’s called ‘directive obfuscation’. I’d never read anything like it and I had a hard time taking it seriously until M. Fiandus explained it to me. Here, take a look for yourself.”

He pushed a low pile of paper over his desk toward Xan who read it slowly. “‘Find the shield that was talked about at the meeting, then we will pay you the amount of money written on page…’ This is obfuscation? What’s it meant to obfuscate?”

“The identity of the emitting party,” replied Tuencam. “Contractual documents tend to retain traces of emitters’ style, culture, that kind of thing. They effectively act like fingerprints. To remove any identifying trace in a document, it’s given over to a third party that specializes in obfuscating the content while retaining its essential meaning and legal validity. So, the document is legit.”

Xan was still reading from the contract. “‘Don’t tell anybody about what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.’” He hesitated. “Are you sure about this?”

“Xan, do you want this project or don’t you? Honestly, I was very close to just sending the contract back, or at least ask to renegotiate the remuneration structure, but Berfmon said you’d be keenly interested in pursuing the matter given the big triumph you had in the meeting. Just, you know, tell me what you want to do. There’s a time-allotment remuneration line and a results line. I can spare you for two weeks before the project turns into a loss. We’ll just consider any results a bonus.”

Xan nodded once, a curt, vigorous nod. “I accept. I want to know what the data represents in the real world, what the disease is, and what the shield is about.”

“Personally, I don’t believe in the real world, but that’s me. Don’t go bringing any disease into this office.” Tuencam threw him a memory stick, which slipped out of Xan’s fingers and landed on the floor. “It contains a set of documents that describes the nature of the data and indicates various potential sources from where it could have been extracted,” he explained, shaking his head at Xan’s clumsiness.

Xan nodded as he picked it up. “This actually confirms that it’s not their data, you know. They obtained it from some other company, somehow. They’re just handing over their latest research so we can pick up where they left off.”

“Speaking of leaving off,” added Tuencam, leaning back in his seat, “I’ll be leaving the office soon. I’ve been promoted to the main offices of OLFC.”

“Oh. Congratulations.”

…

Xan made his way to his desk, eager to get started on finding the shield. The documents on the memory stick were mostly notes and drafts, along with the extended version of the original data. Xan spent the day sifting through the documents, reading the source information and checking it against databank libraries. He ate lunch at his desk.

Later in the afternoon, Mancia came by.

“I missed you at lunch,” she said.

“I had too much work to make it to the bench by the river,” he explained.

She looked pensively at her hands a moment, as though searching for the optimal way of delivering bad news. He recognized it as a cue to ask her what it was about, but refrained from doing so.

“I should get back to work,” he said.

“Actually, that’s what I’m here about,” Mancia replied, and the transition was so flawless that Xan privately speculated that she had planned it that way.

“You’re here about the search for the shield?”

“In a way. I’ll be replacing Tuencam, who’s leaving. He’s been promoted.”

Xan nodded.

“So, I’m your new manager.”

Xan nodded again. Still sitting, he pulled his right foot over the left leg and pushed down on his knee with his right hand so as to stretch the inner thigh muscles. Recognizing the gesture, Mancia’s speech grew animated.

“Obviously, this is awkward,” she stated. “I mean, you and I are friends. I mean, but you did help me move, and that counts for something. We’re more than just colleagues. We eat together most days. In any case, my point is that it doesn’t need to be awkward. It’s just a question of leaving our personal relationship aside when we’re working together and resuming it when we’re not, right? It’s a question of effective compartmentalization. I’m not suggesting that the exercise is easy, but I’m sure it’s not all that hard, either.”

“I don’t believe in compartmentalization.”

Mancia insisted, “It can’t work if you don’t believe in it.”

“I don’t believe that the human brain supports the concept of stowing away different behaviors in different parts of the brain.”

“Xan, why are you making this difficult for me? You’re my friend, my best friend. At work. You should be helping me adjust to this new world of responsibilities that I’m in now. I need your support, not your silent, sullen, leg-stretching criticism. Look, I didn’t choose to have you on my team, OK? I didn’t want this to be so awkward.”

Xan sighed. “So? I’ll be reporting to you, then. Is there anything else? Tuencam was a very delegation-oriented manager. He gave people as much leeway as they needed to get the job done.”

“Is that how you want this to be?” asked Mancia, through a petulantly clenched jaw. “I’m disappointed in you.”

She walked off with a sigh. Slowly, deliberately, Xan grasped his right foot from the leg he had been stretching, lifted it off his left leg and guided it to the ground. He turned to his computer but found it difficult to concentrate. The notion floated around the edges of his mind that he had stretched one leg but not the other. The stretching dissymmetry became a load. He pushed away from the desk and stretched the other leg for some time, gazing into the distance.

…

That evening, he got a phone call from Fidiory.

“Xan! Did you receive the contract?”

Xan indicated that they had by a noncommittal grunt that confused Fidiory, who repeated the question.

“Yes, yes, we got the contract. But there’s no money in it, so I’m the only one who’ll be working on it,” said Xan.

“I know there’s no money in it, it’s the same at our company. They just threw the contract on a table during a meeting and told us that whoever wanted it could just pick it up. I almost jumped on the table. I could have spared myself the effort too: no one else wanted it. From an economic standpoint, that’s the ideal condition: to want what no one else wants. It’s the best way of getting it. Field work! I’m excited. Let’s work together on this.”

“We can’t do that, our companies are competitors.”

“So? Who cares?”

“Who cares? Who cares?”

“Yeah, who cares? I know I don’t. And you don’t, either. And no one else is working on this.”

“It makes me uneasy. If my superior finds out about this, she’ll have my hide. She’s already out to get me as it stands.” Xan could feel Fidiory fidgety on the other end of the receiver.

“Well, I’m sharing my work with you. You can share back if you want to.”

They exchanged a few more words. Fidiory reminded Xan of the invitation to the dance show in which he was performing with Fiora, then they hung up.

Xan sat for a while thinking of Mancia. Having, in the flow of the conversation, referred to her as his ‘superior’, he now measured the true extent of his resentment toward her. Gone was the desire, the recurrent fantasies and the daydreaming. Already, she had become a symbol, the extension of the corporate structure, a petulant, self-serving, simplistic drone coasting on a superficial, yet void, mysterious aura. He went to bed early and slept until morning, untroubled by the fitful mid-night wakeups that habitually punctuated his sleeping pattern.

…

At noon, he headed out to his bench for lunch. He had just bitten into his sandwich when he was joined on the bench by Mancia and her salad container. She opened it and forked a bite.

“So, what’s the news on the search for the shield?” Mancia asked with a full mouth.

“Oh, it’s going OK, I suppose,” he replied evasively. “Not much to go on, really. I understand why the client hasn’t committed overly much in terms of remuneration. They must feel that the project is hopeless. They basically stopped their research and handed all of their current findings to us as a last-ditch effort.”

“If that were true,” said Mancia, “they would have considerably sweetened the pot in the advent of success. Their remuneration structure doesn’t provide much more for results than it does for time allotment.”

Xan shrugged. “That’s a side effect of internal politics. Someone at the client company doesn’t want to be embarrassed in case this shield is actually found. Probably pressure by their research group not to give out too much results-based remuneration, because the bigger the remuneration, the more important the results, the more blatant the failure of their research team who didn’t manage to carry their research to its logical end.”

“So what’s the disease? What’s its nature?”

Xan shrugged, again. “I don’t know that yet.”

“When will you know? Can you give me some kind of time frame?”

Startled, Xan realized that this was not a friendly lunch conversation, that they were actually in the middle of a work meeting, and that his hierarchical superior was asking for a progress report on the state of the project. His mouth felt embarrassingly full of sandwich. He swallowed too quickly, and felt the worrisome pain of a lump of partially chewed food lodged at the base of his throat. He struck himself twice on the chest in quick succession, his hand balled up into a fist. Tears welled in his eyes.

“Do you have a time frame?” repeated Mancia.

“I have food stuck in my throat,” he explained, noting the blanket of self-pity that engorged his own voice.

Mancia noted it too. “I know you’re more used to an academic setting where things progress at their own pace, but this is the real world,” she said.

“And I’m not used to any academic setting,” he replied, on the defensive. “I was refused at graduate school.”

“Really?” she said, head cocked sideways as though she had just received the last piece of a complex puzzle. “I always thought you had an academic background.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Don’t be defensive,” she chastised. “If you had been more forthcoming with this kind of information, I’d have a clearer picture of how we can work together. Now, moving forward, I need a time frame.”

Xan nodded, acknowledging her reminder that the company had an organizational structure consisting of neatly fitting, self-interested cogs. To buy time, he took another bite from his sandwich. The new bite added itself to the lump in his throat. Mancia noted that he had his mouth full and stared off at the flowing river.

“Flowing water is really beautiful,” she said. “It’s so silently powerful. Can you imagine how much water flows past per second? We’d be amazed. The actual number doesn’t matter, of course. I’m not a numbers person.”

“A week!” shouted Xan while swallowing his mouthful.

“A week…what? What will we accomplish in a week?” asked Mancia. Her face flooded with puzzled skepticism.

“I’ll find the shield within a week!” intoned Xan. He knew, deep down, that he had no business giving a time frame to a task that he had no idea how to go about accomplishing, but by now the lump of sandwich lodged in his throat was triggering a panic reaction. He would give Mancia anything she asked for if it meant not taking another awkwardness-alleviating bite from his sandwich. Having committed to a one-week time frame, there was no going back now.

Mancia asked, “And do you know what the disease is?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea? Do you know what the symptoms are? Do you know who it affects, or where it’s spreading?”

“No.”

“What do you know?”

“Nothing yet! All I have is indicators.”

“Indicators.”

“Yes.”

“Indicators of …?”

“Lots of different things. For example: There are the measurements of time passed standing in front of publicity posters. These were taken by motion detectors discreetly set up in public places. Depending on the content of the poster, the product promoted on it, the words used, the colors, and so on, various indicators, human-dependent interpretations, can be determined. Another example: you have the breakdown of coffee flavors chosen by customers over a five-year period at a well-known coffee outlet. Or the statistics from subway point-to-point usage. Thousands of such indicators, along with their analysis nets. It’s those analysis nets that allow for determining the spread of the disease. There’s a noticeable change across a broad swath of such indicators. The change undulates outward across certain dimensions, it reaches out geographically, travels through socially homogeneous strata. It moves and reflects itself in all the different ways people subtly modify their behavior patterns.”

Mancia stared at him, nonplussed. “Can’t they get this from hospital data or sales statistics on medicine?”

“If they could, they wouldn’t be resorting to our help,” Xan flatly stated. “My interpretation is that the disease is still in a dormant state. It’s undiagnosed, but the client knows it’s out there, because they’re a pharmaceutical company or something similar. They have an interest in studying the disease while it’s in its incipient phase.” He paused and shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just a data analyst.”

Mancia nodded. “Of course. A week, then. We’ll update on your progress when the week’s over.”

Xan noted that he was being dismissed. Some part of him rebelled against the idea that Mancia could lay claim to the bench, to their bench, as an extension of her office. He mentally formulated a protest, but it materialized too slowly to be voiced to Mancia with any degree of confidence. He therefore stood, accepting and legitimizing her dismissal, the image of the compliant foreigner. Silently, he left the bench he loved and the view of the flowing water to which he had grown so attached and come to think of as his own. He walked away from it, heading toward his workplace, obediently rejoining the locus of his duties, acquiescing to any and all demands made upon him so long as they were came from a platform of authority.

It seemed to him, as he bitterly made his way back to his workplace along the route he would no longer be using at lunchtime, that others in his same situation, someone like Fidiory for instance, would not simply accept being banished from a public place. It seemed to him that for too long now, he had made a habit of simply accepting other people’s conclusions for the sole reason that they were from here and he was from somewhere else, that there was a complicated web of things you could and couldn’t do and that learning to navigate it was a permanent process, one that didn’t feel natural and probably never would. It seemed probable to him that he would go on allowing people to humiliate him like this, nodding placidly, agreeing, publicizing his by-default resignation, capitulating in advance to a game whose rules he couldn’t seem to internalize, that would forever demand of him a pause for translation before making any sense at all.

8

Caxior came back to work wearing a wan smile and reassuring everyone that he felt fine. He noticed, when greeting someone he hadn’t seen since he left, how in the first moment the person would scrutinize him closely.

Fidiory was relieved to see him back, and considered his personal responsibility in Caxior’s absence settled. He briefed him on the state of the project and explained to him how it came about that he should be the only person working on it.

Caxior nodded. “We’re ultimately always alone, anyway. That’s how we came into this world and that’s how we’ll leave it.” This confirmed suspicions that he wasn’t cured of the matrix gel-induced data complex, whose effects, if not permanent, were certainly long-lasting. They didn’t prevent him from working, however. They simply made him a death-obsessed worker. This was unfortunate, but from a medical standpoint there was no reason to prolong his leave of absence.

Fidiory invited him to his dance show, scheduled to take place in three days’ time, on the upcoming Friday.

“Why not? I’ll be there,” Caxior answered. “It’ll be fun.”

“It’ll cheer you up too,” added Fidiory, unthinking.

“Cheer me up?” Caxior raised his eyebrows theatrically. “I don’t need cheering up. I’m fine as it is. People think that people who talk about death are necessarily depressed, but that isn’t the case at all. It may even be the opposite. I see myself as having awakened to a positive lucidity. This ‘illness’, the data complex, in my opinion isn’t even an illness at all. It’s a realization that enables the person to focus on meaningful things.”

“Maybe we’re not meant to focus on meaningful things,” replied Fidiory. “Maybe we focus on meaningless things for a reason.”

“I’d go as far as to state that the data complex is a desirable state of mind -”

“Because if you’re always looking at the big picture, well, you’re always looking at the same picture, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised in the least of people start packaging this matrix gel as a standalone product in itself, which enhances the cognitive processes attending on dealing with life’s bigger issues…”

“The big picture, if there’s any such thing, is basically a static, unchanging picture. No one in their right mind stares at the same picture all day.”

“Who knows? Maybe, somewhere in human history, we evolved with something chemically similar to the matrix gel neuron-affecting agent in our diet. Maybe we stopped consuming it at a certain stage, due to rarity or disappearance of its source, and at that point we lost our primal lucidity about life and death.”

Fidiory changed the subject.

“So, about the dance show… I’ll be glad if you can make it, we’ve worked pretty hard at what we’ll be showing, my dance partner and I…”

“Dance is important,” said Caxior with wise finality. “Dance is our primary movement. Civilization was built on dance. Not agriculture.”

…

Fiora hadn’t left her apartment for anything but basic grocery shopping over the past few days. Today, for the third day running, she called in sick at work. In her living room she had pushed all of her furniture against the walls and made space in the center so as to practice her dance moves, which she hardly did at all. She mostly drank her tea and paced, then looked out her window at the people walking by on the sidewalk below, trying to imagine what their lives were and where they were going. She couldn’t see them very well and couldn’t make out their features. She wished she lived in an apartment on a lower floor so she could get a better view.

She debated finding some excuse to cancel the show and weighed consequences. She wondered how the other upcoming performers were coping with pre-show anxiety.

How did people ever think a show would be a good idea? The first show ever certainly wasn’t thought up by the performers themselves. Someone else must have put them up to it. It had to be a king, or a priest, or a tribal leader. Someone who recognized the significance of public performance while not caring too much about the potential embarrassment of failure, or in any case who didn’t imagine that it could fail. History is built out of people making decisions for other people, not of people making decisions for themselves. That’s the only way to apply hard, cold logic: to not be the person to which the logic is being applied. Lack of empathy, that’s key. Lack of empathy is the big social organizer.

She decided that her future lay in organizing events, not participating in them.

The day before the show, Fidiory came by her apartment for a last rehearsal. As she heard him ring the doorbell, she made up her mind. She opened the door and greeted him by saying “Sorry, I can’t do it.”

“So what?” replied Fidiory, standing in front of an open door whose entrance Fiora blocked bodily.

“I can’t do it. I can’t simply climb onto a stage and dance. Look, I’m sorry I’m doing this to you, we’ve both worked very hard at this -”

“Can I come in?” interrupted Fidiory, totally unworried. She paused to observe him, still standing in the doorway. His stance was so confident, as though he had expected her last-minute withdrawal from the project, anticipated her excuses and had prepared his own arguments, needing nothing more than to be invited inside to deliver them, to persuade her to set aside any unfounded misgivings and get back to the scheduled rehearsal. Such confidence was catchy, especially emanating from someone such as Fidiory who had no experience in the dance world and had never actually participated in any show. She felt how easy it would be to abandon herself to such confidence, to believe that Fidiory perceived a timeline that she did not, and let him lead her into it. As they stood there unspeaking, the moment acquired an awkward weight and she stepped back, swinging the door fully open. “Go ahead, come in,” she said. “Can I offer you some tea?”

Fidiory nodded and walked into the center of the living room, where he stood facing the window that overlooked the street below. “We’ve come this far,” he said. “Can you really imagine us just canceling? Because of what, nerves? When would another opportunity like this surface? Maybe not until the next such show, next year. What’s the problem, anyway? You’re just nervous, is that it?”

