~//~

You all set? Something wrong with the avo toast? I brought you the chai to go. Again, really sorry about that.
It was great, as always, Sammie. I don’t need any change. The rest is for you.
Your friend doesn’t need a box?
Imagine she’ll need medical assistance if she’s not out of the bathroom in the next ten minutes. But I’ll be late for my gyno if I don’t leave now.

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Across town, there are two institutions of higher education, the Milwax College, ‘the’ being a light moniker tossed around by those who attend/attended classes there, and X State University, which despite its origin as a land-grant college in a sleepy agrarian township 125 years ago, was rechartered and moved to the subnation’s largest city and not its capital 118 years ago.

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The proximity of the two schools might have led to rivalries seeded and/or intensified through athletic competition, but the students of the Milwax had little use for sport, much like the playthings of X State had little use for study.

So it was on an advertisement sliding across the counter glass inside Mulberry Street’s second-most-successful pancakery, which straddled the 36-meter shared boundary between the two institutions that these worlds would collide in ways that would forever alter a future comprising people like Deidre and Glover (not the law firm).

WANTED: TEST SUBJECTS FOR PRISON EXPERIMENT WHERE YOU MOST DEFINITELY WON’T GO CRAZY AND ABUSE PEOPLE

PRE-RACIALS NEED NOT APPLY[1]

The pancakery was the obvious place for the research project’s designer, Eustace Beauregard, who knew the difficulties such prerequisites present toward ‘casting the widest net possible.’

He had already learned that pre-racialized people were already more likely to volunteer for a prison-type experiment, where they might wield unlimited theoretical power over others they perceive as lesser (or better) through an inhumane racial lens—evidenced by the fact only three people across Eustace’s entire research club within the Milwax College passed said racialization screening. [2]

Upon the suggestion of his academic extracurricular adviser, Dr. P.I. Swillowing, Eustace would need to include members of the much larger, sexually profligate X State population if he wanted the best result possible. Any.

Competent local conglomerates had poured a lot of money into this experiment. A poor result would mean the end of his career prospects, assuredly.

The first three hours of the promotional campaign occur without incident, sadly. Only three people bothered to watch the flyers beneath their meal—or at least so far as Eustace could tell—he had to go to the bathroom a few times because he wasn’t used to drinking so much coffee and he may have missed someone interacting with the ads during those seven minutes out of one hundred eighty total he spent at the pancakery. Had he seen them interact with the advertisement scrolling by their flapjacks, he could have approached them and encouraged submission of a survey response.

By 11am, the pancakery’s closing time, Eustace realizes that such an establishment may not be the best place to find students who would’ve stayed up the entire prior evening night drinking, sexing, and drugging with members of various ethnographies before skipping class for more of the same.

The X State quad and student union are also equally bereft of coeds and interracials, interlopers and interlocuters.

‘Excuse me, but could you tell me where the college students are?’ Eustace says to the cashier at the Memorial Union’s Taco Bell Express.

The cashier’s warbled reply requires a request for clarification, but upon receiving an equally unintelligible second answer, Eustace nods and then walks away. He cannot stand seeing a Cheesy Gordita Crunch for twenty-five shekels without the possibility of a Baja Blast to wash it down.

A lot of good things died in the Coca-Pepsi merger.

Eustace walks across the street to a large administrative building with bigger windows and art displays in the foyer than any other building he’d entered that day, X State or otherwise. He takes the elevator up to the sixth floor, which stands about two floors above the fifth floor of nearby, comparable buildings.

The directory mentioned this being the office of the Dean of Student Life, so this appeared to be as good of place as any to a) adjudicate what stores (if any) X State students frequent in sufficient numbers to respond to his advertisement, and b) find out where X State students were, in general, today.

‘Is the dean in?’

‘What is this regarding?’ says a secretary with a sleek brow-piece with an expandable microphone branching out like an old-timey orthodontic headset.

‘Student Life.’

‘Hold, please.’

Eustace freezes, then three minutes later the secretary ushers him toward a sliding glass door. Odd, for the interior.

‘Come in, come in, young learner. Thank you for braving the cold to come speak to me today.’

The Dean is polishing a protein shake while Eustace can hear the toilet bowl filling from a recent flush in the adjacent private restroom.

‘Thank you for having me, Dean.’

‘How can I help you?’ she says, eyes wide and expectant.

‘There are no students out today; the school is bare.’

‘You didn’t get the email that it is Staff Appreciation Day?’ she says, her voice lowering.

Eustace gulps. ‘No, no email.’

A section of lip, just at the corner of the Dean’s mouth, wobbles. Then it stops. ‘I can resend it. Just tell me your EdSync username.’

‘I don’t—I don’t have an X State username, exactly.’

‘I am the Dean of Student Life. I cannot send an email if you aren’t a student. Why have you wasted my time?’

‘I didn’t mean to; I just told your secretary I had a question about Student Life.’

The Dean stops her stalking towards the door, and snaps erect, beaming. ‘Then why didn’t you say so?’

‘I’m trying to enlist the help of X State students in my research experiment… I go to Milwax College. My name is Eustace Beauregard.’

‘Well, in that case, Eustace, let me explain one of my favorite X State traditions… Staff Appreciation Day!’

‘What’s that?’

‘It all started from an idea I got years ago when I worked a thankless job in the university mailroom. I was four months pregnant with my third child, and my husband hadn’t yet told me about his mistress. I was very hurt when I kept imagining what all the students who said nothing to me when I delivered the mail were really thinking. “What a cow—that stupid woman who delivers the mail!” Or maybe, “If campus police weren’t around, I would beat her and her unborn baby!” Terrible, right?’

‘Sure is.’

‘I vowed that when I became Dean of Student Life, once a year, I would have the students assigned to a campus job for a day!’

‘So, the person taking my order at the Taco Bell Express was a student held back from class? What do the professors do all day?’

‘Why they stay at home, with their faithful spouses, of course!’ says the Dean, wiping away a tear, indiscernible in causation.

‘Wow, that’s…different. I didn’t know that.’

‘Of course, there are opt-outs. Most post-racialized students didn’t want to acknowledge the power structure needed to invert the client-server model inherent in this institution to begin with. They’d rather stay at home on a day like today too, which is fine by me! As long as I can afford the staff this gesture that may or may not be interpreted as kind, depending on their viewpoint!’

‘So if it’s Staff Appreciation Day, why aren’t you at home?’

‘I am at home!’

And this is when Eustace notices the woman is too young and taught to have had her third live-birthed child years ago.

‘You said post-racialized students typically refrain from participating in Staff Appreciation Day?’

‘Uh-huh,’ the Dean says, checking her watch.

‘Would you give me the chance to email those students? I need post-racials to assist in a research experiment I’m conducting.’

‘What kind of experiment?’

‘It’s a prison experiment. I think I know why prior ones have failed—it has something to do with ideology.’

‘Prison, you say? Do you have a counter ad?’ the Dean says as she sits back hunting her desktop for the flyer to pass.

[1] ‘APPLY’ button links to the Milwax College’s Amateur Research Club Racialization Survey (Fall 2106 edition): a prerequisite for participating in Eustaces’s research experiment A Foray into the Epistemological Roots of Inequity and the Establishment of Corrective Ethics in Systemic Rehabilitation.

[2] Himself not included.

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But it’s also when I get the coffee out, and coffee is warm and soon I’ll feel good when I have it, not for the caffeine, which barely raises anything these days, but its reminder of what constitutes something; and if it's not going to be coffee then it would be something more destructive even though I feel good about the lack of destruction lately; cured pork and all.

When you can find that god path, routine, something reminding you of a preceding same, maybe seven months and three days ago, that’s ascent. A person unbothered by a filling lane, braking. One who’s drawn to cell towers in the distance, winding high up in the mountain, while the journey’s climb fights itself over which is the toughest part; upon arrival, then, it’s nothing.

