Knot 1: Loom-Song (call-and-response)

Who lays a cloth on the night?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
Who pins it with needles of light?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
When the cloth dries stiff and white, what do we read?
The warp of fate, the weft of need.
Who taught the first pattern?
Someone’s grandmother’s grandmother, whose name is lost, but whose hands are blessed.

They call me Kaka, and that is not my name, but it is what I answer to. My hut faces east to the desert. And at night, when the sky dries out like the back of a fish, from my door you can see Sitaara’s cloth so clearly you’d think it will fall on your head.

This world is called Jamdani, after the cloth that is never plain. Jamdani’s mostly desert, with pockets of life surrounding the geyser deeps, the mercy cracks. All patterns live in mistakes, the sprigs blooming where the thread jumps.

From the crack’s throat, geysers shout: sometimes soft, sometimes furious, throwing up water salted bitter as grief. Around the spray, plants grow with roots clever enough to sip what would scald us. We humans built boilers and clearers to tame the water for our own mouths.

Our village too sits on a mercy crack, its houses leaning like stitches at the edge of a fray. When the geysers burst, children run with bowls, women spread cloth to catch the steam, and men curse the salt crust underfoot. If Jamdani had been woven perfectly, we would all be bones by now. Remember that when you weave and when you pray.

The old belief? Yes, I will tell you. Long before our grandmothers, when there were only five villages and seven geysers, a weaver-woman walked into the desert with a copper needle and a spool of darkness. She said: Enough. She strung the first warp between two dunes. She threaded stars through the weft. She hung the cloth to dry on the spine of the sky. When the wind worried it and the dew caught in it, the cloth stiffened and became the dome above our heads. And thus Sitaara gave us nights that could be read.

We learned to read them the way our people read cloth: by fingertip and side-glance, by the corner, by the mistake. A mistake, you know, is an omen. Leave one in your shawl to invite mercy.

In my father’s time, we watched for the Scorpion Lattice. It means locusts. In my own time, we watched for the Broken Gazelle. It means a year of daughters. Now the young ones say the Ragged Border has appeared: they say it means a space ark’s coming back.

What is a space ark? It is a kind of needle for the sky.

Items Received in Sitaara Village:

• Two rolls of ajrakh cloth, block-printed with indigo and madder.
• Three bags of single-origin cumin, adulteration inspected.
• News: A future spaceport is being surveyed at the far salt pan beyond the nakshi tree.
• News: the scientist returns with a box that makes the stars speak.
• Gossip: Kaka’s granddaughter has betrothed herself to the wind.

Items Promised:

• One pattern-reading for the caravan’s onward journey, payable in jaggery and diesel.
• A jar of last year’s rain, sealed.

Sign: Dhirubhai of the Red Cart. Witnessed by the nakshi tree’s shadow.

You want to see my hands? I will show you both sides. See these little cuts? The loom teaches us through blood.

My grandmother’s grandmother was a pilot on the last space ark and could read the sky cloth better than anyone. They say she would sleep facing north with her palms open so the night could set its wisdom on her lines. She taught us that a new pattern is a new word the sky speaks. To hear it, you have to listen not with your ears but with your soul.

I weave ajrakh patterns because the geyser was once generous. Indigo is the smell of dusk; madder is the warmth of breath. If I place a repeat of eight stars across a border and the ninth is misprinted, that is not a flaw; that is mercy — a place where the sky can look back into us.

You ask about the Ragged Border? The children saw it first. Children see everything we bury. It appeared at the edge of the hunter’s belt, a frayed line like the selvage of a cloth that was cut with dull scissors. The same week, a man with shoes that did not take dust came to the village. He called himself a surveyor for a company with a name like a chemical: Akkash Dynamics. He looked at the salt pan the way you would look at a bare, clean table.

He asked me: Do you think the sky is a surface or a depth? I told him: It is a cloth. He laughed the way city people do when they wish to respect you but are already somewhere else.

He came with the scientist woman, the one we call Didi Stars. They say she grew up in the city of Nakshahr, in a house that smelled of wet fish and physics. She bought one of my shawls with the Broken Gazelle motif. She asked me to explain it. I said: It means daughters. She said: Good.

Field Note: 1

The elders here hold a cosmology that maps night-sky patterns onto textile grammar. This isn’t figurative; they treat constellations as repeats, borders, motifs, and misprints. Their lexicon is rich: chhed (hole), rekha (line), buti (small flower), kinara (edge). They claim history has been read from the night’s cloth. Frankly, the elegance of the metaphor has resisted my attempts to reduce it. My mother was a sari-seller. Perhaps I am compromised by affection.

Field Note: 2

The space ark is returning, and we’re building a spaceport to fit her specific requirements. Akkash Dynamics offered me a contract as “community liaison,” which is code for: come and convert belief into permission. I refused. Then I accepted. I am not a saint; I have student loans to think of, and a father with a heart like a frayed rope.

Field Note: 3

I brought an array: a suitcase of detectors tuned to measure skyglow and star-track error. Light pollution will ruin their reading; still, rural darkness persists like stubborn cloth. I set up the array under the nakshi tree, and the children watched. One girl asked if the machine had a favorite star. I told her yes, mine. She said hers is the “eighth eye” of the scorpion. We both pretended this was scientific.

Field Note: 4

The Ragged Border is a wound where the sky forgot how to stay whole. To the naked eye, it looks like threads pulled loose, a seam glowing faint and restless, as if someone worried the cloth with impatient fingers. The villagers call it a mercy. The company calls it a hyperspace shear, the ark’s corridor bleeding into sight. Both names are true. When the wind carries fine salt through the night, you can see the Border ripple, shivering like cloth not yet hemmed. The weavers say this is the path of the Needle. They wait for it to stitch itself home.

A Sari:

I bought a shawl in the Broken Gazelle motif. It sits on my shoulders like a vow. I am tired of being reasonable. I want to see what happens if I read a sky like a girl raised on lullabies.

“The scientist looks at the sky like a midwife looks at a crowning.”

“Kaka says the salt pan is getting thirsty for machines.”

“Mira’s loom sang a new beat yesterday.”

“A new beat?”

“The treadle paused. The shuttle refused. We say the loom knows first.”

“My sister’s son says the new bright line at dawn is a ‘rocket path.’”

“Paths cut both ways.”

Slide, shuttle, slide.
Mind the mercy on the edge.
Count to eight and leave the ninth for the gods,
for daughters, for mistakes that keep us alive.
If the sky snags, smooth it with your breath.
If the cloth tears, name the tear before you mend it.

My job is to measure and not to be measured. Villages like Sitaara make both hard.

I bring maps, drones, and the company’s own liturgy: We believe in access, in opening the heavens to human ambition. It sounds like a hymn, but it is an invoice.

At the salt pan, the ground is flat enough to make you humble. The horizon looks like a long, long ruler you could hold to the world’s edge and draw a straight line to tomorrow. We need straight lines. The space arks, unlike gods, do not tolerate imprecision.

But the first day I pegged the perimeter, the children came and stuck ribbons on the stakes and called them kites. The second day, Kaka came and drew a line in the dust and said, Here the nakshi tree’s old shade used to fall. He told me a story about a weaver who taught the sky to be kind. He said, We will take your money and your jobs. We are not fools. But point your needle carefully. Cloth once torn never falls the same against the shoulder.

I asked him what the Ragged Border means to the village people. He told me to marry a woman who weaves.

Faith is a word that is too big for my hands. I like smaller words: trust, habit, taste, mercy. But if you insist, I’ll tell you faith is when I throw the shuttle and believe the other hand will be there to catch it.

When we read the sky, we are not predicting like your scientists; we are tasting what we belong to. The Scorpion Lattice told my mother to dry the grain early; that saved us a season’s grief. The Broken Gazelle told me I would have daughters, and I did: two girls with knees like nakshi nutshells and minds like geyser crowns.

The Ragged Border tells me something that I cannot say without my stomach hurting. It says: the cloth is being unhooked. Someone is taking it down to cut it to a new shape. I do not know whether to be angry or to make a blessing.

So I go to my loom and I make the raggedness in silk and cotton. I feed my misgivings to the pattern. I add a mercy at the edge.

[Cicadas. Wind. Occasional laughter from the distant huts.]

Recording? Okay. My mother used to sell saris in a shop with a tin roof that rattled staccato under the salt thrown by the winds. She could look at a pattern and tell you if a loom had been repaired with wire. I wonder what she would say about the sky.

I ran a spectral analysis tonight. There’s a measurable increase in skyglow here, even away from the city, from satellite constellations and the new cosmoport being built. The villagers call it “the stiffening of the cloth.” They’re not wrong. The sky is becoming less of a depth and more of a used surface, a written-on slate.

And yet [wind rises] and yet, when I align my array with the Ragged Border, my instruments interpret it as an error. The software screams. The Border is a mercy in physics, a loophole. It lets the ark close its path faster than the universe should allow, as if a weaver’s hand left a stitch loose. Without that looseness, the space ark would never reach us; it would be shredded in its own thread. What the cloth calls a flaw, the travelers call a door.

There’s a proposal on my desk to integrate local belief into our outreach documents. It says: Leverage cultural narratives to build stakeholder buy-in. That sentence makes my teeth feel like mismatched buttons. But maybe the only honest leverage is to admit that I, too, want a story to help me live with what I’m doing.

We set off at dawn along the salt road. The air tasted of old coins. Before we go, we always ask the oldest stone to carry our words to the sky.

O cloth-keeper who hangs the night to dry,
Keep our wheels away from thorns,
Keep our rumors true enough not to poison the mouths they pass through,
Keep our greed light enough to float, heavy enough to feed our children.

This time we asked for one more thing:
Let the incoming ark’s needle not pierce the wrong place.

The stone, being a stone, said nothing. But a salt-tail barked its harsh laugh into the air, and sometimes that is an answer.

Akkash Dynamics is proud to partner with Jamdani’s communities. We bring:

• Roads for connection.
• Jobs for prosperity.
• Investments in education for the future.

Together, we stitch progress into the very fabric of Jamdani’s skies.

Listen: Every prophecy charges twice. First in ghee and grain, in the patience of elders. Second, when it comes true, and we must bear its weight.

Once a year, on the night the geyser steam tastes of iron, we spread our best cloths and sleep beneath them so the sky can read us back. And what does it read? That we are stubborn, that we feed our children first, that we dream of leaving and we dream of staying — and both dreams pull like oxen until the yoke cracks.

Now the prophecy stands before us in steel. The company does not ask; it drives stakes, raises towers, hammers its path toward the sky. The ark is coming whether we nod or spit.

So the work of the village is not to refuse, but to shape. To weave the machine into our cloth, to leave mercy where iron seeks perfection, to make Jamdani live through change rather than be broken by it.

We told them the date. They brought laddoos and old quilts. It felt both like a wedding and a theft.

The first freight rocket rose at dawn, exactly when the cloth is thinnest. The sound folded the desert like a bedsheet snapping, and through the Nakshi tree ran a tremor. The children screamed. The women laughed. A man fainted; he will dine on the story for years.

In my instrument graphs, the payload unfolded into lattice segments, each locking into place aligned with the Ragged Border. Piece by piece, a braking frame will take shape, to catch the ark before it tears too close to Jamdani’s atmosphere.

In the villagers’ eyes, a new hem was stitched across the morning, a mercy edge at the sky’s unraveling seam.

After, Mira brought me a shawl with the Ragged Border motif rendered in indigo on indigo, so that you only see it under the right light. She said: Take this to your bosses and tell them the cloth wants softness where you push it. I said: The cloth cannot have wants. She said: Then it has mine.

That night, the children sang a new version of their rhyme where the rocket is a needle with two mothers: one who taught it to climb, and one who taught it to come home.

The loom gave me a gift. After the launch, the treadle beat like a new heart. I wove a border I had never seen: a ladder that turned halfway through and became a river. In the mercy of the misprint, the rungs bent like reeds.

I took it to Kaka and he nodded as if he had ordered it from the world. He said: This is how we will live with the needle: by teaching it to come down as carefully as it goes up. By making room in the cloth for the place where descent is not a fall but a return.

Faith, you see, is not blind here. It is half a sight, and half a hand. It is knowing how tight to pull so the pattern holds but does not choke.

Subject: Community Engagement Updates —  Sitaara Site

• Observations: Local narratives frame the sky as textile; border-fraying suggests apprehension regarding freight rocket traffic and launch frequency.
• Action Items: Commission co-designed textile exhibit for the visitors’ center; sponsor the weavers’ cooperative; incorporate a “mercy edge” concept into the safety signage (soft language around “anomalies”).
• Risks: Empowering narratives may also empower dissent.
• Opportunity: Rockets are to be positioned as “needles carrying up lengths of thread,” each payload a strand in the fabric of Jamdani’s sky. This framing suggests harmony: Earth and orbit stitched together for the ark’s safe arrival.
• Note: The science liaison appears ambivalent; her local rapport is valuable but may conflict with the corporate messaging.

Sons go to the roads; daughters learn the knots.
Needles go up; needles come down.
Between them, we keep the world from splitting.
Hush now, hush, the hot milk is skinning.
Hush now, hush, your father’s shirt is thinning.
Hush now, hush, the night is pinning itself to us with stars.

Ma,

You would have liked Mira. She would have teased you about your insistence on matching blouse pieces. You would have liked Kaka, who reminds me of Nana’s refusal to be rushed by anyone’s clock.

Today I stood at the edge of the salt pan and watched a rocket cut the morning. My job is to say why this matters. Each payload is a beam for the Braking Pad’s containment lattice above us, a hem to catch the Ragged Border before it unravels.

Without that frame, the ark would rip the sky open wider than Jamdani could bear. With it, the ship may pass cleanly, land, and leave again without breaking us. That does matter.

But something else happened. The children clapped their three-times-clap. The weaver muttered something that sounded like a blessing and a threat braided together. I felt the world’s cloth pull tight over our heads, like someone testing whether it would hold.

I think the Ragged Border is not a warning that we are tearing the sky. I think it’s an instruction to stitch with humility. To leave the mercy edge. To remember that a cloth thrown too hard will bruise the shoulder.

If I come home, I will bring you a shawl with the pattern. I will bring you a piece of sky you can fold into your cupboard, between the napkins and your winter hopes.

Love, A.

When I am done with this body, I will become an itch in someone’s story, and that is enough. Tell them: In our village we read the night. We did not all agree on what it said. We ate, we quarreled, we prayed with our hands in the flour. The ark is not ours, but we must live with it.

Once in a generation, it cuts the sky, drawn back along the Ragged Border like a needle following its own thread. Why not more often? Because cloth cannot be hemmed in the same place twice without tearing. Time must heal the seam before it can be opened again.

What does it bring? Tools we do not know how to make. Seeds with new hungers. Medicines that taste of metal and work anyway. And a promise: that those who long to leave may ride its corridor, and perhaps send back a word before their voices fade.

What does it take? The bright motifs. The strong arms. Sometimes the foolish, sometimes the wise. And always the quiet of our nights, for once the ark has passed, we can never again believe our sky belongs only to us.

Do not call it a gift or a theft. It is a rhythm, like drought and flood. Our work is not to stop it. Our work is to weave its passage into Jamdani’s cloth so that when the ark leaves, the pattern still holds.

• Tomorrow evening: women’s cooperative meets under the nakshi tree. Topic: dye shortages; indigo trader late; possible company sponsorship (strings?).
• School holiday adjusted: Space ark landing window at dawn, please keep children away from the salt road.
• Lost: one copper thimble (engraved with a peacock).
• Found: a strip of silver insulation near the pan, soft as the inside of a sickle moon. Don’t chew it.