“It’s not just nervousness,” she replied as she walked into the living room in turn, heading for the couch. She plopped into it, shutting down his unspoken request to start the rehearsal practice directly. “I’m an entrepreneur. If things don’t go well tomorrow, I don’t know how long it will be before I can find the confidence to do another, do you understand? Confidence is key. In matters such as this, dancing is almost secondary. It’s really a mental game. I need to… develop, my mental game. I haven’t done that yet. I approached this the wrong way. I thought it was all just a question of developing this dance, of showing it to people… But that’s not all there is, at all. If I head into this unprepared, who’s to say I won’t suffer a huge setback? What if we make mistakes? What if we freeze up right in the middle of it? That could leave a horrific first impression on key people who will potentially be watching the show: students, journalists, …”

“Journalists? Seriously?”

“Mm,” she grunted in confirmation, nodding.

“I don’t think this show is as big a deal as you seem to think it is.”

“There’ll be journalists there, I guarantee it. Not from major news outlets, but rather specialized journalists from the smaller periodicals that cover the dance world.”

“You mean dance school newsletters. They’re written by the actual school directors and they serve only to foster a sense of community within the schools.”

“That being the case, I’m sure that, in certain cases, they have journalists. I’ve read periodicals, too, that circulate in the dance world. They were well written. They had that journalistic flair.”

“Flair.”

“Some of those articles I read about dancing were really quite gripping. They conveyed a compelling view of dance as a living act, ceaselessly evolving as various influences coalesce and build off one another, bridging diverse disciplines spanning the spectrum from biology to the study of human communication, touching on history, and anthropology, along the way…”

“It was compelling to you because you’re the target audience. Articles like those are written for people like you.”

“Hey, that’s insulting! You’re diminishing my capacity to appreciate quality journalism and be touched by universal human themes.”

“You’re right, you’re right. I apologize. Look, I appreciate that there are important things at stake heading into this show and that maybe we could have invested more in terms of mental preparation…”

“A very large part of the game is mental.”

“…but at this point, I think it would be a big mistake to cancel our participation in this event.”

Fiora sighed, “Whatever.”

…

The day of the show, Fidiory was hardly working at all. His mind was occupied by the event scheduled for that evening, he had trouble focusing on his work. Time appeared to have slowed down. He checked his watch frequently and was disappointed every time.

Caxior noticed his distracted state and approached his desk. “If this were your last day alive,” he asked, “would you spend it at the office?”

Fidiory flashed him an irritated glance. “What are you doing here, M. Lucid?”

“This is where I need to be.” Caxior nodded and grinned broadly, eyebrows arched, silently requesting any prompt to launch into an explanation of his thought process leading to the conclusion he had just provided for free. Fidiory sighed theatrically, making it expressly clear that he was preparing to do nothing more than indulge Caxior’s whim and that he had no real interest in the answers. With index finger and thumb, he squeezed at the skin over the bridge of his nose and scrunched his eyes shut, layering an advance fatigue to his premature depreciation of Caxior’s upcoming illness-induced nugget of wisdom. “Why is that, Caxior? Please tell me.”

“Listen,” said Caxior, as he pulled up a chair to face Fidiory and let himself drop into it, “we’ve been herded into thinking that ruminations about the big picture are unbecoming of adults, that a man, a real man, accomplishes his duty and then goes home. That there is something heroic in him silencing his doubts. However, the perspective of death puts a stop to all that. You can’t keep your head down in the face of death, you have to look up, you have to look around…”

“Everyone looks at the big picture,” Fidiory interjected, “they just refrain from doing it in the workplace. Because it detracts from working.”

“Listen, Fidiory, if I were to tell you that you are going to die today…”

“You’re making death threats in the workplace? Get yourself checked, man.”

“…What would you do? Would you stay at work and pore over the data? No, of course you wouldn’t. You would do something with your day that is deeply meaningful to you.”

“Analyzing data is deeply meaningful to me. I love it. If it isn’t deeply meaningful to you, maybe you should be looking into a career change. I’m sure there are lots of jobs that call for applicants to be versed in death.”

“Like the world is just littered with meaningful work? Grow up! Economies don’t function that way. Work is just work, we do it to get paid.”

“What are you doing right now that warrants getting paid?”

“If I told you that you would die today -”

“Stop making death threats! You can’t do that!”

“- you would leave work immediately, and go spend your final moments doing the things that have the utmost importance in your life, like, in your case, dance…”

“…which I’m going to tonight, death or no death…”

“Because you can, because the consequences of setting aside past ambitions are void in the face of your upcoming death. That’s why we do all the things we do but don’t appreciate, because the universe threatens us with consequences, it coerces us. But those consequences don’t directly apply to us, do they? Rather, they apply to future versions of us.” Caxior beamed with pride at the image he had just evoked.

Fidiory shrugged, “Whatever?”

“Think about it,” pursued Caxior, “the person you think of as ‘you’ is only you in the present moment, in this infinitesimal instant of your consciousness. The ‘you’ of tomorrow is a different person altogether, isn’t he? And yet, you are doing things now that will benefit tomorrow’s ‘you’ because you feel a degree of proximity to tomorrow’s ‘you’, a kinship, because you want to maintain and perpetuate the chain of continuity that links the yesterday’s ‘you’, today’s ‘you’ and tomorrow’s ‘you’. Because you feel gratitude toward the yesterday’s ‘you’ who worked so hard so that the today’s ‘you’ could have money to buy food, and you want to honor that gratitude by doing your part in the chain of continuity, by working so that the tomorrow’s ‘you’ can have money to buy food, and so on. Only, you don’t know for sure that tomorrow’s ‘you’ exists at all. There may even be a slight chance that you’ll be dead tomorrow and that you’re staying at work today for nothing. A probability, though it’s arguably very low, that you may even die today. So low, in fact, that you disregard it completely and stay here at work. But what about the ‘you’ of next week, of next year, in ten or twenty or fifty years? The probability that those ‘yous’ won’t be around anymore increases as you project yourself further and further along the timeline, until, far enough down that timeline, the probability of your death becomes a certainty, the gripping reality that mankind has struggled with forever. We all eventually die.”

Caxior paused for dramatic effect, then leaned in toward Fidiory. “A probabilistic degressive chain of friendship, disappearing into the distant horizon. We’re friends with our future selves, but only up to a point. Who can calculate the probabilities? No one, and that’s what makes those friendships awkward.”

He added, “Anyway, right now, this is where I choose to be.” He got up from his seat and walked away, leaving Fidiory to put the seat back in its original place by the wall, out of the way.

…

Xan was getting results. Like eyesight adjusting to the night, previously vague forms were coming into focus, patterns in the data were showing a recurring regularity when filtered through certain algorithms. Increasingly, and this was what was the most stupefying: it seemed as though the dataset had chosen him to be its decipherer. His breakthrough occurred when he found a common link to a large set of indicators. It was like drawing lines through various points and discovering that they all intersected at a common point.

That point was localized in Margolia. More precisely, ancient Margolia. A data analyst without his background would have missed the references, would have chosen different combinations of decoding algorithms to render patterns in the data.

Xan, however, recognized things: a syntactic linguistic construct here, a narrative structure there. Veiled and cryptic references to Margolian history, conveyed in the style of Margolian speech with its strange elisions and groupings that remained identifiable even after being translated into another language.

It was like listening to a speaker in a room full of people and realizing that one was the only person present who understood the language being spoken. Like looking around that same room and seeing blank stares on everyone else’s face, or seeing faces flush with misguided concentration. Like trying to imagine not understanding the noises being emitted from the speaker’s mouth, or attempting to perceive the sounds as the homogeneous garble that other people heard. Xan imagined that that was how the other data analysts presumably working on this dataset must be perceiving it: as a homogeneous garble.

That’s why this project is paying so little, he thought. The client has elected to give out a number of contracts to a number of different data analysis companies, paid by time allotment, hoping that one or more of them could make something out of it. They don’t know of any one approach that could show any particular promise, so they’re choosing to strike out blindly. They’re placing their bet on numerous shots in the dark, hoping one of them might eventually hit something.

And they had hit something: they had hit Xan. Thanks to his Margolian background, he was making rapid progress, and even accelerating. He now knew, beyond doubt, that the disease was a form of mass hysteria, though the pathogen remained unknown. He hadn’t yet determined exactly what form the hysteria took and suspected that the particulars of the disease had been doctored out of the data, that the client knew all they wanted to know about the disease itself and simply wanted to get access to the shield in order to devise and market some form of protection against it.

There were other occurrences of the mass hysteria, but all information regarding the time and location of these occurrences was masked. Still: mass hysteria. How many occurrences could there really be? Most if not all cases of mass hysteria were documented, largely known events. They made compelling news stories. They made people realize how easily their delusions about free will and individual thought could be disproved. They reassured people that everyone in the public at large shares a code of agency. They hinted that mankind’s ultimate destiny was common, traversing arbitrary borders of class, culture, gender, geography, even as they pointed out that this commonality was a weakness as potentially devastating as it was a source of strength.

I could just look up examples of mass hysteria in recent and slightly old news, he thought, but decided against doing so for fear of introducing bias into his analysis and breaking the virtuous cycle of accelerated understanding that he was currently experiencing. He knew his misgivings to exploring that route had superstitious underpinnings, but he accepted it as such. All that counted, really, was that he should find the shield.

Instances of such a shield were perceptible in manifestations of the disease. Systematically, in those situations in which the disease had arisen, there were hints of the some counteracting agent’s presence, one that would locally impede the progress of the disease or halt its transmission altogether. From what he could distinguish, this counter-pathogen wasn’t always a cure, though it was in many cases.

Xan supposed that the client knew that a new occurrence of the disease was imminent, and therefore so was a manifestation of the shield. It remained to be determined when and where the shield would appear, as well as the answer to the crucial question: what form would it take?

By the end of the day, his advancement was more than satisfactory. He was on his way out when he was intercepted by Mancia.

“Are you leaving, Xan?” she asked him, in a voice laced with a mild accusatory undertone.

He had his coat on and was carrying his bag, so he answered her with a curious, probing stare that said ‘is this not obvious?’

Mancia asked, “Can you spare a moment for an update?”

“I thought we were going to do that next week. I’m on my way out right now.”

“It won’t take a minute.”

“Um, yes, it will. I’m the one updating, I should know. I have a lot to report.”

“Well, now I’d say you’ve piqued my interest.”

He hesitated a moment, even went as far as to turn his head toward the exit door, as if debating whether to make a break for it and sprint out of the building.

Mancia added, “I’ll wait for you in my office.” She turned and walked off in the direction of her new office. Xan started to unbutton his coat and took a step in the same direction, then abruptly stopped and stood there, one foot forward, weight partially transferred to the front foot, standing very lightly as though poised to bolt, like a startled bird who has detected the presence of a predator in its vicinity and has frozen all movement in hopes of remaining unseen.

Lemina walked past him and gave him a quizzical look, head cocked to the side. “What’s this?” she smirked. “Some kind of exercise in immobility?”

“I’m on my way out,” he replied.

“Well, it’s this way,” she said, and walked out the door. Xan counted to twenty, then turned and followed her out of the office, mentally declaring that the weekend had officially begun.

…

The Emergent Dances show was set to take place in a theater in Baguetel’s South Side. It wasn’t really within walking distance, but Xan had a few hours to kill before the start of the show. He felt like being outside, so he set off on foot.

The streets were large, flanked by narrow, run-down sidewalks that were crumbling in certain parts. The sidewalks, by their decrepitude, depreciated the act of walking, casting it as an illegitimate mode of locomotion on Baguetel’s South Side. Xan saw no one else walking. He felt embarrassed to have singled himself out in this manner, yet nevertheless clung to the activity of walking stubbornly. It felt like a silent argument with the city itself, which could at any moment devolve into a flurry of imaginary name-calling and silent, implied shouting.

…

Having reached the theater, he was relieved to see the lineup of people milling about in their evening attire, excited at the prospect of the show and its promise of novelty. He joined the lineup and was further relieved to see other unaccompanied people like himself in it, standing by themselves and gazing around expectantly at those who stood in groups.

This is the perfect context for striking up a conversation with a stranger, he thought. I could just turn to anybody and ask, ‘so, do you like dance?’ and regardless of their answer, I could follow up by talking about everything I know on the subject. I could state that I’m from Margolia, just put that out there, and mention the puppet dance, explain the coincidental yet striking resemblance it bears to the robotic swerve, and offer my interpretation of possible common influences of the two dances. From there, it would be a small step toward discussing dance from a larger perspective, what it means to me and why I think humans invented dance in the first place.

There was a woman standing alone in front of him in the lineup. He waited for a moment when she turned, and blurted out, “so, interested in dance?”

“My cousin is in this show,” she replied. “She is really into interpretive dance, she plans to make a living out of it, soon. We’re all very supportive of her in the family. She’ll be a big name someday. She can do the most amazing things with her body, she’s very flexible and talented. She’s very athletic, too. It’s really important to be athletic, people like to see athletic people onstage. Being skilled is one thing, and it’s necessary, but by itself it’s not enough to impress an audience. Athleticism is very, very impressive and important. My cousin and I were very athletic from a young age, we were constantly outdoing each other in running, climbing, and jumping. I could have been onstage with my cousin this evening, but I didn’t go into dance like she did. Dance isn’t really my thing. I don’t really like dance. Actually, I kind of hate it. Still, it’s that competitive rivalry with my cousin that allowed her to reach the heights where she is today.”

The conversation had taken a professorial hue. The woman had adopted a condescending tone and was now explaining dance to him. He hopped into a leg stretch, his foot pulled up underneath him, so as to appear too busy to give her his full attention. She took the hint and trailed off mid-sentence, turning back into the lineup.

…

Xan was enjoying the show. The various participants were demonstrating strange movements, and their deviation from traditional, prescribed forms of dance shed light on his own expectations for movement and sequences.

The real revelations taking place here, he thought, are the set, rigid frameworks that I’ve always imagined define the world of dance.

Being taken beyond his preconceptions was heartening: a reminder that frontiers exist everywhere, even in fields as mundanely familiar as human movement, and that these frontiers could still be explored by those people curious enough to leave the familiar behind.

The music was charming. In general, he had to listen to any one piece of music multiple times before it registered and provoked any narrative sensation, but it seemed unnecessary here. The music was narrated through the dance and he was spontaneously lifted by its swells and crests, shocked and exhilarated by its moments of disruptive cacophony, and pleasantly surprised to find that, though most of it had no singing, it didn’t fail to engage. He had always needed sung words in music, even simplistic ones, to be properly grasped by its spell.

The seat he had been given was close to the stage, in part because they were first-come-first-served seats and he had arrived early in the lineup, but also because the theater house was only partially full. Only a small portion of their advance tickets had been sold. This had freed up a large segment of the choice seats for the gate sales.

Sitting so close to the stage, Xan got a close view of the dancer’s bodies. Their physiques were fascinating. They were lean, low body-fat physiques, and their muscles tensed and rippled as they moved. Veins bulged. Many of the dancers went barefoot and the soles of their feet were caked in dust and grime. It conveyed a sense of getting back to essentials, of showing the bare basics subtending movement.

By the time Fidiory and Fiora came onstage, Xan had almost forgotten that they were scheduled to perform. Seeing them run onto the stage from the side curtains provoked a cognitive dissonance in him. He had been so absorbed with the show up to this point, been transported so far into unfamiliar and remote sensations, that seeing two people he knew on the stage was difficult to process and reconcile with the way he knew them. He struggled to repress an urge to vomit.

He was grateful when the dissonance-provoked nausea subsided as quickly as it had come.

Fidiory and Fiora were both dressed all in black, from neck to foot. The height of the stage, Xan saw, lent an element of heroism and authority to those who stood on it. The stage lights, eerily unnatural, with their insistent and focused rays, amplified this mechanism.

They started their dance from opposite sides of the stage, both of them motionless in the initial silence. Then, the music erupted, a powerful, percussive staccato. From their opposite positions, Fidiory and Fiora lifted their faces and turned to look at one another. Xan felt himself both complicit to this delving stare and simultaneously scrutinized by it. He was also stirred by the onstage tension. There floated an expectancy that the dancers should approach one another, yet they simply stood there with their eyes locked, intensely aware of each other’s presence, making no move to either approach or withdraw. Then, in the music, an instrument rose: a nasal bass line that blanketed the percussive undercurrent, rapid and strident, looping over a short sequence of notes. Fidiory and Fiora disengaged their gaze and turned to the audience. They began popping shoulders, lifting up their arms alternatively. Elbows at right angles. Feet shuffling forward, yet not pushing them in any particular direction: an illusory, aerial walk that served only to support the illusion of being suspended above the floor, of being mobile and devoid of any appreciable friction, as though on ice or some other equivalently slippery surface. Their synchronized movements characterized and identified the nasal bass line as an injunction: as a series of commands to which they obeyed and were reacting to.

