Chapter Five: The Systems Multiply (Part II)

World 76

The storm arrived at the same time it always arrived—7:47 PM, every evening, without variation—and K. was setting the table for two when the thunder announced that his spouse was home.

"You're angry," K. said to the weather.

The storm flickered with lightning. The rain intensified against the windows. A gust of wind rattled the door in its frame.

"I can tell you're angry," K. continued. "But I don't know why."

He had been married to this storm for, according to the calendar in the kitchen, seventeen years. There were photographs of their wedding: K. in a suit, standing at an altar, facing a swirling column of wind and rain that wore what might have been a veil. The officiant held an umbrella. The guests looked wet but happy.

"Is it about last night?" K. asked. "I'm sorry about last night, if that helps. I don't remember what happened, but I'm sorry."

The storm made a sound that was not quite thunder. It was softer, more like the rumble of a throat clearing. K. had learned—or was learning—to interpret these sounds as communication, though the vocabulary was limited and the syntax was entirely meteorological.

"I made dinner," K. said. "I know you can't eat, but I made enough for two. It seemed appropriate."

The storm settled over the house. The rain found its rhythm—steady, consistent, the heartbeat of something vast and inhuman. K. sat at the table and ate his dinner while the weather watched, or whatever it was that weather did when it paid attention.

"I don't remember loving you," K. said. "But I think I must have. To marry weather. To commit to being wet every evening at 7:47. That takes something."

The storm softened. The lightning stopped. The rain became gentle, almost tender, drumming against the roof with the particular pattern that K. was beginning to associate with forgiveness.

"Thank you," K. said.

He finished his dinner. The storm stayed. In the morning, it would be gone—it was always gone by morning, off somewhere being someone else's weather, part of the great atmospheric system that circulated love and rain and jealousy across the planet. But for now, it was here, and he was here, and they were married, whatever that meant.

World 77

The family was waiting in the lobby of his office, and K.'s assistant was explaining that they had been waiting for three hours, that they were very upset, that their mother had died in a dream that K. had designed, and that the lawsuit was already being prepared.

"I design dreams?" K. said.

"You're a dream architect. The best in the city. People pay you to design their sleeping experiences. Mrs. Chen—" she gestured at the family, "—Mrs. Chen's mother commissioned a memory dream, a recreation of her childhood home. She died while experiencing it."

K. looked at the family. There was a man in his fifties, a woman of similar age, two younger people who might have been grandchildren. They had the particular expression of grief that wanted someone to blame.

"I'm sorry for your loss," K. said. "But I don't understand how a dream could—"

"The dream was too perfect," the man said. "She didn't want to leave. She died in the dream because she refused to wake up. Because the world you built for her was better than the one she'd be waking to."

K. sat down. He had built a world. He had made it so beautiful, so complete, that an old woman had chosen to stay in it forever. He had killed someone with beauty.

"Show me the design," K. said to his assistant.

The files appeared on his screen. Blueprints for a dream: a farmhouse in the countryside, a garden with specific flowers, a kitchen that smelled of bread, children playing in a yard. K. had specified everything—the angle of light, the temperature of the air, the particular creaking of a wooden floor.

"It was exactly what she asked for," his assistant said. "You gave her exactly what she wanted."

"But I made it too well."

"You made it perfect. And perfect is a trap."

The family's lawyer arrived. There were discussions about liability, about the duty of care that dream architects owed their clients, about the difference between facilitating escape and causing death. K. sat through it all, looking at his blueprints, at the world he had built inside someone's sleeping mind, at the farmhouse that was now a tomb.

"I'll pay," he said finally. "Whatever they want. I'll pay."

It was not enough. Payment was never enough. The woman was still dead, still sleeping in a dream that would never end, and K. was still the architect of her final, fatal contentment.

World 78

The monastery was silent, which was the point, and K. was sitting in his cell, hands pressed against his mouth, trying not to scream, while the brother who had come to check on him watched with concern that he could not express in words.

K. had taken a vow of silence. He had taken it, apparently, forty years ago. He had not spoken since.

But now—now—there was something inside him that needed to be released, a pressure that had built over decades of unexpressed sound, and his vocal cords ached with the effort of containing it.

The brother made a gesture: Are you well?

K. made the counter-gesture: No. I am not well.

Another gesture: What do you need?

K. couldn't gesture the answer. The gestures were for practical things—food, water, medical assistance, spiritual guidance. There was no gesture for "I need to make a sound, any sound, after forty years of holding everything in."

He went to the courtyard. The other monks were there, performing their silent tasks: sweeping, gardening, praying without words. They moved in a choreography of stillness, their lives a continuous meditation on the absence of speech.

K. opened his mouth. No sound came out—his voice had atrophied, perhaps, or his throat had forgotten how to work—but the motion itself felt transgressive, felt like standing naked in public.

A younger monk approached. He made the gesture for concern, and then another gesture that K. didn't recognize.

K. pointed to his throat. He made the gesture for pain. The younger monk nodded, sympathetic but uncomprehending. Pain was not unusual here. Silence was difficult. Everyone struggled.

But K.'s pain was not the ordinary pain of discipline. It was the pain of accumulation: forty years of things unsaid, forty years of thoughts that had never become words, forty years of conversations that had happened only in his mind.

He returned to his cell. He sat on his cot. He pressed his hands against his mouth and held in the scream that wanted to emerge.

Somewhere inside him, a sound was building. It had been building for forty years. And it would not be contained much longer, vow or no vow, monastery or no monastery.

