Those Who Didn't Fully Die

After Kira — after seeing that rewrite is possible, that the soup really does become a butterfly, that the subject invariant is fact — I made a mistake. I decided the hardest part was behind me.

Wei Lin, naturally, corrected me. Using the method he preferred above all others: he showed me.

— You’ve seen how Kira came through, — he said. — Now see those who didn’t.

— The Heptarch, — I said. — We’ve already seen that.

— The Heptarch is one type of failure. Loss of agency. The cleanest, most complete, most... final. Earth-the-project is another, but that can be redesigned. There are others. Worse. Or stranger. Or both.

— Worse than losing agency?

— Worse because it’s partial. The Heptarch lost everything. He doesn’t suffer. He’s nobody. But the ones you’ll see today lost a piece. And remained enough of “themselves” to know what they lost.

(This really is worse. The Heptarch is an empty chair, and he has nothing to compare his own emptiness with. Marek is a chair someone is still sitting on, and that someone remembers in detail, for two hundred and seventy-three years now, how one after another the parts were pulled out of the chair without which, as it turned out, you can’t sit. The word “almost” here is scarier than “completely” — “almost” keeps its memory.)

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Marek.

First thing I learned about him: he’s four hundred years old. Second: he sat in a room that looked like an ordinary room (table, chair, books, window) but felt like a refrigerator. Presence-wise — temperature had nothing to do with it. Around Wei Lin, I felt stillness. Around Hiero — heat. Around Noma — depth. Around Marek — nothing.

A different kind of “nothing” than the Heptarch’s (the Heptarch is absence — an empty chair). Marek was presence with the warmth switched off. He was here. He looked at me. He spoke (voice steady, precise, like a metronome; every word in its place; not a single extra one). He understood. He analyzed. He functioned. By every metric — a subject. Thinking, willing, competent.

Only — without empathy. Without any empathy at all, as if one band had been removed from the spectrum: everything else looks normal right up to the moment you realize red is gone. Marek saw people, understood their motives and could predict their behavior with an accuracy that would have made Artyom’s knuckles go white — but he didn’t feel those people, and they didn’t touch him. Glass where skin should be.

Like a TV playing a movie about love: the picture is there, the sound is there, the plot makes sense — but the screen doesn’t cry, because the screen isn’t the viewer, just a surface across which pixels run.

Marek was the screen.