Their initial movements were synchronized, reinforcing the notion that they were responding to commands issued by the music. They did it with such vigor, investing such strength while making it look effortless, that they seemed imbued with a masked level of raw power that could be tapped into, hypothetically, should some injunction from the music demand it. It was a dance designed to fool, to emulate and borrow from non-sentient machines that brute force of objects that aren’t designed to protect themselves, nor to survive, but only to selflessly accomplish the task toward which they are geared and specialized, blindly resolute. Small movements were made to look mechanically powerful by being executed smoothly, at a constant speed, yet terminating in abrupt bumps as though the movement had been purposefully slow, set to a controlled cadence to accommodate external constraints, but nevertheless capable of great accelerations and decelerations when those same constraints allowed for it, as manifest in those end-of-movement bumps.

Their eyes locked with one another once again as they executed these movements, as though the movements were an exterior manifestation of some shared message. As they rolled out their synchronized gestures, their gaze remained locked. Though nothing in their movement gave any indication that this shared gaze was perturbing to them, the unwavering line between them that it drew indicated that some communication was under way on a channel beyond the audience’s perception, that the two beings onstage were accessing some deep, dormant protocol, exchanging messages, each verifying that they belonged to common groups, requesting and providing coded passphrases, determining levels of similarity and trustworthiness, sharing and weighing information, suggesting cooperative strategies and proposing ways of implementing them. Still watching one another, they began to converge in that skidding, skating fashion that characterized their lower body movement, as though their foot and leg gestures maintained their bodies in some kind of suspended state, nullifying gravity-induced friction and ensuring total freedom of lateral movement in any direction that the underlying terrain’s topology allowed. The force ensuring their mutual approach seemed to come from some invisible tether that linked them together, an imaginary elastic rope either too fine to see or made of a substance imperceptible to the human eye, that they had fastened between them and were now, of a common accord, reeling in with the same characteristic mechanical precision that they had displayed in all of their other gestures. They slid toward each other and met at center of the stage. As their hands touched, they froze, dropping the non-touching hands by their sides, halting all lower-body movement, straightening up in the back and neck, chins lifted to face one another fully. The silent communication protocol appeared to enter either a final phase or an intermediate conclusion, a final negotiation and decision process.

Concomitantly, the music had reached a bridge. The nasal bass had stopped in time to the dancers halting. The percussion had abandoned all complexity and was reduced to a single cadenced, rumbling beat. A high-pitched, squeaking whine now invaded the sound space, hovering above and below an elusive note, searching for it even as it overshot it, working on close but different frequencies and seeking to hone in on it. When it finally hit the note, the convergent frequencies collapsed onto it like streams flowing into a river. It signaled that the negotiation protocol was over. Fidiory and Fiora tore their gaze away, breaking the symmetry of their previous movement. Fiora slid in front of Fidiory, who encircled her with his arms. They clasped hands in front of her. Another wave of percussion invaded the music, layering complexity on odd beats, introducing degrees of movement like a crystal breaking into shards. The nasal bass returned, faintly at first but growing rapidly. Tugging back with one hand and pushing forward with the other, Fidiory spun Fiora around. She turned passively, then bounced off a straying foot and came to rest directly behind Fidiory. Their hands were now clasped in front of him. She tugged-pulled in turn as he had done, this time in the opposite direction. Fidiory spun as well, but did not kick at the corresponding moment so as to wind up behind her, but rather moved to the side, allowing one pair of their clasped hands to part and unraveling their linked arms to full length. They raised their opposite arms and drew their span out onstage like some giant bird unfolding its wings.

From that point on, the choreography became familiar to Xan. It was more or less the same one he had witnessed in Mancia’s apartment the evening following her move in. Lead and follow were regularly exchanged between the two dancers, creating a secondary rhythm, a pendulum movement of alternating roles that gave the impression that a kind of conversation was taking place between them. At any time, the one who had lead moved less than the follow, assuming a central position and allowing the follow to spin around the gravitational center. Sometimes the lead moved too, directly toward the follow, closing in while coiling an arm around to prepare some spin or mirroring footwork.

The music reached a peak and fell off abruptly. The percussion trailed off like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Fidiory and Fiora stood motionless onstage, locked in a close embrace, arms entwined and heads facing in opposite directions. It wasn’t a position of rest or equilibrium, but rather like the random snapshot of a complex piece of machinery that had been abruptly switched off at some point of its routine.

After a second or two of appreciating their sudden silent motionless, Xan made a point of being the first to applaud. The audience joined in, some clapping politely, others wildly slapping their hands together and cheering. Xan turned to look at the applauding people and felt a stirring of pride. Though there was no way to quantify his contribution to Fidiory’s dance style or Fidiory’s contribution this couple’s dance, he nevertheless felt that he had had a part in it all.

…

Not knowing if he would be allowed backstage to congratulate the dancers, Xan waited outside for them to come out. There were a good number of well-wishers amassed, clustered in small groups that stood around in circles. For the most part, these groups were families: transverse population samples with representatives from every age group, chatting excitedly and professing surprise at the high quality of the show they had just witnessed.

After a time, the dancers trickled out of the theater house by ones and twos, to be greeted by cheers from the crowd. Peaks in the cheering volume arose from the circles composed of their respective family and friends. Xan scanned the crowd seeking Fidiory and Fiora’s families, searching for faces that resembled older, or more portly, or younger and fresher versions of them. He noted no credible candidates and told himself that noticing a family resemblance between any two individuals was a confirmation bias that only worked after one was informed of the family link between them.

Fidiory and Fiora came out. “Hey!”Shouted Xan, sticking a hand up to catch their attention. They walked over. Xan congratulated them warmly on their performance and shook their hands in turn. They were then joined by Mancia, who emerged from the surrounding crowd. Xan was dumbfounded that he hadn’t noticed her in his scan.

“Where were you?” he asked Mancia.

“Right over there,” she replied, pointing to a dark spot near the theater entrance, shaded from the projections of the lampposts that cast fuzzy, regularly-spaced pools of light. “I should be the one asking you that question! We were supposed to do an update at work. I was thinking we’d come here afterward together, but you just disappeared.”

“What’s going on?” asked Fiora.

“I’m his superior at work,” explained Mancia. “He hates me for it, for some reason.” She turned to Xan. “It’s just work, Xan. It doesn’t mean I own you.”

Xan chuckled sheepishly and stared down at his feet.

“Don’t start stretching your leg!” Mancia added in feigned horror. “It’s as ineffective an escape as they come.”

They were joined by Caxior, who shook everyone’s hand in turn and gave a solemn, curt nod. “That was a very expressive dance,” he said to Fidiory. Fidiory stared back at him, expecting him to add something regarding the cycle of life and death, but Caxior just answered his stare with a pleasant smile.

“Did your families come to watch the show?” Xan asked both Fiora and Fidiory. Fiora laughed, a bubbly, self-deprecating gurgle. “I didn’t tell anyone about it except for Mancia here. I couldn’t have dealt with having them see me fail. It would just have confirmed that I haven’t grown up yet. In fact, if they had been there watching me, I would probably have slipped up at some point.”

“I invited all of my family,” said Fidiory. “No one was available.”

“They don’t take your non-professional aspirations seriously,” affirmed Caxior. “To do so would be to define in which stage of the reproductive cycle they find themselves. Inevitably , your rise to maturity signals their incipient demise.”

“No,” replied Fidiory. “They wanted to come, they just weren’t available.”

“Fidiory,” said Xan, switching to his business tone, “I’m on the verge of a breakthrough with the data. I’d like to show it to you, as soon as possible.”

9

The following evening, Fiora and Mancia attended the second evening of the Emergent Dances weekend. Fiora, relieved to have her own performance out of the way, was giddy with anticipation at the prospect of another evening of experimental dancing. Mancia was content to have something to do on Saturday evening.

In the darkness of the theater house, as a pale blue light doused the stage ahead of the first performance, Fiora was suffused with the excitement spilling over from the previous evening, performance anxiety removed. Leaning toward Mancia, she whispered, “The dance moves we’re about to witness will be mainstream in couples’ dancing in a few years!”

Mancia shook her head. “No,” she replied. “All these moves are designed in people’s heads, they aren’t spontaneously born on dance floors. Moves that spread virally are those that just happen, collectively. Real dance is organic dance.” Realizing that she possibly sounded arrogant, she hastily added, “but you’re the expert. I guess.” She shrugged.

However, Mancia’s position on the issue weakened as the opening dance began. The energy emanating from the audience was palpable. People squirmed in their seats in time with the dancers onstage. Mouths hung open. After the first dance ended, the applause was scattered and unresolved, not because the audience was disappointed but rather in impatient anticipation of the next performance. Mancia could hear Fiora breathing despite the volume of the music blaring from powerful, shoulder-high loudspeakers set on either side of the stage. Fiora’s pattern breathing was heavy, irregular, and occasionally punctuated by inelegant grunts, of which she seemed unaware.

Mancia leaned toward Fiora and murmured, “You’re really into this!”

Fiora turned to Mancia and flashed a smile but didn’t reply. She turned quickly back toward the stage, reluctant to miss anything.

The show reached its scheduled halfway point, at which time the top lights lit the room, stark and bright, and a speaker walked onstage with a microphone to announce a short break for technical adjustments. He was met with loud protests from the audience, jeers and angry shouts. Unsettled, he made a halfhearted attempt to reassure the audience that the scheduled programming would resume shortly. The wave of protest grew even louder, assuming a vociferous, ferocious edge. A few dancers trotted onstage to confer with the speaker, who listened with a perplexed look to their hushed, insistent injunctions, then shrugged and announced that the scheduled break would not take place after all in light of the audience’s and dancers’ combined assent. A cheer erupted from the audience and the top lights switched off immediately, as though the technicians manning them had expected this outcome. The music blasted forth at high volume from the loudspeakers, well above the levels attained in the first half of the show.

Mancia winced and frowned. “Do they really need to play the music that loud?” she said to Fiora.

Fiora’s face was riveted to the stage and she gave no indication of having heard. Mancia observed her friend as closely as the dim lighting permitted. Fiora was transfixed, her head making small, rapid bouncing movements in no particular direction, as though it were mounted on a spring and was entertaining the unabating aftershock of an initial jolt. There was something off about her stare. It took Mancia a few moments to notice that Fiora wasn’t blinking. In a joking manner, but with a genuine and mounting concern, Mancia passed a hand in front of Fiora’s face, as though to break the spell, to dispel the invisible web that bound her to the stage. Fiora swatted away Mancia’s hand in a brusque, uncontrolled gesture. The nails of her partially curled-up fingers scratched at Mancia’s hand and wrist. “Ow!” cried Mancia, “My hand!”

Fiora blurted out, “I’m sorry!” then briefly giggled. The levity drained away from her face as quickly as it had appeared.

“Are you alright?” asked Mancia, gingerly rubbing her hand. The slight sting of the scratches was in no way painful, but it was alarming.

Fiora’s face was seized by what appeared to be a sudden, engulfing and overarching revelation. “I need to get closer to the stage!” she blurted out. She sprung to her feet immediately and swiveled left, then right, seeking the closest route to the side aisles that led down to the stage. She chose the right side and clambered over Mancia’s feet and knees in her haste to reach the aisle. “Wait!” cried Mancia, trying to extricate her feet from Fiora’s onward rush and avoid the foot stomps threatened by her clumsy, eager momentum. Fiora ignored her outcry and staggered madly between knees and the back of seats. People retracted limbs to let her through. Some of them got to their feet in her wake and followed her over to the aisle.

In the aisle, Fiora was engulfed in a crowd of people from the audience who were all headed toward the stage. They were dancing as well as possible given the density of milling bodies. The theater house, with its floor set on an incline and aisles broken into regularly-spaced steps leading down toward the stage, was not built to accommodate dancing in the audience zone. They came, nevertheless.

Mancia shifted in her seat, craning her neck and scanning the room in search of some intervention by the organizers, but none was visible. Down below, the crowd was pressed dangerously against the stage. Their agitation didn’t reflect the enthusiastic crunch of youth at a concert, or even the outraged, angry tumult of a demonstration. It was a blind, instinctual rush forward, like a mass of panicked animals who just happened to be dancing. The mass of people shook limbs, spun, staggered. Many were maintained upright solely through the close proximity of other dancers. Onstage, the official dancers carrying on with the show, appearing either oblivious to what was taking place just at their feet or determined not to allow it to perturb their choreography. In the audience, the remaining seated people were struggling to understand what had triggered the mass reaction. Shocked faces turned to one another, seeking confirmation that something was indeed wrong, silently appealing for someone among the more assertive elements to take charge. A voice cried out, “They’re going to be crushed!” It was barely audible over the din of the music, but eyes were drawn toward the press of people in the right aisle. Someone had fallen over and was tripping up others in his wake. The crowd milled about the mounting pile-up of struggling bodies and was getting sucked implacably into it. Mancia scanned furtively for Fiora’s figure in the human mess but couldn’t focus on anyone in particular in the swarm, as people continued to dance and different individuals appeared and disappeared at the visible surface of the boiling crowd.

She got to her feet and climbed over the row of seats in front of her, swinging first a leg over, then holding herself above it by grasping the backs of the seats of the rows ahead and behind her, holding her weight above her extended arms as the swung the other leg over. She caught her calf on some rough, protruding metallic edge and felt it scratch lengthwise, heightening her sense of panic but crystallizing her resolve. She leaned forward and swung her leg over another row of seats, grasped two more seat backs and held herself aloft as she swung the other foot, being more careful this time to check where her legs were landing, finding a rhythm in the deliberate placement of her limbs. She vaulted another row of seats and this time accidentally kicked a woman in the head. The woman slapped a hand to her head to protect herself and appeared to cower from an eventual follow-up blow.

She thinks I’m attacking her, thought Mancia, and briefly marveled that that was the first thought to pop into her head. She’s not even turning to defend herself. If I wanted to, I could attack her. I could snatch her purse and run away with it. Leave the theater house. Take the money out of the purse, then dump it in the garbage. But I don’t need her money. I have a job. I’m a good person, too. I don’t do that sort of thing.

She vaulted a few more seat rows and found herself just a dozen or so rows away from the stage. Stopping to consider, she turned to her right to assess the stampede situation. There were about twenty or so fallen people, many of who seemed to be making no attempt to get up. Instead, they remained on the ground and continued to dance, rolling around, kicking legs and pumping fists, not even trying to avoid getting stepped on. She swiveled about and took note that a similar situation was developing in the left aisle as well, with even more fallen people disappearing into the crush of dancing legs. In both aisles, the crowd was constantly growing, fed by a flow of audience members sucked out of their seats and drifting toward the stage, dancing all the while.

What’s the capacity of this theater house? Thought Mancia. How many people are in this crowd, anyway? How dangerous is the press of people in front of the stage? How many people need to join a stampede for it to become a genuine threat to those in it who’ve fallen down?

She turned forward toward the stage and vaulted more seat rows, racking her brain for an idea of what she would do once she reached the front row. In her mind, an image flashed of Fiora’s face when she had expressed the urgency of getting to the stage, her eyes wide and unfocused, foamy saliva dribbling from her open mouth.

Much of the two first rows were occupied by people still engrossed in the show, apparently oblivious to the disruption occurring in the aisles. With no opening to vault the final row, Mancia had to sidle sideways along it, hugging the backs of the seats to avoid spectators’ legs.

How can they just keep watching the show ? She thought. Does any of this seem normal to them? Are these actually their seats or did they just steal them when their previous occupants went to the stage?

She found an opening and vaulted the last row of seats. The floor of the upraised stage lay at chest level. Mancia flung herself toward the stage, expecting her momentum to carry her whole body onto it. Instead, her upper body plopped neatly onto the stage while, from the waist down, her legs dangled from the edge, like flailing fish. This is embarrassing, she thought, a cool appraisal that shielded her from actually feeling embarrassed. She swung a leg up, but couldn’t produce enough momentum to land it onto the stage. She caught a few stares from the onstage dancers.

On the stage, arm in arm, a row of ten dancers was skipping left to right, their feet executing a complex kick and slide pattern. As they passed in front of her, each dancer looked down at her. It looked like a part of the choreography, like a rehearsed reaction to an ostensibly fake disruption. Mancia allowed her torso to roll sideways onto her left side, threatening to roll off the stage, and used the added leverage to haul her right foot onto the stage, barely managing to place half a foot on the edge. She tugged with foot, elbows and forehead on the dusty stage floor and rolled fully onto it.

The row of dancers was coming back, still linked arm in arm, kicking and sliding their feet. The leading dancer caught a glimpse in his peripheral vision of her supine form and swerved backward to avoid her. The next dancer in the line, however, was caught unaware. He tripped and fell, sitting down heavily on Mancia’s chest and left shoulder. Mancia groaned. The third dancer kicked her hard in the head, but somehow managed to remain standing. Why didn’t I swing the left leg up and roll onto the stage the other way? She thought. She scrambled to her feet, pushing off the leg of the fallen dancer who rolled away, turned over twice, and pounced to his feet with a large smile, trying to make it look choreographed. His arms flung upwards as if to say, ‘look at what I just did!’

The leading dancer shouted angrily at Mancia. She turned and ran to the end of the stage, facing the aisle where the audience crowd pressed forward in their dancing frenzy. She got down on her knees and extended a hand, splaying out her fingers, bending at the elbow and flexing her bicep muscle, to look stronger than she felt.

“Come onto the stage!” she screamed at the audience dancers closest to the stage. A few faces looked up at her curiously.