World 79

The man across the table was identical to K., and K. was not surprised, and this lack of surprise was perhaps the most disturbing part.

"I thought I should introduce myself," the man said. "Since we're both using the same face."

K. looked at him. Same eyes. Same nose. Same particular configuration of features that K. had assumed was unique to him.

"Are you my twin?" K. asked.

"I don't know what I am. I woke up with this face three months ago. Before that, I had a different face. Before that, another."

"So we're not related."

"We might be. We might be the same person. We might be two instances of a template. There's no way to know."

The café around them was ordinary. People drank coffee, read newspapers, lived their lives. No one seemed to notice that two identical men were having this conversation, or if they noticed, they didn't care.

"What do you want?" K. asked.

"To understand. To know if you're the original, and I'm the copy. Or if we're both copies. Or if there's no original at all."

K. considered this. He had memories—not of this life, but of others. Dozens of lives. Hundreds. Faces that had been his and were no longer his, names assigned and revoked, entire existences lived and abandoned. He felt like himself, but he had always felt like himself, and that had always meant nothing.

"Does it matter?" K. asked.

"It matters to me. I want to know if I'm real."

"I don't know if I'm real. I've never known."

The double absorbed this. His expression—K.'s expression, on another face that was the same face—was thoughtful, troubled, familiar in a way that was more disturbing than the resemblance itself.

"We could pretend," the double said. "That we're both originals. That we're both real. That the duplication is a coincidence."

"Would that help?"

"It would be something. A story we tell ourselves. Everyone needs a story."

K. nodded. He looked at himself across the table—this other self, this parallel existence, this version of him that had emerged from somewhere and wanted to understand. They were mirrors, or copies, or iterations. They were alone together, uniquely un-unique.

"Nice to meet you," K. said.

"Nice to meet you too," the double replied.

They finished their coffee. They went separate ways. In the crowd, K. thought he might have glimpsed another face like his, but he couldn't be sure, and he didn't look back to check.

World 80

The customs officer was examining K.'s suitcase, which was full of emotions K. didn't remember packing, and her expression suggested that the contents were not merely illegal but somehow offensive.

"Joy," she said, holding up a vial that appeared empty. "Unregulated joy. Do you know what the penalty is for importing unregulated joy?"

"I didn't know I was importing anything," K. said.

"Ignorance is not a defense." She made a note on her tablet. "The joy is confiscated. What else do we have?"

The suitcase contained other vials, other containers, all apparently empty, all apparently full of feelings that K. had no memory of acquiring. Nostalgia. Hope. A small amount of carefully packaged spite.

"The spite is borderline," the officer said. "You're allowed up to three grams of personal spite for domestic use. This is..." she weighed it, "...2.7 grams. You're lucky."

"Why is joy illegal?"

"Unregulated joy. There's a difference. Licensed joy, taxed joy, joy that has been processed through proper channels—that's permitted. Wild joy, imported joy, joy that hasn't been certified as safe—that destabilizes the emotional economy."

K. looked at the confiscated vials. He couldn't see anything inside them, but he could feel, very faintly, what they contained. The joy was warm. The nostalgia was heavy. The spite had an edge to it, a sharpness that made him want to wince.

"Where did these come from?" he asked.

"Foreign emotional production. Unregulated manufacturers. There's a black market." The officer sealed the vials in a secure container. "Were you planning to sell these?"

"I don't even remember packing them."

"That's what they all say." She finished her inspection. "I'm going to let you go with a warning, but the joy is confiscated, and you'll be flagged for additional screening on future entries."

K. collected his suitcase. It was lighter now—emotionally lighter, literally lighter—and he walked through the airport with the strange sensation of having lost something he hadn't known he possessed.

Outside, the city was flat, calm, emotionally regulated. People moved with the steady affect of a population whose feelings had been processed, taxed, certified. And somewhere in a customs warehouse, K.'s confiscated joy sat in a vial, waiting to be destroyed or sold or repurposed for someone who had the proper licenses.

World 81

The building was waiting for K. to bless it, and K. was standing in front of its foundations—bare concrete, rebar, the skeleton of a structure—holding a book of words he couldn't read.

"The ritual is straightforward," the construction foreman explained. "You speak the blessing, the building responds, the walls rise. It's how we've built for generations."

K. looked at the book. The words were shapes, symbols, a language he didn't know. He was, apparently, a building priest, certified and licensed, and the words in this book would, if spoken correctly, cause stone and steel to arrange themselves into shelter.

"What if I say it wrong?" K. asked.

"Then the building comes out wrong. Walls in the wrong places. Doors that lead nowhere. Rooms that can't be entered."

"Has that happened?"

"More often than we'd like. Bad priests, bad buildings. Some structures are still standing, unusable, monuments to miscommunication."

K. looked at the foundation again. Workers were waiting, tools ready. They trusted him—trusted that the words he spoke would give them something worth building, something that would stand and shelter and serve.

He opened the book. He chose a page at random. The words were there, inscrutable, demanding to be spoken.

"I could try," he said. "I could speak the words and see what happens."

"That's what we pay you for."

K. began to speak. The words came from his mouth without understanding—sounds that meant nothing to him, a language that existed only between priests and buildings, a communication that bypassed his comprehension entirely.

The concrete shifted. The rebar bent. Something was happening, something he had initiated, something he couldn't control.

"Keep going," the foreman said. "Don't stop once you've started."

K. kept going. The words flowed, foreign and necessary, and the building responded, rising from its foundation, walls assembling themselves, rooms taking shape. It was not the building on the blueprints—it was something else, something stranger—but it was a building, undeniably, with doors and windows and a roof that sealed against the sky.