Response swells within, an afraid scream—always quieter than rage. Which makes me think, there’s a primal fear out there, the worst there is, I reckon nearly silent. It’s a type of fear where you know it’s the end. The slightest point of a drip that starts slow, and oozy, but then pulsing—not a painful feeling—but pounding rhythm. Something that cannot be inferred by anyone standing outside it, those who would say, ‘what is there to fear?’

Most have no sense of how 9/11 upended our collective psyche, nor an understanding of what mass foreclosures did to the American family during the Great Recession.

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Not to say young people are ignorant—most of them can recount the facts (or at least the vibes) well enough—but major events no longer function as reference points capable of orienting future goals.

Perhaps it’s the absence of such anchors that translates into polls showing Gen Z has a historically low belief in hard work leading to success, equally dismal trust in institutions, and abysmal confidence in the future.

But it’s not for lack of trying.

Gen Z participates in the labor market at a higher rate in the 18–24 cohort than their Millennial counterparts ever did, while posting comparable postsecondary education figures.

All this negativity despite women under 30 earning more money than their male counterparts in 22 of the largest U.S. metros!

But because there is no single shared cultural value—thanks to political turmoil, a war on truth, and the weaponization of the internet—this negative outlook is likely to persist, as young people today possess no directional memory.

What’s missing is not information, but a kind of collective experience that settles into the background of decision-making, and quietly shapes what feels possible, risky, or irresponsible.

I exclude COVID from this argument because of how its handling was so polarized and fragmented from the jump. Instead, I regard 2020-2021 as an extended period of unresolved extremes that resisted becoming a shared experience at every level.

For starters, a substantial portion of the country still denies that the immunocompromised and elderly experienced genuine horror, painting more than one million deaths as “fake news” or mere “natural causes.”

While on the other hand, a generation of germophobes still tries justifying the material harm they caused young, healthy people with prolonged shutdowns and the cancellation of in-person schooling.

We never integrated these realities into a shared account of tradeoffs or lessons, in part because we still argue over whether the virus emerged from a lab or a pangolin.

COVID remains vivid in our minds but comes nowhere close to functioning as shared memory because, in its wake, we skipped the slow work of interpretation and moved directly into identity.

It’s difficult to build consensus under these conditions because memory requires delay, digestion, and a willingness to sit with unresolved tension.

We argue endlessly about what happened, but rarely about how it should shape what comes next, which suggests the problem is not a lack of data, but an ethical failure.

Even now, it feels impossible to acknowledge both the necessity and the harm of certain policies without triggering ideological reflexes, as if any attempt at processing the experience threatens to collapse into caricature—Marxism on one side, Trumpism on the other—leaving no room for calibrated judgment.

Imagine if 9/11 occurred in 2020—the cultural fallout would have been ten times worse. Partly because American cultural cohesion was stronger back then—but also because Dick Cheney-directed bombers moved quicker than our dial-up internet. Back in 2001, Americans didn’t know how truly medieval Saddam’s Iraq was, both culturally and technologically. Unlike today, when we know for a fact that less than 10% of our drugs come through Venezuela—but for some reason we’re not kidnapping leaders in Colombia, Mexico, and China.

Could it be because they don’t have 300 billion barrels of oil reserves?

Why do we have more information than twenty years ago, but less of a capacity to use it?

Before the widespread adoption of the internet on mobile devices, world events didn’t simply happen and pass; they accumulated. They created a sense of before and after that imposed friction on future action, forcing institutions and individuals alike to move with caution or humility, at least for a time.

Today, we seem unable to generate that kind of buildup. Experience flows through us without settling, leaving behind little more than opinion and posture. We lack not only foundational experiences held in common, but even a unifying theory of what those experiences meant or why they should still matter. Memory no longer stabilizes the present.

I suspect that Google, Meta, and the broader class of companies that profit from attention at an algorithmic level—as opposed to offering a mass-market product—play a central role in this erosion, not because they lie outright, but because they dismantle the conditions under which memory provides weight.

Today’s internet treats the past as a reservoir of fragments, each retrievable on demand, stripped of the temporal and emotional contexts that once gave them force.

History becomes something we consult rather than something that constrains us, a set of interchangeable excerpts rather than an accumulated structure we must move through. In this environment, memory loses its capacity to slow us down. It no longer delays action or introduces hesitation; it simply offers options.

What this reveals is a deeper difficulty we now face: our inability to allow memory to accumulate without immediately weaponizing or dissolving it. When every event is instantly searchable, instantly reframed and folded into a derivative narrative, nothing lingers long enough to matter.

Memory becomes shallow not because we don’t record the past, but because we refuse to let it slow us, irritate us, or demand patience. We move too quickly from experience to interpretation, leaving no space for the kind of reflection that once made history instructive rather than ornamental.

You can see this failure most clearly in the way we process contemporary geopolitics. Take the abduction of Nicolás Maduro under the familiar pretext of narco-trafficking, a justification so thin it barely bothers with plausibility when everyone involved understands the real stake is oil and regional leverage.

Memories of Iraq and Panama might exist, but do no work. In an ethically collapsing world, history neither delays action nor sharpens skepticism; it simply floats on as another reference swallowed by the feed.

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I was never good at the formal mechanics of writing in those formative years, and even now I still worry that whatever prose of mine isn’t utterly dense can feel overly choreographed.

There’s often a sense that the sentences want to stop before I do. As a concrete example, in college I received a C in Business Writing, a small but telling hint at my inability not only to write directly, but to think in a straightforward manner as well.

My tastes were also out of step. I preferred Maya Angelou to Toni Braxton, Conrad to Kafka, and Camus above them all. Shakespeare never enamored me, likely because I felt more alive reading Harper Lee and her colloquialisms rooted in abrupt, declarative statements than wandering verse and elevated diction. I respond more to immediacy than to ornament, yet have difficulty executing it myself.

For most of my adult life, I wanted to create a franchise—a second-world universe—in which my own pure creation could help others get lost in splendor. I imagined something expansive, immersive, and transporting. But those worlds, or at least my increasingly wizened idea of them, can never truly compete with video games, big-box retailers, and the other banal enterprises that already dominate attention so completely.

I’ll be 34 this year, and it’s an incredibly scary number. Not simply because one’s relationship to others becomes more stretched and distant the further one moves through spacetime, but because in an expanding universe one’s sense of place becomes exponentially more disfigured.

I say this because I never really wrote before the hyperscaler age. Anything I produced before 2023 reads, in hindsight, like random musings—200-word bursts spaced out over four-month intervals—usually written when I felt I couldn’t take any more of what the rat race had to give me. Though, in retrospect, I see that version of myself less as overwhelmed and more as insufficient. Not strong enough.

I still feel that way many days, when I soberly stare at my monitor, hoping the words will come.

I’m at that point in this latest novel—nearly finished—where the going turns into a slog. The momentum falters. Worse still, everything around me seems to be moving so fast. Another year gone, and it’s not so much that I worry about where the world might take me anymore. It’s more a question of whether the world will ever find me at all.

2025 will forever be known to me as the year I built a philosophical framework that treats morality as maintenance, much like a computer programmer tends to their source code. In this view, language—when shaped by forces of existence like power, memory, and desire—hardens into societies and cultures.

I feel this framework is as legitimate a worldview as any, though at present I lack the chops to defend it rigorously or explain it to others in a way that doesn’t make me sound positively spacey, or untethered from reality.

I used to believe that my shifting desires—wanting to be famous, rich, powerful, impactful—treating those shifting dreams, themselves volatile, as cause enough for action. I wholeheartedly believed that simply following one’s dreams would lead to a kind of transcendence.

But in a world where the pursuit of happiness is the closest we ever get, wanting is no longer sufficient. Despite what we think we desire, we are shaped far more by the world around us, and by everything that has come before us, than by any intrinsic motivation.