“Come onto the stage!” she screamed again, allowing the panic to flood into her voice and, through its inflection, to convey a sense of urgency.

One man shook his head. “Audience members aren’t allowed on the stage!” he shouted back at her.

A woman, who danced with her arms held over her head, gave the man a complicit look, sharing his indignation. Her brow was furrowed and her eyes wide in mock surprise, silently agreeing: ‘I know, right? Who is this woman and why doesn’t she know that?’

“Please,” pleaded Mancia, “the people behind you are getting crushed and stomped! Come up onto the stage!” She noticed that her voice, suffused with a mix of fear and anger, sounded petulant.

This is why people hate me at work, she thought, this is what I sound like when I’m trying to get things done, like a sulky little girl, like my only goal is to call attention to my status. Still, I did get promoted.

“Get on the stage, or people are going to die!” she barked. She brandished her extended arm as though shaking a flag. The foremost man and woman continued to dance, ignoring her plea and eyeing each other in shared annoyance. They seemed to shrug, ‘she won’t give up, we can’t help her’.

Then, a woman’s hand reached out from behind them and grasped Mancia’s, palm cupping palm, thumb curling around thumb, fingers pressing against the back of each other’s hand. Mancia felt its sweaty warmth and admired the taut, bulging tendons in her forearm. She thought, ‘yeah!’ and hauled backward. The woman displayed a lithe athleticism, pouncing upward, grasping the stage edge with her free hand while planting a foot next to it, kicking off and bouncing lightly onto the stage. She moved past Mancia and resumed dancing a few steps away. Mancia bent forward once again and extended her arm, inviting the next dancer up. A corpulent man grasped her hand. Buoyed by her previous success, Mancia tugged backwards lustily. The man tugged back and Mancia pitched forward, head first into the crowd.

She stretched her arms out to the sides in an attempt to slow down her torso’s descent long enough for her feet to hit the floor first, but neither arm encountered any resistance whatsoever. What are the odds? She thought, as her knees crashed into the floor and her face collided with someone’s boot. Lying on the floor gave her a unique view from inside the crowd. She could see others laid out as well, still dancing, their arms and legs flailing like insects stranded on their backs. She felt a stab of pain in her right hand as someone stepped on it with a hard, narrow heel. “Ow!” she cried indignantly, and the same heel came down on her hand once more, this time on her fingers. She cried out again and swiftly withdrew the hand, instinctively stuffing her fingers into her mouth. They tasted of bitter dust, like dust that had settled on some industrial-grade cleaning product. She spat out in disgust. I’m going to die of poisoning, she thought, and no one will know it because I’ll have been trampled post-mortem. All the dead people will have been trampled so there won’t be any autopsies. She clambered to her knees. Someone’s knee banged her face, striking her on the bridge of the nose. “Ow!” she cried, and looked up. The man who had just kneed her in the face was staring directly down at her, as though he admitted to having deliberately kneed her in the face and wondered if he should do it again. She stood up, turned around and pushed through the throng of people blocking the front of the stage. Slapping her hands onto the stage surface, ignoring the shooting pain in her right hand, she jumped, hefted herself with the strength of her arms and placed a knee on the stage.

Perched on the edge of the stage, she waited to ensure that her position was stable and that she wouldn’t fall backward. Then, she turned her head to the audience and screamed, “Let’s dance on the stage, all of us! Come on, let’s get on this stage! Let’s take the stage!”

She hoisted herself up, slowly enough to give the audience time to notice. From her peripheral vision, she noticed that the official dancers were still performing, forming and unforming lines, traveling across the stage with their complex kicking and sliding patterns. The music was a constant rhythmic blaring, a repeating loop that gave no indication if it was gearing up or winding down. She had no way of knowing if it was ending or if it would go on for some time. She didn’t know if she preferred for it to stop or go on. Given the state the crowd was in, Mancia presumed that, with or without music, they would go on dancing.

She turned toward them once again. “Let’s dance on the stage!” she screamed. By now, she was standing on the edge of the stage. She began to dance, windmilling her arms down-back to up-front, the fingers pressed into cone-like structures, raising her legs alternatively with the toe hovering just above the floor, pointing downward as though indicating the direction toward the floor. She tossed her head around, making her hair bounce like a cascade of afterthoughts.

Two men from the audience climbed onto the stage, lumbering and eager. She stopped between them and helped them up by pulling under their armpits, curling her mouth in disgust against the sickening, sweaty warmth. A woman followed, struggling with the height of the stage. Mancia grasped her under both arms and heaved upwards and back, surprised at her own strength. She felt the woman’s knees scrape against the rough edge of the stage, then the shins. Those are going to bleed in a few minutes, she thought. She let the woman drop, face first onto the stage, and resumed dancing, windmilling her arms like she invented the move. Another man hefted himself up half onto the stage, putting down an intermediate knee. He looked up expectantly at the burgeoning accumulation of dancers on the stage. As he scanned around, he locked eyes with Mancia. He smiled, his eyes flickering in recognition.

It was the man who, moments before, had put a knee to Mancia’s nose.

She stopped dancing and felt her body awash with a pervading, exuberant joy. She laughed out loud. He laughed in answer. They laughed in unison, two consciences locked in joyful communion in a sea of swirling people. Then, she took a running start, dashed up to him and kicked him full in the face. He toppled backward, groaning audibly as he fell away from sight beneath the edge of the stage. Mancia raised her arms, hands balled into fists, and roared. Her throat rumbled with the boisterous outgoing thrust of air.

The face-kicking electrified the audience. The crowd rushed at the stage and multiple people began to scale it at once. People beneath pushed up on the legs and buttocks of those that were halfway onto it. Another rush took place on the left aisle. From both sides of the stage, audience members vaulted, clambered, clawed onto it and drifted toward the center, like dye diffusing into clear water, to where the official dancers still pursued their performance in spite of the growing encroachment into their dancing space. Mancia moved to the side of the stage as people flowed through. She watched, searching for Fiora. When the flow of people had trickled out, she jumped off the stage to approach the fallen people, who continued to dance though they lay entwined in a heap of limbs, heads, and torsos. She started helping them to their feet.

Those she helped up thanked her politely enough, but continued to dance, still obeying the deep compulsion. Ostensibly, they preferred to dance standing up, but would have continued to do so lying down if need be. Other non-dancing members of the audience converged on the pileup to help, tugging at people’s elbows, lifting them up. Once up, the dancers made their way to the stage to climb up on it. Quite a few were visibly injured. They sported bloodied noses, cut faces and limbs held in unnatural positions, at weird angles. None of them stopped dancing. Mancia saw a woman, obviously injured, trying to climb onto the stage with one arm held close to her chest. It was Fiora.

She rushed to her side.

“Fiora! You’re hurt!” she cried out. Fiora didn’t answer, making repeated attempts to swing a leg into the stage while hanging onto it with her good arm. Her injured arm, held close, rubbed and scraped against the stage. “Fiora!” Mancia cried out, again. “Stop!”

Fiora, still hanging off the edge of the stage, turned to her and looked confused for a moment. She then recognized Mancia and smiled sheepishly. “Hey, Mancia,” she said with a conspiratorial grin, “Help me up on this stage.”

“Fiora, you’re hurt. Look at your arm. Come on, let’s get you down from there.”

Fiora looked down at her arm. “My ribs hurt,” she admitted. Her breathing was irregular and appeared forced, as though she were constantly sighing.

“Please,” said Mancia, placing a hand on Fiora’s back. “Get down from the stage.” She wanted to pull her bodily from the stage but she was loath to engage her physically. Given Fiora’s state, she feared making her injuries worse.

Fiora, having acknowledged her injury, appeared to forget it just as quickly. She grinned at Mancia, a crazily persuasive, wild grin. “Mancia,” she said. “Hey, Mancia. Help me onto this stage.” Mancia shook her head sadly. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Fiora.”

“Come on!” urged Fiora. “Get underneath me. Push on my bum.”

Mancia shook her head. “No.”

“Come on!” Fiora giggled. “Come on and push up on my bum!” She giggled again in the face of Mancia’s dismayed silence. “Push me? Help me up?” She nodded expectantly at Mancia.

Mancia replied, in a tremulous voice, “Fiora, I have to say, I don’t understand what’s going on here. Everyone’s dancing like they can’t stop, and I don’t get it. Why is everyone dancing?”

“Help me up, we’ll talk on the stage,” said Fiora.

Mancia shook her head. “That’s the thing,” she said. “I just don’t think that that’s a good idea. I don’t think you should get on the stage.”

Fiora stared at Mancia for a moment, dismayed, saddened and disappointed with Mancia’s refusal to help, then dug her forehead into the stage and swung her leg up to the side, just managing to land a toe hold on the edge. She strained and pulled, emitting a rasping whine, an unnatural sound that seemed to come from her lungs as much as her vocal chords. Mancia listened a moment, cringing at the strange noise, then groaned, “Oh, help. Help. Help. Help.”

She traveled under Fiora, propped a shoulder underneath her backside and heaved upward. Fiora rolled onto the stage, then stumbled to her feet and started to dance. She did a halting, stuttered version of what she had performed the evening before with Fidiory. This time however, partnerless, her display was imbued with a pathetic loneliness, like a person talking to herself in a crowded room. In her halting gait, Fiora drifted toward the center of the stage.

“Wait!” cried Mancia. “Wait for me!” She jumped up and allowed her top body to plop onto the stage, swung up a leg and rolled onto the stage in a single, fluid movement. I’m getting good at this, she thought.

The music track came to a fade-out, then started over again. Someone in the sound booth had evidently set it to automatic repeat. The official dancers had finished their performance but remained onstage, milling about and still dancing, mingling with the crowd that now occupied the entire stage. Mancia trotted toward Fiora who stood near the center and was spinning around slowly, her good arm held out, palm up as though catching invisible snowflakes. Her injured right arm hung downward at an unlikely angle. Mancia took her by the hand.

“Fiora. Come sit down.” She tried to say it in a soothing manner, but the volume of the music and ambient noise was forcing her to shout to make herself heard, making it sound like she was barking out an order. “You’re hurt. Come and sit down.”

Fiora leaned into Mancia, encircling her with her good arm. She laid her chin on Mancia’s shoulder. She had a cut on her cheek and Mancia felt the warm, sticky sensation of blood on her jaw. She wanted to recoil from it, but steeled herself.

“I feel bad for the other dance troupes that didn’t get a chance to perform. It feels as though the show were over now,” murmured Fiora. Mancia had to strain to hear her words. Her speech was slurred and her breathing pattern still irregular. Mancia noticed that they were slowly turning. Fiora was exerting a subtle pressure while stepping left, then right, in sequence. She had assumed lead. Mancia tried to resist, to sway them in the opposite direction, but Fiora’s drive was overpowering. Uninhibited, thought Mancia. All systems go.

“Your arm is hurt,” Mancia said. “You shouldn’t be dancing.”

“Don’t worry about me,” replied Fiora, in a quiet voice. “I’m fine.”

“No, I don’t think you’re fine,” insisted Mancia. “You got stepped on back there, you got trampled. Your arm is broken and you don’t seem to notice it, who knows what other injuries you’ve sustained. And you’re acting weird. Everyone dancing on this stage is acting weird. I can’t say why, but it’s more than just dancing.”

“There’s nothing more than just dancing. I see that now.”

“What?”

“Every molecule of our bodies is continually dancing, Mancia.” Fiora’s voice had assumed a dreamlike quality, as though she were unaware that she was speaking aloud. Mancia had to strain to make out the words. “Every molecule is moving at the speed of light. We simply can’t see it when they’re confused and canceling themselves out. But when you really learn to dance, you get all of these molecules to align, to collaborate. This is the peak of the mountain. This is the utmost organized state that the universe is capable of. This is where you go for the view.”

“Fiora, you’re hurt,” protested Mancia. “At least your arm, and probably something else, too. Just come sit down, cool off, we’ll get you checked out.”

“Mancia! Why can’t you see it? There is no ‘me’. There is no ‘my arm’, or ‘my leg’. There is only the dance. Everything else is arbitrarily demarcations, like countries on a map. The arm isn’t broken. My shoulder popped out of its socket is all.”

“Aren’t you in pain?”

“You’re looking at this the wrong way. Pain is part of the music.”

Mancia shook her head, still trying to resist Fiora’s incessant thrust, locking her knees at every step in an attempt to slow down and counteract the turning procession which they were undergoing, trying to steal lead. “Pain is not music,” she said. “Pain is your body telling you to stop, to rest and heal up.” How can I get through to her? She thought. What is this mental state she’s in?

“Well, you’re telling me to stop, argued Fiora. “Does that make you a pain? Does that make you my pain?”

Mancia reared her head back to scrutinize Fiora’s face. Her pupils were widely dilated and her gaze darted around rapidly in random directions. A vein throbbed at her temple, but her face appeared wan, bloodless. There was cumulated spittle at the corners of her mouth. The cut on her cheek was now dry, with caked blood smudged over it. Her hair was disheveled, matted, and pressed down on her head as though she had received blows to it. “I’m going to stop,” Mancia announced, and tried to disengage herself from Fiora’s embrace. Even with only one good arm, Fiora’s grip about Mancia was unbreakable.

“Stay… Dance with me.” Fiora’s voice was hoarse.

They continued to turn a moment. “What other pain are you feeling?” asked Mancia.

“Does it matter?”

“Just tell me. What other parts of your body-”

“…arbitrary demarcation…”

“OK, what other arbitrarily demarcated part of you is telling you that it’s in pain, Fiora?”

“Let’s see…” said Fiora dreamily, “I have to think about it, I have to run this self-assessment test. Pain is so easy to ignore once you see it for what it is.”

“Please, just stop dancing? This is weird,” pleaded Mancia.

Fiora appeared surprised by the demand. “Stop dancing?” she repeated, as though trying to decrypt it. “I don’t think I know how to do that.”

Mancia jerked her head toward the other dancers around them. “Is it the same for all these other people here?”

“Oh, for sure, yeah.”

“We’ll have to stop eventually. The music is going to stop. The theater is going to close. We’re going to have to leave.”

Fiora shook her head. “No, I don’t think that that’s true.”

“We’re going to get tired. We’re going to want to stop,” insisted Mancia.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so, Mancia.”

“Fiora, listen to me. You’re not in a normal state. No one on this stage is. Everyone here is a slave to this weird compulsion.”

“I hear you, Mancia. I really do. Only, you see, I think I’ve finally found my normal state. We spend so much time motionless that we end up thinking that the basic state is to be at rest, but it’s not. Rest is just there so that motion makes sense. The basic state is to be in motion. To hear music, to be here, with these other people. To be surrounded by people. Everyone synchronized through this music, all of us set to a universal clock.”

The music ended. There was a brief silence before it started over, still on the same track. In the interlude, Mancia stole a glance around the stage to see if anyone else was stopping. No one was stopping. The dancing continued unabated, at the same pace, as though she were the only one who had heard the music stop. In the audience, a few people were still sitting, watching the stage, observing the dancing and visibly wondering if this manifestation was part of the ‘experimental’ programming. In the back of the theater house, near the double door entrance, a large group of people stood. Friends and family of those dancing onstage, they were ostensibly worried, uncertain of what course of action to take, waiting for this spell to cease. They exchanged concerned looks, muttered disapproving descriptions of what they were watching. They milled impatiently about, standing with arms crossed, transferring their weight from one foot to the other. They struggled with feelings of abandonment, conflicting with a reluctance to intervene. No one wanted to be the one spoiling the party.

The stage was flooded with dancers. They danced alone or with a partner, some even in groups of three or four with arms laced around each other’s shoulders. The space onstage was so encumbered that people were occasionally knocked off the edge and fell below, getting back up mechanically and climbing directly back onto the stage. The lighting had changed from earlier in the show. Mancia had not noticed it happen, but someone had switched off the colorfully dim stage lights and switched on the regular overhead lights.

At least someone acknowledges that the show is over, she thought. Someone in charge can see how abnormal this is and how it has to stop eventually. Why don’t they stop the music, too? Why don’t they just tell everyone to go home? Are they afraid people are going to riot and trash the stage?

She could feel the animal strength in Fiora’s lead. If the rest of the crowd was under the same spell as Fiora was, there would be no easy way of stopping them. Nothing in Fiora’s slight build gave any indication that she could possess such strength. Mancia couldn’t stop the relentless turning movement that Fiora was imparting. She couldn’t even slow it down. Fiora was exhibiting the strength that the body reserves for emergencies, for those adrenaline-fueled feats of extraordinary power that enable one to get away from a predator or free a family member trapped under a fallen tree trunk. A concentrated action signaling an essential shutdown of self-control, during which a torn muscle or broken bone will go unnoticed.

“Hey!” said Fiora suddenly, jolting Mancia to attention. “I haven’t taught you my dance. Do you want to learn my dance?”

Mancia shook her head, “no.”

“Of course you do! It’s the couples’ dance of the future. It’s so new it doesn’t even have a id yet. Notions of lead and follow aren’t tied to gender, and during the dance, lead and follow switch around, like a conversation, with its own rhythm.”