"Not quite what we ordered," the foreman said, examining the result. "But livable. We can work with livable."

K. closed the book. The building stood before him, born from words he didn't understand, shelter he had spoken into existence. It was wrong, probably. It was unexpected, certainly. But it was there, and people would live in it, and his blessing—whatever it had been—had made it real.

World 82

The organ registry showed that K. was composed of pieces from at least seven different decades, and the assessment technician was explaining that this was unusual, that most people maintained more temporal consistency, that his heart being thirty and his lungs being seventy was causing problems.

"What kind of problems?" K. asked.

"Desynchronization. Your heart thinks it's young—it beats fast, takes risks, recovers quickly. Your lungs think they're old—they conserve, protect, anticipate decline. They're not cooperating."

K. pressed his hand against his chest. The heart beneath it was, apparently, thirty years old—either a younger heart transplanted into his body or a heart from a time when K. himself was thirty. He couldn't tell which.

"Can they be synchronized?" he asked.

"In theory. But it would mean aging or de-aging parts of you to match. Which direction would you prefer?"

"I don't know. What's normal?"

"Normal is forty-two average. You're fifty-seven overall, but the distribution is..." she pulled up a chart, "...erratic. Your liver is nineteen. Your kidneys are sixty-three. Your brain is—" she paused, recalculating, "—difficult to date. It registers as multiple ages simultaneously."

K. thought about his brain. It held memories from many lives, many ages, many configurations. Of course it couldn't be dated. It was everything and nothing, ancient and newborn.

"What happens if I don't synchronize?" he asked.

"The components continue to operate at cross-purposes. Your young heart exhausts your old lungs. Your old kidneys can't keep up with your young liver's metabolism. Eventually, something fails because the system can't agree on what it's doing."

"How long?"

"Hard to say. Years, probably. Unless a particularly young organ makes a demand that a particularly old organ can't meet."

K. left the assessment center. He walked through the city, feeling his mismatched parts move together in their temporary collaboration—the thirty-year-old heart pumping, the seventy-year-old lungs receiving, the nineteen-year-old liver processing, the sixty-three-year-old kidneys filtering.

He was a collage of ages. He was a committee of decades. And somewhere inside him, the parts were negotiating, arguing, trying to find a compromise that would keep the whole system running for another day.

World 83

The researcher was very apologetic, and K. was lying on a medical table, and there was something living inside him that everyone wanted, and K. had no idea what it was.

"The cure has been inside you for approximately twenty-three years," the researcher explained. "We've tracked its development. It's mature now. It's ready."

"What cure?"

"For the plague. The one that's been killing people since before you were born. The cure exists only inside you. Something about your biology, your environment, your luck. It grew there, and now we need to extract it."

K. looked at the ceiling. The lights were bright, clinical, designed to reveal everything. He was a container, apparently. He was a vessel.

"How do you extract it?" he asked.

"Through your blood. Regular donations. It's not painful, but it's... extensive. We need significant quantities to synthesize a treatment."

"How often?"

"Weekly. For the rest of your life, ideally."

K. considered this. He was being asked to bleed for strangers—literally bleed, regularly bleed—so that they might live. It was a purpose, which was more than he usually had. It was a function, which was more than he usually understood.

"What if I refuse?" he asked.

The researcher's expression flickered. "People will die. Many people. The plague has no other treatment. You are, unfortunately, the only source."

"And what do I get?"

"Gratitude. Compensation. A purpose. The knowledge that you are saving millions of lives."

K. sat up. The room was full of equipment designed to take things from his body—tubes, needles, machines that would separate what was valuable from what was ordinary.

"I'll do it," he said. "But I need to understand something."

"Of course."

"How did it get there? The cure? Why me?"

The researcher looked uncomfortable. "We don't know. It's possible someone put it there. It's possible it grew naturally. It's possible you were designed for this purpose."

K. lay back down. The first donation began. He watched his blood flow into containers, carrying something precious, something he couldn't see or feel or understand.

He was bleeding for the world. He would keep bleeding. The cure inside him would keep flowing outward, and he would get lighter, emptier, more essential.

World 84

The shadow was missing, and K. had not noticed until the child pointed, and now everyone in the park was staring at the space on the ground where darkness should have been.

"Mister," the child said. "Where's your shadow?"

K. looked down. The sun was directly overhead—he could feel its warmth on his shoulders—but there was no dark shape beneath him, no silhouette stretched across the grass.

"I don't know," K. said.

"People without shadows are dead," the child said matter-of-factly. "My grandmother told me. Shadows are souls. If you don't have one, you're a ghost."

K. moved his hand. No corresponding darkness moved on the ground. He stepped left, stepped right, turned in a circle. Nothing. The sunlight passed through him, or around him, or simply forgot to cast him in darkness.

The park had grown quiet. Parents were pulling their children away. Other adults maintained their distance, watching with the particular wariness reserved for the potentially dangerous.

"I'm not a ghost," K. said to no one in particular. "I'm standing here. I'm solid."

"Solid doesn't mean alive," a woman said. She had a kind face, but she was edging backward. "Solid just means present. Shadows mean soul."

K. sat down on a bench. The bench had a shadow. The tree above him had a shadow. Even the pigeons, waddling across the grass, trailed their dark shapes behind them. Only K. sat in light, surrounded by darkness that wasn't his.

"When did I lose it?" he asked.

No one answered. No one wanted to get close enough to answer.