Hang the cloth, Sitaara, hang it wide.
Hold the Border, let it guide.
Count to eight, then let the ninth
Be the ship that crosses the rhyme.

Let the ark break slow, break true,
Fall like mercy, not like rue.
If the Border burns, do not despair:
Hem it, bless it, bind it there.

The ark will bring, the ark will take.
Name the pattern it will make.
Cloth is only cloth until
The sky is stitched by human will.

The ark cannot leave us quickly. Its hull is bruised from the tear, its seams hot with stress. The Braking Pad needs to be rebuilt upside down, so it will close successfully the Ragged Border after the launch. Meanwhile Sitaara’s cloth stays ripped over our head and it is a humbling sight.

The company calls this ark’s stay maintenance. I call it convalescence. The ark is alive in ways it should not be. Every measurement I make declares: error. Even sitting on the salt plain, the ark is still a mistake the universe has not yet decided to forgive.

So it will rest for a year, maybe more. Long enough for us to circle the seasons, long enough for children to grow taller. A guest who lingers until the year turns leaves its name stitched in the cloth. The ark will leave its name.

The ark sits heavy as a dune on the salt pan, and where there is weight, there is trade. Stalls rise like mushrooms after steam: sweets, salt-tail feathers, prayer ribbons, even broken tools claimed as relics. Children charge tourists for stories of fainting men, and someone sells bottled steam as “ark breath.”

Some call it wealth. Others call it shadow. The company watches with clean boots, taking notes. The scientist walks through with a worried face. We laugh and bargain anyway, because laughter spends the easiest.

At night, when the torches gutter, the shadow of the ark lies across our quilts. It is bigger than a hill, smaller than a season, but we know already: the cloth will never be plain again.

They came in a convoy of white trucks, company men with clipboards, helmets, and smiles too clean for Jamdani’s dust. Behind them walked the recruiters, stiff in their uniforms, trailed by villagers curious as salt-tails. The children clambered on the fences to see. Old men muttered: “So this is what choosing looks like.”

The recruiters asked for names. I said my daughters’ names aloud, and it felt like pulling threads from my own skin.

Noor, with her knees like Nakshi-nut shells, who cannot pass a loom without touching it. Saavi, with her hands quick as steam, who can open a clock and make it tick again. The ark recruiters nodded as if they had woven them themselves.

I told the girls, “This is not a choice. This is the season. When the Border opens, someone must go, or the cloth unravels.” They nodded, eager.

That night, I pressed my palms to their hair as they slept. Their breath smelled of milk and salt. I thought: when the ark leaves, Jamdani will breathe with their lungs, or not at all.

Subject: Local Recruitment Initiative — Preliminary Notes

Candidate Noor demonstrates unusual pattern recognition.

• Quick adaptation to visual alignment tasks.
• Spontaneous use of metaphor (“warp/weft”) — training staff flagged as effective teaching heuristic.

Candidate Saavi shows aptitude for mechanical restoration.

• Repaired a simple diagnostic panel without instructions.
• Potential fit for Transceiver repairs.

Community reception: high engagement. Villagers gathered during convoy arrival; visible curiosity was interpreted as support. Recommendation: leveraging this in outreach materials.

Messaging: emphasize “opportunity,” “education,” “future.” Avoid terms such as compulsory service or crew attrition.

They call it the FTL Transceiver, as if a mouthful of letters could hide its silence. I call it the Shuttle. Once it carried voices back and forth between stars, the way a weaver’s shuttle carries thread through cloth. Now it lies broken, and the ark is deaf.

I put my ear to its casing. No hum. I press my hand flat. No warmth. But machines are like cloth: they remember. If you tug the right corner, the whole pattern stirs.

I will mend it. Not for the company, not for their memos. For Jamdani, so that when the ark leaves, our sky will not be mute again.

Left foot, right foot, count the gaps,
speak to the weft in whisper maps.
Mercy on the edge, mercy in the seam,
leave room for the day you change your dream.

After the ark’s landing, the salt pan around our guest gleams, melted to glass. And with the gleam comes clutter: shards of alloy the ark no longer needs, food wrappers printed in languages no one here can read, a vial that once held medicine sharp as metal. The crew tosses them aside as useless. To us they are relics. Children snatch them up, racing to show me each new find as if I am a shrine.

My array now includes a simple thing: a notebook of the children’s interpretations. They draw the Ragged Border as if it were theirs to tame. One girl sketched it as a staircase with one step missing. Another drew it as a river, its banks stitched with tiny knots “to talk to the other side.”

They are proud that Noor and Saavi walk the ark’s corridors. Their grandmothers have walked only to the market or to the mercy crack, but these girls will be grandmothers in other skies. The pride shines in their eyes brighter than the scraps of alloy in their hands.

I grew up believing science was the loom that would teach me fairness. But looms, too, can be owned.

I sat in the pilot’s chair today. It is too big for me, but that is the joke — they say the ark is too big for anyone. The console glows with marks I don’t know, but I don’t read them. I touch them the way you touch cloth in the dark, finding the give, the snag, the misprint.

When I close my eyes, the Ragged Border rises in me. Not lines on a screen, but threads under a fingertip. If I press wrong, it pulls away. If I breathe steadily, it settles, like a child soothed.

They tell me to call it correcting the course. I call it listening to cloth.

When I left the simulator, some children followed me, whispering my name as if it were already a story. I am not a story. Not yet. Not until the ark rises.

I stayed with the Shuttle today until the lamps went dim. Its belly is tangled, wires curled like burned roots, panels scored with salt. The company men say it is useless. I say cloth only looks ruined until you find the thread that holds it.

I opened one coil, black with ash. When I touched it, it crumbled but beneath, the copper still shone. I hummed a loom-song under my breath, the way you do when pulling out knots. Not for magic, just to keep steady.

For a breath-long moment, one light blinked. Only once. A single stitch in a sea of holes. Then darkness again.

I pressed my forehead to the casing and whispered: “I will bring you voices. I promise.”

The freight rockets started flying anew, this time turning the Breaking Pad inside out, so the ark will reopen the Ragged Border on launch. The company has been saying the word return with the zeal of a convert. Reusability makes money; rhetoric makes reusability palatable.

At dawn, the booster came back like a needle reconsidering a stitch. Perfect until the last thirty meters, then there was a wobble like a skipped heartbeat. It landed skewed in the far quadrant of the pan, throwing up a veil of salt. No one was hurt. We tasted victory and corrosion at once.

Mira wraped a shawl around my shoulders without looking at me. The pattern was new: a ladder becoming a river, the rungs bent like reeds. “For descent,” she says. My throat does a thing that is not scientific.

Applause is a habit city people brought to us. We used to say wah-wah when old women sang, and arey baap re when goats did something clever, and that was enough. Now we clap for rockets, and for everything that tries to go to space: a boy leaping farther, a politician stretching a vowel.

After the freight rocket’s needle stitched the sky, someone began to clap. It was Noor. It sounded like salt raining on a tin roof. Others followed. Even the salt-tail added its ridiculous cry.

Applause is a way of telling ourselves we are here. It is also a way of telling the sky we are not done.

The company asks the cooperative to weave a panel for the visitors’ center: “Community Heritage Textile.” Money enough to buy indigo for a season, to fix three roofs, to send two girls to vocational school without bargaining with uncles.

I gather the women. We talk long, with flour on our hands. We agree on a condition: we will choose the pattern. The company nods, as if consenting to gravity.

We weave the Ragged Border with the mercy edge thick enough to feel under a palm. We thread a ladder that turns to river. We hide, at the selvedge, a tiny misprint: a stitch that pulls away from the needle, a loop that refuses to be cut. We call it Return.

When we deliver the panel, the surveyor runs his fingers along the edge and shivers, as if a small future just touched his wrist.

Subject: Visitor Center Textile —  Interpretive Copy

• “The Sky as Cloth”: Emphasize shared human heritage of weaving; analogize rockets as “needles carrying thread of cooperation.”
• “Mercy Edge”: Reframe as “safety margin.”
• “Ragged Border”: Present as “evolving horizon.”
• Avoid terms: tear, fray, wound.

Add a donor plaque.

Note: Local artisan collective insistent on use of “Return” motif. Spin as sustainability.

We’ll stitch a step where none was there,
teach a needle how to care.
Salt in hair and soot on skin,
we’ll clap the cloth and call it kin.

We live at the selvedge. It is where the weft turns back, binding the edge so the cloth does not unravel. The selvedge is plain, not full of flowers or stars. But without it, even the brightest pattern comes undone.

The ark rests in our salt pan. The Pad rises again, beam by beam, like a hem rebuilt. Beyond us lie the motifs, the far-off worlds the ark stitches together: bright with towers, heavy with oceans, loud with voices we have never heard. When the ark leaves, its name will blaze like a motif. Ours will not. That is fine.

A cloth cannot live without its selvedge, even if no one sings about it.

I wear the glasses until my eyes ache. The Shuttle opens like no cloth I know: layers inside layers, threads smaller than dust. I guide the nano-instruments the way I once guided a needle, hand trembling, heart steady. One wrong tug, and the whole weave slips away.

For days there has been nothing but silence, silence that tastes of iron. Today, at last, the pattern aligns. A tremor runs through the lattice, sharp enough to make me bite my lip.

Then, voices. Not one, a flood. A hundred tongues, a thousand. Languages I do not know, laughter, arguments, lullabies, markets, warnings. The salt pan itself rings with them as the Shuttle awakens.

People stumble out of their houses, faces lifted, mouths open. Some laugh, some weep. Children clap their hands to catch the noise, as if it were geysers’ foam. For the first time in generations, Jamdani is full of voices not its own. No longer alone.

The instructors strap me in, their voices taut. “Stability check. Simulate the hyperspace shear and the event interface.” The console blooms with light, lines twitching like frayed threads. The ark shudders, as if remembering its wound.

I breathe slowly. I press where the weave gives, let the misprint lead me. The tremor softens, the lines grow steady. It is not a question of strength. The Border hums against my palms like a drum.

Someone claps behind me, too soon. I ignore it. I carry the cloth through until the seam lies flat again. Only then do I let go.

I pass. The certificate is printed on paper that smells like a machine trying to be a tree. Jagan says he will carve my name on his toolbox lid. I tell him to spell it right. He tries, fails, paints over, tries again. The lid looks like a palimpsest. I like it that way.

The wind on the way home talks in a language we grew up with and forgot. The Ragged Border doesn’t look ragged tonight. It looks like a hem folded twice and pressed.

A girl came to the cooperative with a pattern scrawled on the inside of a cement sack. It looked like the Ragged Border swallowing a needle and then smiling with all its teeth. We laughed; then we grew sober, because the pattern felt like a dare.

We wove it small, as a sample. We failed it three times. On the fourth, Saavi adjusted the tension with a patience that made the loom forgive us. Noor looked at the cloth and said: “It looks like coming home with a scar.” We nodded.

I told them: cloth is not for worship, it is for wearing. If a pattern does not sit on a shoulder without biting, it is a bad prayer. That is what my grandmother taught me, and what I teach them.

We cut the sample free. I edge-hemmed it with my grandmother’s copper thimble, the one with the peacock. Then I remembered the chalk notice: Lost: copper thimble. Found: none. I untied it from my own finger and gave it back to the air.

When I was young, I thought the bright motifs were a reward and the plain selvedge was punishment. Then I learned neither is true. The motifs dazzle but fray, the selvedge holds but goes unsung. A cloth is honest: it shows where you belong, even when you do not wish to see it.

People say rockets mean leaving. I say rockets are needles, stitching a path so the ark may come and go without bowing to seas or kings. But the real leaving is quieter: boys with phones, girls with bags, children who choose a door and step through.

Noor will leave, and she will also stay. Her hands will guide the ark, but her laughter will linger in the geyser’s crowns. Saavi will stay, and she will also leave. Her Shuttle will bind Jamdani to other skies, her voice traveling farther than her feet.

You want me to explain? Go ask a Nakshi tree how many roots hold the village, and how many shoots escape its shade.

The ark is never empty. We fill it with grain, tools, spare filters, samples of soil, and more lists than I can name. Every crate is weighed against thrust, every gram measured against risk. The Braking Pad hums with tension, waiting to release the ship as it once caught it.

Noor walks the corridors as if she has always belonged here. Saavi lingers by the Shuttle, listening for echoes even when the voices have quieted. I mark their names in my notes, though the company will only call them crew.

The villagers bring laddoos, quilts, salt-crusted water jars: offerings no manifest will record. But I write them too, because cloth is not complete without its selvedge, and departure is not complete without what clings to it.

One for the warp that never breaks,
Two for the knot a mother makes,
Three for the girls on a rooftop stair,
Four for the needle that learns to care,
Five for the salt that fell like rain,
Six for the ark that left without pain,
Seven for elders who watch and mend,
Eight for the mercy we leave at the end,
Nine we do not count aloud,
the child who changes the rhyme is proud.

The ark does not rise gently. It pulls at the cloth, tearing what we thought was whole. The Ragged Border opens, jagged as teeth, and for a moment Jamdani shudders as if it will unravel.

But cloth is made to be joined. A tear is not an ending if you know where to knot it. That is what the Shuttle does now, it ties Jamdani’s selvedge to other motifs, binding us into a pattern too wide for one sky alone.

I leave with Noor, not as thread cut loose, but as thread carried through. The ark is our shuttle. Its engines are needles, its wake a seam. The cloth frays, then binds.

I press my palm to the wall as the Border flares. I feel the tug, fierce and bright. It is not loss. It is joining.

Subject: Community Signal Bell

• Legal advises removal.
• PR advises “lean in.”
• Ops advises earplugs.
• Liaison (Scientist) advises leaving it and learning to hear.

Action: No action. (For once.)

I weave the cycle into a shawl for no one and everyone. Indigo on indigo, so the pattern only shows when light leans. Ladder to river. Ragged Border thick and thin. Mercy edge like a sigh. In the middle, a small motif like a ring that fell from the sky and learned to be worn.

When I cut it free, I do not sing. I breathe. I lay it over the visitor panel for a moment, like a blessing or a practical joke. Then I fold it and put it away where daughters find such things at the exact wrong time and carry them into their right lives.

I put my cough into a jar and it becomes rain. I put my watch into a drawer, and time leaves me alone long enough to say this:

We read the sky as cloth and learned that frayed edges can teach mending. We watched an ark tear through our selvedge and bind us to other motifs. We learned that staying and leaving are only different names for the same turn in the weave.

If anyone asks what faith we kept, say: the faith that a misprint can save you. The faith that you leave a space for the ninth, unnamed thing. The faith that a border is not the end but the place you turn back and make whole.

If anyone asks where I went, say: into the cloth itself, to the shade that used to fall here.

Up with the needle, down with care,
leave a mercy, leave it bare.
Edge the sky with salt and flame,
name the tear and stitch the same.
Not to master, not to own,
just to make the pattern known.
Sitaara, hang your night again.
We’ll read it, mend it, and remain.

The bell rings at unexpected hours. Children say it knows when the sky inhales. The company adds a line to the tour script: “Listen for the community bell; it symbolizes our shared vigilance.” The bell ignores scripts.

I run my hand along the visitor panel’s mercy edge and feel the softness the women have built into it. In our codebook, the one I keep with Saavi’s knots and Noor’s diagrams, I add a new entry:

Mercy Edge (n.): The deliberate looseness that prevents a pattern from becoming a prison.

I close the notebook and look up. The Hyperspace Shear is not ragged tonight. Or it is, but we are too. Either way, the cloth holds.

I am not sure if that counts as science. I am sure it counts though.