By now, her speech was so slurred that Mancia had to lean close and turn an ear directly in front of Fiora’s mouth to understand what she was saying. She then pulled back. “No,” she replied, I don’t want to learn your dance. I’m worried about you and I want you to stop, just… stop!”

She locked her knees once more, bracing her legs and harnessing all the power in her lower body and back to push Fiora the other way. Fiora’s knees buckled and she collapsed into a heap at Mancia’s feet, her arms still encircling Mancia, but at knee level now. For years afterward, thinking back to this evening, Mancia would feel responsible, would feel that she did this to Fiora, that she had done everything wrong.

Everything, that is, except for when she shook Fiora off, and Fiora fell to the side on her dislocated shoulder, and her shoulder popped back in.

10

“There. There it is, look at it.” On his computer screen, Xan pointed out a star formation to Fidiory. They were sitting at Xan’s workplace desk. Xan had chosen to bring him into the office on a Saturday evening so as to avoid dealing with pesky questions from colleagues that he wouldn’t have been able to answer properly. For example: why was he showing private company data to someone who worked for a competitor? From his desk in the open space, he stood up every few minutes to look over the partitions at the other desks and at the door, making sure they were truly alone. Having just pointed something out on the screen, the onus of analysis was now on Fidiory. This freed him up to take a quick scan of the open space.

“Please stop doing that,” sighed Fidiory.

“I have to, you’re not supposed to be here,” replied Xan.

“You’re acting in a suspicious manner.”

“Anyone could walk in right now and demand to know exactly what you’re doing here.”

“No. It’s more like you’re advertising that you’re secretly engaging in illicit activities. Ask yourself: what would you do if you came into this office and one of your colleagues was just casually sitting down with someone you don’t know?”

“That would depend.”

“That’s right, it would depend. It would depend on whether you have anything to gain by stirring up trouble about it with the colleague in question. Otherwise, you’d just shrug and get busy with your own work. Do you have enemies in the workplace? Does anyone envy your position who would want to sabotage you and take that position away from you? Is there anyone that you’ve hurt, or humiliated, who would want to devise plans to upset you? I’m guessing ‘no’. You haven’t been working here long enough for anyone to envy you, and you’re not the kind of person who makes enemies anyway. You’re too placating. And now, you’re just acting like a sheepish child who doesn’t know if he’s allowed to invite friends to his room, but he does know is that he’s up past his bedtime. Take my word for it: you have absolutely no reason to be watching that door.”

Xan shrugged. “I never had my own room. You’re projecting.” He pointed once more to the star formation on the screen. A dot hovered at its center, slowly moving about in random directions, occasionally stopping and changing direction brusquely. Attached to the dot were trailing tendrils attached to fixed points on the screen. The tendrils grew taut or loose depending on the movement of the central dot. Occasionally, certain tendrils faded and disappeared. Others suddenly appeared, bright arcs that connected the dot to some invisible onscreen anchor. Fidiory found the figure’s colors and movement hypnotizing. He stared at it for some time without speaking.

At last he said, “So that’s it. That’s the shield.”

Xan nodded. “Where it appears, the disease stops.”

“What is it, though?”

“It’s hard to say, but according to the indicators that I used to isolate it, it’ll soon make an appearance. That’s how I know I’m right about this. The shadow company that retained our services obviously knows that the shield is out there somewhere, and they’re counting on our analysis to find it and exploit it for their own purposes. It could be some microbe that they’ll look to harvest, or a plant, or some industrial byproduct. It could be anything.”

“You don’t know what the disease is yet.”

“I don’t and I won’t know, because any data that would reveal the nature of the disease has been just wiped out. They’ve surgically stripped it so that the shield can be isolated without divulging what it is it shields against. It was masterfully done. I’d go so far as to call this a blueprint for outsourcing a company’s data analysis. You transform the data so that the only party that can profit from the analysis is you. You’ve effectively encrypted it by removing any direct link the data has to the underlying phenomena, you leave only meta-data. The people to whom you’ve outsourced the analysis can build the results, but they won’t know what they mean, only you will. At this point, I must admit I’m very curious as to who the client is.”

Fidiory scratched his cheek pensively. He stared for some time at the dot moving around onscreen, like some translucent sea beast searching for nutrients in unfamiliar water. “So why are you showing this to me?” he asked.

“Well,” admitted Xan, “right now I’m stuck. I can isolate the shield in the data, but I can’t make any sense of the indicators that tell us where this shield is going to show up in the real world. Either the data has been overly stripped, or I lack the tools to understand it.”

Fidiory nodded. “Well Xan, I’m very impressed with your work. I’ve been so caught up with my dancing project that I didn’t put in the time and effort this kind of project demands. Can you maybe show me the intermediate indicators? A fresh pair of eyes might catch something you missed.”

“I can show you the intermediate indicators,” replied Xan, “but it’ll just seem like a meaningless string of numbers to you. In many places, they even removed unit information. You’ll see values and not know what they are values of. I’m not even sure they represent actual measurements.” He grabbed the keyboard and typed out a few commands. His fingers were moving so fast that Fidiory couldn’t distinguish the individual impact of each key.

He’s showing off, he thought. He acts humble, but he has a very high opinion of himself.

A long sequence of numbers appeared onscreen, spanning several lines. As Fidiory stared at it, he stopped breathing.

“There must be separators somewhere in this sequence, but I don’t know where to put them,” Xan explained.

Fidiory resumed breathing. “OK, then. Very funny,” he said dismissively.

“What?” said Xan.

Fidiory turned to scrutinize Xan’s face. “This is a joke, right? You’re making some kind of elaborate joke here?”

“No, I assure you. Why, do you see something in the numbers?”

Fidiory paused, observing Xan’s features closely. He then turned to the screen and pointed. “There. Do you see it? Are you going to make me believe that you don’t recognize my phone number?”

Xan gasped, stuttering, “I… It’s out of context, I… I didn’t recognize…”

“There,” Fidiory pointed again. “That you won’t recognize, but it’s my date of birth. And that -” pointing to another part of the screen, “-is my national ID number. And below it is my passport number. I’m not sure about that one. But it does look very familiar. And here-” shifting his finger once more on the screen, “-is the red-green-blue index of my eye color. I remember writing it down on a form. You were right, this isn’t a series of measurements. This is a record, probably even a government record. Of me. So tell me what you’ve been doing to hone in on my personal record!”

Xan sat with his mouth open, shaking his head from side to side in small, uncomprehending movements.

“Xan!” burst out Fidiory.

Xan took a long breath before replying. Meeting Fidiory’s gaze and speaking deliberately, he said, “It’s you, Fidiory. You’re the shield.”

“What?” Fidiory frowned in contempt. The whole bottom of his face twisted into a sneer. “Just stop it.”

“You,” repeated Xan, “are the shield.”

“I can’t be a shield, Xan!”

“You are.”

“That makes exactly zero sense.”

“I’m sure of it.”

“I’m the shield,” spat Fidiory. “Me. I’m the shield, I’m preventing the disease outbreak. Well, I guess that explains why there are no diseases breaking out around me.” His voice was laced with sarcasm, but his face showed a mounting unease.

“Listen,” said Xan. “I don’t know how this is, but it’s for real. If it were random, or accidental, the algorithms wouldn’t have converged. I don’t need to tell you that, you know it as well as I do. You should see how many algorithms I needed to apply to get this far, to isolate the convergence factor. And few people could have found the key to the sequence algorithms to do that. It was a long sequence, man, but it converged, and you saw the result. Do you want me to show it to you again? Here, look at it, tell me it’s not the result of near-perfect convergence.” He tapped a few keys and the star formation reappeared onscreen, moving about, tendrils trailing from a central dot.

That’s me, thought Fidiory. That’s me I’m looking at. I’m a water spider.

He shook his head. “How can I be a shield? I’ve never been a shield. I’ve never shielded anything. I’ve never been at the center of an epidemic that I know of.”

“The shield has been active in other epidemics of the disease,” admitted Xan. “That much is true. But that doesn’t mean it was you. It’s not necessarily always you that’s the shield, maybe it’s a manifestation of some part of you. Maybe it’s some rare gene, that only an extremely narrow set of the population possesses, that counteracts the epidemic. When the disease hits, only the few people in the vicinity that have this gene are susceptible to lend it to the affected population. Maybe the reason your record comes up is that you’re the only candidate who’s close enough to the next outbreak’s epicenter and liable to help.”

“A rare gene. If that were true, then I would have ancestors that acted as shields as well, right?”

Xan shook his head. “I don’t know… not necessarily. Any genetic trait is a combination of genes. The ‘shield’ combination could be a rare occurrence that requires a particular configuration of the parent genes. Rare traits like that can be shared by geographically distant populations. It’s not necessarily a family trait.”

“Well, what is it then? Is it a gene or not?”

Xan threw his hands up helplessly. “I don’t know!” he exclaimed. “That’s the kind of information that was washed out of the data to mask the nature of the disease! The client who provided this data was keen to avoid divulging the specifics of the disease because they obviously have some commercial interest, they want to corner the market for a potential cure or something.”

Fidiory arched his eyebrows. “I’m not a cure,” he said, marking each word. “I don’t want to get myself kidnapped and shut away in some colossal corporation’s underground laboratory, getting picked apart by medical researchers, held in confinement while my body is given over to instruments and probes in my orifices and irreversible procedures.”

“That won’t happen.”

“Hey, aren’t you confident! Someone is looking for me, Xan!”

“You mean the client?” Xan made a deprecatory flatulent sound through pursed lips. “Come on, they don’t even know what the shield is. They don’t even know that it’s a person. They know nothing.”

Fidiory nodded. Both men stared at the star formation for a few moments. What is it about hypnotic objects that make them so hypnotic? Thought Fidiory. Is it the strange way they catch and reflect light? Is it that the human mind automatically looks for a pattern in the movement and the subtle shifting of the light? To conquer it by finding the key to its predictability?

“Does the client know what the disease is?” asked Fidiory.

“I’d think so.”

“And you’d say they’ve washed out all trace of the disease and its nature from the data?”

“Oh yeah, for sure. They’ve done a good job of that.”

“Well, can you determine where and when the disease is supposed to strike? If I’m the shield, then I suppose I must be immune to it, so I can just show up there and see the effects for myself.”

Xan’s eyes went wide. He touched three fingers to his head. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “If we know that you’re the shield, we can simply inject your position into the data and see what it reveals about the disease’s epicenter.” He began to type furiously at the keyboard. His fingers were a blur as they flitted about over it like insects gathering food. “Today,” he declared as he typed, “you are here in my office. Yesterday… evening… you were at the theater house… do you have the address?”

“It’s on the South Side. Just put down: the south end of the city.”

“Not very precise, but why not. South… end… and before that?”

“I basically went to work and went home all week. Oh, and a few evenings I went over to Fiora’s apartment for dance rehearsal.”

“Do you have the addresses?” Xan turned to Fidiory expectantly.

Fidiory had puckered his mouth thoughtfully. His brow was furrowed.

“I never invited you over to my place,” he said. “What kind of friend is that?”

“There was a context,” assuaged Xan. “We had finished with university, we were moving on…”

“So? Did that make us into new people? Is that a reason to just forget about all the people you’ve been around for years?”

“Look, Fidiory, I didn’t want to contact you either.” Xan looked sad. “In fact, I wasn’t going to. I just wanted the world to forget about me, about this smart kid from Margolia who had shown so much promise, who had perfectly blended into Baguetel’s culture, who would come home to a graduate position and impress the younger students with his flawless foreign-learned dance moves, and had the swagger that goes with it, the bold lack of inhibition and circumspection that comes so hard to us. That contract was broken. I just wanted to be forgotten.”

“The world doesn’t care about any of us. It’s just our nature to believe that it does,” Fidiory replied quietly.

Xan didn’t answer for a moment, and nodded gravely. Then, he turned back to the screen and his hands hovered about the keyboard. “Addresses?” he asked.

Fidiory envied Xan’s capacity to feel so strongly about the events of his life. In his own case, events appeared to be random steps taken in succession along a vague path of self-realization. Of all the potential he had seen in himself, he now discovered that the one true potential, the one that would overshadow all his other talents, the capacity to halt a specific disease, had been hard-wired from birth. It was an ability that required no development and no learning, which simply was. There might be a way to make some money from this, he thought.

“Move over,” he said. “I’ll type out the addresses myself.”

A sense of foreboding gripped him as he typed the addresses. He felt as though he were entering the coordinates for an aerial bombing mission of which he was the target.

“These addresses do not leave this office,” he stipulated. “No information regarding me goes to the client. Let them figure out who I am for themselves, or not at all. Let them show themselves, reveal who they are, first.”

Xan nodded, pacifying Fidiory. In that instant, he knew that he held an absolute trust in his friend. He clapped a hand to Xan’s shoulder. “You’re a good man, Xan. Really dependable.”

Xan chuckled in a self-deprecating way. “I’m going to enter these addresses into the analysis and use them as parameters in the algorithms,” he said. He added, “It may take some time. And, I don’t know for sure that it will converge. The data was given to us some time ago, so the predictability is weakened by not having any indicators that trace you through the past week.”

“Well,” stated Fidiory glibly as he rose to his feet and stretched his legs, “we have all the time we need, don’t we? I mean, so long as we don’t know what disease is currently breaking out onto the world, spreading like, a disease, as far as we’re concerned there isn’t any disease, right? I mean, as long as we don’t know what it is, it’s not our job to stop it. Or, if it is our job, then in any case we don’t have a time frame, so we don’t know for sure that we need to hurry. Or, even if we do know that we need to hurry, we can’t go any faster than your computer is going, right? I’m going to find something to do.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Xan nervously, as though he suspected Fidiory of preparing some juvenile office prank.

“Nothing”, replied Fidiory, surprised by the question. He walked around the office, staring at absent people’s desks and belongings while Xan implemented his analysis. Occasionally, Xan stood and popped out his head over the partitions to check on Fidiory, who called out, “I’m not touching anything!” from where he stood. After a time, Xan called him over with results.

“It appears that you were at the epicenter of the disease, no later than last evening at the theater house,” he announced.

Fidiory drew in his breath sharply. “You were there too!” he exclaimed. “Maybe… Maybe you’re the disease?”

Nonplussed, Xan shook his head solemnly. “Probabilistically,” he pursued, “the first wave of the disease would have originated then and there. Your presence in the area either delayed it or stopped it altogether. I’m not sure. This is where my analysis breaks down: it’s not clear if there’s actually going to be an epicenter. The conditions need to be the same for that to happen.”

“What conditions?”

“Again, unclear,” Xan replied, “but these conditions were assembled last night in the theater house. It must owe to the populations present, the location of the theater house, the proximity to the catalyzing pathogens…”

Fidiory thought for a moment as Xan trailed off. “The same conditions are assembled tonight as well. The Emergent Dances festival takes place over the whole weekend. Last night was just the first night of the festival. There’s a show tonight as well, and a lot of people from last night will be there again tonight. It’s basically the same population. Doesn’t that mean that it’s the same set of conditions?”

Xan nodded. “That’s probably the case, yeah.”

“Fiora is there tonight,” pursued Fidiory. He felt a mounting sense of alarm. His throat went dry. His stomach suddenly felt queasy. “What do we do, Xan?”

Xan stared at Fidiory, noticing his sudden transformation. The urgency of the situation struck him through Fidiory’s concerned look. “We should go there,” he offered. “Right now.”

Fidiory nodded. He had gotten to his feet while mentioning the Emergent Dances festival and now sat back down.

“Don’t sit down,” said Xan. “We should go there now.”

They grabbed their coats and ran out of the building and into the street. It was dark out. Busy as they had been in the office, time had passed faster than they noticed. By now it was late evening. The air was cool and crisp and the city seemed to be placating them with the assurance that it was a Baguetelian night like any other, that the city had weathered its share of crises and remained unflappable. They paused for a moment, having trouble fathoming that somewhere out there, a lot of people depended on them. Fidiory was the first to break out of their momentary torpor. “What’s the quickest way of getting to the theater house?” he asked.

“We should take a taxi if we spot one, otherwise just run,” Xan replied. “The best way would be to run, but to look back regularly all the while, to see if we spot a taxi. There’s also a bus that goes there, but the route takes a detour. The bus will get us there faster than running. But, if we’re on the bus when a taxi goes by, we won’t be able to switch.”

While Fidiory was considering, Xan added, “We should run.” They took off in the direction of the South Side. At the end of each block they stopped running and turned to scan the street for taxis, then turned back again to run.

Fidiory was grateful for Xan’s presence. If Xan weren’t here, he thought, I’d want to sprint, and then I’d quickly expend myself. This is more efficient. This is a good pace. After running a few blocks, he felt warm. Without slowing down, he opened up his coat, letting it flap into the surrounding rush of air. Xan ran conservatively, taking small, measured steps at a high rate. His steady gait suggested that he could maintain this pace indefinitely. His arms, bent at the elbows, executed discrete pendulum movements. His running style was focused and economical, at odds with Fidiory’s wild rush. Fidiory’s arms flailed above a long, irregular stride. Fidiory interpreted the difference as a cultural one. Even with his mind to Fiora’s safety and the need to stop, turn and scan for taxis at the end of each block, Fidiory reminisced about the evenings he had spent dancing the robotic swerve while Xan did the puppet dance. He marveled at how similar the dances were, indistinguishable even, whereas something as basic and goal-oriented as running locked them into such culturally dissimilar idiosyncrasies.