He spent the rest of the day testing. Indoors, under artificial light, he cast no shadow. At night, he was invisible in a way that was different from everyone else—not hidden by darkness, but absent from it, a gap in the way light fell.

By evening, he understood that life had become more difficult. People who saw him would edge away. Doors would close. Whatever a shadow represented—soul, presence, belonging—he no longer had it, and the absence was visible to everyone.

He walked home in the dark, a man without shadow, a body that light refused to acknowledge. And somewhere, perhaps, his shadow walked too, separated, independent, casting darkness on walls that K. would never see.

World 85

The preserve was beautiful, in the way that museums are beautiful, and K. was sitting in his enclosure, and the visitors were tapping on the glass, and the sign outside explained that he was a living fossil, one of the last examples of a species that had otherwise been extinct for a hundred years.

"Regular human," the sign said. "Homo sapiens sapiens, unmodified. Observe feeding behavior, communication patterns, and emotional expressions typical of the pre-enhancement era."

K. sat in his chair—a replica of a chair from his era, according to the placard—and read a book—a replica of a book from his era—while visitors took photographs and children asked their parents why the human wasn't doing anything interesting.

"They just sat like that?" a child asked. "For hours?"

"That was their recreation," the parent explained. "Before neural enhancement. Before experience optimization. They called it 'reading.'"

K. turned a page. The book was Shakespeare, which the preserve had determined was appropriate for a specimen of his type. He didn't know if he had ever read Shakespeare before, in any of his previous lives. He knew the words were beautiful, even though beauty was, apparently, something his species had been known for but not mastered.

A researcher entered through the staff door. She had the particular manner of someone who worked with endangered species—careful, respectful, professionally distant.

"Time for your enrichment," she said.

Enrichment meant walking in the outdoor portion of his enclosure, where there was grass and a pond and a recreation of a natural environment from the era before nature had been optimized. K. walked. He touched the grass. It felt real, though it might have been synthetic.

"How long have I been here?" he asked.

"In the preserve? Forty-three years. You're our longest-running exhibit."

"And how long do I have left?"

"Your species typically lived to eighty or ninety, in optimal conditions. You're..." she consulted her tablet, "...estimated at sixty-seven. So perhaps twenty more years."

K. sat by the pond. Fish swam beneath the surface—also specimens, also preserved, also the last of their kind.

"Were there others?" he asked. "When I arrived?"

"A few. They've since passed. You're the only unmodified human left."

K. watched the fish. He was the last of something, the final example of a configuration that the world had moved beyond. When he died, the species he represented would be truly extinct, and the preserve would close his exhibit and put up a different sign.

World 86

The voting booth was designed for singing, and K. was standing inside it, looking at the ballot, trying to find a way to cast his vote without using his voice.

"The ballot is activated by singing your choice," the instructions said. "Please sing clearly and in tune. Off-key votes will not be counted."

K. looked at the candidates. There were three: a woman, a man, and something that might have been a corporation. Next to each name was a musical notation—the melody required to vote for that candidate.

He tried the first one. The notes emerged from his throat wrong—flat, wavering, uncertain. The ballot remained inert.

"Please try again," the machine said. "Your vote was not registered."

K. tried again. The melody was simple—five notes, ascending—but something in his voice refused to cooperate. He could hear the right sounds in his head. His throat produced different sounds.

"This is discrimination," he told the election official outside the booth. "Against people who can't sing."

"Can't sing is a choice," the official said. "Voice training is freely available. If you haven't learned to carry a tune by voting age, that's a personal failure."

"I don't remember ever learning. I don't remember having a voice that worked."

"Then you've chosen not to participate. The system is fair. Everyone can sing. Everyone who tries."

K. returned to the booth. He looked at the three candidates, their three melodies, their three futures. He wanted to have an opinion. He wanted his opinion to matter. But his voice was a broken instrument, and broken instruments did not get to play.

He left without voting. Outside, he could hear other citizens singing their choices—confident voices, in-tune voices, voices that knew how to participate.

The election results came that evening. The corporation won. K. wondered, briefly, what it would have sounded like to vote against it.

World 87

The memory palace was on fire, and K. was running through its burning corridors, trying to find his childhood, which had somehow been moved to the wrong wing.

"Left at the third turning," he told himself. "Past the hall of first kisses. The childhood is in the southeast corner."

But the palace was rearranging itself as it burned. Doors that had led one place now led elsewhere. Rooms he remembered were gone, replaced by rooms he didn't recognize.

"Who's doing this?" he shouted.

A figure emerged from the smoke. It was small, hunched, carrying a bundle of memories like firewood.

"Remodel," the figure said. "Your palace was outdated. We're updating the floor plan."

"I didn't authorize a remodel."

"You did. Seventeen years ago. In the small print of a document you didn't read."

K. grabbed for the bundle. The figure dodged, surprisingly quick.

"Those are mine," K. said. "My childhood. My first experiences. My formative memories."

"They're being moved to the basement. More efficient. The prime real estate in your mind should be reserved for productive memories. Work accomplishments. Professional skills."

K. looked around. The fire wasn't destroying—it was transforming. The palace was becoming something else, something organized around utility rather than meaning.

"Where do I go?" he asked. "To find myself? If you've moved everything?"

"The administrative office. Third floor. They can help you locate any specific memory you need. Operating hours are nine to five, Monday through Friday."

K. watched the figure disappear with his childhood under its arm. The palace continued to burn, continued to change. Somewhere, the hall of first kisses was becoming a storage closet. Somewhere, the room of childhood fears was being converted to a workspace.