Welcome to Sitaara Launch and Learning Center!

Learn how humanity stitches Earth to sky!

• Exhibit A: “The Sky as Cloth” –  (the mercy edge is real; touch it when the docent looks away).
• Exhibit B: “Reusable Rockets” –  (watch for the wobble no one admits). Community Panel: woven by Mira Cooperative –  (there’s a misprint near the left selvedge; it’s a promise).
• Sound Installation: Bell of the Border –  (it rings when the wind remembers our names).

(Penciled note at bottom): If you stand under the nakshi tree at dawn and close one eye, you can see the Ragged Border turn into a river for a breath. If you breathe with it, it will carry you exactly far enough.

Who hangs the cloth tonight?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
Who leaves the mercy at the edge?
We do, we do.
What is the Ragged Border?
A place to turn.
And the ark?
A shuttle that stitched us to return.
And faith?
The misprint that saves us.
And us?
We mend, we bind, we remain.

Dipu sits in front of the gate as the super-shop shuts down. Much like the plastic plant kept inside a plastic pot nearby. He gets up once, to leave. But where can he go? He sits back again.

The city has stitched one house after another, crossed one town after another, leapt past fields and rivers to reach Dipu’s childhood. His memories of the place have been unhanded by a multiplex project. Where shall he go? Home? Whose home? Which home?

Dipu keeps sitting. The super-shop will reopen at nine in the morning and close at eight thirty at night. It needs to be shut at that time according to the new laws of the government. Earlier it was better because it used to be almost eleven by the time the shop closed its business. Now he has a lot of free time for himself after work. Dipu doesn’t need such a lot of time. He will feel lighter if he can somehow sell all his free time. He is thinking of getting another job for the night. He can be a night guard. He doesn’t need money. Rather, he wants to get a job even if he needs to shell out money. He fishes out his phone from his pocket. He taps the buttons for a long time. He puts it on his ear and then doesn’t take it down.

Ma? Should I send it tomorrow? I will allow it to grow. Please have your medicines properly. Don’t be like Abba. No one grows rich saving money meant for medicines; people die this way. Abba has. Abba’s not alive, Ma. At least you stay. What? Fine, I’ll send over a sum. Ma, is my goat still there? You haven’t given away my ball, have you? Ma, I’ll come soon. You’ll wake up one day and see me standing right next to your forehead. I want to come back Ma, but I can’t for the life of me remember the way to our home. Wasn’t there a tender coconut tree right next to the tap? Now I spot a tender coconut tree in every house, but the area around the tap doesn’t match! Ma, have you hidden the tap somewhere? Or has Abba taken it with him? Ma…

He gets no answer from the other side.

Dipu puts the phone away from his ear. It has been two days since he charged it. He did put it to charge once today but forgot to switch it back on. He keeps clicking the buttons of the phone in his hand. Right now, even this seems like some sort of occupation to him. And while he clicks away, Dipu feels as though he is running on a board like that of the phone’s keypad. From zero to nine—no scope of going outside this limit. And within this space, life seems vast to him. But what he really needs to do is to reduce time to a dot and fling himself inside that dot. That dot that will have no time before or after it.

Dipu keeps sitting.

He gets up eventually. He gathers all his strength, but his legs suddenly feel numb. These days his memory freezes anytime, without a warning. He cannot recall a thing from just the day before. And when the people of this city think about their future, Dipu tries to build his past from a vacuum. He doesn’t remember if he ever had a house. His mother must have been there. There must have been a mother, since he had been birthed. And that is why he must have had a father. But what about a wife or sibling? Perhaps he has one, maybe he doesn’t. And when he thinks of a wife, the image of a child swims to his mind from the black hole that is his memory. And if he has a child, there must be a wife. Or does the black hole release the image of someone else’s child? Or that of his own childhood? Has everyone known to Dipu died? Among the millions and millions of people in this city, why doesn’t he know anyone? Is he himself alive? Do the dead have any memory? Dipu thinks that either he or others are dead. But this thought is not based on sound logic. Dipu now tries to hear some faraway sound. Some young bride is sobbing quietly. Her pillow is soaked. Dipu’s senses are suddenly so sharp that he can see everything clearly. His spirit seems to move out of his body and sit on that bed. A picture is kept on the mirror of the bamboo dressing table inside the room. It isn’t difficult for him to recognize it in the darkness. He opens his eyes and realizes that a house like this must exist somewhere in this world, a place where his photograph is kept. But where will he find that house? Why should he search for that house?

A dog climbs a few stairs and sits near his feet. One empty truck after another roars past him on the road in front. All the trucks carry materials for the construction of the new building. A night bird flies from the darkness nearby to the denser blackness yonder. A dream shifts from one side to the other in search of a sleeping person. Perhaps the people of this city do not sleep like Dipu, or maybe each of them has a pet dream, and a few commonplace dreams lie waiting for Dipu.

I had a pet dream once; I used to see it every day. Dipu says.

I am a pleasant dream. But no one wants good dreams now. This city has turned even dreams into entertainment. The dream says.

I can’t remember my dream anymore. Do dreams die like people? Dipu asks.

We can’t differentiate between alive and dead. We can only tell apart sleep from wakefulness.

And if one slips into eternal sleep? Or lies awake in perennial wakefulness?

The dream gets up without another word. It leaves in search of someone asleep. A person that has no dream of his own. This city has lakhs and lakhs of people who love dreaming. Dipu envies them.

The night doesn’t seem to move ahead. The buildings slowly dim one by one. Dipu feels like walking through the entire city today. And while walking, he wants to enter an unfamiliar house. Perhaps a woman will say—wash your hands and face and come for dinner. And after washing his hands, with great intimacy, Dipu will wipe his hands on the edge of her saree. And as if she were his own, she will not stop any of his advances. Dipu wants to embrace her once. He hasn’t hugged a woman in so long. And sitting for his dinner at the neat and organized table, he will taste the food made by someone very familiar. He will be a little absent-minded in trying to recall whose hands cooked such food. The woman will place her hands on his shoulders then. And he will break down trying to wonder if anyone had ever placed her hands on his shoulders that affectionately.

Dipu recalls someone. While walking the lanes of his neighborhood, he tries to remember the name. A person’s existence is incomplete without a name. While searching for that name, Dipu walks quite a distance. He decides to enter a house. He spots an old, two-floor house on the street that hasn’t crumbled yet because it is waiting to be demolished any day soon. Before he can press the calling bell, someone opens the door from inside. Dipu puts one of his feet inside.

Keep your shoes outside, I just swept the floor. The woman says.

She probably opened the door. Dipu keeps his shoes and looks at the wall, wondering what to do next. A lizard looks at him. He stares back at the lizard squarely in its eyes. He slowly builds the courage to look at the woman’s eyes.

What happened? Wash your hands and come for dinner.

Dipu looks around and locates the washbasin. He washes his hands for a long time. He moves forward to wipe his hands. The woman is not wearing a saree, she is clad in a salwar-kameez. She doesn’t have a dupatta on her. There is space for only one person at that small dining table, the rest of it is cluttered with objects. Dipu pulls the chair and sits. At the table there is a plate of rice along with two vegetable sides. When he looks closely a cockroach moves down from one of the containers, climbs his arm and enters his shirt. He sifts through the rice on the plate. The potato mash is watery; the young banana curry has dried up. While eating, he tries to recall something. No, he cannot remember. He cannot recollect the thought he had when he entered that house. And he cannot eat fast, preoccupied with thoughts about what to do after dinner.

Go to the room after you’re done eating. I’m leaving for the hotel. Napa Suppository is kept there. Give her the medicine if the fever increases. She will have to be admitted in the morning. Did you get money anywhere? Saying this, the woman applies a thick coat of lipstick and drapes a black dupatta on the salwar-kameez she is wearing.

Dipu realizes that he has entered the wrong house. He gets up and brushes his clothes. The cockroach falls to the floor and scurries away inside the room. Dipu cautiously follows suit. A child is lying there, around seven or eight years old. The bed looks really old. Dipu sits gingerly beside the girl. She seems to be shivering with fever. He should get out of here before he is stuck in some major problem. There are many other houses in this city, lakhs and lakhs of skyscrapers have hidden the sky and the trucks hover all through the city carrying materials for another lakh of such buildings. Dipu regrets entering the wrong house, his life suddenly seems unbearable to him, if at all he is alive… He will leave right now. There is no one to stop him now. He gets up. He is startled, looking at the picture on the bamboo dressing table on the wall next to him.

Rumors hold that everything worth remembering in human history has been written down by one person, someone who has been around to see it all. No one can imagine who it might be; human history has been written for thousands of years, yet no one can live that long. Except a god, one recording humanity’s actions for a purpose they were too little to understand.

No one knew who first spoke of a god of written history; the best historians could only find short sentences describing this god, but no mention of its name. Many gods were known in that time: the god of the sun, the god of the moon, and many gods that helped people in their times of need, but a nameless god that kept history was still a great mystery. These other gods were more concerned about the number of worshippers they had, how many temples were built in their honor, and their own divine stories of greatness and power, not stories about humans. Their stories were meant to be tales that were passed down through the ages: tales of great courage or wrath or kindness, these stories were reasons to worship and build temples for these gods. A god with no temples and no stories of their own was no god. Though no one knew what this supposed god looked like, everyone from the biggest cities to the smallest villages agreed that whoever was written down in this nameless god’s books was one to be remembered throughout history. Even though no credit was given and no praise was held, the nameless god still wrote down everything that was necessary; a thankless job but one the god knew was necessary for humans to keep moving forward.

While the stories of gods were told more than any other, humans were still desperate to reach the level of remembrance that the gods had by having their own tales of greatness. Whether it was kings conquering lands untouched or emperors creating mountainous civilizations, it is human instinct to want to be remembered and those who are remembered can be remembered for anything. Families have tried for centuries, gods for millenia, and while not everyone is remembered, every story worth passing down was written down by some god, somewhere. If you were not written down, you may as well have not existed.

For those who could not make their name in eternal history, they were content with leaving a legacy their own family could remember and be proud of. Some became local legends rather than national ones; others were famous within their own families. Shino had a family that had no legends and no legacy, but this was not for a lack of trying. His grandfather’s grandfather had tried to save his village from an oncoming flood, but his body had been swept away by the rushing currents. Shino’s grandfather’s father had thought he could launch himself to the moon to conquer land no one else could reach; his footprints are still marked with soot in a town center somewhere Shino has never visited. Shino’s grandfather had thought he could gamble their family’s little worth on bad bets and Shino’s father had thought joining his country’s military would be the safest option to repay the debts Shino’s grandfather had accumulated. These were stories that would be passed down and forgotten one day, just as the names of the people in these stories were gone. Shino knew his family was not written in history, not yet.

After seeing the failures of his forefathers to reach any sort of height or fame or leave a legacy worth sharing, Shino took it upon himself to make his name in history.The rest of Shino’s family wanted little in life; the siblings who survived to adulthood despite poverty were grateful to be alive. While his siblings saw their failures as reasons not to search for notoriety, Shino took his family history as motivation to do better. Shino had already forgotten his grandfather’s name by the time he was old enough to leave, as had the rest of his family. He did not want the same legacy for himself, so with little knowledge but rumors and prayers, Shino searched for the historian god. “If my name is great enough to be written down by gods themselves, we are sure to live fruitfully,” Shino reassured his mother the night before he left on a quest for a better legacy.

Shino had listened to what little he could go on to begin his quest, mostly whispers from other gods written down by devoted worshippers, largely forgotten by humanity. It was said that the god of history stayed on a mountain that never changed while history changed around it. Shino could not find much of what it meant for a mountain to never change. How much was a mountain supposed to change over time? Shino did not know and checking every mountain in the world would have been an arduous task, so Shino took his time to ask masters in knowledge what such a rumor could mean.

“A mountain stuck in time,” one master said smugly. “Find a mountain where nothing happens and climb to its peak.”

Shino pondered the master and asked, “What happens when nothing happens?”

The master said he had no more time to answer questions and needed to return to his studies. Shino knew the master had no answer.

“A mountain in the middle of nowhere would have no history. If the mountain is nowhere important, it would have nothing to occur,” a second master reasoned.

Shino thought about this too, and asked, “Are there places in the world left unexplored?”

Unlike the first master, the second master was excited by Shino’s curiosity. He answered, “There is always land left to conquer, something for rulers left to seize. As much as we record every piece of knowledge, there is always something new to learn from our world.”

The second master’s answer left Shino unsatisfied, had most of the world not already been recorded by adventurers older than Shino? Shino also knew that conquering an unexplored land required an army, resources only few in the land could afford. No one was going to give Shino what he needed so his name could be recorded by some mythical being. The second master’s answer made Shino concerned this task was an impossible one, so he sought after a third opinion, one that he felt he could take on his own with only a satchel on his back and food to trade.

Shino was able to find his answer with the third: “Find a mountain for which nothing changes. A height that does not shrink or grow, a peak that does not melt or clear, a storm that never leaves, the parts of a summit that would change with time. There are a few that fit, but there may be one close enough to make the journey close to home. But would this make the journey worth it?”

The third master’s answer reignited Shino. There was hope in such an answer, it was so obvious to Shino that he was surprised the masters couldn’t see it earlier: find a mountain whose weather never changes. He took months of climbing to scour the mountains of his country, praying that whatever god was watching over Shino was recording his journey. While climbing mountains alone was not worth a legend, Shino reasoned climbing to the peak of every tall, snowy and stormy mountaintop might be. It became an arduous task, Shino frequently having to climb down his mountain once the storm settled after days of raging furiously. He had never bothered to ask how many tall peaks his country may have had, he only had a map to cross out where he had been.

Starting up one of the last remaining mountains on his map, Shino could feel paranoia and anxiety creeping in at every crack in the clouds. Despite looking for a god, Shino never considered himself religious. With the luck his family had in their own fortune, what god could possibly have been listening? Knowing this, Shino still prayed. As he lay in his shelter, preparing for the scouting ahead, Shino prayed aloud, “Please lead me to you, whoever you may be. Am I not worthy? Am I the first to seek your guidance? I cannot go back home as much of a failure as my forefathers and only you have the solution, oh god of history.”

Until, one day, around the age of 20, the same age as his father when he left, Shino found a cabin in a blizzard, halfway up the last mountain he could check before he would have had to ask permission to leave the country to search nearby countries for other mountains. The cabin was shoddy, Shino was surprised to see it still standing against the fiercest winds he had faced. “Shelter,” he told himself as the snow crushed under his worn boots.

While the outside of the cabin had seen better days, the inside was a different story. Inside the cabin was a golden sheen that illuminated the dull colors on Shino’s wet coat. As Shino stepped inside, he looked and saw the walls were coated in lights and scrolls. The room itself was small, only another door and a fireplace displaced the walls. Shino followed the scrolls upwards and saw the cabin had no end, contrasting the shabby cabin roof outside that was at most two heads higher than him. Closing the door behind him, Shino began to strip away the snow-soaked clothing and warm up by the fire, its flames licking a wood that never seemed to burn.

Once finished and down to his barest garments, Shino saw the other door open. The warmth of the cabin had caused Shino to drop his guard, along with his weapon. He scrambled towards his knife, one that had helped him defend himself against thieves during his journey, and held it close to his chest.

This isn’t your home, a small voice reasoned in Shino’s head.

This voice was drowned out by the louder, Protect yourself, you are the most precious thing.

Standing close to the fire but far from the door, Shino saw a child, maybe younger than when Shino was when he left home on his journey for the god. The child had hair a paler blond than any scroll in the cabin, the lights gave them a golden aura.

No, it wasn’t the lights doing anything, the child themselves glowed.