Put differently, desire functions more as a measurement than an aim—a diagnostic check to ensure that we, or the society we inhabit, are properly accounting for constants and variables.

We must realize that, across the modern condition, those in power peddle satisfaction as an idea rather than deliver it. Most are willing to perpetually defer satisfaction, or at the very least bend it to provide tension for a grand design (think nationalism, or colonizing Mars).

Sigmund Freud may have been the first to articulate, with real clarity, these conditions as the foundation for compulsion: where desire no longer ends in pleasure, but loops endlessly into continuation.

If we so desperately wish to carry life into the metaverse, ostensibly to free ourselves from the wanton desires that plagued the world before the Information Age, why then are we purchasing products from internet companies unwilling to deliver subjective fulfillment and then letting us move on with our lives?

There is no investor “satisfaction” if you stop clicking.

Put another way, a worker who is comfortable at their desk, sure of their place, content to ride out the next twenty years in their role—does that worker not stop optimizing?

This is not meant to be a scathing indictment of everything you have ever wanted. Rather, it is an inquiry into how you continually evaluate why you want things, feelings, and—most importantly—other people.

Coming full circle, there was no legitimate human reason for making Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. The system that produced it simply wanted to validate its own existence, to remain solvent and self-justifying.

J.J. Abrams was not tuned to what the world wanted—or, more importantly, I would argue, what it needed. As a result, audiences were left with an extraneous, disjointed plotline grafted onto an otherwise coherent and seminal franchise.

Sadly, in desiring a better answer to that failure, I embarked on creating a novel as a response—one not at all aligned with what I ethically desired, and not the sort of project that truly honors what my high school English teachers gave me. What they gave me was resonance. The resonance of the novel as a form capable of describing the most innate, fibrous, minute pieces of our humanity.

That’s not to say that I’m not incredibly proud of my novel, The Spiral Stair. It simply means that it was made, by my own definition, under unethical circumstances. Luckily, thanks to my high school English textbook Everything’s an Argument, language is not a compulsion. And thus, if I continue writing—whether I want to or not—it is, arguably, the right thing to do.

They reflect movement, hesitation, maturity, and that uncomfortable awareness that proximity to something meaningful isn’t the same as actually touching it. If there’s a unifying theme here, it’s transit: between places, between selves, between the person you were and the one you’re quietly becoming.

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‘Bangkok’ by wakelee opens the list with the deceptive energy of a song that sounds sun-drenched but isn’t interested in vacation. Echoes of early Bloc Party guitar work cut through an emphatic chorus that makes you question what Gen Z has against tanning — bright, urgent, almost confrontational.

But the song itself is about reluctance: a traveler in Bangkok who isn’t there for the sand or the spectacle, but for the reckoning that travel sometimes forces. It’s a song about realizing that movement doesn’t absolve you of unfinished business. That being near something doesn’t mean you’ve engaged with it. To be a person in transit, the song suggests, you don’t get to leave the loose ends behind.

That idea of becoming unrecognizable to yourself resurfaces in ‘Silhouette’ by In Passing. One of the quieter miracles of the streaming era is how algorithms can sometimes cut through geography and obscurity with surgical precision.

In Passing — an emo band made up of thirty-somethings from rural Missouri — would likely never have crossed my path otherwise. As one of their proud 295 monthly listeners, I can say the production value on “Silhouette” is anything but DIY.

A disconnected phone line hums in the background like an unanswered question while the lyrics ask whether you’ve become a shadow of someone else, or whether you’re actually living your own life. It’s a familiar emo theme, but filtered through experience — not adolescent despair, but adult unease. The kind that doesn’t scream, just lingers.

Dislocation takes a stranger, more communal form on ‘Bastard’ by Shoplifter. Little is known about this underground band from Victoria, BC, which feels appropriate given how the song itself resists clarity. Off-key guitars grind against deep, intoned vocals that feel closer to a hymn than a hook. Horns and piano drift in and out, never quite giving you what you expect, or what you think you want — and then somehow giving you exactly what you need.

‘Bastard’ captures the feeling of being young and misaligned with the world, of recognizing your own downtrodden experiences mirrored in others without romanticizing them. It’s messy, unresolved, and honest in a way that feels increasingly rare.

If Shoplifter captures communal dissonance ‘Say It For Yourself’ by Casino Hearts turns inward. The song feels like being dropped into a broken home — bell-like synths hovering over brushy drums and a low-fi, picked-at guitar. The lyrics are devastating in their restraint:

counting faces / in the mirror / in the chamber / of a beast i couldn’t help

There’s a sense of place and cadence here that cuts deep, but it’s the vocals that truly haunt. They transport me back to a softer time — like if The Cranberries were stripped of outright rage, leaving only a low, persistent hum. The song rises slowly, carefully, as if promising resolution… until it doesn’t. And that refusal to offer comfort feels honest. Some things don’t end cleanly.

Some wounds don’t close on cue.

Movement becomes gentler on ‘Essen’ by Nora Van Elken. The mysterious, largely anonymous (and presumed Dutch) DJ has built a discography that maps place through sound, and in 2025 that map led to Germany. Classical piano overtakes her usual minimal house framework, floating through breaks that feel perfectly suited for a rooftop wine night.

‘Essen’ isn’t a showstopper — and that’s the point. It functions as sonic glue, the connective tissue between moments, moods, and memories. It’s why Nora ended up as my most-listened-to artist this year: not because any one track dominates, but because the work understands how life actually moves.

Finally, ‘Sunset Years’ by DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ closes the year with patience. Who else but a longtime collaborator with The 1975 would layer Murder, She Wrote voiceovers over a beach-hazed meditation on maturity?

Running nearly six minutes, the song barely changes on the surface. Angela Lansbury’s words drift in and out, the chords spaced wide enough to demand attention. Nothing here is rushed. The reward comes slowly, not in sound but in feeling — the realization that growth doesn’t always announce itself.

That’s a wrap on 2025: I really appreciate your readership, insights, and support.

Along with language and culture, these concepts have been treated by famous philosophers as layers sitting atop the fundamental aspects of existence, rather than composing its essence.

In my view, having felt detached from society since my first reading of Camus in the eleventh grade, I’ve held this sneaking suspicion that humans don’t describe reality with language, so much as they use it as a store of meaning.

The forces we imagine as backstopping our society—power, memory, and desire—are not described through language so much as they are shaped by it.

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In other words, language—and the societies it produces—are more structure than metaphor.

I suppose by the nineteenth century, when science and corporations had laid bare the path of modern life, most thinkers started answering the same basic question:

Why does society feel real, and why does it hold us even when we don’t agree with it?

Karl Marx started with force. Who owns what, who works for whom, who eats and who doesn’t. From there, he modeled meaning flowing upward. Ideas, values, even morality are shaped by material conditions. Language, in this view, is mostly a surface effect—ideology, justification, sometimes illusion. Marx gives us propulsion (mostly toward revolution) but the motion is one-way. Power shapes meaning that doesn’t talk back.

Émile Durkheim noticed something Marx doesn’t linger on: symbols. Durkheim believed symbols don’t just describe society, they bind it. Rituals, shared beliefs, norms—these things feel external and real, even coercive. They organize behavior. They stabilize life. But Durkheim treated symbols like finished structures. Once formed, they sit there, holding society together. He explains stability, not change. His society works—but it doesn’t drift.

Max Weber got closer to the recursive motion of reward and punishment. He watches meaning drain out of the world as systems rationalize. Charisma turns into offices. Ritual turns into procedure. Purpose turns into process. But Weber regarded societal outcomes as loss—meaning disappearing under bureaucracy. What he misses is that meaning doesn’t vanish. It just survives in thinner, more procedural forms.

By the 20th century, the philosophical tone shifted from explanation to suspicion.