It occurred to him that he was doing something heroic, running head-first and headstrong to save Fiora. However, he dismissed the idea.

I’m not a hero, he thought, heroism implies a certain degree of self-sacrifice. If I’m a shield to this disease, whatever it is, it stands to reason that I’m immune to it. If anyone is heroic here, that would be Xan. Look at him, running along at such a steady pace, his head level. He is totally focused on getting to the theater house, running directly into danger, not a single thought given to his personal safety. Maybe a few. Maybe he’s even prone to deep misgivings, but if anything that only increases his heroism, because he’s simultaneously dealing with his need to save people and his deep misgivings regarding his personal safety. That speaks to the worthiness of his character. Worthy of what, exactly? Do I have a worthy character? I don’t think I’m defined by it, I don’t think people who know me immediately think, ‘Fidiory has a worthy character, he’s a man of integrity. He’s dependable’, and why would they, my character hasn’t developed any noble trait because such traits are born of strong personal strife, of having weathered tests and having surmounted and overcome them. Maybe this, here and now is my test. This is the moment that will define me to myself and give me a sense of who I am. Do I need a sense? Couldn’t I have a sense of myself without a test? How would I define myself? I’m a fun-loving guy with a biting, insightful sense of humor and a keen curiosity about the world and its subtle rules. People who know me would probably describe me differently, of course.

He had by now settled into a pace and was relieved to find that he could keep up with Xan. Then, Xan stopped.

“Do you see a taxi?” asked Fidiory, leaning forward and placing his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

“I think we may have taken a wrong turn,” replied Xan.

“Oh no, that’s unacceptable,” stated Fidiory. “We’ve been running all out because we were sure that it’s the optimal way of getting there as fast as possible. What does that say about us if we’ve gotten lost?”

Xan held up a hand. “Don’t worry.” He turned back to look the way they had come, remaining motionless for an excruciatingly long moment, observing the buildings that lined the street and accessing some deep map memory.

He is taking a moment to appraise the situation because he needs a moment, Fidiory thought. If he could go any faster he would. The last thing he needs right now is for me to interrupt his train of thought by asking him if he knows what he’s doing. I need to stay out of his way and let him focus. “Xan,” he heard himself ask, “Do you have any idea of where you’re going or are you just lost? I hate to be the one to bring this up, but people’s lives are at stake here. How’ll you live with yourself if you got us lost, I don’t know.”

Xan held up the same hand, again. “Relax.”

“Relax? No.”

“Stay loose. It’s important.”

“OK.”

Xan turned both ways once more, then pointed back the way they’d come. “We have to backtrack for a bit. Just two blocks. We made a wrong turn.”

“Are you sure?”

“Come on.” Xan shifted seamlessly into a run. He noted Fidiory’s need for continuity. He needs a directive, he thought. He needs to know that he’s on the right path. Margolians aren’t like that. We just need to know that we’re on any path, whatever it is. All paths go somewhere. We know which paths go nowhere because the people who take those don’t come back. End of story. That’s how Margolians think. It’s not that life doesn’t have value, it’s that it has a value that you can spend. Then again, in a crisis, doesn’t everyone think and act the same? Isn’t a crisis a great equalizer, with cultural differences on hold until it passes, then back to those differences when we can once again afford to be stylish and suboptimal?

He found that he was enjoying this run through Baguetel’s cold night. Though, if his analysis was correct, not far away at the theater house a disease was developing, in the streets the air was cool and fresh. The sensation of wind and speed exhilarated him.

He was almost disappointed when, after they had backtracked to the point where they had taken the wrong turn, he spotted the taxi going in the right direction. He jumped up and down, waving his arms frenetically to express urgency, as Fidiory caught up to him. “A taxi, good,” puffed Fidiory.

The taxi pulled up and the driver eyed them warily. They climbed in and gave him directions to the theater house. “This is urgent,” said Fidiory, “we need to get there as fast as possible.”

The driver nodded, but replied, “I respect the driving code. I don’t endanger my life or my passengers’.”

“This is a question of life and death,” insisted Fidiory.

“Everyone says that.”

“Please just hurry,” said Xan, and they left it at that. The taxi wound through Baguetel’s large South Side streets, stopping at traffic lights for infuriatingly interminable lengths of time. Xan and Fidiory remained silent on the way. The presence of the taxi driver revealed to them that there was, in fact, an unspoken pact of secrecy about their mission, a reluctance to divulge their intentions. They looked out their respective taxi windows, watching the flow of shop windows, restaurants, bars, and the occasional warehouse or small factory, as the city unraveled glimpses of its normalcy, the aggregation of the many individual ambitions that had fed off of one another to build an overarching identity. Following one last turn, they arrived at the theater house. A crowd had gathered in front of it.

The crowd was dancing.

“It’s here,” declared Xan.

“This is your life and death situation?” the driver asked, incredulous.

Xan and Fidiory exchanged a quizzical look, then paid the man and got out. The taxi driver looked at the crowd, shook his head and drove off. “What now?” asked Fidiory.

“Close proximity and heat generated from the dancing bodies.” Xan was thinking aloud. “You might say that this is the perfect vector for a contagious disease. The people here are breathing all over each other.”

“Why are they dancing?” asked Fidiory. “There’s no music.”

The realization was jarring. The people dancing were silent save for the sounds of their bodies on the sidewalk and against one another. They displayed none of the shouting attendant on crowds in general.

They danced in thoroughly different ways. Some danced alone, others in couples. Some danced in groups, linked up at the arms and swirling about. Some gyrated, others jumped up and down. Yet, in spite of the strong variations in style, they shared a unifying rhythm. It appeared as though some overarching synchronization mechanism was in effect, as though this crowd of dancers were hearing some music that Fidiory and Xan could not. They stood, fascinated, and stared at the dancers, feeling like they were refusing some subtle invitation. Then, like eyesight adjusting to the night darkness, they began to notice other people who weren’t dancing either. The non-dancers stood at the periphery of the crowd, lined against the walls of the theater house, staring at the crowd of dancers. Some looked merely worried. Others bore expressions of horrified impotence. Xan pointed at them. “We should go talk to them”.

They approached a man who was standing with his hands on his hips. He looked like the decisive type, like a man prompt to action who was now disarmed by the inexplicable event unfolding before him. “What’s happening here?” Xan asked him.

The man shook his head. “I don’t know. We were watching the show and my wife just started dancing. I couldn’t get her to stop. At a certain point someone shut off the music and people just started flowing out of the theater house, but they all just came here and continued to dance. I followed my wife outside, but now I can’t find her in the crowd!”

Xan stared at the crowd of dancers. The size of it was difficult to gauge, but he nevertheless guessed that they were far more numerous than the theater house could hold. “All these people were at the show?” he asked the man.

The man who shook his head again. “No, that’s the weirdest thing. Most of these people weren’t at the show at all, they were just walking by and then joined in. It’s like their minds just shut off. It’s really hard to even talk to anybody. Go ahead and try it, you’ll see. You talk to someone and they’ll answer you something short, like they’re in a hurry to get somewhere and you’re keeping them from it, they’ll give you this short answer and they’ll just sort of turn away, and they won’t stop dancing to answer you. My wife too, and that’s not the way she is, generally, but she just brushed me off!”

Xan and Fidiory exchanged a look, then both silently nodded. Clearly, dancing wasn’t a vector of the disease. Dancing was the disease.

“We should alert the proper authorities,” ventured Xan.

Fidiory noticed an ambulance parked across the street and pointed it out to Xan. “Someone already called for an ambulance,” he said. “And I’m guessing that the ambulance drivers are somewhere in this crowd.” He scanned the crowd looking for medics’ uniforms, to no avail. As they watched, a group of people on the sidewalk opposite the theater paused, then spontaneously drifted across the street and into the crowd, twitching into dancing moves as they neared. The crowd was swelling like a breathing lung. It spilled into the street as the newcomers approached. A car passed by and honked loudly, then swerved into the remaining lane that the crowd had yet to occupy.

“It’s not going to stop!” exclaimed Fidiory, “it’s just going to get bigger! Xan, I’m supposed to be the shield. Tell me what to do? What should I be doing to stop it?”

Xan shook his head helplessly. “How should I know?” They watched as more passers-by approached the theater house and were sucked into the crowd.

And then, Fidiory knew. He felt that rare, elating certitude, a clicking revelation, irrefutable somehow, inescapable to the person making it, impossible to articulate. “I know how to stop it,” he said to Xan, “I just have to join them and dance. They’ll stop dancing when I start.”

He expected Xan to contradict him on this, to promote reason, so he was surprised when Xan replied, “I can see that working, maybe a pheromone that you’d secrete while dancing? Try it, in any case.”

“Would you find Fiora? I can’t see her anywhere, and I may be busy for some time. It’s going to take a lot of effort to quell this crowd. That much I’m sure of.”

Xan nodded, “OK.” Then, “should I call the epidemiology center? Maybe they know all about dancing epidemics. I’m just wary of alerting them to the presence of the shield, you know… you. You’d want to avoid being used as a research tool…” he trailed off, waiting for Fidiory’s assent but silently agreeing not to make the call should Fidiory refuse.

Fidiory placed a grateful hand on his shoulder. “Do what you have to, Xan. Call the epidemiology center. They’ll know what to do. This kind of epidemic must have happened before. That’s how the client knew that another one was coming. They won’t find me, though. I’m going to dance, then I’m going to disappear.” He waded into the crowd and started to dance.

Xan watched him and noted, fondly, that he was doing the robotic swerve. He does it well, he thought. He has real talent. He’s very expressive.

Fidiory pumped his shoulders and brought his hands up to chest level, first one then the other, before letting them slip back down again. His legs arched, feet planted, then slid toward one another, synchronized to his arm movement. His head was motionless, hanging forward, face downward cast, as though all of his body above the shoulders was not participating in the present movement and had yet to be solicited. It conveyed a sense of mechanical disjointedness, a bodily modularity, like an assembly of parts that were conceived as separate entities and could function separately with a minimum of internal communication.

Xan left him and circled around the periphery of the crowd, looking for Fiora. I don’t even know what I’ll do if I find her dancing, he thought. What’s to be done, anyway? If she’s under the same compulsion as all these other people, she won’t be persuaded to stop anyway. He decided that he would circle just once around the crowd to look for her, then find a telephone to call the epidemiology center. He approached the crowd deliberately, scanning for Fiora’s features in the writhing mass of bodies. Will I recognize her if she’s partially hidden by other dancers? He wondered. What’s the bare minimum view of her that I need to see for recognition to trigger?

He had made a complete turn and found himself near the theater house entrance when he spotted Mancia emerging from it. She was visibly distressed and she glanced about restlessly. Their eyes met and she ran to him. “Xan!” she exclaimed. She grabbed his shoulders, her nails biting into his flesh through his shirt, as though she were afraid that he might be wrested away by the surrounding crowd. “I don’t know what to do, Xan! Fiora’s sick. She collapsed. She’s inside. I called for an ambulance, but they’re not coming!”

“They came. They’re here. The medics must be somewhere in the crowd, dancing,” Xan explained. He added, “Fidiory is here too. He’s going to fix this. By dancing. It’s hard to explain.”

“Xan, Fiora has collapsed! I think she’s badly injured.”

Xan nodded. “I’m going to call the epidemiology center. They’ll send people who have the technology to resist getting sucked into a crowd of dancers.” Hearing himself speak, he mentally pictured experts advancing toward them, sealed off in whole-body suits and anonymous, opaque visors. He hoped that he was right.

11

As he danced, Fidiory experimented with his newfound power. In certain cases, he found he had only to touch the person he was liberating so that he/she would stop gyrating or wriggling or whatever dance move he/she was executing. The person would then look around bewildered as though suddenly awoken from a deep sleep. Then, he/she would walk out of the crowd, looking embarrassed. If he wasn’t himself dancing, he found, his attempt at liberating anyone was without effect. The person would receive his touch and continue to dance as though nothing had happened. So, Fidiory danced on, approaching people with a shimmying side step during which he’d bend sideways at the neck, then roll that bend downwards to his hip in one fluid wave-like motion, then jerk his feet sideways to place them under his hips’ new position. It was slow going to reach people, but the crowd was dense and the people were close to one another, so he didn’t have far to move each time. He couldn’t just walk up to people, then resume dancing and touch them, it was as if he needed the impetus of the shimmying approach to trigger the wake-up action that his power conferred. In certain cases, he found that he didn’t need to touch the person directly with skin-on-skin contact, that it sufficed to unroll an arm at the termination of a wave motion and then point a finger from the waving hand at that person as though the wave had left his body and was being propelled through the air toward the target, like some ethereal field ray. Somehow, the person would receive the ray and suddenly go motionless, blinking and looking confused. The person would then push out of the crowd and either wander off into the night or go looking for the people with whom he/she had come to the show. One by one, Fidiory woke people out of their dancing fever. No one spoke to him. No one asked him how he had awakened them, or what their state had been, or if it might occur again. No one, upon waking up, offered to help him wake up the others. In any case, Fidiory couldn’t be assisted, which was a disappointment. He had hoped that he would wake up a few people who would in turn each wake a few other people and so on, so that the people awakening should spread rapidly, in exponential acceleration. Such was not the case, however. He had to wake people up one at a time and all evidence indicated that only he could do it. He saw on the outskirts of the crowd that people were still joining it, still getting infected and being absorbed into the writhing mass of sick dancers. It alarmed him. It set a pace for his dance of healing. It meant that he needed to jolt dancers out of their dancing compulsion at a faster rate than new adherents were being contaminated by it, or the epidemic would spiral out of control until the whole world was dancing, or at least a crushing majority of people, given that a certain fraction of the population seemed to have a natural immunity to the disease. This, he felt, was the last stand, the only stand that would be made against the outbreak, and no one could make it but him. So he danced. He spun and touched two different people on their shoulders, one with the left hand and the other with the right. He then rolled his fists over one another in a continuous follow-me-follow-you motion as he sidled sideways, with small steps, then reached out and prodded someone full in the chest with rigid fingers set in double prong. Everyone he touched immediately went motionless, as if the energy they had been displaying up to then were suddenly drained out from them through the base of their feet.

Fidiory wasn’t restricting himself solely to the robotic swerve. He was branching out, creating new moves or copying moves from other dances, though he would systematically go back to the robotic swerve following those new moves, as though returning home, or coming to an equilibrium.

He shook from his legs, then his core, then flung out his arms to point them at another woman, who had been dancing facing perpendicular to him. She stopped dancing. Fidiory wondered if she had seen him from her peripheral vision or if some other channel carried the healing signal. He tested it by swinging his knees inwards, then out, then alternatively pumping each fist upwards, then bringing both his fists down and out in front of him so that both of his arms were pointing directly at a person whose back was turned to him. To Fidiory’s growing wonder, it worked. The person stopped dancing.

After some time waking dancers from their compulsion, he began to notice the music. It explained how the dancers were synchronized to a common beat even though they pushed their bodies in wildly different styles. It wasn’t music that could be heard. There was no melody, no notes, not even any sound. The sensation of music, however, was present and manifest in this crowd, a beat egging the dancers on, a succession of emotionally colored tones and yearning voices. Fidiory would have been incapable of identifying the organ in his body with which he perceived this music, but its presence was undeniable. Undeniable, too, was the potency of its pull. He intuited that his own action, the touching of the dancers that wrested them from the grip of the dancing fever, was tantamount to cutting them off from the source of the music. When he made contact with someone, when he saw their eyes glaze over, then begin to blink rapidly, he felt the music stopping for them, the instant memory of it draining away from their consciousness, to be replaced by a vague sensation of loss, of summary exclusion. Cut off from the other dancers, having no recollection of their purpose in this crowd, they then had no other option but to leave it, to walk away confused and foggy.

As he worked his way toward the heart of the crowd, Fidiory began to notice fallen dancers, sprawled out on the pavement of the theater house front, still twitching, still caught up in the dance even after exhaustion and dehydration had knocked them down.

His purpose as a shield was all too apparent to him. If I had not come, he thought, these people would have danced here until they all collapsed. He stopped and made a full, slow turn, taking in the sheer numbers of the crowd and feeling the tug of despair. There are too many of them, he thought. I can’t wake them all. And more of them are coming, people off the street, they come near out of curiosity and then the music sucks them in. Soon, they’ll be joining faster than I can work them out.

A hand rested on his shoulder. He turned, relieved to see Xan. “I can’t do it!” he cried. “There’s too many of them! There are more of them all the time!”

“Fiora is inside,” replied Xan. “She’s hurt. I called the epidemiology center. I don’t know what they understood of the situation, but they’re coming.”

“I have to help Fiora! I have to save all these people! I have to get out of there before the epidemiologists show up!”

Xan nodded.

“How do I do it, Xan?”

“How should I know?”

“You said you needed your Margolian background to make the data analysis converge! This has something to do with Margolia! Tell me what it is!”

Xan’s eyebrows arched in thoughtful surprise.

“Xan!” Fidiory was now shouting. “Come on, think! What does this have to do with Margolia?”