The child closed the door behind them and greeted, “Hello Shino, how may I welcome you to my home?”

Shino lowered his knife, no one had said his name for months. In order to be safe, Shino had always opted for a fake name, especially if there was any chance he would have to owe money. He knew it wasn’t right, he knew his mother told him his father did something similar, but Shino reasoned that nothing should get in the way of finding this god. Now that he was in the presence of one, he thought about how stupid his actions might have been.

“Are you—”

“Please, call me Um. I am but a humble archivist. I write what needs to be written.”

Shino smiled. “That is excellent because you need to write about me!”

Um turned their head before they turned away and began to make tea over the fire. As he took a metal rod and began to poke the fire, Um asked, “Why do I need to write about you? Have you done something noteworthy?”

“I climbed every unchanging mountain to find you! Is that not worthy of being written down in history?” Shino was given a cup and told to wait for tea. As he waited, he wondered why Um looked the way they did. He thought the god of history would look, well, historical. As if to prove Shino wrong, Um reached out an arm to the ceiling and watched as a scroll fluttered down from the pile on the wall. Um didn’t open the scroll but held it tight in their hand as they began to pour tea for Shino.

“You climbed five hundred and twenty eight mountains, but I have a record of someone who climbed over a thousand mountains. Do you think climbing less than half the mountains the person in this scroll did makes you a legend?” Um asked.

“No.” Shino took a shameful sip of his tea. It tasted close to the brew made at home.

“Shino, to make legends, you need to have something worth passing down. Come back in double your lifetime after you have done something will be passed down.”

Shino accepted Um’s challenge and, in a blink and a sip of his tea, found himself at the bottom of his first mountain, the one closest to his hometown.

Once he returned to his village, Shino’s peers began rumors that he failed. None of this deterred him, Shino vowed to himself he would find something worth passing down. His first step was to leave his family home and start his own. While the chastisement from his mother was a harder sting than the disapproval of his village, Shino left his home and started a new life in a new village.

After finding a new village a week’s time away from his own, Shino was able to integrate himself. He took an interest in the village’s administration. He volunteered for all the work no one else wanted and gave helpful advice whenever asked. This attracted one of the village higher-up’s daughters to Shino’s side. After a short time together, Shino was married with a few children.

Once Shino was forty, he saw his new home thrive. Thanks in part to his efforts, his village was one of the few that was able to survive several droughts and a handful of famines. When a plague soared through the land like a blanket of death, Shino was able to help keep the village clean and away from any dirty omens. He was claimed a hero in the village many times over. He saw how his family looked at him, full of hope and pride for their patriarch.

Shino knew he was ready.

“Do you have to go to the mountain?” Shino’s fourth oldest child asked him.

“They said to return at the time when my life has doubled. When I went then, I had nothing, but now, I have everything. When you get to my age, what will you tell your children about me?”

“That their grandfather saved his village many times and was a hero!” his child cheered.

Shino smiled before he headed off, making sure everyone knew he was going to come back a legend. If he had been in his old village, Shino knew he would have been ridiculed many times over before he had left the front gates. Here, with all the good he knew he was doing, the most anyone did was a passing glance. For the first time, Shino found himself feeling respected.

The god’s cabin on the mountain didn’t change, neither in location or shabbiness. Shino felt blessed to not have to wander mountains for ages again just to meet and ask a simple favor. On the shorter journey, the more he found himself talking to himself, the more Shino was assured that he was due to be written in history.

Opening the door, Shino saw that nothing had changed. Even with styles and cultures changing in areas Shino had seen twenty years prior, the cabin had remained the same. Its intense glow bathed Shino as he began to take off his coat, rather than stripping almost entirely. As the fire flickered nearby, Shino declared, “Um, I am here to be made a legend!”

Their inner door opened and they rushed to Shino. After a moment of inspection on both ends, Shino saw no change in Um’s appearance. They looked as young as the first time Shino met them. He couldn’t find any wrinkles on the child’s face while Shino unconsciously felt the slight folds on his face crease further. His mouth twitched.

“It is further proof of your godliness that you remain so young after so many years, Um. Please, as the god of history, you must have seen my contributions.”

Um backed away, tending to the fire. “I have, yes. Do you feel these are sufficient for you to be written as, how you say, a legend?”

“Well, yes, my village may have perished without my help. Is saving a village after what could have been numerous disasters not enough for my name to last generations after me?”

Um shook their head. “Maybe a few… Maybe your great grandchild will know your name, but there are many others and there will be many others that will save their fellow countrymen from danger and their names will last until they die. After that, they are as important as the spit from a full man. I cannot write your name down as you have not done anything any other man would not have done in your place.”

Mouth agape from the god’s bluntness, Shino watched as Um made their way back to their hidden room. Before they grabbed the door, Shino came to his senses and asked, “You gave me advice last time; can you give me more? I will spend just as many years and come back to show you I am worth writing down, even in a single line.”

Um’s hand cradled the knob while they watched Shino in their peripheral vision. “Do something worth remembering, else why should history remember you?”

Before Shino could protest or ask for further explanation, he felt his body flying back through the door and ended up back at home, crashing into a nearby table while he heard his wife cooking nearby. Rushing from another room, Shino’s wife shrieked, “Shino! I thought you would have been at your mysterious mountain at this point. Tell me what you’re doing!”

Regaining his composure, Shino stood from the ruins of their table and announced, “We will be moving to the city, I have a new goal in mind.”

After getting the god’s advice, Shino took less time than before enacting a new plan to be written down in the history scrolls. When picking the village he would move to, Shino originally picked a village a week’s time away. Unknownst to Shino, he had picked a village that was less than a day from his country’s capital. When he explained to his father-in-law why he wanted to move to his country’s capital, Shino assumed that his wife’s father would have forbidden Shino from taking his daughter away from him.

Shino was never happier to be wrong; not only did his father-in-law approve, he wrote Shino a letter of high merit for when he went to apply for a job. Once Shino and his family reached the capital, the letter allowed Shino to start his job in the government in the city. His family lived better than they ever could in the city, a large house near the capitol building with enough rooms to have at least three more families move into, if Shino’s children wanted to stay.

As Shino aged, he gained more respect from his fellow countrymen, helping strategize and lead battles as the number of enemies of the country grew. Shino grew to be a natural leader, his oldest children starting families in the house that only grew with age. While his decisions were thought to be more ruthless against any country that tried to smudge the beauty of their prosperity, Shino was well liked by a majority. Once it was time to elect a new leader, Shino was the almost unanimous winner, with the few dissenters changing their mind once Shino brought further happiness to his country.

His rule was bloody, but only to outsiders that refused to come. Many saw the wealth and joy Shino brought to his country and were nothing but jealous. He cut leaders down like the threshing of wheat, giving any land captured during the times of war to citizens who had nothing. At the peak of Shino’s reign, a quarter of the world was under his command.

Once he was sixty, Shino saw everything he ruled over and everything he had accomplished. He saw his children grow up to fine adults, his wife raise a home that gave Shino the support he needed to guide his people, and the citizens he gave a better life to than he had at the same age. He knew the god would be pleased.

“Father, you have accomplished more than any man I could find, why do you still go on what appears to be a fruitless journey?” One of Shino’s sons grew to be an academic, one that questioned if the person Shino was meeting was even a god.

“If you saw them like how I saw them, you would understand.” As Shino aged, he found himself giving vague answers to his children about his goals. His children would never understand, his wife never did and argued with Shino the days leading up to his journey.

His son continued to complain, “Then take me with you! Let me see this so-called ‘god’ and prove to you that this dangerous journey was never worth it.”

Shino put his foot down. “If you are calling it dangerous, I refuse to allow you to journey alongside. I forbid it. Besides, young one, if I did not go on this journey, we would not have had this wonderful home, or the education you received to be able to snap at your elders. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

The son wanted to snap back, but it would have only proved Shino right. Even though Shino was the highest politician in the land, no one followed Shino in his journey. Bringing such a time of peace and prosperity into the country itself, many felt grateful to have Shino as their leader and those who didn’t were terrified of the consequences of hurting the sixty-year old man. This made the journey to the mountain much easier than in previous years, despite his old age slowing him down.

Instead of letting himself in once he reached the cabin, Shino thought it would be polite to knock. He raised a fist to the door but before he could rap the cabin door, he heard Um say, “You may come in.”

The door opened on its own and Shino shuffled inside. Um was sitting, waiting for Shino’s return. They were unaged while Shino’s joints cracked and popped more than the burning wood. The fireplace looked unchanged, still flickering as brightly as the first time he came through. The only thing that seemed old in this cabin was him. “I followed your advice.”

Um looked Shino up and down, Shino wearing coats made out of animals only found in countries he had taken over. Exotic furs lined his body, Shino asked for only the warmest for his journey. “I can see.”

“Am I a legend in your history?” Shino asked.

“What advice did you follow?” Um asked.

Shino was taken aback, wondering if the god couldn’t remember the past twenty years. No, it had to be a test, to see if Shino was paying attention to the god’s words. Shino answered, “You said to do something worth remembering. I did. You must see the gifts this country has been bestowed under my leadership?”

Um asked, “Is the slaughter of thousands worth remembering?”

“Yes, we remember the lives of those we have had to cut down in order for us to better our people.”

“Do you remember Okin, the fifty-ninth throat you had to slice? Do you remember Chi-Won, the mother that you executed? Or do you remember the idea of them, the concepts of dead citizens to be remembered?” If Shino had not known better, he would have assumed Um was mad. Instead, Shino knew Um was asking in earnest. They were testing Shino, getting towards the end, he felt the title of a legend was within grasp.

“While I do not remember, the fact that you do means you have been looking, watching. I must be ready,” Shino rationized.

“You are not,” Um responded.

Shino stopped, his heart sank. It had been sixty years and he still wasn’t ready. Before Shino could protest, Um clarified, “People come and die all the time. Killers are not new, there are and always will be people who kill in different names, whether it’s religion, their country, or their way of life. Killing for the sake of making a name of yourself is nothing new. Do you want to be a legend?”

Shino nodded vigorously. Shino heard the door open behind him. Um looked to Shino and said, “Come back in twenty more years after you do something that will leave a true mark on history.”

Shino was once again swept away before he could ask for an explanation. Sixty years and the god refused to put his name down for him. All Shino ever received was vague sayings instead of real answers. Frustration from divinity erupted into a loud anger as Shino started to destroy valuable art pieces his wife had spent time curating to make their palace a home. When one of Shino’s sons found him and restrained Shino from destroying their home, the son asked, “You just left not that long ago, why have you returned?”

“I am quitting as this country’s leader, effective immediately. I have a new goal to make my name matter,” Shino explained.

“But your name does matter, father. It matters to your family, isn’t that all that matters?”

“No!” Shino cried.

He knew his time was coming, this next visit would be the last one he would have with Um. After Shino’s resignation, the country began to enter a time of war, wiping the peace Shino worked for within half the time he had spent working for it. Before his meeting, Shino would have cared that his legacy in the country might have been destroyed, but Shino continued to swallow his anger. Some of Shino’s grandchildren were drafted into the wars ahead, but Shino didn’t care when he heard over half of them perished on the battlefield.

Shino’s wife left him after she found her husband becoming an uncaring patriarch. His kids stopped visiting his home, shrinking Shino’s living space from a large mansion to nothing more than a shack, smaller than the cabin he was destined to see. All the while, Shino spent his time in pent-up rage. He had lost almost all of his belongings he gained during his leadership, but kept around a knife he had taken from a foreign temple. The knife’s blade was nearly invisible, only small black specks were seen in the blade’s edges. Shino had always felt there was something special about this blade, so he decided this was the one possession he needed. He focused all his anger into this blade as he trained to use the knife to the highest of his potential.

By the time Shino was almost eighty, no one visited him anymore. Shino didn’t notice anyone coming in or out of his cabin, just whether someone had touched his most important knife. On the day before his final visit, The academic son spent one more visit to convince Shino to give up on his mission.

“Mother is dead,” the son announced.

Shino didn’t move. It took him a long moment to realize what the son had said. All Shino could respond with was an unenthusiastic, “Shame.”

“Do you care? Most of your family is dead, do you care?”

Tears swelled in the son’s eyes as his father responded, “I don’t know.”

The son slammed the shack’s door, the whole foundation shook under his anger. Shino didn’t look at his son during the encounter, he refused to give any of his negative emotions where it didn’t count. Instead, he packed, focusing his anger on the knife. He knew where he could make history.

Shino didn’t pack anything for the journey, not that he had anything worth packing. The cabin was still there, undisturbed by time while still falling apart. Once Shino opened the door, he saw Um was not inside. It looked as warm as the first time around, but the heat felt less inviting. Instead, Shino felt rage, nothing had changed but he continued to age. He felt the god mock him from the other side of the door.

The door he had yet to open, the one that no doubt contained Um’s living quarters. It was ridiculous, why would a god need to sleep, but Shino rushed to the door. Inside, he saw Um, sitting at a table, hunched over something Shino was unable to see. Their back was turned to Shino, but they still greeted him like an old friend. “Shino, have you made your mark on history?”

They sounded happy, almost excited, infuriating Shino further. He took the knife and plunged it into Um’s back, holding them against the table while Shino sliced in further. Shino dragged the knife and watched as black blood spilled from the god’s back, flooding the floor as the god began to shrivel. The body turned to a shade of white devoid of any life as Shino stabbed them for the umpteenth time. Once the god no longer moved, Shino saw what he had done. The body looked aged and decrepit, as if all the years spent young caught up to the poor god.

After he finished inspecting his years of anger abused onto one god, he saw what Um had been working on on the table; a piece of parchment with one line: “Shino killed the god of history—” The name was covered in ink and Shino was unable to remove it.

At first, Shino smiled; he had finally made his name in history, the god had written Shino down like he wanted. He grabbed onto the parchment and read it against the nearest light. For a short moment, he was proud. Then the consequences of Shino’s actions filled his mind. Shino had only known one god, but there must have been more. Killing a god had to incur the wrath of many others. He looked back to the parchment and thought about how to spin this in the positive. “People conquer gods all the time, right? I cannot have been the first warrior to do so. Let me just write down their name, so I’m secure in history. It was, um…”

Shino couldn’t remember. The god’s name refused to surface, Shino couldn’t think of any of the times he had addressed the god by name. “Well, I told my children at some point, I must have, I’ll just ask—”

Shino stopped, the names of his children were fading from his memory. Panic set in as Shino ran out of the god’s room into the main cabin. Once in the main room, Shino noticed it was dark, only moonlight illuminated the room as it began to fall apart. The cabin began to shrink, scrolls from the infinite ceiling rained onto Shino before turning into dust once they hit him. Shino attempted to grab a scroll from the wall but it disappeared into nothing once his fingers touched.

The cabin became smaller and the threat of Shino getting hurt inside grew larger. He ran out into the snow and closed the door behind him. His heart began to slow and he looked to the cabin falling in on itself until it disappeared. Shino looked around at his environment, he had no idea how he got to the mountain or why he was sitting next to a pile of wood in a blizzard. He reread the piece of parchment as winds began to pick up. “I am Shino and I killed the god of history. I am Shino and I killed the god of history.”

Those who travel the mountains claim to hear the voice of a god killer, crying as he repeats the last thing he ever read. History went on without him as his country faded into obscurity and his family legacy was lost after two generations.

I should laugh but I have a Mickey Mouse smile.”

– Jaromír Nohavica “Mikymauz”

WALT 1

The dressing room was filled with the smell of nail polish, wig glue and alcohol, slightly repressed by the scent of makeup. The soft light of the vanity mirror caught the actor’s wrinkled, powdered face out of twilight.