Michel Foucault showed that power doesn’t just repress—it produces. It creates categories, norms, identities. Institutions don’t merely control bodies; they make people legible to systems. Language becomes a technology. This is a huge step. But Foucault stops at exposure. He opens the machine, names every gear, but stops short of determining how meaning stabilizes, returns, or exhausts itself.

Then Jacques Derrida pulled the floor out entirely. He said meaning is never present—that every word points to another word. There is no final reference point. While devastating, this notion tracks in a prompted, looping world of computation.

But once meaning is endlessly deferred, you’re left with a question Derrida failed to answer:

If nothing ever fully means anything, why does society still function at all?

What all of these thinkers describe—force, ritual, procedure, discourse, deferral—are not competing explanations. They are slices of the same moving system. What’s missing is the idea that meaning doesn’t just flow or dissolve.

It returns.

Language shapes power, memory, and desire. Those forces harden into structures like society and culture. Those structures teach us how to speak, want, remember.

Around and around it goes. Not as repetition, but as a feedback loop.

In this model of symbolic return, we recast consciousness as a legible path through this loop—a sort of brief, instantaneous transcendence.

Yet if meaning does not originate in truth or belief, but in recursive return—if society continues not because we agree with it, but because we keep speaking it—then ethics can no longer be about obedience or transcendence.

They become a question of maintenance.

So how does one maintain ethics in a world like this, if not by clinging to fixed rules, and not by abandoning structure altogether?

In my view, ethics become a practice of balance: understanding history without becoming trapped by it; anchoring oneself to commitments that can be repeated without becoming hollowed; and keeping power visible enough that it can be questioned, adjusted, and shared.

In a recursive world, ethics are not about purity or certainty. They are about sustaining a loop that still returns meaning—carefully, consciously, and without pretending it will do so on its own.

You feel it in the office when someone schedules a meeting to “discuss an alignment” involving square pegs and round holes.

You feel it when you navigate the automated phone tree of an outsourced customer service agency who “can’t access that information in our system, ma’am.”

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You feel it the moment you realize you’re following rules no one around you genuinely thinks are real. The strange thing is that nothing dramatic happened.

No revolution or last-chapter moment where someone stepped to the podium and declared the social contract void.

Everything kept working. And yet something essential stopped returning.

This is the break—not from society, but from societism: the quiet, unspoken belief that the systems we inhabit must be good simply because they exist. That persistence equals legitimacy. That order, any order, is better than the alternative.

It’s not an ideology you sign up for. It’s a feeling that gets under the skin early.

It might be a teacher telling you to raise your hand before speaking. Or a parent making you say thank you, even when you don’t feel it.

The rituals change as you grow, but the lesson stays fixed: the world runs smoother when you stay inside the lines.

By the time adulthood arrives, societism isn’t a belief—it’s a reflex.

But reflexes can misfire. And lately, many of them have.

If you ask people when they first “lost faith” in society, most will shrug. There was no single betrayal, they’ll say. No catalyzing deceit. Instead, it was little things—accumulated gestures that didn’t add up.

A ballot that didn’t seem to matter. A job review written by an algorithm.

None of this breaks the world. But each moment thins the signal—until one day you realize you’re illegible to others and still performing common rituals anyway.

Societism survives precisely because it doesn’t need belief. It only needs repetition. As long as the gesture continues, the structure can pretend to still mean something.

The tragedy isn’t that the structure lies. It’s that the structure no longer cares whether you believe it.

No child is taught the philosophical basis for society. They’re taught how to behave inside one.

Raise your hand. Wait your turn. Follow the script.

From school to workplace to hospital to courtroom, you don’t just learn facts—you learn choreography. Recognition, even thin recognition, rewards your performance.

And that’s all societism needs to survive: the faint impression that structure still equals safety.

But what happens when that impression erodes?

You would expect rebellion. What you get is compliance.

Because the danger isn’t “the system failing.” It’s stepping outside a system that no longer recognizes you.

Modern life has turned legibility into an existential resource. If an institution, platform, or bureaucracy cannot read you, you may as well not exist.

So the subject, even disillusioned, keeps performing—not for meaning, but for visibility.

This is why societism is so durable: it outlasts belief by making recognition the last remaining reward.

Even someone who sees every flaw in the machine will hesitate to walk away. Not because they think the machine will repair itself, but because there’s nothing outside it that returns a name, or a role, or even proof of life.

Every system runs on a feedback loop. Political, social, corporate, algorithmic—it doesn’t matter. You perform an action, and the structure returns something that acknowledges, corrects, rewards, or redirects you.

Societism is the belief that this loop is inherently good.

Once the return dies, the ethical orientation shifts. Not toward rebellion—rebellion requires belief—but toward recalibration.

When you stop assuming the structure is moral, you start asking the only question that matters now:

Does it respond?

Q: It’s been almost six months since you published The Palest Snare. When can we expect your overdue project, The Spiral Stair?

Hey, that rhymes. I’m pleased to announce that Spiral Stair will launch on April 18, 2026, at the LA Times Festival of Books. I hope to see you there!

Q: How has The Spiral Stair changed from what you started out building?

When I started writing The Spiral Stair, I wanted to build an epic science-fantasy series that could step into the space left by the thematic collapse of properties like Star Wars and, to some extent, The Lord of the Rings. Plus, I wanted a science-fiction series that actually incorporates recent discoveries in physics. In the first year of the project, I marched toward that really quickly. But in the second year—this year—it became incredibly difficult. The process of packaging the book for editors and publishers who probably wouldn’t want it in the first place drained me mentally. Around August, I realized that science fiction, besides being very crowded, is also quite constricted—almost more conventional than people admit. I still love writing it, and I have a good deal of the second book written, but I don’t think it deserves my complete attention anymore.

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Q: How did The Palest Snare and that intense revision stretch push you toward a more explicit philosophical thesis?

Around June, I was furiously editing The Spiral Stair after publishing The Palest Snare, and it was the kind of editing round where you’re threading themes across the whole book. I knew I’d reached the point where my philosophies had to coalesce into a solid thesis; if any academic or critic reads the book, they’re going to want to point to some sort of palpable argument. I knew the last major philosophical movement in this line was Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralism, and that since it arrived in the sixties we’ve basically been stuck trying to move from: “Okay, the world is tough and there are no absolutes like good/bad,” to: “So now what? How do we actually live inside that, instead of spending all our time just critiquing it?”

Q: For readers who don’t live in theory-land, how do you explain post-structuralism and what you’re trying to do beyond it?

Post-structuralism is the idea that structures—armies, governments, universities, Instagram—corrupt symbols and language so that participants can’t have a “pure” experience or achieve that lovely philosophical ideal of transcendence. For me, post-structuralism is the best way to explain why the word “America” means different things to different people. Is it a land of opportunity, or a dying imperial power? What drives that meaning?

Symbols. Symbols are communicated through language which—after being spoken, written, enacted, and enforced—forms societies. Within those societies, myths and values are encoded as culture. How we remember these systems, how people exert power on these systems, and how much we desire change or permanence in these systems all shape our interpretation and use of language—which then drives further change back into society. Symbolism is a loop.

There’s no way to achieve transcendence in a loop of infinitesimal, equal-and-opposite reactions. This symbolic loop—very much like how a computer program runs—is, to me, a better way to view the world than the absolutes embedded in Christian or classical philosophy. I think the reason I call my framework “post-societal” is that it’s fundamentally tearing down our assumption that society, in and of itself, is “good.”

Q: Where does Christian or classical philosophy fit into this picture for you, especially in the United States?

Even though “religion” still guides about two-thirds of Americans culturally, our true faith is in our laws, institutions, and politics. That’s where we do battle. Not in our souls, but in the square of public opinion. I think that needs to change. If we saw our values as more of a progression than an absolute written thousands of years ago, we’d be more willing to admit that many things in our society are not working for us. We might be able to flush out the people wielding hidden power over our desires and over the way our memories get metabolized into identity.