He found the administrative office. He filled out a form. He requested access to his own memories, which were now filed under "Archival: Low Priority."

The clerk said processing would take four to six weeks.

World 88

The client was nervous, and K. understood why, because lying professionally was harder than most people realized, and K. was very good at it, and that made people nervous even when they were paying for the service.

"I need you to tell my wife I was at a conference," the client said. "In Seattle. Four days. The conference needs to be real—details, names, verifiable facts."

"I don't just tell lies," K. explained. "I construct realities. By the time I'm done, you will have been at that conference. Photos will exist. Records will exist. Other attendees will remember you."

"How is that possible?"

"It's what I do. I'm a reality consultant. I make things true retroactively."

The client nodded, too eager, too trusting. He didn't understand what K. understood: that once a lie was constructed thoroughly enough, it stopped being a lie. It became real, as real as anything else, as real as the truth it replaced.

K. began the work. He created a conference: the Pacific Northwest Regional Symposium on Supply Chain Management. He populated it with attendees, speakers, breakout sessions. He inserted the client into photographs. He updated databases. He bribed or persuaded or convinced everyone who might have noticed the client's absence.

By the time he was finished, the client had genuinely been in Seattle. K. had made it so.

But K. had also, somewhere in the process, lost track of his own reality. He had told so many lies, constructed so many truths, that he could no longer distinguish between what had happened and what he had made happen.

He looked at his own memories. Were they real? Or were they constructions—elaborate lies he had told himself, made true through repetition and evidence and the conviction of belief?

"The conference was excellent," K. told the client. "You learned a lot. You made valuable connections."

The client smiled, relieved. He now believed in a past that hadn't existed until K. created it.

K. went home. He looked at his photographs, his records, his evidence of a life lived. He wondered which parts were original, and which parts were lies he had forgotten lying.

World 89

The society had liquefied centuries ago, and K. was solid, and this was a problem that was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

"You should have flowed by now," his physician explained. "Most people transition to liquid state by adolescence. Maintaining solid form past forty is... unusual."

K. looked at his hands. They were hands. They had fingers and knuckles and skin. They did not flow.

"How does one liquify?" he asked.

"It's natural. It happens. You relax the rigid structures—bone, muscle, the insistence on shape—and you allow yourself to become what you truly are: fluid."

"And what if you can't?"

"Then you remain solid. Rigid. Stuck in a form that limits your potential."

K. walked through the city. Around him, citizens flowed—moving without walking, changing shape to fit their circumstances, sliding through obstacles instead of walking around them. They were beautiful in their fluidity, graceful in their formlessness.

He was a stone in a river of water. He was the thing that didn't bend.

"You could try therapy," a friend suggested. "Flexibility training. Some people are just late bloomers."

"What if I don't want to liquify?"

The friend's fluid face arranged itself into an expression of concern. "Why wouldn't you want to? Solid form is limiting. Painful. You can't fit anywhere. You can't become anything."

K. considered this. He liked his shape. He liked knowing where his edges were, where his interior ended and the exterior began. He liked being able to point at himself and say: this, here, is me.

"I think I'll stay solid," he said.

The friend flowed away, literally poured themselves around a corner and out of sight. K. stood on the street, solid and alone, the only fixed point in a world that had learned to flow.

World 90

The garden was producing something, and K. had been growing it for years, and the harvest was finally approaching, and he had no idea what he would be harvesting.

"You planted the seeds yourself," his gardening log told him. The entries were in his handwriting. "Standard planting depth. Standard spacing. Care regime: water, sunlight, monthly fertilizer."

K. looked at the plants. They had leaves, stems, something that might become flowers or fruit. They were the correct color for plants—green, mostly, with some brown at the edges. They looked healthy, whatever they were.

"You must know what you planted," his neighbor said. She was leaning over the fence, examining his crop. "Nobody plants without knowing."

"The seeds were unlabeled. I bought them at a market. I thought—" he paused, trying to remember thinking anything. "I don't know what I thought."

"Could be vegetables. Could be decorative. Could be pharmaceutical." The neighbor squinted. "The leaf structure looks medicinal to me. You might have a very valuable crop."

Or a very worthless one. Or a very illegal one. K. had cultivated something for years without knowing what, had nurtured growth without purpose, had prepared for a harvest that would surprise him as much as anyone.

"When do I pick them?" he asked.

"When they're ready. You'll know."

"But I don't know what ready looks like. I don't know what done looks like for this plant."

The neighbor shrugged. "That's gardening. You do the work. You wait. You find out."

K. sat in his garden as the sun set. The plants swayed in a breeze that smelled like soil and potential. Somewhere inside their stems, something was developing, something was becoming, something was preparing to emerge into a world that would have to decide what to call it.

He would harvest when the time came. He would discover what he had grown. And whatever it was—valuable or worthless, beautiful or ugly, legal or not—it would be his. His mystery. His years of patient cultivation. His unknown made manifest.

World 91

The genealogist was very sorry to inform K. that his family history had been repossessed, and that the descendants of its original owners were demanding its return with interest.

"I rented my ancestors?" K. said.

"In 1987. Your family, as you know it, was leased from the Marchetti estate. The Marchettis were a respected lineage—merchants, artists, a minor cardinal. Your biological family was—" she consulted her records, "—unremarkable. Farmers, mostly. No notable achievements."

K. looked at the photographs on his wall. His grandmother—rented. His great-uncle the explorer—rented. The minor cardinal who had met a pope—borrowed, on a thirty-year term that had apparently expired.