“Who are you kidding?” Robert — that was the actor’s name — swept the cotton pad across his chin, leaving a streak of lotion and white lint on the skin. His eyes squinted and his upper lip twisted in neither disgust nor grief.

“Joke,” he said, and reluctantly glanced at his unshaven chin and tired eyes. He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t look angry either. “Too bad it’s not funny.”

On the stage that evening, all the tricks he had tried had failed him — gestures, expressions and punch lines — no one had been laughing, no one had been applauding. Not that it had been quiet, oh no. Two ladies in the front row had been chatting away throughout the first act, while a cheeky teenager had been enjoying some chips and a guy next to him had been typing on his phone. After the interval, half of the audience had left, and you could hear snoring from the back.

“A homeless shelter is the place you belong,” Robert said to the mirror. He took out a flask from his jacket pocket and took a sip. Tears glistened in his dull eyes, which he noticed with a tinge of masochistic satisfaction. The last time he had smiled was twenty-three years ago, when he was picking up the award for Best Supporting Actor in a Mini-Series. It had been the pinnacle of his career, and then everything had descended slowly downhill. His “wealth of talent”, which had once been so praised by critics, was gone, but he still had grey tones of melancholy. He just couldn’t use them in today’s farce, and besides, they were transparent to most viewers, who were used to the colourful sitcom chaff. Today he had only convincingly portrayed his fall from grace.

He wouldn’t have to act.

When he heard a knock, he quickly wiped his eyes with his sleeve and tucked the flask into the pocket. He muttered a cautious invitation, and the door swung open.

“Master,” a man called out as he entered the room. He had a puffy face, a high forehead with a receding hairline, and small eyes, but it was the phone in his hand that brought back memories for Robert. This was the guy who had been typing on his cell phone throughout the third act. And now he had the courage to come here with his phone, his baldness and red cheeks and… praise his acting.

His name was Adam Cox. He introduced himself after the welcome shout, which was the beginning of a long, rambling monologue. He said that he had come to see the performance that night, lured by a poster with Robert’s photo. He was surprised to discover that the slogans written on it were not at all exaggerated. “It’s a diamond! Farce of the year! Masterpiece!” he said.

Maybe if he was sober, the actor would have shown more caution and some remnants of healthy self-esteem, but his involuntary reflexes had taken over. Like a young pelican, he tilted his head back, opened his mouth and closed his eyes. After a while, he was unsure whether he was more intoxicated by the whiskey or the compliments. “Masters”, “artists” and “new Marlon Brando” fuddled his brain like strong alcohol. The memory of the hiccup Adam had made during Robert’s performance slowly faded into oblivion…

And yet, something was wrong.

“Sorry, Adam,” Robert interrupted his guest. “But wasn’t the third act a bit boring for you?”

“I’m sorry, master, but I had to quickly check something on the phone.”

“Oh, what was it?”

“I wanted to make sure I could make you an offer, master… an amazing deal. And it turns out that I can.”

Robert sat down more comfortably and crossed his legs.

“I’m all ears,” he said, faking a lack of interest. In fact, he almost sobered up and began to listen intently. The man looked like a salesman, but wasn’t that howagents looked these days? He wouldn’t have known, because for the past twenty years, he’d been organising everything himself, and he’d only seen agents in movies. Culture, decency and good practices had disappeared these days, and he was the last one to cast stones at another loser… But maybe Adam was a winner who just needed help with his outfit.

“It’s a really important role,” said Adam Cox. “No, it’s not just any old episode or cheap farce. And it’s not a movie production either; it’s a live performance.”

“So, is this a theatre production?”

“It’s more like a reality show, really.”

Robert winced.

“Really…” he said, suddenly losing interest. This time, he didn’t have to fake it.

“It’s not trash TV,” Adam Cox reassured Robert, sensing his reservation. He began to speak faster, clearly excited about what he had to say. “Not every man’s docu-soap, oh no. This is the role of the head of an empire. And it’s not an empire of politics or economics, but of an area that really matters — the realm of the spirit. The ruler of this empire conquers and controls minds through stories that are known to people all over the world…”

The agent stood up as he spoke, beaming with pride at his own words.

“He will rise soon to do new things and complete the work that was interrupted.”

The room fell silent. Robert crossed himself and raised his eyebrows questioningly, but Adam Cox shook his head.

“This resurrection will be seen by eight billion people, not just a few,” he said with a warm smile and bowed. “Thank you, master. And after all, you’ll end up in heaven, where there’s no end of love and joy to be found. At least it’s the closest thing to heaven you can buy for a billion dollars in this valley of tears.”

Adam paused and looked at Robert with a cheeky grin. Robert rubbed his chin for a long time.

“And what is the budget for the whole programme?” he asked.

“Over three hundred billion…” Adam paused, looked to the side, and sniffed. Robert quickly put away the flask that was sticking out of his pocket. Adam looked at him with concern, as if he was thinking about it, but finally waved his hand and started typing again on his phone, which he was obviously addicted to.

“… because that’s the net worth of the global network of film studios, TV channels and Internet platforms,” he said, slowly regaining his usual calm. Robert began to make connections in his head, even before Adam showed him the phone display. He’d heard a few comments from people who had taken his photos a month ago, as well as from people who’d seen these photos on the theatre’s website. He’d also heard from a waiter and guests in a certain restaurant, who’d noticed him growing a moustache for his new role. He looked at the black and white photo on the phone, then in the mirror.

“I’m not sure what it’s all about…” he said, looking at his long face with a prominent nose and a slightly recessed chin. “I don’t see any resemblance at all.”

“You look just like Walt Disney!” Adam Cox said, his voice booming like a prophet’s. “And I know how to make money off it.”

After a moment, the last cars’ engines could be heard leaving the parking lot.

“Bil-lions!”

The agent wiped his damp lips, and the actor thought it would be a good idea to listen to the whole story.

A month later, they walked down a shabby corridor into a bright future for both of them. It smelled a bit like urine, grease and rat poison, but that was to be expected. The rollercoaster above them was going at full speed, screeching at the bends and shaking the underground walls. Robert had been sober for a whole month now, and the noise made him shiver even more. He wiped his sweaty forehead and took off his jacket, feeling the cool air on his skin.

“Hot?” Adam asked with a warm smile. “Don’t you worry, it won’t be long now. The cryo-capsule is waiting for you. Is minus three hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit enough?”

“Why here?” Robert moaned. His agent had nudged him to speak up. “Why was I kept in the Pirates of the Caribbean basement?” he asked, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Why not in the secret chamber of Sleeping Beauty’s castle? I would have slept right by the side of the most famous sleepy-head in the world. It would make sense…”

“Oh, you know, there’s this urban legend that Walt Disney lies frozen in the basement of Pirates of the Caribbean,” Adam interjected. “Don’t argue with the legend, Legend!”

Meanwhile, the rollercoaster above passed by, and after they unclogged their ears, they could talk normally again.

“I was also thinking about my fee,” Robert said with a smile. “I wonder where you got this billion from?”

“We’re here,” Adam interrupted. He opened the door that said ‘Adam Cox, Junior Development Manager’ and turned on the light. The actor, taken aback, looked into the broom closet that passed as Adam’s office.

“This is your office?” he asked. Without a word, Adam walked over to the dusty espresso machine, next to which stood one clean and one cobwebbed cup.

“Coffee?”

“No,” Robert yelled out loud as another rollercoaster whizzed by above. Wobbling, he made his way over to a chair, stumbling over boxes, buckets and piles of paper along the way. In the fluorescent light, the chair looked like a hologram. He carefully nudged it with his foot before sitting down with a sigh. It was only then that he realised that Adam, sitting on the other side of the desk, was watching him closely.

“Have you been drinking?”

Robert took a deep breath, bent down, and blew with dignity. Adam sniffed and smiled.

“Well done, you’re a real hero.”

“I’m sick.”

“Very well,” Adam said, creaking his chair with his weight. “After hibernation, you should be indisposed, so you don’t have to pretend. The less you have to act, the better for us.”

The actor, who was accustomed to being addressed as ‘master’ or ‘artist’ until recently, straightened up as if he’d been touched in a tender spot.

“I have the utmost respect for your talent,” said Adam, his voice quickening. “I believe in you, and I know you can do it. That’s why I chose you.”

“Not because I’m Disney’s Double?”

“Well, I chose you for two reasons.”

“Let’s talk about my opening statement,” suggested Robert, who, like most actors, was also an unfulfilled screenwriter. “I feel like it’s missing something.”

“Just don’t change anything about it,” Adam said strongly, also filling in as a screenwriter in the project.

“But how do I know what woke me up?”

“Because you didn’t wake up in the hospital, but in your cryo-capsule, and you find out that the failure was caused by negligence of the management board,” Adam explained to him, as he usually did, emphasising the key words. “You figured it out because you’re so clever. A dazzled genius is still a genius.”

“But how did I survive my own death? Most scientists say that cryonics is a waste of time.”

The agent impatiently gestured with his hands.

“Are you a doctor or a scientist, by any chance? Or maybe you’re an engineer? Let’s not talk about things we don’t know much about, okay? We both work in entertainment. Let’s focus on what we know. People will buy anything you sell them, as long as you package it well. They’ve already bought frozen Walt, and they’ll buy the defrosted Walt too, as long as you stay sober and stay in the role.”

He looked accusingly at the actor, who lowered his gaze and grimaced.

“Is TV really coming here?” Robert asked, looking around the shabby hole. He was still trying to handle his mounting tension. He wasn’t sure if the roller-coaster was moving up the hill again, or if his heart was beating faster and faster. The idea of performing live in front of the cameras seemed even more daunting than it did a month ago. Today it brought back not only forgotten desires and dreams, but also forgotten fears.

“Yes, yes, I’ve already reached out to my old contacts,” Adam reassured him. “This bloody network hasn’t absorbed everything yet, there is also independent media out there. They’ll come, and it’s not charity. It’s not every day that the whole complex fails.”

“And if there are victims?”

“Then all the stations will be here.”

The rumbling got louder and Robert covered his ears and cringed. Adam, who was used to the sounds, looked up to the calendar on the wall and smiled. It was decorated with the famous silhouette of a palace with an arch in the background. He shifted his gaze to the paint peeling off the door and then to the mouldy ceiling.

“Tomorrow, this circus will stand in dead silence and darkness. It’ll be quite the earthquake, with a capital ‘E’. And it’s about time…”

He stopped as the walls shook so much that plaster fell from the ceiling, and a piece of it dropped over his eye.

“And the stars in the sky fell to earth, just like figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind,”  Robert recited a phrase that he remembered from some performance he’d seen before. Adam rubbed his eye while glaring at the actor with the other, then waved his hand.

“Tomorrow’s failure will be the last straw for this disastrous management,” he replied, getting up and walking toward the door. “Your first decision as president will be to kick them out. And if there are victims, they will be brought to trial.”

Robert got up, put on his jacket and with a heavy heart, walked toward the door. His poor head had just been crushed by the wheels of an electric locomotive, and its wagons had broken his arms and legs… He knew in his heart that it was all nonsense. The locomotive that had demolished him was called alcoholism, and it pulled wagons of caries, rheumatism, alopecia and eczema. He still lacked money to treat these ailments.

Adam, seeing his expression, couldn’t help but smile wider and pat him on the back.

“Just remember your speech and you’ll be fine.”

“Where’s the… ahem… that goddamn pod?” Robert asked, coughing.

“Right here, behind the wall. It doesn’t really work, the engineer just made it look real. We’ll bring the nitrogen over tomorrow. If you’re feeling chilly, you’ve got a sleeping bag there. Just another hour of the roller-coaster, then we’ll be in a palace-like warmth and quiet. Are you ready?”

“No.”

Adam laughed.

“Come on, come on, you can do it. You’ll get some rest and you’ll be like a newborn again tomorrow.”

“What about the real Disney?”

 “And rich,” Adam kindly added, as if he hadn’t heard him. “And famous, and…”

“Oh, what if they really froze him?” the actor asked. “Oh, there’ll be two of us?”

“Oh, the world is waiting for its Messiah. We’re all waiting for you. Hallelujah!”

WALT 2

The next day, only a big mouse was waiting for them at the emergency exit of the Pirates of the Caribbean complex.

“Oh no, he died!” it squeaked.

This was the first time the artist had seen his most famous creation in half a century.

Of course, none of it was true. The scream came from an actor in a spongy disguise, and another actor pretended to be the creator of the mouse.

Adam hadn’t actually died. He was semi-conscious from an electric shock which had paralysed him when he had tried to immobilise a roller coaster by short-circuiting the underground installation. Robert woke him up in the corridor and helped him out with a fireman’s lift, carrying him outside.

There they discovered that the Pirates of the Caribbean ride was still in full swing, delighting crowds with its lively soundtrack and thrilling journey into the caves. No one but they paid any attention to them.

“Leave me alone,” Adam said, sounding cross as he shook off Robert. “Let’s see if we can find the media. That’s him!” he called to the people who rushed to his aid. “This is Walt!”

Robert tried to stand up straight and smile. But suddenly, a stun gun, tucked under his jacket, gave him a little jolt through his shirt. Robert stiffened, then flopped just like his friend had fifteen minutes ago. Two broad-shouldered bodyguards in gardener uniforms grabbed him by the arms and scooped him into an electric car, whose open boot was loaded with shovels. In the general confusion, no one noticed them, and no one registered Robert’s resemblance to anyone.

Or so it seemed.

The e-vehicle meandered along park alleys, past palaces, merry-go-rounds and fairy-tale characters. Merry children passed before Robert’s stunned eyes.

“I had a dream…” he murmured the speech he had memorised earlier. “I dreamed of a world where sick people wake up from comas, orphans… parents… everything ends well… Adults look after children… Everyone enjoys every moment… Paradise… Florida… my mission into the world,” he whispered, pausing to add his own inserts: “The wolf… the lamb… The leopard… the goat… The calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child…”

The electric car stopped, and one of the guards slapped Robert across the face. They carried him through the gate that had welcomed Disneyland visitors for five decades, the very gate that said “Happiest Place on Earth.” They opened the door of the old Chevy and helped him into the back seat. They handed him a plastic water bottle, which was about half full.

For Robert, it was half empty.

“Who drank it?” he asked. He shook his head and pushed the bottle away.

They found a spot in the beach parking lot. The guy, who had zapped and slapped him earlier, now swung again, but his friend was there to stop him. With Robert in tow, they switched vehicles to a long limousine, the kind driven by newlyweds and one-day millionaires in Las Vegas.

“What’s next?” Robert mumbled under his breath. “A… a helicopter?”

He was dumped in the back of the car. An armrest jabbed his paralyzed side.

“Is it real?” a grey-haired woman next to him asked, looking him up and down through dark glasses as if trying to decide. The guards left, and the door closed behind them with a slam. The car started up, rocking at the parking lot threshold and joining the lazy afternoon traffic on the freeway.

“Is it real?”

Robert looked at the woman. Her hair was neatly tied back. Her sharp cheekbones and pointed chin gave her the appearance of a weasel. Her jacket was elegant and the pearls in her ears and on her neck reflected the leather and wood finish of the car’s interior perfectly.

“Yes, absolutely,” he replied, returning her patronising smile. “Call me Walt, my dear.”

The weasel-woman took off her glasses, leaned over and brought her hand to his face. He straightened up quickly and threw his head back, laughing.

“It’s real,” he said, covering his moustache.

“Did you grow it yourself? Bravo! You’ve done a great job of creating an illusion.”