“I…I’m not….It’s…” Xan stammered.

“Xan!” shouted Fidiory.

“Shut up! Sputtered Xan, shaking his head from side to side. “Shut up and let me think!”

Fidiory breathed hard and stared wild-eyed at Xan, making every effort not to speak. Xan looked up with an unfocused gaze, silently mouthing words as though he were reciting a story from memory.

A long moment passed. Fidiory was breathing hard, yet felt as though he were holding his breath. He stared at Xan, whose eyes were now turned upwards into the night sky and whose lips cycled silently through foreign words, while all around them bodies shimmied and gyrated with frenzied energy.

Then, Xan blinked and met Fidiory’s stare. “An ancient legend,” he started. “A myth surrounding one of Margolia’s greatest emperors. A story about a strange creature that came to claim the emperor’s daughter. I’m starting to think that it may have been symbolic. That this creature wasn’t a creature in the traditional sense of the word, that maybe the myth was built around an early struggle against an unbeatable foe, such as a disease. Maybe the creature was this disease.”

“OK…?” Fidiory assented by shaking his head, prompting for some action.

“Listen,” said Xan. “You can wake everyone up in one stroke. But first, you have to harmonize them. You have to get them to fall into the same dance, to speak with the same body language. Then, when you wake one of them up, they’ll all wake up together. The wave of awakening will traverse them like lightning.”

“But how, how do I do that? What do I do?”

“Fidiory, listen to me.” Xan placed both hands on Fidiory’s shoulders and leaned in close, marking his every word. “You have to organize these people. You have to reach them, and get them to dance the same dance. You have to get everybody to do the robotic swerve. It’s the only way. I’ll help you. We’ll do it together, OK? This is how it has to be.”

He didn’t give Fidiory a chance to respond. Raising his voice to address the crowd, he announced, “We’re doing the robotic swerve!” and immediately launched into it, his hands straightening out with fingers splayed like fork prongs. Fidiory followed his lead, mirroring Xan’s gestures.

Xan’s execution was odd. His rhythm was slightly off that of the crowd’s. Fidiory understood that Xan, who evidently was immune to the disease, couldn’t hear the mysterious music. He worked to influence their common speed subtly, gradually, by hinting at the proper rhythm and allowing Xan to adapt. Xan picked up the hint almost immediately, being aware of the crowd’s silent concertation though he wasn’t privy to it. He fell into Fidiory’s lead gracefully.

This will never work, thought Fidiory, exaggerating his gestures to attract the crowd’s attention. A crowd is a wild beast, it can’t be organized, it’s an entropic mess, it’s whatever multiplied by whatever, and so on as many times as there are people in it. Why would they follow any directive? Why would they follow me?

“Talk to them,” said Xan, as though he had heard Fidiory’s thoughts. “Tell them what you want them to do. You’re the shield.” His tone, calm and steady, seemed to be saying: ‘believe in yourself. Believe in yourself, and they will follow you.’

When did Xan become so wise?, thought Fidiory. He’s so aimless and clumsy where his own life is concerned.

“Popping shoulders!” he shouted. “Popping shoulders, one, then the other!” Two women turned to face him and imitated his gesture, smiling. “Popping shoulders!” he shouted again.

“Popping a shoulder!” echoed Xan, to his side.

Not ‘popping a shoulder’…popping shoulders! As in: both shoulders! Thought Fidiory. What does that mean anyway, ‘popping a shoulder?’ He’s going to ruin this with his blundering rendition of the robotic swerve, with that stupid puppet dance he goes on about. He’s supposed to be helping me, not ‘popping a shoulder’!

Recognizing fear and doubt in his thoughts, he dispelled them willfully.

“Arms at right angles!” he shouted. “We are robots! We are all robots! Robots of the night!”

A few people joined the two women who faced them, suggesting the initial stirring of a crowd movement.

“We are all the same robot!” echoed Xan. “We are a single, magnificent robot! A big robot! Majestic and complex.”

From shoulder popping, then arm movement, they introduced the people to wavelike torso rotation, then leg movement: the foot shuffling and the sliding. Gradually, everyone in the crowd was turning to face them like metal filings aligning in a magnetic field. They were mostly getting the movements of the robotic swerve wrong, but the atmosphere was suffused in fun and no one seemed bothered by their own ineptitude as they strove to express the robotic swerve’s basic movements and the ironic illusion that it entailed.

Maybe irony doesn’t scale, thought Fidiory. Maybe crowds can’t be ironic, or people in crowds don’t want to be. Maybe the joy of dancing in a group, the togetherness, demands that the irony be put aside for a time, so as to focus on the present moment, to feel whole, to return to a pure state that leaves no room for reference, a state that exists only for itself.

Yet here they were, countless people doing the robotic swerve, imperfectly, awkwardly ,but also simply and without hesitation. The dance spread rapidly through the crowd, gaining momentum with each added participant. It reached critical mass and kept accelerating, like a fire that had caught and required no more kindling or stoking, incurring no further resistance, turning the remaining dancers to its inexorable influence until everyone in the crowd was doing it. Only those nearest to Fidiory could hear his instructions, but all followed them. Xan echoed alternate interpretations of those same instructions. Fidiory organized the robotic swerve into small sequences of movements that he repeated, over and over again until the crowd anticipated them and fell into sequence even when he delayed his instructions. He tested the programming by sporadically falling silent and relying solely on his movements, gauging how much the crowd was engaged.

“They’re ready!” hissed Xan.

“You think so?”

“Yes! Bring them in. First, you bring them in close to you. Then, when they’re packed close enough, you wake them up, all of them, all of them at once!”

Fidiory nodded. He made to speak to the crowd, but Xan beat him to it.

“Everyone press in!” shouted Xan.

That’s for me to say! Thought Fidiory. “Everyone come in close!” he shouted. He waved, motioning for everyone to approach.

The crowd’s brilliant and destructive sun.

The first circle of dancers advanced. Then, those behind them followed, and so on. Seen from above, the crowd resembled a collapsing lung. In the midst of a double arm swing, elbows held high in front of him, hands clasped together with fingers entwined, Fidiory abruptly stopped dancing. He reached out and touched the dancer closest to him.

It happened to be one of the first women to join in on the robotic swerve. The easygoing smile on her face momentarily curled into a shocked grimace. Then, she blinked a few times and her features sunk into placid neutrality. One by one, the other dancers followed suit, going motionless as if shedding the dance like a coat. In the space of a few seconds, the only remaining dancer was Xan, who saw the crowd go listless but wanted to finish the dance anyway. In the crowd, questioning faces turned to one another. Few spoke. In the sudden immobility brought about by the dancing stoppage, an expectant hush descended on the crowd.

Xan put a hand on Fidiory’s shoulder. “Fiora’s inside,” he said.

Fidiory nodded and turned to follow him. They pushed their way toward the theater house entrance through the mass of stranded people, drawing empty stares. People were already showing signs of reanimation. Some started to make their own way out of the crowd, as though remembering some appointment.

A procession of five large white vans pulled up the street and stopped a short distance from the crowd. Xan noticed them as he climbed the few steps of the theater house and pointed them out to Fidiory.

“The epidemiology center,” he said. “I wonder why they sent so many vans. Do you think …?”

Fidiory joined Xan on the steps and turned to look as well. The back doors of the vans swung open and uniformed men began to drop out of them, hitting the ground running, swinging around the parked vans and speeding toward the already dispersing crowd. The men dressed all in black, with heavy boots and helmets with opaque visors.

“You don’t think…” said Fidiory, as the first of them reached the crowd.

“Are they going to…” echoed Xan.

The uniformed men produced long, shiny batons from side pockets in their headlong rush and began administering blows to the people in their path. Screams erupted from the crowd as the blows rained down, accelerating the dispersion but imbuing it with a panicked, self-defeating energy, as people sought to leave the area in all directions and collided with one another, or bounced off the throng of helmeted men who were swinging their batons brutally, aiming at heads, arms and retreating legs, advancing in formation and bullying the crowd. Stragglers fell under their deliberate onslaught.

“So. You called the epidemiology center,” said Fidiory. “Who do you suppose they called?”

“I thought it was the smartest course of action. I thought they’d know what to do,” replied Xan, at a loss. “We’d better get inside.”

They reentered the theater house and moved past the now abandoned ticket booth, then through the doors of the theater room. At the far end of the large hall, on the stage overlooking the rows of empty seats, was Fiora. She lay slightly turned onto her side, with one of her legs carelessly flung over the other. Her arms were stretched out. She looked like a discarded doll. Mancia kneeled near her head, one hand resting on her shoulder. She looked concerned but loath to make any contact beyond that hand, as though she were afraid of making her even more broken.

Fidiory and Xan ran down the aisle and jumped up on the stage, propping their arms over the stage edge and vaulting over them. Xan hit the stage with too much momentum and had to quickly jump a second time to avoid Fiora’s prostrate form, picking up his feet just in time to avoid kicking her in the face. He narrowly cleared her head and crashed to the floor just behind her. Fidiory barely managed to reach the stage and sat down heavily on its edge with a mid-air torso rotation, bruising a hip. He swung his legs up and clambered to his knees beside Fiora.

“Fiora?”

Fiora opened her eyes and stared weakly at him.

“We’re going to get you some help, only it’s going to take some time because Xan accidentally called the riot police and they’re beating everyone up.”

“What?” said Fiora.

“What?” echoed Mancia, looking up sharply.

“They have sticks,” explained Xan, kneeling behind Fiora. “I probably shouldn’t have called them. I don’t know, though. Time will tell.”

“Fiora,” said Fidiory, “are you in a lot of pain? Can you get up?”

Shaking her head, Mancia interjected, “She can’t get up.”

Fiora stirred, and winced. “What happened?” she asked. She struggled briefly to shift into a less painful position, then gave up with a sigh and plopped her head back down onto the floor.

“There was an epidemic, Fiora. A dancing epidemic. We don’t know anything about how it spreads or what the source is, but it’s over now, in any case.” He paused, then added, “They’re beating people up because they think they’re sick, only they’re not sick. Well, not anymore, anyhow.”

“Why would they do that?” asked Fiora. “You don’t beat sick people. My whole upper body hurts. I’m thirsty.”

“We should get her to a hospital. Or at least out of here,” offered Xan.

“Fiora, I’m very sorry that this happened to you,” said Fidiory. “If I’d have been here, with you…” his voice trailed off. He caressed Fiora’s face with a hand placed under her head for support. He turned her face slightly up, bent forward, and kissed her lips. Fiora pushed his face away, with more force than any of them would have expected.

“I can’t breathe! And you’re twisting my neck! Why would you do that, here and now?” she burst out.

“I…I don’t know,” stammered Fidiory. “You’re injured, I don’t know how much time we might have…”

“What? I’m dying, is that it? Is that what you’re telling me, that I’m dying?”

“You’re not dying,” interjected Mancia, frowning at Fidiory. She gestured to him with an open hand, hovering palm turned upwards, as if to say, ‘what are you thinking?’

“Well, we’re all dying, to different degrees, in different timeframes, I was just, you know, trying to be nice to my present self, not just my future selves.”

“Oh. Ohhhh, you’re being nice to yourself, that’s adorable,” shot back Mancia. “You just saved the world. I guess you’ve deserved this then. I guess you’re entitled to your prize. Go ahead and claim her, take what you’ve earned.”

“No, don’t,” chimed in Fiora. “Don’t kiss me. Even if I am dying, don’t make my final moments weird.”

Xan cleared his throat. “We should go,” he said.

“What, and just leave her here?” hissed Mancia.

“I don’t think I said that,” replied Xan, raising his chin pugnaciously.

“I’m not dying, and please don’t leave me here,” pleaded Fiora. “I’m coming with you.” She rolled onto her stomach and slowly, painfully, pulled her knees up under her hips.

“I’ll carry you,” offered Fidiory. They helped Fiora into a sitting position, letting her legs dangle over the edge of the stage, then Fidiory got down from the stage and stood with his back to her. She wrapped her legs around his waist and arms around his neck. Gently, he tugged forward until she slipped off the edge of the stage and all her weight came to rest on his back. “Ow! My ribs!” she moaned.

“I’ll try to be gentle,” promised Fidiory.

“We should use the emergency exit,” proposed Xan. “That’ll lead into an alley, away from the riot police. The last thing we need right now is for Fiora to be savagely beaten up. In her present state, I mean.”

They found the emergency exit from a passageway heading out of the theater hall from the right side. Fidiory found Fiora surprisingly light on his back, though he suspected that she would soon feel heavy if they had to go very far. He felt her weight more keenly when they climbed a set of stairs heading up to the exit door.

They stepped out into the night air. A few people were streaming down the alleyway. One man was holding a hand to his bleeding head.

“Let’s go, in the same direction!” Xan shout-whispered. They walked briskly down the alleyway. Behind them, a narrow segment of the street leading in front of the theater house was visible. The crowd had mostly dispersed. A few men in black uniforms ran back and forth in the small window of visible street, holding their batons at shoulder or waist level.

“They’ll run down and beat up a few stragglers, but I don’t think they’ll make any arrests,” affirmed Xan as they reached the end of the alley and emerged onto a larger street. “It actually makes sense. A riot is wholly different thing from an epidemic. Their main priority is to avoid creating a panic in the general population. If you send in the riot police, it means there was a riot, not an epidemic.”

“That makes sense,” assented Mancia. “That’s what I’d do, anyway.”

“Where are we going?” asked Fidiory. “Where’s the closest hospital?”

“There’s one by the river,” said Mancia. “I pass in front of it every day when I go to lunch. You know the one I’m talking about, Xan. What’s its name?”

Xan and Mancia exchanged a look. Xan shrugged. “It never occurred to me that I might get sick.”

“How far is it?” asked Fidiory.

“Why, am I too heavy? Are you going to leave me behind to die?” moaned Fiora from his back. Her forehead rested against his shoulder blade.

“You can just dump her in the street and go on alone,” said Mancia. “You’ll travel faster without her added weight to carry.”

“You should save yourself,” added Xan. “You deserve it. You just saved the world, after all.” They all laughed except Fidiory.

“You saved the world with the power of dance,” said Mancia. They all laughed again, this time with Fidiory chuckling along.

“We’ll stop somewhere along the way. Stop if you see an all-night café,” said Fiora. “I’m so thirsty. I really need to drink something.” Fidiory nodded in relief.

A few blocks further they found one, illuminated by a neon sign flashing through a dust-caked window.

“It’s a Margolian café,” said Xan, his voice tinged with wonder. “It’s an all-night, Margolian café.”

“It looks dirty,” said Mancia.

“I don’t care, I’m thirsty,” replied Fiora.

“I wouldn’t mind sitting down for a bit,” assented Fidiory. They all entered save Xan, who lingered a moment in front of the window, staring at the café sign, before he followed them inside.

They took seats around a corner table. They were the only customers in the café. The walls were covered with posters of Margolian singers, film stars, and other assorted objects of Margolian heritage: a traditional herder’s tie-belt, a gentleman’s formal cap, fingerless climbing gloves. Xan’s gaze darted from one object to the next, his mouth agape in wonder and reminiscence.

“What’s with you, Xan?” asked Fidiory. “You look like you’re discovering Margolia for the first time.”

Xan smiled in reply, but continued to stare at the walls. Fidiory turned to Fiora. “We won’t stay long, just a quick refreshment and then we’ll get you to a hospital.”

Fiora shook her head. “I don’t need to go to the hospital. I’m actually feeling better. My ribs are sore, though. I think I got stepped on when I fell down in the crowd during the show. There were so many people! It really took me by surprise. It didn’t seem like there were that many people when I first approached the stage.”

“I can confirm that,” said Mancia. “You got up first, then a bunch of other people got up too, from all over the place. Some people reached the stage before you did, but you were definitely the first up. In fact, I thought that you triggered the whole stampede toward the stage, that you got it started.”

Fiora’s eyebrows arched. “I was the first?” she said, “Well, I wouldn’t have bet on that.” She looked pleased. Though her gaze remained downcast, her face puckered into a demure smile.

“Did everyone notice how I’m a shield to the dancing disease?” said Fidiory. “Xan saw it in the data. Well, he didn’t see it exactly, but he isolated it. I went over to his office, and there it was on the screen, all my information. There was my national ID number. There was my passport number. All from my personal records, and only Xan could have made that isolation. I must admit I was getting nowhere with the data analysis. Xan? Hey, Xan? Are you with us?”

Xan awoke from his reverie and smiled at his companions. “Of course I’m with you. Or rather, you’re with me. We’re in Margolia here. I’ll order for you.” He motioned to the waiter standing behind the café counter, who approached the table. Speaking in Margolian, Xan ordered four strong ginger teas, in a happy, ebullient voice.

“Will you be able to walk?” Mancia asked Fiora. “If you can’t walk then you need to go to a hospital.”

“I can walk,” replied Fiora. She pushed her chair away from the table, eliciting a chorus of concerned protests from Fidiory and Mancia.

“Take it easy,” pressed Fidiory.

“I’m OK, I can walk,” replied Fiora. Slowly, wincing from the pain in her ribs, she stood and took a few steps around the table, supporting herself with the chair backs, the table edge and her companion’s shoulders. “It’s like I’m still waking up,” she explained. She completed a full circle of the table, wincing every few steps.

