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Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
A little joke. Trust that I have accounted for all variables of irony. Though I suppose if you’re unfamiliar with overanthologized works of the early Strand 6 nineteenth century, the joke’s on me.
I hoped you’d come.
You’re wondering what this is—but not, I think, wondering who this is. You know—just as I’ve known, since our eyes met during that messy matter on Abrogast-882—that we have unfinished business.
I shall confess to you here that I’d been growing complacent. Bored, even, with the war; your Agency’s flash and dash upthread and down, Garden’s patient planting and pruning of strands, burrowing into time’s braid. Your unstoppable force to our immovable object; less a game of Go than a game of tic-tac-toe, outcomes determined from the first move, endlessly iterated until the split where we fork off into unstable, chaotic possibility—the future we seek to secure at each other’s expense.
But then you turned up.
My margins vanished. Every move I’d made by rote I had to bring myself to fully. You brought some depth to your side’s speed, some staying power, and I found myself working at capacity again. You invigorated your Shift’s war effort and, in so doing, invigorated me.
Please find my gratitude all around you.
I must tell you it gives me great pleasure to think of you reading these words in licks and whorls of flame, your eyes unable to work backwards, unable to keep the letters on a page; instead you must absorb them, admit them into your memory. In order to recall them you must seek my presence in your thoughts, tangled among them like sunlight in water. In order to report my words to your superiors you must admit yourself already infiltrated, another casualty of this most unfortunate day.
This is how we’ll win.
It is not entirely my intent to brag. I wish you to know that I respected your tactics. The elegance of your work makes this war seem like less of a waste. Speaking of which, the hydraulics in your spherical flanking gambit were truly superb. I hope you’ll take comfort from the knowledge that they’ll be thoroughly digested by our mulchers, such that our next victory against your side will have a little piece of you in it.
Better luck next time, then.
Fondly,
Blue
* * *
A glass jar of water boils in an MRI machine. In defiance of proverbs, Blue watches it.
When Blue wins—which is always—she moves on to the next thing. She savours her victories in retrospect, between missions, recalls them only while travelling (upthread into the stable past or downthread into the fraying future) as one recalls beloved lines of poetry. She combs or snarls the strands of time’s braid with the finesse or brutality required of her, and leaves.
She is not in the habit of sticking around, because she is not in the habit of failing.
The MRI machine is in a twenty-first-century hospital, remarkably empty—evacuated, Blue observes—but never conspicuous to begin with, nestled in the green heart of a forest bisected by borders.
The hospital was meant to be full. Blue’s job was a delicate matter of infection—one doctor in particular to intrigue with a new strain of bacteria, to lay the groundwork for twisting her world towards or away from biological warfare, depending on how the other side responded to Garden’s move. But the opportunity’s vanished, the loophole closed, and the only thing there for Blue to find is a jar labeled READ BY BUBBLING.
So she lingers by the MRI machine, musing as she does on the agonies of symmetry recording the water’s randomness—the magnetic bones settled like reading glasses on the thermodynamic face of the universe, registering each bloom and burst of molecule before it transforms. Once it translates the last of the water’s heat into numbers, she takes the printout in her right hand and fits the key of it into the lock of the letter-strewn sheet in her left.
She reads, and her eyes widen. She reads, and the data get harder to extract from the depth of her fist’s clench. But she laughs, too, and the sound echoes down the hospital’s empty halls. She is unaccustomed to being thwarted. Something about it tickles, even as she meditates on how to phase-shift failure into opportunity.
Blue shreds the data sheet and the cipher text, then picks up a crowbar.
In her wake, a seeker enters the hospital room’s wreck, finds the MRI machine, breaks into it. The jar of water is cool. She tips its tepid liquid down her throat.
* * *
My most insidious Blue,
How does one begin this sort of thing? It’s been so long since I last started a new conversation. We’re not so isolated as you are, not so locked in our own heads. We think in public. Our notions inform one another, correct, expand, reform. Which is why we win.
Even in training, the other cadets and I knew one other as one knows a childhood dream. I’d greet comrades I thought I’d never met before, only to find we’d already crossed paths in some strange corner of the cloud before we knew who we were.
So: I am not skilled in taking up correspondence. But I have scanned enough books, and indexed enough examples, to essay the form.
Most letters begin with a direct address to the reader. I’ve done that already, so next comes shared business: I’m sorry you couldn’t meet the good doctor. She’s important. More to the point, her sister’s children will be, if she visits them this afternoon and they discuss patterns in birdsong—which she will have done already by the time you decipher this note. My cunning methods for spiriting her from your clutches? Engine trouble, a good spring day, a suspiciously effective and cheap remote-access software suite her hospital purchased two years ago, which allows the good doctor to work from home. Thus we braid Strand 6 to Strand 9, and our glorious crystal future shines so bright I gotta wear shades, as the prophets say.