Robert felt anger, fear and irritation. For a moment he pushed all his confusion aside, wanting to prove something to her and to himself. He’d been abstaining and waiting for the promised billion to help him reenact the forgotten actor that he was. For too long he had been preparing himself for the role of his life to be satisfied with being an extra or a prop, tossed from pillar to post. With a smile, he smoothed his thin black tie and white pocket. He rested one hand on his knee and the other on his chin in a characteristic pose.

“Illusion is my middle name, my dear,” he said, imitating a slight Kansas accent with a warm smile. The woman laughed, then looked at him with a whole new interest.

“You’re ok,” she said. “But that partner of yours…” she gave a soft tut and shook her head. A few lines appeared above her pursed lips.

“Oh, what did you do to him?” Robert asked, straightening up. “Was it you who had him electrocuted?”

The woman let out a deep sigh and became quite serious.

“He’ll be fine,” she said. The actor nodded and looked around. There was a black circle over two smaller ones embossed on the seat headrest. The same logo was on the notebook next to the woman. It only reinforced his suspicions.

“Did you have a microphone in his office?” he asked. “You stopped the media from coming in, is that right?”

She put her sunglasses back on.

“We are the media.”

A phone rang with a familiar tune. The woman retrieved it out of her bag and put it to her ear.

“Yes?”

She frowned as she listened, then hung up and began tapping the display. She winced, clearly not happy with what she was seeing.

“Where are we going?”

She waved her hand impatiently, as if she was swatting a fly. The limousine jumped over a few bumps and then stopped. The door opened and a man with a moustache, wearing a grey jacket, a black tie, and a white pocket square, shuffled in. He nodded to the woman and sat down next to her, facing Robert.

“Call me Walt, sport,” he said with a smile.

Robert was so taken aback that he couldn’t move. His outstretched hand hung midair. It was only later that he realised that the shock of meeting the resurrected genius was intensified by smaller surprises. Why was the woman still tapping away on her phone, ignoring him so obviously? Even if she was the head of the company, she couldn’t be any higher up the ladder than its founder. A few details didn’t quite add up to him, either.

The limousine glided noiselessly down the highway again, and the outstretched hand slowly descended. Men in grey jackets looked at each other with curious eyes.

Robert had the feeling that he was looking at himself in a mirror that was a little out of focus. The hairstyle, tie, shirt, eyes and nose were quite similar, but his cheeks were a little on the large side. And there was more. A double chin and a bulging belly. He couldn’t help but think that he looked more like Walt Disney than the original.

If he was the original.

“You had a great idea, but we were the ones who made it happen,” the other man began. “Your fairy tale is starting to crumble like a house of cards. He wasn’t frozen; he was cremated. You missed doing your homework, didn’t you? Well, the family officially announced it fourteen years ago.”

“Then where did you come from?” Robert asked, curious.

“I’m his clone.”

The actor shook his head and frowned.

“Cryonics is a pitch,” the man said. “On the other side, cloning — there’s not much information out there, but every word is true.”

“Was it already a thing in the 60s?”

“Scientists knew what DNA is and the government was able to secure it. And they found it was definitely worth doing in a few cases. And don’t forget, Kennedy and Elvis fans will soon have their big days too.”

Robert looked at the CEO’s furious face and then at the clone. He still didn’t know where they were taking him, and thought perhaps that the cast for this show had yet to be approved. Maybe he was just being cast for another role? It seemed that the stakes might have been higher than the fee they had promised.

There could only be one Disney.

The woman finally looked up from the phone.

“We have a problem,” she said and pointed at Robert. “Someone took a picture of this disguise and posted it online.”

She showed him a photograph taken just an hour ago, as he and Adam had exited the roller coaster. “Disney is alive and well,” read the caption underneath the cropped portrait. Robert couldn’t help but smile genuinely for the first time that day.

“People have all kinds of theories and guesses about where he is now,” said the weasel-woman in a soft, gentle voice. “Memes, like viruses, spread like wildfire.”

She ran her fingers across the screen and showed them a picture with the distinctive silhouette of cartoon characters leaning against a reindeer with the headline “Disney” and the title “Frozen” with a question mark attached. The second photo showed Robert with the title “Defrost”.

“People are gullible and will swallow any crap as long as it is well packaged,” said the younger man with a smile.

“I think I heard it somewhere,” the old actor said with a sigh, adding a hint of sarcasm. “But aren’t you in the media too?”

The CEO and the rival looked at Robert furiously. He stood his ground and politely offered, “Why don’t we just stick to the plan and hold a conference in an hour? Let’s take advantage of the hype and seize the initiative.”

“I’d love to speak at the conference,” his rival interjected.

“Please,” Robert said with a sigh. “They have my photos. And you’re younger and not to mention fatter…”

“Shut up, both of you.”

The woman threw her phone into her bag. Her pursed lips and furrowed brow made her triangular face look more predatory.

“I beg your pardon,” the man said, loosening his tie. “You must be forgetting something. This comedy has been going on for far too long. You can see for yourself what it led to, if you like. Why have you kept me hidden for so many years? And why are you holding my scripts?”

“Because they suck.”

His chubby cheeks turned red.

“That’s just your opinion. Others believe that the studio will make a fortune on them, especially if they appear under my name…”

“D256-X / B7?” the woman replied with a laugh. “Or Arthur Smith, from your driver’s licence? The government programme is secret and you are officially gone, clone.”

“You will regret it,” the man said, trying to recover his voice. The grey-haired lady pursed her lips and looked at Robert. The actor sensed the curtain before him rise again.

“It’ll be safer to stick to the cryonics story,” he began to speak quickly. “I’ll play everything for you. I will say that in my will, I kept my hibernation a secret and instructed my family to issue a declaration of cremation. And I will prove that I am myself, that is…”

He took a fountain pen from his pocket and bent over his notebook embossed with a Mickey Mouse head. He opened it on the first blank page, put the nib against it, and without tearing it off, penned the signature he had been practising for the last month. The CEO looked at the famous autograph and at Robert. She turned her face to the window and stared at the palm trees moving behind him. She looked as if she was hesitating, but the actor could tell from her expression that the decision had already been made. The producer doesn’t take unnecessary risks. Environmental selection doesn’t promote the most gifted, the truest or the most beautiful, but the best adapted, in a pond full of fish or in show business, no difference. The value of genius in the age of cloning may soon drop, but it’s more sensible to invest in loyalty. However, if her opinion of the scripts written by the clone was true, a talent cannot be copied. Or, at least, it had failed this time. The new — old — head of the studio would be a figurehead, thank goodness!

After all, there could only be one Walt.

WALT 3

Robert looked into his face, illuminated by the warm glow of the vanity mirror. The smell of perfume in the dressing room effectively masked the scent of cleaning products and adrenaline.

“You did it, my friend,” he said to his reflection with a smile.

Diet, meditation and massages had fulfilled their task. All his nasty withdrawal symptoms had disappeared completely. And all his other persistent ailments had been cured too, as there finally were enough funds. His rotten teeth were replaced by a set of implants — for now only temporary, but still even and white, like real ones. After two months of abstinence he had finally begun to sober up. No more stage fright or dark thoughts. He was ready to conquer the world, or rather, to take control of the world that had already been conquered on his behalf.

“Mom, Dad, I’m ready,” he said to his agent and the President of Development, the official function of the weasel-woman, Fiona Cartwright. She spoke first.

“Our last teaser had more viewers than the finals of the last World Cup,” she informed Robert. “Your speech will be seen by half of humanity in just fifteen minutes.”

“Not bad for a piece of ham that I recently pulled out of the rat hole,” smirked Adam Cox. The dressing room buzzed as several assistants ran around, chatting excitedly with each other and on their phones. The make-up artist standing next to him bent down to listen in on the conversation. Robert glared at his agent.

“Just remember it was my idea,” Adam muttered and looked down.

“Which, thankfully, I tweaked ‘a little’,” Fiona said. “Thanks to me, your fairy tale gained more class and a few more authentic touches.”

Adam turned to her angrily.

“Your main contribution was getting me plugged into a million volts.”

“You did that yourself,” she teased.

“I could have died!”

“You could have broken the carousel!”

They stared at each other with fierce expressions, then both smiled.

“Champagne after the show?” Adam asked. And she began to consider his proposal, which showed how quickly the elevator of corporate promotion sometimes runs.

“And to think that not so long ago you were planning to ‘kick this disastrous management out’,” Robert reminded his agent. The President turned to him, raising her eyebrows, and behind her back, Adam put his finger to his lips. The actor waved his hand and sat down comfortably.

“By the way,” he said, “has the security guard, who beat me up a month ago, been fired?”

Fiona smiled briefly and opened her mouth.

“You get on air in fifteen minutes.”

Everyone looked at the assistant standing in the doorway — a bearded man with a samurai bun. Adam looked at his watch.

“We’re starting at six,” he informed him. “And it’s five-fifty already.”

“So, we’re on air in ten minutes,” Fiona added.

“Unfortunately, we may have a slight delay,” he replied, pointing towards the window. “There’s some fuss at the studio.”

“The fuss has been there since the morning,” the president said. “I don’t care about stupid fans.”

Even through the closed windows, the roar of drumrolls and the crackle of flares and sirens could be heard. People seemed friendly, but the producer of the programme assured them ‘just in case’ that the station had a helicopter and a helipad on the roof.

“It’s not about the fans,” said the assistant, pressing the Bluetooth clip in his ear. “It’s about new guests of the show. They’ll be here soon.”

In the silence that fell upon the room, only muffled chants, horns and the beating of drums were heard.

“Guzman!” Fiona roared. She looked around and strode up to the nearest camera. “Guzman! Get your fat ass up and come here. Now.”

A blonde girl in a Mickey Mouse apron passed by, nodded to Robert and quickly looked away. She sat in the chair on his right and arranged the cosmetics in the cabinet. Another girl turned on the lights by the mirror to his left.

“I’ll kill you,” hissed Fiona, turning into a predator again. “You know very well that in five minutes, half of humanity will be sitting in front of the screens.”

One of her smoothly combed locks fell across her face in a grey line. She was about to spit venom from her pursed lips.

“And I know how to attract the other half,” said Alonso Guzman, the show’s executive producer, with a confident smile. His brown eyes and athletic physique were enhanced by a fitted suit. He strode over to Fiona and spoke in a firm, decisive tone, “With the help of the new show’s guests, we’ll…”

“Are you crazy?” she demanded. “You invited a new guest without even telling me? Who?”

Guzman gave the assistant a sharp nod, and he immediately got to his feet. He strode to the door, waved his hands and shouted something down the hall.

“It’s an improvisation in the style of your tacky ‘Tijuana TV’ from which you came here…”

Fiona paused as two men in grey jackets entered the dressing room.

“Good morning,” said the first one. It was the young clone that Robert had met in the limo.

“Hello, I’m Henry Disney,” said the second in a deep, commanding voice. He was an elderly man whom he had seen for the first time. The young clone gazed at Fiona with a hostile look and, without a word, strode towards Robert, nodded and sat on his left with an ironic smile. Behind him, the old clone, helped by a blonde in an apron, climbed into the armchair on the other side.

“What is this?” hissed Fiona. She looked at the producer, narrowing her eyes. “Are you having a clone rally here at five to twelve? I knew you’d mess up eventually. You’re a cocaine-addicted, tacky, provincial dickhead. But today?”

“Shut up.”

Fiona’s face was a white mask of amazement.

“First of all, you invented the ‘Copy of the Master’ action,” Guzman stated, pointing to the clones. “And I’m certain people will believe in real cloning rather than in a fictitious freeze and frostbite.”

“You’re fired.”

Guzman’s laugh sounded like a bark.

“And who will produce this show, you old witch? I can do it in a few minutes and do it my way. All three Disney candidates will enter the studio. The best will win and take it all. They’ll deal the cards.”

Robert caught a knowing look from the actor to his left, who exchanged it with the producer.

“Tell me: do you prefer one chance in three or none?” asked Guzman.

“Why three?” she demanded. Her fury was still battling with surprise. She pointed to the old man. “Who is he?”

“This is the candidate preferred by the Disneys. They contacted me today because they discovered that their great-uncle had a twin.”

“Nonsense,” Adam bellowed, finally recovering his voice. “He didn’t, and even if he did, he’d be dead a long time ago.”

Fiona produced a rattling box from her pocket and the producer moved closer to her.

“Let’s show the old man to the world and laugh at him today,” he said firmly. “Why make him a new sensation tomorrow?”

Fiona swallowed the white pill from the box and opened her mouth again, but at that point, they all started talking simultaneously.

“Let viewers point to the real Disney after the debate.”

“It will be a shit show, not a debate.”

“People are stupid. They like the shit shows.”

“In five minutes, we’ll be on air!”

“Wouldn’t it be better to do DNA tests on them?”

“Which moron said that?”

“This is television, not a laboratory.”

“This will be the show of the century.”

“More like the failure of the millennium.”

Robert’s teeth, which had been replaced with implants, suddenly started hurting. It seemed that they were growing artificial roots deep into his head, entwining with the roots of the implants in his new hair. The nonexistent nerves hurt just as much as real ones.

“Why don’t you freeze time in your capsule?” the younger Disney clone smirked, tapping his shoulder. Robert flinched, slipped his hand under his shirt and began scratching himself. He needed an eczema ointment, a head compress and an anaesthetic pill.

“Let’s start with the fact that a third of humanity is asleep right now.”

“When they wake up, they’ll watch the rerun online.”

“I’m sure they have Wi-Fi even in the boonies.”

“I’ll be on air in four minutes.”

Robert knew exactly what kind of anaesthetic he needed. A golden liquid with a spicy aroma and a barley flavour would put him on his feet in seconds. One shot would be enough. He turned in his chair and looked at an open drawer of a cupboard, standing under the window.

“And why did you have the ‘Frozen’ movie produced and promoted as the biggest hit of the studio?”

“To make money, of course.”

“So that after entering ‘Disney Frozen’ Google throws out different answers than data about freezing Walt Disney. You’ve done your best to stop people from pursuing this topic.”

“It’ll be on air in three minutes.”

“Aaaah!”

His critics would have been delighted — Robert had let out an authentic primal scream. It was pure emotion, with no words. The blonde, who was standing closest to him, jumped back and covered her ears, while her friend dropped the powder compact. Fiona turned pale, Guzman turned red, and the assistant gripped his beard and nearly tore it out. Robert got up and walked on, silently. His rivals stepped aside without question, and the rest followed suit. He kicked the garbage can, shifted the fan on the stand and approached the cupboard. He reached into the top drawer and pulled out a bottle that he had sniffed out an hour ago, right after entering the dressing room. He uncorked it, put it to his mouth and took a swig.

The warm vodka burned his throat, adding to the soreness of screaming. Once swallowed, it came back up, but he followed it with a second gulp. The third one went down smooth as silk.

It was like receiving a defibrillator charge on your deathbed. His heart started beating again, and his pain and helplessness passed instantly. Robert exhaled and regarded the people around him as if he was seeing them for the first time. He dazzled them with the whiteness of his implants, but they didn’t smile back. He huffed dismissively and turned to the vibrating glass.

Smog hovered over the city, but the artificial lights shone brighter than stars. Fireworks shot out against the dark December sky, and New York glistened with its own light like New Jerusalem in Saint John’s vision. A parade of cartoon characters flowed slowly through the streets below. The crowd chanted one name.