Q: So in that light, how do you think about religion and its ability to preserve symbolism?

In essence, this is what religion is: not just a set of beliefs, but a long-running symbolic encoding. No one really cares to remember that Jesus was executed for flipping tables in a market outside a sacred temple. Zealots and Roman opportunists later attached symbols of divine purity to that emotive act, and out of that synthesis they birthed a powerful opiate that has taken more than a millennium to flush from our system.

Q: Where did you get the idea for your next project Jailbreak!, and how does it carry these post-societal ideas?

Jailbreak! honestly comes from my current obsession with Infinite Jest and noticing its sort of encyclopedic style as a better vessel for these “post-societal” thoughts I’ve been developing. We’re living in a time where, instead of everyone starting their cybernetic journeys from the same “homepage,” we each have our own domain, our own society of one, pulled by strings we can’t see, along a track laid down by the larger system.

The result is a loss of resonance. Cause and effect no longer speak to each other. The exhaustion and discontentment you feel are the residue of a greater collapse: declining birth rates, increased income inequality, an economy built on derivatives. In this slow American decline, you can trace the cracks back to flaws in the structural design. I think we have the tools to correct it, but it’s really a question of getting out of our own way.

Q: You said this greater collapse makes us exhausted. What do you mean by that?

I think the first literary character I ever really identified with was Meursault, in Camus’s The Stranger. His exhaustion with the postmodern condition—the obvious roots of our pain combined with his powerlessness inside the social inheritance he’s stuck with—shows up as this sick kind of rebellious indifference. It isn’t a lack of care; it’s a resignation of meaning.

The connections he has left—to pleasure, to nature—are about all we get when our actions can’t change the structure or culture we live within. That’s where a lot of us are now. We’re exhausted, not just from work or politics, but from living in a loop that keeps asking for performance without ever returning real meaning.

Q: Once we admit we’re exhausted, your next question is “What works?” What are you really asking there?

My thinking went to this notion that if algorithms and systems rule our lives, how would they approach ethics? Since we literally require millions of GPUs to command our environs these days, it feels right to build an ethical framework based on the recursive loops in their programming.

What is the “source code” that explains how structures get steered to drive inequality? What’s the blueprint that warps desire and memory so that neighbor is turned against neighbor in this new cold civil war? I’m less interested in another moral sermon and more interested in mapping the architecture: which loops generate exploitation, which loops could be tuned toward repair.

Q: If society isn’t allowing us to approach transcendence, what goal are you writing toward instead?

The problem, I realized, is that most philosophical frameworks—from Kierkegaard to Kant—treat transcendence as a side of the equation, a clean endpoint. For most of its history, we’ve approached the absurd existence Camus describes with the built-in assumption that anything blocking us from transcendence is something to rebel against.

But today, when so much rebellion feels scripted—when “revolution” often means executing the same constitution in a new skin—we still haven’t absorbed the idea that not all transcendences are created or experienced equally. Transcendence isn’t just a goal; it’s a kind of structure.

Postmodernism and post-structuralism told us that language has been used to corrupt structures: racist housing laws, the abolition of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the PATRIOT Act. We took that to mean that any structure is bad. We’ve spent thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union building and breaking structures with no end goal—fighting for the sake of fighting—because we know we’re not fair. We probably have religion to thank for that, too. As I said, it’s still a guiding light for about two-thirds of the country.

So the goal for me is not transcendence, but coherence: a way of living inside the loop where our structures don’t lie to us, where ethics is less about purity and more about how well the system returns a signal.

I’ve always been the one who waits for the smaller conversation, down at table, where I can offer a joke or some quick little flare of wit that convinces someone—briefly—to want more.

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It’s a hard life for people like me in this era where identity has been converted into a commodity, and even something as benign as a morning routine can be packaged, monetized, and sold as aspiration. The last decade saw us shed the shabby charm of the computer-café society for the supposed freedom of the gig economy. But once companies discovered the lengths to which people would go merely to stave off bankruptcy, the gig atomized into something even thinner: the micro-commodification of time and attention, until even the margins of our lives were optimized for harvest.

We wake each morning in a fresher hell than the day before. The language of advertising—slick, insinuating, omnipresent—has lodged itself into the void inside us and declared itself meaning. Fulfillment has become more important, more loudly insisted upon, than the quality of our souls.

Around the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven, I grew restless with the prospect of life passing me by without any sense of authorship on my part. I was beholden to a large conglomerate for the roof over my head and the ability to meet basic civic obligations, and yet I did not feel part of anything. So at twenty-eight, I convinced myself to dive headlong into a nascent industry my immediate experience insisted was “next.” It was not.

Ecommerce aggregators turned out to be a woefully inadequate sector whose entire fate depended on the whims of shadowy platforms. I spent three years reconciling that mistake—making lemons out of lemonade, then trying to make something drinkable from the residue.

But on December 4th, 2023, the lemonade stand was over, and I was bare. Exposed. Whatever cultural scaffolding I had encoded within myself no longer aligned with the society around me, and I could no longer pretend the path I was on led toward anything I recognized. Liberty, justice, equality—those supposedly foundational pillars of American civic life—have come to feel infrequent, almost spectral, glimpsed only out of the corner of the mind.

This problem, I’ve realized, like my employment history, is rooted in platforms. X.com, Amazon, TikTok, Instagram. The hidden machinery of their power distorts and warps the very language we use, fracturing the culture into mutually unintelligible dialects.

I cannot reconcile my view of America with half the country because half the country is working from a completely different definition of what America means. Meanwhile, the ruling class—operating through algorithms and data centers—pricks us with a thousand tiny cuts in the form of eight-second videos that chip away at whatever intact notion of self we might have had, replacing it with something synthetic and frictionless.

We cannot reconcile our desires when we cannot assemble a shared image of our own history. We cannot see the hand that rocks the cradle because we are too busy sleeping. Put simply, the English language—American culture, really—has splintered into millions of microcosms, diffusing meaning until it becomes meaningless. Freedom dissolves into infinitesimal variations, each one loudly defended and mutually exclusive.

Freedom from billionaires. Freedom from poverty.
Freedom from colonizers. Freedom from savages.
Freedom from procedure. Freedom from dissent.

We remember the Roman Empire—the armies, the peace, the roads, the cities—as if those glories simply appeared, fully formed. But we forget that it was the republic that built the civilization. The empire did not conquer the Mediterranean so much as it held the pieces together when cohesion had already begun to slip. Culture did that first. Symbols did that first. And the symbols outlasted their makers.

We also forget that slaves and second-class taxpayers outnumbered Rome’s six million citizens seven to one. Yet we inherit this strangely unexamined idea that ten percent of people owning half the wealth is a prerequisite for order and freedom simply because that’s “how it’s always been”—or, at least, because someone has been very good at telling us that’s what order and freedom mean.

And here’s the part philosophers haven’t quite parsed: the precondition of power—of society, of culture—is symbols. What makes us human is our ability to encode and decode them. What we are terrible at is retracing where those symbols came from, what purposes they once served, and why they persist long after their original utility has evaporated.

Take Christianity. No one would be celebrating Christmas this year if not for a handful of Roman patricians in the late second century who decided that its morality and ritualism held greater unifying power than their fading state pantheon. The Roman civic religion had lost its ability to bind the people; Christianity, with its liturgies and moral scaffolding, offered a more cohesive symbolic operating system. Whatever else the Bible may be—literature, cosmology, spiritual guide—it also functioned, quite effectively, as an instruction manual in obedience.

Free will—theoretically the closest we get to freedom—is our choice in interpreting the symbols we inherit. To decide, even briefly, that a meaning handed down to us no longer fits the life we are trying to live. Consciousness is simply the moment we notice that shift; the flicker of recognition that a symbol has changed, or that we have.

Love, I suspect, is the first and most powerful example of this: the sudden coherence between the inner life and the outer world, the feeling that something matters before you can articulate why.