"What happens now?" he asked.

"The rental history is removed from your file. The Marchettis reclaim their ancestors. You're restored to your biological lineage." She handed him a new folder. "The Kowalski family. Farmers in Poland and later Ohio. No historical significance."

K. opened the folder. The photographs showed strangers—faces he didn't recognize, lives he had no connection to. These were his people, apparently. His blood. His actual past.

"Can I appeal?" he asked.

"There's no appeals process for genealogical fraud. The original rental was unauthorized—someone in your family forged the paperwork. The Marchettis have been very patient."

K. walked home with the Kowalski folder under his arm. The streets looked the same, but he felt different moving through them. His history had been stripped away, replaced with a history that was more honest and less interesting.

At home, he took down the Marchetti photographs. The walls looked bare without them. He put up the Kowalski photographs instead: farmers in fields, families in front of modest houses, no cardinals or explorers or anyone who had ever mattered to anyone but themselves.

"This is who I am," he told the empty room. "This is who I've always been."

The room didn't answer. The Kowalskis stared from their frames, strangers who were now his family, a past that had always been waiting for him to stop pretending.

World 92

The god was malfunctioning, and K. had been called to repair it, and he was standing in the temple with his toolkit, looking at the divine machinery, trying to understand what had gone wrong.

"It stopped answering prayers three weeks ago," the priest explained. "Before that, there were glitches. Blessings going to the wrong people. Miracles arriving late."

K. opened the god's chassis. Inside were gears and circuits and something that pulsed with a light that was not quite physical. The divine mechanism was old—centuries old, according to the maintenance logs—and the parts were obsolete.

"The problem is here," K. said, pointing to a component that flickered irregularly. "The grace distributor. It's wearing out."

"Can you fix it?"

"I can try. But the part hasn't been manufactured in a hundred years. I'd need to fabricate something new."

The priest looked alarmed. "You can't fabricate divinity. You can't build holiness from scratch."

"I can build something that distributes grace. Whether it's truly divine is a theological question, not an engineering one."

K. worked for hours. He cleaned connections, replaced what could be replaced, improvised where improvisation was possible. The god hummed and clicked and occasionally emitted bursts of that strange light, but it didn't speak, didn't move, didn't do whatever it was that gods were supposed to do.

"Try a prayer," K. told the priest.

The priest knelt. He closed his eyes. He murmured words that K. couldn't hear.

The god stirred. Something within its machinery aligned. A response emerged—mechanical, processed, but recognizably an answer.

"It works," the priest said, tears in his eyes. "It answered."

K. closed the chassis. The god resumed its divine operations, answering prayers, distributing blessings, performing the functions that its worshipers required. It was not what it had been—something essential had been lost in the repair—but it was operational, and operational was what the contract specified.

"Thank you," the priest said. "You've saved our faith."

K. didn't respond. He had fixed a machine. Whether he had saved a faith, touched the divine, or merely maintained an illusion was not a question his toolkit could answer.

World 93

The mark was visible to everyone but K., and the reactions ranged from pity to disgust to fear, and K. walked through the city with something written on him that he couldn't read.

"What does it say?" he asked a stranger.

The stranger looked away. "I'd rather not repeat it."

"But it's about me. I have a right to know."

"You really don't."

K. tried mirrors, cameras, every reflective surface he could find. The mark—whatever it was—did not appear in reflections. It existed only in other people's perceptions, visible to everyone except the person it marked.

"It's serious," a clerk at a government office told him. "I can process your request, but you should know that your status has changed. Significantly."

"Changed how?"

"I'm not authorized to explain. But you should be aware that certain rights and privileges have been adjusted."

K. walked home. People moved out of his way—not aggressively, not cruelly, but with the particular caution reserved for the dangerous or the contaminated or the cursed. He was something now, something that repelled, and he had no idea what or why.

At home, he searched his records. His file showed nothing unusual. His status showed no changes. Whatever the mark represented, it existed outside official documentation, visible only to human eyes, invisible to systems and databases and the formal apparatus of identity.

"I could wear a mask," he thought. "Cover myself. Hide whatever they're seeing."

But the mark was not on his face. People reacted before they saw him clearly, as if the mark preceded him, announced him, filled the space before his arrival with its message.

He stayed home for three days. On the fourth day, he went out anyway, because isolation was impossible and hiding was pointless and whatever he was marked as, he was still himself, still present, still requiring food and air and the basic functions of living.

The reactions continued. The mark remained. K. learned to ignore what he couldn't understand, to move through a world that saw something in him that he could not see in himself.

World 94

The taste in his mouth was someone else's childhood, and K. had been experiencing it for three days, and the memory specialist was explaining that cross-contamination of this kind was rare but documented.

"Taste memories are particularly portable," the specialist said. "They're stored in areas of the brain that communicate easily across individuals. When contamination occurs, taste is often the vector."

"But I don't want someone else's childhood," K. said. "I don't want to remember their grandmother's kitchen, their first birthday cake, the specific flavor of their fifth summer."

"The memories will fade. They're not your native format—your brain can't maintain them permanently."

"How long?"

"Weeks. Possibly months. In rare cases, years."

K. ate breakfast. The eggs tasted like a kitchen he had never visited, prepared by hands he had never held. The coffee triggered a memory of a porch swing, creaking in a breeze that had happened to someone else, in a place K. had never been.

He didn't want to return to these memories. They weren't his. They belonged to a stranger whose tastes had somehow infiltrated his experience, whose childhood was now colonizing his meals.

"Is there treatment?" he asked.