The view was spoiled only by a dark smudge on the glass. Robert grabbed the lever and opened the window. A choral song with drum rolls — rum, pum, pum, pum — flowed over him like a stream of warm water. Like a blessing. He closed his eyes, opened his mouth and began to absorb the vibrating energy. Hundreds of instruments and thousands of throats joined together to create a single, unified sound in response to the horns. Robert raised his hand. Someone must have noticed him and pointed him out to the people around them. The news spread through the streets into the city like an earthquake. With a single gesture, he silenced the raucous crowd. He filled his lungs with the smoke-touched air and screamed again. His voice reverberated from Fifth Avenue to Central Park and back again, echoing back in time. People screamed, and the tune they had searched for before came successfully from thousands of throats.

“Walt!”

They were not strong, they were the strength. Filled with them, Robert felt himself hovering above the floor. This mystery had nothing to do with a hoax anymore. The scam had grown into art and surpassed it. In this situation, was his pop-culture prophet costume still a disguise? The illusionist — the trickster — began to levitate. The body became the Word.

“Walt!”

Who did they love? Who did they shout to?

“Okay, okay, man,” Adam said firmly in his ear. “Keep it up.”

He placed his hands on Roberts’ shoulders and turned him to face him.

“But not everyone on Earth will see you through the window,” he said, looking him in the eye as if he were hypnotising him. “They’re all waiting for you there,” he said, his voice a spell.

“Over there,” he pointed to the door marked ‘In the air’ and firmly guided Robert towards it. He wanted to say something, but his scratched throat wouldn’t let him.

“Go, Prophet,” Adam commanded, sticking the handset in his ear. “Repeat my every word, and today we will be in Eden. Go.”

Robert turned to the window, but someone had closed it, and the glass separated him from his fans again. He emptied the bottle, set it down and shrugged. He allowed himself to be led through the deserted dressing room to the small crowd of people gathered by the studio door. Next to them were his two powdered doubles.

“Five seconds,” Guzman said. He opened the door and, with a gesture of authority, invited the three men in grey jackets inside. He motioned for the others to step back.

But they all backed away.

On the threshold stood a Black man with a grey moustache, also dressed in a grey jacket with a black tie and a white pocket square. He laughed at the sight of wide-open eyes staring at him.

“Don’t worry boys, you’ll get your chance too,” he called to the other Walts in a condescending tone. “People already know from the snapshots that Disney is me. The stations broadcasted it a moment ago. But we play fair until the end. I saw you there on the monitor.”

He turned to Robert. “New York may be yours, Mr. Screamer, but what about the rest of the world? Will you tell your fairy tale to the viewers?”

He laughed and gave Robert a firm pat on the shoulder. His hand was firm, cold and strong, and the skin strung tight over it gleamed like plastic.

WALT 4

Robert wobbled into the studio and stopped only at the brightly lit couch.

The host welcomed the guests and introduced them to the audience. He shook hands with ‘the clone’, ‘the twin’ and ‘the real Disney’ one by one. He called each of them Disney, although it was only with the fourth guest that his ironic smirk disappeared, as if he had dropped the quotes from the name. He let the black man speak first, justified by the fact that the other guests were speechless. Robert sat huddled at the far end of the couch, staring at the man’s hand gesturing excitedly.

He still felt its cold, shivering touch on his shoulder.

The man’s words, now slurred by alcohol, slowly began to register. He made a long list of complaints about the racist 1940s in which the ‘real Disney’ could not reveal the colour of his skin and had to send an adult white actor to meetings. He started using the actor in interviews and documentaries, and that’s how things stayed.

“Did you really make all those cartoons as a kid?” the showman asked.

“I kept making them,” replied the black man, “after my white face died.”

The word ‘died’ was clearly understood, not to be confused with the words ‘was frozen’.

“Did you create all the later Disney movies?” The presenter shook his head in disbelief.

“All of them, up to this day,” the man asserted with certainty and a grin. “Have any of you ever seen their writers’ faces?”

There was a long, awkward silence in the studio.

“We see it now,” the host declared, “because it’s one face.”

Robert was jolted awake by the roar of applause. He fixed his gaze on the black man’s hand and the word ‘Applause’ that flared over the audience. He also felt like applauding in the face of such an internally consistent absurdity. He knew he had to act fast, or fiction would soon become truth. Unfortunately, his sore throat still hurt and he knew it would probably fail to obey him. Furthermore, his mind was blank, and somewhere along the way, he had lost the earpiece through which Adam was to give him instructions.

And there was something else. This competitor would strike up close and take the audience away. That’s why he was the ideal avatar — he didn’t need a voice in his ear.

Robert stood up, silencing the host and the audience with a hoarse mutter. He took a fountain pen from his pocket, rolled up his sleeves and raised his hand.

The host froze, but the drummer didn’t miss a beat. He played the tremolo on the snare drum. Robert didn’t autograph with his famous signature. The studio’s logo was created after Disney’s death and had nothing to do with his authentic autograph. Fiona or Adam might not have known it, but the average internet user could look it up in seconds.

No, Robert did something else. He took a swing and plunged the nib into the iron hand of his black rival with a furious force.

Something clicked, sparks flew and false fingers spread apart. Thick lips cried out, “Man, you damaged my hand,” but they didn’t even wince.

Robert had been right, and the cables and sparks confirmed his suspicions. He seized the pen from the artificial hand and, with a swift and decisive move, thrust it into the black man’s neck. To his astonishment, he found no plastic surface hiding cables, actuators and sensors.

The steel smoothly entered the man’s living flesh, from which blood spurted. The man’s uninjured hand grabbed his wounded neck, while his steel hand swung like a shovel, hitting Robert in the ear and sending him flying to the couch. The cyborg, with a terrible growl, fell on him, put his mechanical arm around his neck and squeezed.

Robert’s consciousness escaped him for a moment, and he ceased to be human. His reptilian brain, buried somewhere under his secondary ganglia and cortex, took control. His head turned, and his jaws opened and tightened on a fleshy cheek. The black man’s hand released his wounded neck and seized his bitten face. Robert bowed his head and thrust the pen into the man’s forehead with all his might. The pressure of steel eased, and at that moment, his consciousness returned. He shook himself, spat out iron-flavoured saliva and sat up. Rubbing his bloodshot eyes, he demanded, “Did I kill him or turn it off?”

It took a long time for the audience to recover from shock. After a while, only Robert stood motionless in the eye of the cyclone, which he had himself unleashed. The familiar, brutal security guard slammed him in the face again and overpowered him (as it later turned out, he had not lost his job — in fact he had become head of security for the studio in recognition of his prowess a month earlier). The dying black pseudo-Disney was taken via an elevator to the roof, to the helicopter, and a Mickey Mouse image interrupted the screens.

And then, everyone started talking at once.

“Viewership jumped to five billion,” Guzman declared as he and his assistants burst into the studio.

“Start the broadcast and point all cameras at Robert,” Adam said, running right behind them. He pushed the bodyguard aside, sat his ward down in an armchair and put the receiver in his ear. “Keep calm, man. We can still salvage this.”

The actor read the words from Adam’s lips because he was deafened by electric alarms sounding from every corner of the studio.

“This madman broke my programme.” Fiona was furious. “I won’t let him tear it down.”

“We’ve won the audience. Are you deaf?” Adam shouted, massaging Robert’s shoulders. “Our Disney just got back into the game. He’s now famous and scary — and he’s entertaining bingo.”

“The audience is five and a half billion, but it’s starting to decline.”

“You broke the hit, you retards! The historic human-cyborg battle has just taken place here. Resume broadcasting now.”

When Robert regained consciousness, he promised to be polite and say the whole truth on air. After hearing it, Adam slapped him back into sanity. Fiona ordered both of them to leave and turned to the cameras to call the other members of the board to a teleconference. She tabled an immediate proposal to fire Guzman, which was approved unanimously. The lawyers delayed police intervention, and the PR agent kicked off a debate with the eternal question, “What are we going to tell stupid people?”

Meanwhile, Robert sat in the corporate cafeteria, washed, dressed and patched up by paramedics. He accepted Adam’s apology. He was in shock, but otherwise fine. He just couldn’t hear in one ear. Adam swore that no one would ever hit him again, and Robert promised that he would never lose the earpiece again. They went from whiskey to vodka, and at midnight, when the bosses finally got along, Robert didn’t care. He stood alone in front of the cameras in the spotlight, as the CEOs sent his rivals home.

“We have a problem,” Adam stated firmly in his good ear on behalf of the board.

“We have a problem,” Robert stated automatically to a select few of his most loyal viewers.

Like the Great Depression and many other disasters, this one had begun with rumours. Four hours earlier (about an hour after the suspension of transmission), the fans gathered in front of the studio had become bored with the choral singing and, as is customary, had begun tweeting from their phones.

There, the surviving Disneys were furious that their candidate had been ignored. In response, they had published the death certificate of their great-grandfather. Someone had posted a photo of the urn with Disney’s ashes, and someone else had posted a statement from the cemetery confirming the cremation. However, the heirs’ triumph had been short-lived. Someone had discovered Walter E. Disney’s birth certificate from 1901, which listed no twin. Someone else had found a movie where the real, undoubtedly white Walt, was drawing Mickey Mouse. Advanced technology had juxtaposed the archival footage with the studio recording and had picked up anatomical details that differentiated the original Disney from the three white fakes. And that had been the end of the story. The human ocean had drained from the studio building and spilled over the narrow streets.

Robert was the Messiah at 6 o’clock; at 7 o’clock he was again breaking popular news as the Beast, but by midnight became a scammer. He stuttered in front of the cameras, sweating, and neither his drunk in-ear agent, nor his predatory boss, nor any of the television magnates had a clue on how to stop the catastrophe. They tried to react to what they saw on the screens, because although in their minds they were still addressing idiots, these idiots were no longer passive television viewers, but active internet users. Overactive ones. The cyber-trolls shouted Robert down with comments, parodied him with memes, turned his speech into a grim joke.

“They didn’t have to turn,” he said to his reflection in the mirror of a one-man cell. The studio’s mercenaries had tried to reverse the trend with fabricated reports, but they had all been identified as fakes and stopped in their tracks. Mickey Mouse, who had brought good luck to the real Disney, had brought down the fake one. The icon that had started it all a hundred years ago, the black-and-white mother of other characters, hung on the screens for too long. Mickey was friendly, chummy and famous, but his strength was his movement and voice. Unlike the Mona Lisa, his smile didn’t intend to hide a secret. While the emotions in the studio soared, the ones in front of the screens simmered. The viewers’ attention to the Mouse waned, just as surely as blood drained from the neck of one of its alleged creators.

The unions of Disney Entertainment Studios,  whose Chair turned out to be the programme’s host, knew exactly what to do at the last minute. They were right to assume that a black Vietnam veteran could be easily controlled, thanks to a surgical implant in his brain, and would arouse sympathy even if people did not believe his story.

The jury bought it. They convicted Robert of manslaughter despite his story of a nervous breakdown. The prosecutor made it clear that he and his partner had planned the fraud and then, in cold blood, removed the obstacles in their way.

“There were at least three obstacles in the studio,” the attorney stated, determined to maintain the frenzied narrative. “Why did he only attack one?”

And there was an answer to that. The allegation of racism was the nail in Robert’s coffin, both in the courtroom and online.

He was to get a fortune; instead, he got a life sentence. He was to be famous; now he was sore and scratched and sober for a year. He was to talk to billions; now he was talking to himself. Adam, on probation and relegated to being an assistant to a demoted Fiona, did not speak with him. Robert was alone again.

“We’re late,” he said to his reflection in the glass, and he was right.

“We are five hours late,” he added, and he was wrong.

In the previous century, he and his agent would have taken control of the studio and participated in its unprecedented expansion into the 21st century. But by Year 2026, they were already out of the running. The web users had taken an interest in him for only a moment — rightfully so — and after a quick verification of facts, they had turned their restless attention to yawning bears, melting glaciers, burning forests and other eco-scandals. Robert was nothing but a distant memory, the freak, the offender.

And the Word became flesh. Both Words.

“They considered live animals more important than the drawn ones,” he said, looking through the mirror behind him. “Can you believe me, Mickey?”

The mouse in the corner of the cell blinked and ran a paw over its mustache. Day by day, Robert was slowly letting go of the bitterness that had initially disgusted him to the sight of the rodent. Now, he saw the reflection of its famous namesake in it. He smiled at the mouse more and more often and spoke to it, certain that one day it would answer him. The animated Mickey had also been silent for several years before speaking. Thank God, they had plenty of time.

Emerging from an elevator a few dozen floors down, I filed in behind a couple of salarymen and was briefly distracted by glimpses of ads for watches, investment counsellors, and canned coffee ahead of me on the skywalk. I wanted to see the coffee ad—it featured a famous American actor—but as soon as I got an unobstructed view of the screen, the ad abruptly changed to one for female hygiene products.

Annoyed, I looked away, then caught sight of something that made me stop in my tracks. Two students from my school were in a skypark halfway to Junco Tower, and they were smoking cigarettes. I couldn’t make out their faces, but I recognized the distinct teal of the girl’s sailor suit. Our school was strict about smoking; getting caught usually led to expulsion. Who would have the guts, or stupidity, to smoke in public, and in uniform?

Before I could think of likely candidates, they put out their cigarettes and left the park, returning to the main skywalk via the single narrow one attached to the park. Now I recognized them. It was Arisa, the infamously pretty-but-weird president of the Noh club, and Hirota, who was in my own homeroom, though we’d never talked much. He was also in the Noh club. Huh.

To avoid running into them, I slipped around the salarymen to enter the skypark they had just vacated. It was tiny and unremarkable with a few vending machines, a smoker’s corner with a large ashtray, a few benches and trees, and a flowerbed. One of the vending machines was for cigarettes. A sudden, reckless urge struck me. I wanted to smoke too. I wasn’t the meek goody two-shoes my mom was trying to mold me into. I could break the law and smoke cigarettes like a delinquent. I’d even do it by myself, for my own satisfaction, not due to peer pressure.

After glancing back to make sure no one was heading my way, I fished out a five-hundred-yen coin and put it into the coin slot. I was glad for Japan’s obstinate liking for hard currency; mom routinely checked the contents of my card statements, and the cigarettes were sure to have been labelled as such.

I picked a brand at random and pushed the button.

Nothing happened.

I pushed the button again.

Clink. A single coin fell to the change tray, and the tiny screen next to the coin slot flashed. Purchase denied — purchaser underage. After a moment, the message disappeared, replaced by an advertisement for anti-breakout facial cleanser, a smiling school girl patting her clear face.

Annoyed, I took the coin from the slot. There must’ve been a camera I hadn’t noticed with some age estimation algorithm. I supposed the Noh club members had gotten someone else to buy their cigarettes for them, or gone to a convenience store—did convenience store workers check age? Well, I couldn’t try it now, at any rate, since I was in my uniform.

Nevertheless, even the attempt had been exciting. It was a tiny, tiny rebellion that I’d be able to remember when my mom got on my nerves.

I resumed my walk, stopping at a bookstore to browse for a bit, then arrived home at dinner time. Tadaima, I called out as I slipped off my black loafers. I’m home.

The okaeri I had expected to hear shouted in response never came. Through a doorway, I glimpsed my dad in the living room, on the couch with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up. He said nothing but gave me an odd, hard-to-interpret smile. In retrospect, I think it was meant as encouragement.

The next moment, my mom appeared before me, like a blonde storm cloud wielding a soup ladle, clutched so tight her knuckles were white. “Exactly what do you think you’ve been up to?”

Confused, I glanced at my watch, confirming it really was just eight o’clock. “I… went to Book-Off after cram school and read some manga. Were we supposed to eat early today? If so, I missed that—sorry.”

Mom inhaled sharply. “No, I mean the cigarettes.” She pronounced the word as if she was detonating a bomb in the hallway.

My jaw dropped. “How… how did you know?”