“You were completely out for some time. I was worried. I really thought you were dying,” admitted Mancia.

“I think I was still under the effect of the… whatever it was.”

“Do you remember it?” inquired Fidiory. “Can you describe it?”

Fiora didn’t answer immediately. “It was strange,” she said. “There I was, sitting in the audience, and we were watching one of the dancing troupes onstage, and I was really caught up in their performance, and at a certain point… it’s hard to explain…I felt like a tingling sensation all over my body, and also as if there was a rush of water around my head, and as I watched the stage, I felt as though I were already there, up on the stage, dancing with them, and that the part of me still in the audience was just a shadow, or a memory. All of a sudden I was scared that if I stayed where I was sitting down, then I would slip into the past, become fossilized. I felt like I had to get up. I had to get to the stage, or as close to it as possible, anyhow. I had to be up on my feet and dancing to stay in the present. I can’t explain it any other way. When I was near the stage, and all the people were pressing in around me, I saw the look on their faces, it was clearly the same for them too: they just had to get up and dance. Suddenly, it was the most important thing in the world. After that, my memory is hazy. I was near the stage, dancing. I felt very free, like my movements were predetermined and required no thinking. I was aware that I was dancing, but I couldn’t tell you what each part of my body was doing. I felt disconnected from it. And then I was on the ground, and I thought, ‘I’m going to be trampled’, but for some reason it didn’t matter. My main concern was that I had to continue moving, and even down there on the floor it was no different, I was lying down but I had to dance. People were stepping on me and it didn’t matter. Eventually, I don’t know how, but I got back up to my feet again.”

The ginger teas arrived. Spicy, aromatic steam rose from the amber liquid as the three non-Margolians tentatively sniffed at it. Xan poised his face above his own large glass cup and closed his eyes a moment.

“Well,” said Fidiory after he’d taken a sip, “they’re going to call the Emergent Dances festival a success. I mean, they had to send in the riot police, right?”

“You think that’s a measure of success?” scoffed Mancia. “Good luck finding a venue for it next year. All it does is solidify the reputation of experimental dance fans for being nothing more than louts prone to wanton violence.”

“So what?” replied Fidiory. “It’ll attract new fans. And more importantly: because we were participants in this show, our dance will now be easier to promote.” He looked at Fiora, who shrugged in a way that destabilized him. “We will be promoting it, right?” he asked, leveling his forehead down toward her.

“I don’t think that I’ll be dancing anymore,” said Fiora. “I’m done with dancing.”

“What? Why?” asked Mancia. “You were so engrossed onstage after the epidemic started. I couldn’t get you to stop!”

“That part is blurry to me,” said Fiora, “but I remember being in a timeless place, then falling out of it, as if someone had kicked me off a high ledge. Then there was this sensation of prolonged falling, then a crash. I got confused, I couldn’t assess my own body, I didn’t know where my body parts were. It was as if I was dissolving, as if my parts were being dispersed.” She stared into her tea cup, twirling the golden liquid around in its glass base. “Yeah, I’m done with dancing.”

“Don’t say that,” said Mancia. “I’m the one who made you stop, you’re going to make me feel like it’s my fault.”

“We’re all tired,” interjected Xan in a voice imbued with ancient Margolian wisdom. “Decisions should not be made in such a state.”

“So, do we take you to a hospital or not?” Fidiory asked Fiora. Fiora shook her head.

“Then we should all take a taxi together,” Fidiory resumed. “You all stay here and have your tea. I’ll go stand on the sidewalk and wait for a taxi to go by.”

He stood up. Xan stood as well. “I’ll come with you.”

…

Outside, the streets were empty. A light rain was falling, soundlessly licking the ground. An occasional car went by, slowly, as though lost or looking for someone who was lost.

“What are you going to do about this project?” said Fidiory. “You’ll be giving the client a report soon. I can’t ask you to suppress your results to hide my identity as the shield. It’s just that…well, actually that is what I’m asking. Will you do it? Suppress your results? If it becomes known that I’m the shield, I could get some unwanted attention.”

“I really don’t think you’d need to be worried about that,” replied Xan. His quiet voice evoked deep skepticism. “What’s the worst that could happen? A few research laboratories might ask you for a gene sample. That’s it.” As he spoke, he leaned forward to see as far as possible down the street, watching for car lights.

“But I don’t want to be identified,” Fidiory protested. “What if there are other outbreaks of the epidemic? Do you think that the laboratories will maintain their scruples when a large part of the population becomes infected?”

Xan stared at him curiously. “If a large part of the population were to be infected, wouldn’t you want to help?” he asked, incredulous.

“Of course I would, but I’d want to do it on my own terms, obviously. If there were other epidemics, I’d come forward. It’s not as if anyone were in any real danger, anyway. There were just dancing.”

“Had we not arrived, they would have continued to dance until total exhaustion set in. There would have been severe cases, possibly death. Add to that that we don’t know what other symptoms might have developed if we hadn’t stopped it.”

“Look, I’ll come forward if there’s another outbreak, OK?” assured Fidiory, “Just don’t point me out to the client. A client who functions anonymously, from the shadows, cannot be trusted. It’s a guarantee of shadiness.”

Xan sighed, then nodded. “I suppose I can wind my analysis back a bit, use an intermediary result as my conclusion.”

Fidiory exhaled in relief. “Thanks. In my own report, I’ll just put in that I didn’t make any progress.” He yawned. “Which, as it happens, is the truth. This was nice. We should get back to dancing, you and I. Fiora is going to quit, and in any case, to be honest, I was never very keen on the couples’ version of the robotic swerve. It feels wrong. It boxes couples into an incompatible framework.”

Fidiory appeared struck by his own revelation. “Robots can’t attach themselves to other robots,” he added. “Their purpose is to serve, not bond.”

Xan yawned in turn. “Your yawn is catchy!” he said. Then, “isn’t it done ironically? The robot couple?”

Fidiory shrugged. “Where’s the irony in that?”

In the distance, the unmistakable triangle of a taxi’s headlights and top sign-light appeared. Fidiory and Xan slipped into the street and waved it down. After it had pulled up to the sidewalk, Xan waited alongside it while Fidiory went inside to get Mancia and Fiora.

“The taxi’s here!” he announced. “Xan and I were just discussing the robotic swerve, we-“

“Dancing is stupid,” said Fiora, cutting him off as she got to her feet.

Epilogue

During the following months, Fidiory and Xan developed their dance on the contest circuit. They placed variably in these competitions, depending on how well their unique brand of irony was perceived. Xan, however, had never truly been on board with irony, even from the start, and increasingly he attended the events with a mental remoteness that showed onstage, a dissociation that made him seem absent in performances that required total commitment. He nevertheless continued to attend, out of friendship and loyalty to Fidiory. It was evident that Fidiory couldn’t stop, that he had discovered himself in this activity and would persist in it for as long as he could.

Xan’s resistance mounted, crystallizing in a moment when he stared from the window of the hotel resort where they had just finished performing and saw people swimming in the lake below. The possibility that people could defy gravity by boldly immersing themselves in large bodies of water transported him. He had heard of people practicing this discipline. According to anthropologists, it had been prevalent long ago. A mode of locomotion that was the norm in times before humans were human. It struck him as the epitome of human stubbornness to refuse to give it up.

In the hotel bar, sitting at a table across from Fidiory, toying with his drink glass, he knew with absolute certainty that he would regret letting this opportunity pass. He got up, left the hotel bar, took the stairs down to the first floor, left the building through the back door, took the path leading down to the lake and stood there, on the thin crescent of beach, watching the swimmers reach shallow waters and head out again, until Tinora came out of the water to dry herself with a towel and sit on a table overlooking the lake. She was refreshed and invigorated by her swim. He sat next to her and plied her with questions, totally uninhibited, fascinated by the water-bound locomotion he had just witnessed and deeply curious about it.

Back at the hotel bar, Fidiory remained seated at the same table and spied his friend as a little dot of color down below at a table on the beach, beside a female dot that had just emerged from the water. He measured the importance of this moment.

This is it, he thought with a strange mixture of disappointment and relief, this is the last time we will have performed together. I should find something new to do. He finished his drink and headed back to the dance hall to hear the results of the contest.

…

The judges had finished marking their appreciations and gave their choices in sealed envelopes to an organizer. The gesture was largely symbolic, because the envelopes were immediately opened and the votes summed up. A short time later, an organizer appeared onstage carrying a card with the names of the winners. He pronounced a short speech announcing the end of the contest, thanking the participants, thanking the other organizers and sponsors of the event, reminding all present that placing well at such a contest opened opportunities, listing the accomplishments of previous winners from past events. He then declared that the folk troupe in battle gear had won. He warmly shook each of their hands as they walked onto the stage to collect their large check, bearing the sponsors’ logo and a large amount of money scrawled onto it in vigorous handwriting.

After the battle dancers had beamed and smiled and been displaced to the back of the stage, the organizer announced several special secondary prizes. Other troupes walked onstage. He then announced the winners of the prize for ‘Best Innovation in the Field of Ironic Dancing’. Fidiory heard his name called out and stood up, exhilarated at his long-awaited triumph and relieved that Xan wasn’t there to ruin this moment for him. He ran up to the stage, jumped onto it and bounced up and down. He turned to the audience and waved with extended arms. He ran up to the organizer, shook his hand and received the prize: two ironic caps, one for each troupe member. Xan being absent, Fidiory donned both of them on his head. The crowd applauded lustily, buoyed by his enthusiasm.

“Should I say a few words?” Fidiory asked the organizer.

“No, that won’t be necessary,” the organizer replied, uneasy. Fidiory’s celebration was unexpectedly intense.

Fidiory turned to the audience and started to bounce up and down again. “Thank you, thank you!” he shouted, over and over. He raised his arms in triumph, feet planted far apart, hands balled into fists, knuckles whitening from the force with which he clenched them. He looked like he was gripping an invisible rope tethered to the sky.

“OK then,” said the organizer, patting Fidiory’s shoulder blade with a placating hand.

“I saved the world!” shouted Fidiory. “I saved the world from a dancing epidemic! I am a master of ironic dancing!”

“OK, OK,” the organizer said, smiling.

Fidiory jumped around the stage, pumping his fists and shouting “wooo!” The organizer, who still had other prizes to give out and needed him to stop jumping up and down and shouting, followed him closely.

…

Xan sat with Tinora, excited. He needed to learn to swim. He wanted to be put in contact with a teacher. He wanted her to teach him. He abruptly stopped talking, mid-sentence, to gaze out at the water, marveling at his own enthusiasm, focusing on the sudden sense of purpose.

“We should bring swimming to people,” he declared. “We should make it so that anyone can learn to swim.”

“Everyone doesn’t live near water,” Tinora pointed out.

“But what if…we were to build an artificial lake, right in the city?” replied Xan. As he spoke, images materialized in his mind. “We could dig a hole in the floor of some covered, hangar-like structure, not too large, just enough that crossing it at a typical swimming speed might take a few minutes. We’d have lanes. The hole would be coated so as to prevent water seeping out of it. We could heat the water so that people could swim in it in winter as well.”

“If the hole is too deep,” remarked Tinora “it might be dangerous for novices. Novices need to have footing when they’re still learning to swim”. She was charmed by his use of ‘we’ to describe his plans, this strange man who she had just met yet with whom she already felt familiar. His excitement flooded her with her own distant memories of learning to swim.

He hasn’t even been in the water yet! She thought. He doesn’t even know what it feels like.

“We could make one part of the hole shallower than the other,” pursued Xan, swerving around hypothetical obstacles. “People could wade in and test their skills in a safe environment, knowing that they could stand back up at any time. There would be a section cordoned off for the novices.”

Tinora laughed. “Come into the water,” she said. “You don’t know anything about swimming yet, yet here you are making plans.”

Xan laughed as well, then looked around nervously. “I don’t have any swimming attire,” he admitted.

“Just strip down to your shorts.” Her tone was playful, but he heard the latent challenge in it. He nodded, getting to his feet. Tinora watched with a bemused look as he took off his clothes and folded each item in turn, building a neat pile on the table.

They walked into the water. Xan waded up to waist level before he stopped moving, grinning sheepishly as if to say, ‘this is as far as I go’.

“Come on,” prodded Tinora. “Come deeper.”

“The water’s dark,” replied Xan. “I can’t see my feet. It all seems impossibly vast under the surface. It’s like a whole other world.”

Tinora waded in further, until only her head and neck protruded from the surface. “Before you learn to swim,” she called out, “you have to abandon yourself to the water. You can drown, that’s a permanent risk, there’s no air to breathe in the water and your mind knows it, but you’ll find that your body remembers the water and wants to go back. All life came from the water, originally. All living creatures can swim.”

“Especially fish.”

“Funny.”

“Are there fish in this lake? I mean, big ones? The kind that might attack an adult human? That could see us as food?”

“Not in a lake. Stop thinking! Your mind is negotiating right now, it doesn’t want to immerse itself in the water, but your body is tingling with the call to plunge. Go with the tingling, plunge!”

Xan plunged. There was a trajectory in his mind, the image of a pattern he was applying to his movement. It consisted of a powerful hypothetical arc, his whole body propelled fully out of the water, suspended an instant in mid-air with streams of water gushing away from his surging form, his limbs stretched out and growing taut, his splayed fingers breaking the surface of the water upon reentry and his body following, curving down into the water then leveling off under its surface, flowing in the dark until his momentum was spent, then arching back up to the surface to breathe once more.

What he actually managed to do was jump upwards in the water, land back down on his feet, then slip and flop forward with his face slapping against the surface of the water, arms flailing about awkwardly and splashing, standing up panicked, sputtering, eyes scrunched shut. Tinora threw her head back and laughed. A moment later, pushing wet hair away from his eyes, Xan laughed too.

They laughed in unison until it felt forced, then they grew silent and embarrassed, their eyes meeting timidly over the water.

The lake rippled and swayed, forming concentric, rounded pools of a deep brownish green hue, with diminutive wave crests that dazzled in the ceaselessly changing, hypnotically rhythmic way they caught and reflected the late afternoon light.

…

Back at the hotel bar, Fidiory stood at the counter with a few members of the folk dancing troupe. They were easygoing and friendly people when they were out of their battle gear, and they listened intently as he recounted his experience in the dancing epidemic.

“It could have been a major human disaster, a total, major, catastrophic disaster,” he declared, arching his eyebrows for emphasis. “If I hadn’t been there, if Xan, Xan’s the guy I was dancing with earlier, he’s the guy with whom I won the prize, if Xan hadn’t found my personal information in the data, now, we were both analyzing the same data but we don’t work for the same company, we went to the same university which is how we know each other, we danced together in university too, but just for fun, not competitively, we did the same dance but I would do it ironically, imitating a robot imitating a human, but for Xan it wasn’t ironic, it was, it is, a traditional dance, it’s an imitation of a puppet, not a robot, they didn’t have robots in ancient Margolia, he’s from Margolia. So here we are, analyzing the data, we happened to have the same client, which is why we were analyzing the same data, this is how we came back into contact after having lost touch when we left university, so the data indicates, and Xan did most of the legwork on this, that there is this shield that can keep the disease from spreading, only its nature is very mysterious, because its presence is hinted at by a flood of indicators that are collected from a multitude of measurements from all sorts of different fields and places, only the data has been cleaned up of a lot of information that gives things away about the disease, because the client wants to keep that sort of information to itself, but the shield is clearly there in the data and Xan pulls up the records and he doesn’t recognize it but then he shows it to me and I do, the result is absolutely astounding, you see, because I’m the shield. I’m the only thing that can keep this disease from spreading, and if it does spread the whole world would be contaminated, at first it doesn’t seem so bad because it just gets people dancing, but eventually it becomes clear that the people can’t stop, they’ll just dance and dance and dance until they drop and then just dance some more, and if nothing is done they just dance past the brink of exhaustion and put themselves in danger of dying, so this is serious business. As soon as we identify me as the shield we also get from the data that the disease is going to hit that very evening, so we have to rush into the night to get there and prevent the catastrophe. Xan’s not here, he went outside. He’s chatting up some girl he met who was swimming in the lake behind the hotel, like there’s any future in that. That’s why he wasn’t there to receive the prize.”

Upon hearing the word ‘swimming’, a few of the dancers grew excited and broke into a parallel discussion about swimming. Fidiory turned to the remaining dancers, who seemed keenly interested in the discussion about swimming but were too polite to abandon him mid-story. He took a sip of his drink before pursuing.

“So anyway, um… we went there and, um, I saved the world. So Xan, my partner, is from Margolia. Now, in Margolia, they have this thing that they call ‘Unwanters’, have you heard of them? It’s really fascinating.”

The remaining dancers, succumbing to the pull of their friends’ heated voices, turned to the discussion about swimming. Fidiory listened to them a while, then lost interest.

A song he knew drifted out from speakers behind the bar. He bobbed his head to the beat. He bobbed his head and nodded in triumph, assenting to imaginary acclaim.

About the Author René Ghosh was born in Montréal, Canada, in 1972. He studied engineering physics at Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal. He lives in France, where he works in software development.

Puppet Dancers is his first novel.