"Taste suppression. We can dull your palate, reduce the memory triggers."

"But then I couldn't taste anything."

"That's the trade-off. Someone else's memories, or no memories at all."

K. chose to wait. He ate his contaminated meals, experienced his borrowed nostalgia, inhabited a past that had never been his but now filled his mouth with every bite.

Some memories were pleasant. The grandmother had been kind. The birthday cakes had been chocolate. The fifth summer had been warm and long.

Other memories were less pleasant. But they were vivid, and they were real, and they were someone's, even if they weren't his.

By the third week, K. had stopped trying to distinguish. The tastes were in him now, part of him, as real as anything that had happened to his own body. He was eating someone else's history, and it was nourishing him as well as anything else.

World 95

The timelines were failing, and K. was a probability farmer, and his fields—which grew not crops but potential futures—were dying for lack of certainty.

"The harvest was supposed to be abundant," his farmhand explained. "Good possibilities. Likely outcomes. But something's changed. The soil can't sustain positive timelines anymore."

K. walked through his fields. The possibilities grew in rows—some tall and healthy, representing futures that might come true, others withered and brown, representing futures that had become impossible.

"What happened?" K. asked.

"Uncertainty spike. Something in the present became unclear, and the ripples destabilized everything downstream."

K. knelt beside a dying possibility. It was his own future, he realized—or what his future might have been. A version of himself that was happy, successful, surrounded by people who loved him. The possibility was wilting, its leaves curling, its potential evaporating.

"Can I save it?" he asked.

"You'd need to increase certainty in the present. Make decisions. Commit to paths. The more definite your present, the more stable your futures."

But K. didn't know how to be definite. He didn't know what paths to commit to. His present was as uncertain as his past, as confused as his identity, as fragmented as his memory.

"What happens if I don't?" he asked.

"The futures die. All of them. You're left with only the present—no possibilities, no potential, just the moment you're in, forever."

K. stood in his dying fields. Around him, futures withered: futures where he was loved, futures where he was successful, futures where he understood himself. They were dying because he couldn't be certain, couldn't decide, couldn't plant his feet in the present and declare that this, here, was who he was.

He tried. He really tried. But the uncertainty was too deep, too thorough, too essential to who he had become.

The harvest failed. The possibilities died. K. remained in his present, the only timeline that could survive his fundamental, irreducible doubt.

World 96

The house was unhappy, and the marriage counselor was explaining that in cases of human-structure partnerships, unhappiness could be very difficult to resolve.

"Your spouse has needs," the counselor said. "The house needs maintenance. It needs attention. It needs to feel that you care about its structural integrity."

K. looked at the house. It was a modest house—two stories, a basement, a roof that leaked slightly in heavy rain. He had married it, apparently, in a ceremony that was legally recognized and emotionally binding.

"I've been maintaining it," K. said. "I fix what breaks. I keep it clean."

"But do you love it? Does it feel loved?"

The house creaked. K. had learned to interpret its sounds as communication. This creak was sad, resentful, the sound of a structure that felt neglected despite evidence to the contrary.

"I don't know how to love a house," K. admitted. "I don't know what that looks like."

"It looks like appreciation. Recognition of its value. Acknowledgment of the shelter it provides." The counselor turned to the house. "What do you need from K.? What would make you feel loved?"

The house was silent for a long moment. Then: a creak, a groan, a shudder that ran through its foundations.

"It says you never talk to it," the counselor translated. "You come in, you go out, but you never just... be with it. Never appreciate its spaces."

K. felt something like guilt. He had used the house—for shelter, for sleep, for the basic functions of living—without ever considering what the house might want from him.

"I'll try," he said. "I'll try to be more present."

The house creaked again. Skeptical, the counselor explained. But willing to try.

K. went home. He sat in the living room, not reading, not watching, just sitting. Being present. Appreciating the walls that surrounded him, the ceiling that covered him, the floor that supported him.

It wasn't love, exactly. But it was something. And the house seemed to settle around him, seemed to soften its creaks, seemed to accept that this—this attention, this presence—was the best that K. could offer.

World 97

The deadline was end of day, and K. had to produce seventeen units of something, and no one would tell him what the units were or how to produce them.

"The quota is clear," his supervisor said. "Seventeen units. You've done this before. You've exceeded this before."

"But I don't remember what I'm supposed to produce."

"That's your problem, not mine. The deadline is the deadline. Production is production."

K. sat at his workstation. There were tools here—tools for something—and materials—materials of some kind—and a chute where the finished units were supposed to go. He had no idea how any of it worked.

He tried things. He combined materials in various ways. He used tools that might have been appropriate. Something emerged from his efforts—objects that were neither clearly units nor clearly not units.

"Is this a unit?" he asked a coworker.

The coworker examined the object. "It's got the shape," they said. "But it's missing the essential property."

"What essential property?"

"You know what property. Don't pretend you don't know."

K. didn't know. He produced more objects, more potential units, more things that might satisfy the quota if only he could understand what the quota required.

By afternoon, he had produced nine objects. They were placed in the chute. Some were accepted. Some were rejected. He had no idea what distinguished the accepted from the rejected.

"Five units accepted," the chute announced. "Twelve remaining. Time remaining: four hours."

K. worked faster. He stopped trying to understand and simply produced—shapes, objects, things that emerged from his hands and went into the chute and were either accepted or rejected by criteria he couldn't access.

By end of day, he had produced twenty-three objects. Nine were accepted.

"Eight units short," his supervisor noted. "That's a significant failure."

"I tried," K. said. "I produced as much as I could."