“So you did try to buy cigarettes. Marie, why would you…”

I interrupted. “Really, how did you know?”

She looked annoyed at the interruption, then took out her phone, swiping a couple of times and then holding out the screen to me.

This is an automated message to inform you that Tanimura Marie attempted to buy a pack of Mevius Light at Skypark 714 at 19:12 this evening. The identification certainty level is 97.6% and based on facial recognition confirmed for feasibility with Tanimura’s latest location records.

I stared at the message, incredulous. “That… that is such a violation of privacy!” I stuttered finally. “Is that even legal?”

“Marie,” mom hissed, “you are the one who tried to break the law! And you’re underage—it’s perfectly normal that we were informed. Now, the bigger question is, why would you do such a stupid thing? Who put you up to this?”

“No one,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “I just felt like it.” Normally, my mother’s anger would’ve immediately reduced me to contrite apologies, but now I was too shocked, and too angry myself, to be cowed. I wasn’t angry with her, though, but with the vending machine, with that surveillance system that had sold me out. I felt violated, as if discovering I had been watched while undressing.

“That’s hardly likely, now, is it? Out with it. Was it one of the girls in your homeroom? I could see Rie having some harebrained idea like this. Or did someone bully you into it?”

 “I said, no one.” Losing my patience, I raised my voice. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” I swept past her and into my room, slamming the door behind me, surprised at my own courage in the face of my mom’s anger.

“Marie, we’re not done talking,” she yelled through the door. She began to turn the doorknob, but before she had opened the door, my dad’s calm voice sounded from further away. “Leave her be for now, Hanna. Now’s not the time.”

Mom didn’t say a word about the cigarettes at breakfast the next morning—nor anything else, for that matter. Either dad had persuaded her to cut me some slack, or she was brooding over what new, draconian rules to impose as punishment.

My resolve had hardened, though. At lunch break that day, I headed upstairs to where the gym and club rooms were located. I walked down the corridor outside the club rooms, reading the lettered signs on each door. Baseball club. Judo club. Karuta club.

Noh club.

I knocked on the door before I had a chance to get anxious and change my mind. After a moment, someone called out, “Come in.”

I opened the door and almost jumped. A hundred faces were staring at me. Then I saw they were masks: countless Noh masks of men, women, and demons, mounted all over the walls. There were only four human faces. Hirota sat by a small table, a convenience-store lunch spread out in front of him, and on the floor sat Arisa, plus a boy sipping chocolate milk and a girl with a scarf wrapped around her neck.

“Yes?” scarf girl said.

“Sorry to disturb you guys,” I said. “I was just wondering… Wait.” I pushed the door shut behind me, then looked at Arisa and Hirota in turn. “I saw you guys smoking cigarettes in a park yesterday.”

The three sitting on the floor exchanged a glance. Hirota had been about to take a bite from a custard bread, but froze.

“And, I wanted to know how you went about buying them,” I continued.

“Why?” Hirota asked, frowning.

“Because I want to buy cigarettes, too.”

Hirota had resumed eating. “You want to buy cigarettes?” he asked between mouthfuls of bread.

I nodded. “I tried to yesterday evening, from a vending machine in that park, but it didn’t work, and apparently, it sent an alert to my parents, so I got totally chewed out. I hadn’t known it could do that. So now I really want to buy cigarettes.” I laughed.

The three on the floor exchanged glances again, then Arisa looked at me, a little too long and a little too intensely.

Scarf girl piped up. “Sorry, but we can’t help you. You’ll have to figure it out on your own.”

Before I could decide on what to say, Arisa spoke. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t tell her.”

Scarf girl and chocolate milk boy protested indignantly. “But Arisa, she isn’t even…”, “Prez, we don’t know if we can trust her…”

What was this big secret to buying cigarettes? They were acting like it was some sort of arcane, privileged information, so clearly, they hadn’t just asked someone’s big sister to do it.

I waited while a staring contest continued between the three club members on the floor, as if they were attempting a telepathic debate about the merits of telling me.

 “You don’t have to tell me, of course,” I said, finally. “Thanks anyways.” I opened the door, then glanced at the walls again. “Also, your masks are really cool.”

The next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about the vending machine that had sold me out, about what the great cigarette-buying secret might be, and about the Noh club. I was no longer thinking about what club to join; the Noh club was the only one that intrigued me now, but I hadn’t gotten the impression they were looking for new members.

The following Tuesday, my cram school class got rescheduled to the last slot of the evening. It was past ten and dark above the skywalks when I finally headed home, and the bars I passed in Junco Tower were lively with businesspeople from the nearby office floors.

At a corner after the last izakaya on the floor, I saw Arisa.

She was dressed in jeans, a hoodie, and a baseball cap, a large shopping bag slung over her shoulder. She was looking down at her phone, and I was debating whether to stop and say hi when she suddenly put it away, turned, and disappeared into a door that I had never noticed before.

Without thinking, I followed her.

The door led to a stairwell. Arisa climbed the stairs, exiting again two floors up. I kept my distance and exited a few moments after her. I emerged into a floor of offices, empty and dimly lit; only the corridors had the lights on, while the offices were pitch black. I looked around for Arisa, then heard a rustling sound from around a corner.

I padded quietly in the direction of the sound and spotted her again, now standing in front of a large door in glass and stainless steel; it must’ve been the entrance to some swanky corporation. She rummaged through the shopping bag, then pulled out something I couldn’t identify, a shapeless mass of beige and gray and pink. Then, she removed her baseball cap and pulled the thing over her head.

I gasped.

Arisa’s face was now that of a man in his fifties. The shapeless thing had been a mask. Not a stylized Noh mask or one of those jokey rubber masks caricaturing famous people, but an incredibly lifelike one; it looked as if the head of a man had been transplanted onto the body of a teenage girl. The effect was so uncanny, I felt like I was going to be sick.

Arisa tilted her neck backwards, looking up. I followed her gaze—or the gaze of the middle-aged man, rather—and noticed a camera mounted above the door. Then she lowered her head and stepped forward.

Nothing happened.

She waved a hand, as if to activate a motion sensor, then mumbled something I couldn’t make out. She stepped back, tugged at the mask, and looked up at the camera again. Then she stepped forward once more, and again, nothing happened. Now, she cursed audibly.

I was watching this, fascinated, when I heard a noise from the other side. A security guard had just entered the floor: a gray-haired man wielding a flashlight, probably a part-time retiree on his standard patrol route.

I looked back at Arisa. She didn’t seem to have noticed. I wasn’t sure what she was up to, but I suspected she wouldn’t want to get caught doing it. I dashed out from my hiding place.

“There’s a security guard just around the corner,” I hissed at her. “Take off the mask.”

She stood frozen for a moment, then removed the mask. The middle-aged man’s face seemed to crumple and collapse, and had I not been so nervous and high on adrenaline, I would’ve felt nauseated again. Then her own face was revealed, and she had just stuffed the mask back into the shopping bag when the guard turned the corner and saw us.

“Ora! What are you misses doing here?” he asked, walking up to us. “Everything on this floor is closed for the night, you know.”

“We were going to surprise her dad with an evening snack delivery to the office,” I said, letting my gaze flicker to the big paper shopping bag Arisa was holding. “But it turns out he’d already finished for the night.” I laughed as if this was a big joke.

“Aw, that’s sweet of you girls.” Then his tone turned mock-gruff. “But you ought to be in bed at this time. There; off you go.”

He shooed us away and I acquiesced, grabbing Arisa by the elbow and steering her towards the door to the stairwell. She didn’t say a word until we emerged among the bars and crowds two floors down. “Let’s go over there,” she said, nodding toward a skypark.

It was empty save for a salaryman tapping away on a smartphone in a corner, oblivious to the world. We headed for the opposite corner.

Arisa turned to me. “Thanks for that. It would’ve been bad if I’d gotten caught.” She didn’t ask why I had been there.

I nodded.

“I should’ve paid more attention myself, but I was so frustrated that the damn thing wouldn’t work.” She plopped down on a bench and rummaged in the shopping bag. Eventually she fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Do you want one?” she asked suddenly.

“No, thank you,” I said automatically. “But… what were you doing back there with that terrifyingly real middle-aged dudeface? And where did you get that?”

Arisa looked pleased. “I made it. It’s modelled after an employee there. I was testing it to see if it was good enough to fool those ID cameras and unlock the door. The answer is no, unfortunately.”

“But… what is that place, and why do you want to get in there?”

“It’s just some real estate company, and I don’t.” She lit her cigarette. “But their facial recognition algorithm is really good, and making a mask that can fool it would be a big achievement.”

“Don’t all the ID cameras work the same way?”

“No, no, not at all!” She stood up and waved her cigarette, excited. “There’s a whole range. Like, some really old beer and cigarette vending machines are so shitty you can literally take an eyeliner and draw lines on your face in a certain pattern, like wrinkles, and it’ll trick them into thinking you’re an adult. And on the other extreme, some corporations have ones that are practically like retinal scans. That place,” she nodded toward Junco Tower, “is fairly advanced. We use it for testing purposes. So far, none of us have succeeded in making a mask that’s good enough, though. Except granny, of course.”

Granny? I had so many new questions, I barely knew where to start. “Who’s ‘we’?” I finally decided on the question that was bothering me the most.

“Why, The Noh club, of course.” She smiled. “The name is a bit misleading. It’s more like the Noh-and-privacy-protection club. Most of us are privacy rights activists. Ogura is the only one who’s hardcore Noh-only. Do you want to join?”

Noh and privacy protection. I hadn’t expected that. “Privacy rights activist” had a punky, rebellious ring to it, but Noh was ultra-high culture. “That is so cool,” I said, then it hit me that she had asked if I wanted to join. “But… I don’t know anything about Noh. Or about privacy.”

“You can learn.”

My phone vibrated audibly, and I recalled how late it was. “I have to go; that’s probably my mom, wondering why I’m not home yet.”

Arisa nodded, then stubbed out her cigarette. “If you’re interested,” she said, “I’ll show you the workshop after school tomorrow.”

“Good evening, sensei,” Hirota and Nanami—that was scarf girl’s name—called out as we emerged from a staircase into the workshop. The workshop covered most of the second floor of Arisa’s house. Yes—a house, like in the remotest of suburbs, except this one was squeezed in between Junco Tower and another high-rise; they must’ve been under siege with developers and yakuza wanting to buy the plot.

The workshop was divided in two. Half had tatami mats and antique furniture and Noh masks covering the walls. It was in this half that sensei, an old woman, sat working by a low table. The other half had laminate flooring and furniture in bright white, lifelike latex masks mounted on stands.

Hirota plopped down on the tatami floor, relaxing, while Nanami beelined for a worktable on the other side. Arisa knelt down next to the old woman, motioning for me to follow. The woman was working on a Noh mask, carving the corners of its eyes with a fine scalpel.

“Granny, this is Marie. Marie, this is my grandma. She’s a Noh mask artisan. And she pioneered the latex painting techniques we use for the other masks.”

The woman looked up from her work. “Are you a new member?” Before I could answer, she continued, “Our family has been Noh mask carvers for four generations. Arisa here will be next; her father didn’t have any talent for mask-carving.” She put down her scalpel to pat Arisa on the shoulder.

“Arisa’s parents are both big digital rights activists,” Hirota said, leaning back on his elbows. “Like, super big. That’s another of the reasons we hang out here: my parents would be totally freaking out that we were doing something illegal.”

“Is this illegal?” I asked, nervously.

Arisa’s granny chuckled, then returned her attention to the mask.

“Depends,” Arisa said, getting up. I followed her to the modern side of the workshop, where Nanami had gotten to work on a lifelike mask, a superfine brush in her hand. The mask depicted an older Western woman, but it was nowhere near as realistic as the one Arisa had worn the day before.

Arisa looked over Nanami’s shoulder as she spoke. “There’s nothing illegal about making a mask. It is sometimes—but not always—illegal to use a mask to trick a facial recognition algorithm. Let’s say now that you’re impersonating a specific person and entering a place using their face as credentials. If you don’t actually enter the place, it’s a bit more of a gray zone. And if you’re not impersonating a specific person but just happen to like wearing masks that make you look like a different gender, or perhaps thirty years older, that’s usually—but not always—legal.”

I nodded, watching Nanami make the tiniest brush strokes along the nostrils of the mask. Then she paused, resting her wrist against the table. I wanted her to know I didn’t hold any grudges for her refusal to share the big cigarette secret with me a few days earlier, so I asked politely, “Nanami-san, what’s the reason you decided to join the Noh club?”

She turned to me. “Because of Arisa. And because I don’t like personalized advertising. I had never really thought about it much, but after Arisa told me how face-based advertising worked, it really upset me. Like, we go about our lives boxed in by our own faces, constantly having the world tell us who we’re supposed to be, where we can go and what we should buy and do and watch. I hate it.” She paused, looking down at the mask. “So it feels good to use another face once in a while. And I like the artistic aspects of mask-making, too, though my own masks are still not very good.”

That was exactly it, I thought, as Nanami resumed her painting. I didn’t want to be told who I was supposed to be any more either.

So I joined the Noh club, and I couldn’t say what I loved the most: learning about privacy laws with Arisa’s parents and our adrenaline-fueled outings to test masks in the night-time, or our monthly outings to the National Noh Theater, where the actors transformed into demons or courtiers with the help of finely carved, stylized masks, like those made by Arisa’s grandmother.

At the dinner table at home, I gushed about how Noh masks can appear to change expression based on the angle of the light or the stage presence of Noh actors I had seen. Mom was both out of her depth and fundamentally in awe of anything “traditionally Japanese,” so she never pried, and the Noh club became my sphere of freedom.

A few weeks before the end of the school year, I completed my first realistic mask, and Arisa and Hirota joined me late in the evening at Skypark 714 to try it out. They kept a lookout over the skywalk adjoining the park, and once they had assured me that the coast was clear, I pulled the mask out of my bag. It depicted an elegant older woman; I had modelled it on the old folk singer Misora Hibari in full stage makeup.

I tugged it over my head, then approached the cigarette vending machine warily. It was the same one where I had obliviously tried to buy cigarettes almost a year earlier. Rather than the glamorous Hibari, it would’ve been more fitting had I worn a Noh mask of the vengeful samurai Soga Tokimune.

I put a five-hundred-yen coin into the coin slot, then hesitated over what to pick.

“Get the regular Mevius,” Hirota shouted. “If you don’t like them, I’ll take them.”

I pushed the button for a pack of Mevius, then tilted my head to look directly into where I now knew the facial recognition camera was mounted. We waited in expectant silence.

Thump.

I bent down to fish out a pack of cigarettes from the slot and held it out toward Arisa and Hirota. “Look,” I said, as amazed and proud as a new parent. “It worked!”

“Good,” Arisa said, giving one of her rare smiles, while Hirota let out a whoop and pumped his fist in the air. “Well done, Marie!”

We bought ourselves cans of hot coffee from another of the vending machines and sat down. I unwrapped the pack of cigarettes reverently and extracted one. I had never held a cigarette before.

Arisa handed me a lighter, and I attempted to light the cigarette without much success.

Hirota laughed. “You have to inhale while you light it, you know.”

“Oh,” I said sheepishly. I succeeded on the next attempt and inhaled deeply, then began to cough. It tasted disgusting, and I felt weirdly nauseated. Hirota laughed again, while Arisa moved closer to pat me on the back. Once I stopped coughing, I got up and put the cigarette out in the ashtray. Then, I handed Hirota the pack. “Well, that was a lot of trouble for something I will never do again. Gross!” Arisa and Hirota both laughed this time. I sat down to sip my coffee, and despite the exhaust-fume taste in my mouth, I felt happy and free.