And maybe it’s in the name of love—love of people, of stability, of legibility—that we surrender our agency so easily. We want to remain intelligible to those around us, all of us struggling through the same modern fog, even if it takes 3,600 hours of doomscrolling to arrive at a meaning we believe we share.

This isn’t a critique of Christians or doomscrollers. It’s a critique of all of us, for allowing our symbols to be rewritten without asking who’s doing the writing—or why we’re so willing to let them.

They help mightily with the mucky parts on the floodplain. But your horse needs gumption to cross the riverbed. Water would come up to the horse’s belly, if we’re lucky. For about twenty feet. If we’re lucky.

Muck was the least of our worries.

“We’re sitting ducks if we don’t get across quick!” Medge lamented.

I didn’t have the time to answer, scanning a hundred yards behind for a sign of someone tailing us. All I saw were shadows moving across the buildings, creeping round that burning depot.

“You watch the ground ahead!”

We needed to move quickly as long as María had that lantern. We could risk moving slowly if they couldn’t see us. Then we couldn’t see much, either.

I pulled the reins of my mare, who I quickly discovered, had a problem falling in a line. That wouldn’t make the fording easy. She’d just have to trust us. Easier said than done.

María’s mount neighed as we worked down a mound toward the bottomland trees. The ground was much thicker, but she pressed the colt forward. The other horses shimmied and found their footing, the pace slowing. Boards were fewer and further between.

No day crossing this river was like the next. Enough foot and wagon traffic in one spot builds up mud banks, which serve as fresh pools for boggy water looking for a way out.

I tried not to think about the caked mud marking us when we got out the other side. You had better luck navigating through the slop in the daily sun. Few other than fugitives had a reason to stir up sludge in the middle of the night, especially if the horses got spooked and we had to ditch ‘em.

“This really the way to L’abra?”

“Be quiet, Medge. I’ll tell you if something’s off.”

The lantern had attracted attention. All María’s cunning would be for not if any Rurales saw us cutting south. They could signal to fresher horses at Mission Crossing and ride ‘em hard to cut us off at the Two Rivers.

“¡Más rápido! ¡Más!”

Lanterns had followed us down toward the river. As soon as we had reached the west bank, María snuffed the flame and ripped south. Moonlight coming off the river, split between the scraggly trees, was good enough for her and the horses. All the better if we got out of sight and across before our pursuers could find us.

L’abra was a decent choice. Tucked away against steep hills and far enough from San Rafael. Only problem was, the route would take us through Pico land. I hadn’t had the best experience with Pico men.

“What’s that behind us?” Medge gasped.

“Now they know we’re going south!” Medge hissed, distraught we’d been followed.

What did he expect them to do? Stand around and scratch their heads?

Some folks on the Calle had spoken about old man Pico building a permanent bridge south of where the Hondo met the Angeles River. He wanted the trade coming up from San Pedro, and I didn’t blame him.

But old Pio Pico didn’t control L’abra. Rafael’s Rurales could reach us there by tomorrow morning if we weren’t settled in.

“¡Adelante!” María hollered.

“What did she say?” Medge’s cluelessness baffled me.

But I have a soft spot for lost causes.

“Get ready; she found our spot.”

The girl’s horse had no problem following María into the stream. The water ran slowly, so the splashes were loud.

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“Hurry, now! ¡Ellos vienen!” I urged Alberto.

Medge’s horse bunched up to his at the bank, which spooked Alberto’s horse good.

“Go Medge! No time to wait!”

Medge pulled his horse around, and I followed him in. María picked a suitable spot. Water didn’t get past two feet until we were halfway across.

“Try it again now!” I hollered at Alberto, but his horse wouldn’t go.

“María! ¿Qué hacemos?”

She didn’t miss a beat.

“Alberto, ve a San Pedro. Espera mi carta.”

I didn’t know how she planned to get him a letter, but her calmness at the separation surprised me.

“Sí, señora. Hasta pronto. ¡Vaya con dios!”

He didn’t have to yell that last part, especially with people chasing us three hundred yards off. Then, as if his horse had regained all trust, he vanished into the night.

The thick line of trees on the higher east bank provided suitable cover for our climb out of the bottomlands. Good, honest people worked the farms beneath these hills. And that’s what worried me.

They weren’t fighters, and they’d give us up to the Rurales in a heartbeat.

“Come, blanquito. We necesita move.”

“Pero Alberto,” the girl whimpered.

“Él estará bien, Rosa. Estará bien.”

María soon made it clear she had a better horse than all of us. Bypassing the easier line towards houses to our right, she surged the colt up towards a crest that certainly didn’t move us closer to L’abra.

What have you planned for us, María?

Atop the bluff called Paredon Blanco, the flickering lights of the growing city gave us an idea of what we were up against. Lanterns still on the river worked south, while I could tell a mile to our north, another group giving chase—ten or so riders—had just crossed at Mission.

“Móntenlos hard, blanquitos.”

This was gonna be a long night.

“You sure about this, Fletcher?”

“Startin’ to be.” Spurring my horse. “More by the minute.”

I’d crisscrossed this whole damn basin spreading secrets and running steer for los Lugos, los Domínguez, and los Híjares. I’d seen how these caudillos built up private armies and enclaves after the War of 1867.

She wasn’t taking us to L’abra.

I settled in on her left side, pressing forward and hoping the others kept up. I wanted to ask her where she was taking us, but I knew she wouldn’t say.

We hadn’t even reached the thick of a settlement before I noticed shadows moving against interior candlelight. Lot more witnesses than I’m used to. I hadn’t been this way in a year, and for good reason.

“Can we beat them across El Puente?”

A rocky slope slowed us down after we passed farmhouses. She wouldn’t look at me, only forward.

“No sé, blanquito.”

Even if Alberto drew those initial pursuers south, the party coming around Mission had better roads and horses.

“¿Tienes un plan?”

She was thinking. I was thinking. Medge was complaining, mostly in hushed whispers so María couldn’t hear. She could hear him, though. Hell, half of Rancho San Antonio could hear him.

Less than a mile from the Hondo, rounding a bluff, I pulled up. I’d have stopped even if she’d kept going. I had to look down on San Gabriel for any signs of movement. We’d need to lose any tail we picked up in the river towns. I don’t think María thought that far.

At least now I know how much I could trust her decisions.

“Debemos irnos,” María huffed. At first I thought the horse made the sound.

“Ya.”

Maybe if I’d seen movement down there, I’d recommend some crazy maneuver, like sacrificing Medge to lead the horses away while we double-backed on foot.

Now I was making poor decisions. María was right. We had a lead, and we’d have to keep it. Had to pray the time I wasted confirming that fact wouldn’t cost us later.

“What’s wrong, Fletcher?”

“Nothing. She knows what she’s doing.”

Even if she didn’t, it was the right thing to say.

I knew very little about María. I know she didn’t charge us different nor did she with black folks either. And that was all right in my book. I got plenty of jobs drinking in her saloon.

No longer.

I mumbled a gracias and shuffled farther back to jump down. The tuck and roll onto the hay pile nearly took me into the moonlight between buildings. The trick was keeping the bottles covered now that the rags had soaked in rum.

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“¡No disparen! ¡No disparen!” The cliente called from my left, trying to cross to the next building.

Between his yells and Medge’s firing, the Rurales were distracted enough. I could afford a moment to kneel and catch my breath. The cliente’s turmoil amused me, caught between the police and the river, with the former blocking his way home.

I still heard Medge’s rifle. A good sign.

“Ahora, chico!” I hollered, taking off in a sprint.

He let ‘em have it with Grambling’s pistol. Now I needed to hold my end up—put torch to rag and aim true. One bullet whizzed by my ear, but when another didn’t come, I chucked the first bottle at the bottom window. If the fire spread fast, it might trap ‘em up there. Or better.