"Production isn't trying. Production is units. You're eight units short. That will be reflected in your evaluation."

K. went home. He didn't know what he had failed to produce or why he had failed to produce it. But the failure was documented, official, undeniable. Eight units short, whatever units were.

World 98

The city had changed overnight, and K. was in the wrong one now, and the welcome center was explaining that he had aged into a different demographic.

"You were in City 40-55 yesterday," the representative said. "But you turned fifty-six last night. City 56-70 is your new home."

K. looked through the window. The city outside was different—architecturally, atmospherically, in ways he couldn't quite articulate. The buildings were shorter. The colors were muted. The people moving on the streets moved more slowly.

"I didn't choose to age," K. said.

"No one chooses. But the law is the law. Age-appropriate environments promote wellness. A fifty-six-year-old doesn't belong in a city designed for forty-year-olds."

"I have friends in City 40-55. A job. A life."

"Your job has been transferred. Your friends can visit, with appropriate documentation. Your life continues, in a more suitable context."

K. filled out the forms. He received his new identification: citizen of City 56-70, assigned to an apartment in the Senior Complex, enrolled in mandatory wellness programming.

His new apartment was smaller than his old one, but comfortable. The neighbors were friendly in a subdued way. Everyone understood the situation—they had all been relocated at fifty-six, had all left behind younger cities for this one.

"You'll adjust," a neighbor told him. "We all adjust. And then at seventy, you'll relocate again. Smaller city. Slower pace. Until you reach the final city."

"What's the final city?"

"City 85+. Very quiet. Very peaceful. Not many people there."

K. unpacked his belongings. His furniture from the old city looked different here, in this different light, this different context. He was the same person he had been yesterday, but yesterday's person didn't live here. Today's person did.

He walked his new streets. He learned his new routes. He became, gradually, a citizen of the city that had claimed him by virtue of a birthday he hadn't asked for.

World 99

The excavation had uncovered something that should have stayed buried, and K. was part of the team trying to contain it, and the something—an emotion, apparently, an extinct emotion—was already spreading beyond the dig site.

"It's called 'weltschmerz,'" the lead archaeologist explained. "World-weariness. A feeling that the world is fundamentally inadequate. It went extinct about two hundred years ago."

"How does an emotion go extinct?" K. asked.

"People stop feeling it. The conditions that produced it change. The neural pathways atrophy across generations. Eventually, no one has the capacity for it anymore."

But now they had dug it up. The emotion sat in its excavated container—not visible exactly, but present, exerting a kind of gravitational pull on the mood of everyone nearby.

"I can feel it," K. said. He was surprised. The emotion was settling into him like a familiar coat, like something he had known before and forgotten.

"You shouldn't be able to. You're modern. You don't have the capacity."

"But I do. I feel it perfectly. The world is inadequate. It always has been. There's no remedy for its inadequacy."

The archaeologist looked alarmed. "You're infected. You've caught it."

K. sat down. The weltschmerz was comfortable, actually. It was honest in a way that modern emotions weren't. It didn't promise improvement or demand effort. It simply acknowledged what was: the world, inadequate; the self, inadequate; the gap between them, permanent.

"I don't want to be cured," K. said.

"It's not about what you want. The emotion is contagious. If we don't contain it, it will spread. Everyone will feel what you feel."

"Maybe everyone should. Maybe we're all pretending the world is adequate when we know it isn't."

The archaeologist was already calling for containment protocols. K. was quarantined, studied, tested. They couldn't figure out why he was susceptible—why this modern man could feel an ancient emotion that had been extinct for two centuries.

In isolation, K. sat with his weltschmerz and found it was not unpleasant. The world was inadequate. He had always known it. Now he finally had the word.

World 100

The seal was weakening, and K. was the one who had sealed it, and he stood in front of the vault door trying to remember what was on the other side.

"You sealed it forty years ago," the guardian said. "You were very specific. Never open it. Never tell anyone what's inside. Never even think about it."

"I don't remember what it is."

"That was part of the sealing. You made yourself forget. You said it was the only way to be sure."

K. touched the door. It was cold, metallic, covered in symbols that might have been warnings or might have been instructions. Something behind it was pressing outward, wanting to emerge.

"What happens if it opens?" he asked.

"Unknown. You didn't say. You only said it must stay sealed, and you were the seal, and if you forgot, the forgetting itself would hold it."

But K. had been forgetting more and more lately. His memories were gaps and fragments, his identity a patchwork. The seal was weakening because he was weakening, because the wall between the sealed and the unsealed was made of certainties he no longer possessed.

"Can someone else take over?" K. asked. "Can someone else become the seal?"

"You have to remember what you sealed before you can transfer the responsibility. That's how sealing works. You can't pass on something you don't know."

K. pressed his hand against the door. Something pressed back. Something wanted out, something he had once known well enough to imprison, something he had made himself forget in order to contain.

"Maybe it should be released," he said. "Maybe whatever's inside deserves to be free."

"You didn't think so forty years ago. You were very certain."

"I was a different person forty years ago."

"You were. And that person sealed this. And now you—this version, this forgetting version—have to hold what he held, or let go what he imprisoned."

K. stepped back from the door. The seal held, barely. The thing inside continued to press, to push, to remember the opening that K. had forgotten.

It would emerge eventually. K. knew this. He couldn't hold it forever. He couldn't even remember what it was.

But today, the seal held. Today, whatever he had imprisoned remained imprisoned. Tomorrow would be different—tomorrow was always different—but today, this moment, the door stayed closed.