I’d made it under the awning safe from bullets, with the boys on both sides still trading shots. The problem had come, however, that my first bottle cracked the pane and fell into the depot, but the bottle itself hadn’t broken.

Peering through what I expected to be an empty first floor, with the flame inching down its rag teasing me, not one object was within the blast radius of the rum inside. For this next one, I’d have to throw hard and throw at something.

Those crates might have something explosive.

A flash toward the depot’s back stair told me to duck. More bullets. Before I—

Whoosh!

A burst of fire sent me ducking back, away from the spreading flames. My first bottle worked better than I thought, and now I had a free shot towards the crates. Standing in the blazing heat, I singed the hairs on my fingers, giving the second my best toss. So much for keeping a low profile in Los Angeles.

Boom!

This explosion came quickly, the force sending the houses on each side rumbling. I had no fear of catching bullets on the way back. The contemptible Rurales inside, if any remained, had bigger problems.

“¡Andalé!” I cried up to Mustache.

We had moments before the fire bells started ringing and minutes before thronging streets threatened our escape.

“Jesus, Fletcher!” Medge hollered as I came back inside María’s. His hooked nose always pissed me off. Especially when he bobbed it at me with nothing of substance to say.

“Where’d María go?”

“She’s readying horses.”

“And you believed her?!”

I grabbed him by the collar out of fury and the need to leave. Managed one last look at Grambling through the narrow larder door.

“¡Vamos, chico!”

Mustache probably couldn’t hear me, not that he would spend anymore time than he needed with fugitive whites. Provided the sombrero hadn’t made him.

Grambling and I’d been dodging Rurales since we got to Rancholand. Medge claimed to have done it for half as long. No telling if Mustache could keep up with the demands. Life on the lam. I sure wouldn’t if I could fade into obscurity.

Adobes don’t burn easily, but they burn. The entire block was coming out onto the calle. Enthralled. Seconds before, they’d who’d been hiding, gawked. The shootout, all but forgotten.

‘Spose it’s why Moses paid heed to a flaming bush.

“¿Qué pase?” The old men hollered.

Others shouted curse words.

None had the guts to come chasing after us. Right now, at least. A flicker of torchlight from the stables. María. Mustache came sprinting out of the darkness, like he’d run to the river and back already.

“¡Ella nos deja!”

No shit, she’s leaving us. If Mustache thought the inferno was bad, imagine when genuine Rafael boys come down from the Seco and take revenge on her saloon tomorrow. María lost the tavern the moment Javier Minas de Campo reached for his gun and Grambling shot that Rurale between the eyes.

We all lost something right then, come to think of it. Me, the quiet life I’d planned on a plot outside the Paso de Robles. Medge, any lingering credibility to his snake oil scheme. Not to mention Grambling, who of course lost his life.

Mustache looked motivated for a man who’d just lost his job. Outside the stable, he took directions eagerly from María as she helped the girl with her horse. Not that these horses belonged to any of us.

Susanna, my chestnut filly, was parked north of Primera Calle with José Bravo. He’d hold on to her for a week or two before he sold her off. This bay mare would have to do.

“Where do we go?”

“A casa en L’abra. Sígueme.” Medge stared blankly. “Follow me,” María said.

A safe house in L’abra was an oxymoron. Even Medge knew that. Right on cue, the fire bells started.

Do-gooders were already forming bucket lines from the pump jack. Which increased the odds of at least one resident peering over to check on their horses.

“¿Vienes, Alberto?”

“Por supuesto, señora.”

Mustache has a name after all. And he’s coming with us. He made it seem as if he could ride well. I wasn’t so sure about the girl, Fatima.

“She has to come?” I whined.

“Yes, lo hace,” María shot back. “Vamos! We ride, blanquitos.”

“Shut up, Medge! Hold ‘em still!”

The kid struggled with the tourniquet, so after I tied off Grambling’s right leg, or what was left of it, I hopped around to the arm.

“Let me do it. Get some water!”

Slight chance the señora, despite her bleeding heart for bleeding whites, had antiseptic. No one did on this side of the godforsaken world. Dammit, what am I thinking?

“Forget that; make it whisky! I know she’s got it!”

“She’s got tequila handy!” Medge hollered from the other room.

He was already halfway across the abandoned parlor, half-filled glasses on the card tables. Two bodies still writhing apart from the three dead. The innkeeper and a server were hiding under the bar.

“That’ll do.”

Grambling shook, wearing a look like he knows it’s the end. I don’t have the heart yet, to be honest. He’s a tough som’bitch after all. We took our chances through Tejas and the Comanche lands. Didn’t bat an eye when his horse went down and I took us fifty miles off course to rustle a bronco from some natives.

All to bleed out in this larder.

“Stay with me, Grambling. Stay with me. Medge, where the fuck are you?!”

“Sorry, sorry!” Spilling half the bottle before he got back.

Aarrgh-ahhh!

“Keep pressure on it!”

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“Where are you going?” Medge asked.

“I’ll be right back.”

The kid would lose his nerve if he knew we’d be hanged by Easter if we let the Rurales escape to the garrison at San Rafael.

The shootout had pressed everyone back into their adobes, but enough time had passed where they’d be poking at the windows. Bullets cracked as I sprung out onto the porch. Planting my foot to shift my weight, I dove back in.

Guess all of ‘em didn’t go to San Rafael. The muzzle flash and sound meant they weren’t using the crummy Ciudadelas most Rurales carried.

“How’d they get their hands on some Walkers?” I mumbled.

“What was that?!” Medge cried.

“We’re pinned down! Second floor of the depot. María! ¿Estás aquí?”

“¡Sí, qué lástima!”

Her voice came, as expected, right from under the bar.

“Ayúdalo!”

She sent the server instead. He sported a terribly ornate mustache, but what else was he going to spend his little money on? To his credit, he held Grambling more securely than Medge. No place like a Río bar to get practice.

Medge didn’t need another hint to pull alongside me, crouching underneath the left window. The cracking of the .45 caliber rounds on the mud-brick had him shaking, though.

“You all right?”

“I’m alright,” he lied.

“Lay down cover fire on my signal. When the flames start, head to the stables. Out the back door.”

Medge nodded, though I know he had questions. The unbroken line of adobes on the Rurales’ side of the street meant we’d need to push ‘em back to make a clean escape. Of course he didn’t get that. He got little besides drunk.

I ran around the bar hunting and pecking for the bottles I wanted. Two should suffice.

“Are these really Bacardí?” I shook the bottles at María, knowing her enterprising nature.

“El ron es genuino, blanquito,” now peeking over the counter.

They better be. Ripping a bar cloth in half, I stuffed one down each neck and studied my work. The shadow of Mustache in my peripheral vision jerked me upright.

“What are you doing with that?” He held Grambling’s pistol, though for the moment it wasn’t pointed at me.

“Está muerto.”

I always warned Grambling about the machetes. Rurales and their machetes, daggummit.

María could probably save herself and this bar if they turned these guns on Medge and me. I think that’s what Mustache was really doing, positioned with my head to him so I couldn’t see María’s face.

“Síguelo.”

I hoped María’s instruction to follow wasn’t some sort of code. Either way, I took my time going up the stairs, back to the wall. He didn’t look scared, like Medge did. Speaking of Medge…

“Let ‘em have it!”

It didn’t take Medge long to draw the Rurales’ fire. The shattered glass across the street meant at the very least he was close to his mark. I never had luck with a smoothbore rifle, but this failed farmhand wasn’t bad with it.

“Can you shoot?”

“Sí, viejo.”

“Who are you calling viejo?”

Mustache shook his head and scoffed. I wasn’t in the mood for jokes, least of all the spectacle of a Fornio switching sides to fight the local police. Medge was doing all right, at least from what I could see of it until he disappeared as we inched along the landing.

“Here,” I said.

I got into position and promptly shouldered the second door from the end. Not my first.

A good-time girl and her cliente huddled in the corner. He’d been comforting her, locked up and hidden away. Though once he caught sight of me and Mustache, he flung her toward us.

“¡Tenla! No quiero problemas.”

Had I not needed to check him roughly for weapons, I would’ve paid him no mind. Rameras, especially in this town, deserved decency for what they put up with.

“Dejarlo atrás,” Mustache told the chubby man with a ring on his finger and gout in his gut. It was good thinking on Mustache’s part, holding the woman back until he left. She struggled against him, wanting to leave with the man.

“No, Fatima. Ir a la señora.”

The beautiful girl, not more than a year into womanhood, nodded her head and wiped her eyes.

“Ello will draw sus armas.”

“Good thinking,” I said. It was.

I threw open the shutters and stepped onto the catwalk. Shaky. The Rurales across the Calle de los Negros hadn’t seen our shadow, though Mustache’s new sombrero stolen from the cliente wouldn’t help us keep a low profile.

“¿Qué es eso?”

“No lo necesita.”

I pulled him around me, keeping him pressed up against the flat adobe wall. Whoever in María’s family built this place could have shelled out for more brick along the accents. I inched toward the edge.

“Okay, this is good. I want you to cover my crossing the street, and then back across again.”

“Qué estás haciendo?”

“Damn, my lighter fell out. Gimme yours.”

“¿Tu que?”

“Dame tu encendedor!”

“Pero you’ll die, viejo.”

Over the last decade, our online lives have been quietly rearranged around feedback loops we don’t control. Algorithms decide what we see. Advertising funds the platforms that host our attention. Cloud giants rent out the computing power that runs it all. The result is a digital economy that increasingly funds itself—by extracting more and more time, data, and emotional energy from us.

We don’t just need new regulations for this. We need a new kind of ethical framework—one designed for people living inside opaque feedback loops.

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How the Feed Took Over

In 2016, Instagram moved away from a chronological feed by arguing that people were “missing 70% of all posts and almost half of posts from close friends.”[1] The “solution” was a ranked feed, tuned by machine-learning models to show what we were most likely to engage with. It worked—almost too well.

A large Meta-backed experiment during the 2020 U.S. election forced some users to see posts in chronological order instead of the usual algorithmic mix. Over three months, time spent on Instagram dropped by almost eight hours per person, while time on TikTok jumped 36% and YouTube 20%.[2] In other words, when people are given a simple, time-based feed, they spend less time in the app and quickly drift to other platforms whose algorithms keep them hooked.

Meta has seen this from the inside. When Facebook changed its News Feed in 2018 to favor “meaningful social interactions,” Mark Zuckerberg admitted the tweak reduced time spent by about 50 million hours per day.[3] That’s one line of code and an entire country’s worth of waking hours, gone.

By 2022, Meta said that AI recommendations already accounted for around 15% of what people see on Facebook, and even more on Instagram—and planned to more than double that share.[4] We are steadily moving toward feeds where what we see is mostly what the system chooses, not what the people we follow post.

For creators, this is now existential. If the recommendation engine likes you, you eat. If it doesn’t, you disappear.

The Self-Funding Ad Loop

All of this is powered by advertising. Global ad spend hit roughly US$1.1 trillion in 2024, with digital channels now taking about 73% of that—around US$790 billion.[6] Digital ad spend has more than doubled since 2019 and keeps growing in double digits.[7]

A huge chunk of that money goes to a small group of firms. In the U.S., Amazon, Google and Meta alone capture about 59% of all ad dollars in 2025.[8] Across digital channels, they take roughly 72% of the total.[9] Add Microsoft and TikTok’s owner ByteDance, and five companies together control about 65% of the U.S. ad market.[10]

This is what a self-funding loop looks like:
• Ads bankroll the platforms.
• Platforms tune the algorithms to maximize engagement.
• Engagement produces more data.
• Data improves targeting, making ads more profitable.
• Profits pay for more infrastructure, more AI, more reach.

FAANG stocks don’t just run websites. They own the backbone: ad exchanges, cloud servers, app stores, identity systems, payment rails. Their valuations are based less on profits now than on the promise of future user growth and attention capture—an endless stream of impressions still to be monetized.

Workers, Creators, and Symbolic Exhaustion

For ordinary users, the cost is mostly invisible: more time lost, more fractured attention, more targeted nudges. For workers and creators, it shows up as a different kind of burnout.

The “creator economy” is regularly celebrated as a new path to independence. But most creators earn very little. Surveys find that a majority make below a minimum-wage equivalent once you factor in hours spent producing content, engaging with followers, and chasing the algorithm.[11] Income is wildly volatile and depends heavily on staying in the good graces of opaque recommendation systems.

At the same time, traditional institutions—schools, workplaces, governments—feel less like sources of meaning and more like interfaces. We fill out forms, click “I agree,” complete required trainings, post internally, and yet the feedback we get is thin or contradictory. Many people report feeling lonelier, less trusting, and more worn out by digital life, even as they use it more.[12]

This is what I mean by symbolic exhaustion: we’re still performing all the rituals of participation, but the loop doesn’t return much back. The system keeps running. The signal keeps fading.

Toward a New Kind of Ethics

The old moral stories we inherited assumed a different world—one where you could see who held power, where cause and effect were clearer, and where opting out was at least imaginable. That’s not our world anymore.

We now live inside tightly coupled feedback systems:
• Feeds that learn from everything we do.
• Ad markets that optimize around our attention.
• Cloud infrastructure that makes it cheap to spin up new products aimed directly at our nervous systems.

We don’t just need rules for privacy or antitrust. We need an ethic that starts from where we actually are: inside the loop.

That ethic would ask new kinds of questions:
• Not “Is this app good or bad?” but “What does this loop return to the people inside it?”
• Not “Is this business profitable?” but “Is this model parasitic on human attention and trust?”
• Not “How do I win the algorithm?” but “What would it mean to participate only where the system still responds in a human way?”
Call it feedback ethics, loop ethics, or something else. The name matters less than the shift: away from blind faith in growth and toward active stewardship of the systems we’re already entangled in.

Because if we don’t learn to tune these loops, they will keep tuning us.

Footnotes:

[1] “Your Instagram Feed is About to Change,” PetaPixel, March 16, 2016, https://petapixel.com/2016/03/16/instagram-feed-change/.

[2] A. M. Guess et al., “How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in political contexts?” Science, July 27, 2023, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp9364.

[3] “Facebook’s U.S. user count declines as it prioritizes well-being,” TechCrunch, January 31, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/facebook-time-spent/.

[4] Paresh Dave, “Meta Just Proved People Hate Chronological Feeds,” WIRED, July 27, 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chronological-feeds/.

[6] “Digital 2025: global advertising trends,” DataReportal / Statista Market Insights, February 5, 2025, https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-sub-section-global-advertising-trends.

[7] “The Ultimate Paid Advertising Statistics Report 2025-26,” RockingWeb, November 2, 2025, https://www.rockingweb.com.au/paid-advertising-statistics.

[8] “Triopoly – Reports, Statistics & Marketing Trends,” eMarketer / Insider Intelligence, November 3, 2024, https://www.emarketer.com/topics/category/triopoly.

[9] “Top 10 Companies in the Online Advertising Market in 2025,” Emergen Research, July 29, 2025, https://www.emergenresearch.com/blog/top-10-companies-in-the-online-advertising-market.

[10] Saleah Blancaflor, “5 companies have captured an insanely large share of the U.S. ad market over the last decade,” Fast Company, October 9, 2025, https://www.fastcompany.com/91419317/big-tech-companies-us-advertising-share-growth-report.

[11] “NeoReach’s Creator Earnings Report Finds Over 50% of Creators Make Under a Living Wage,” NeoReach Editorial Staff, July 15, 2025, https://neoreach.com/creator-earnings-report/.

[12] “Redefining health through vitality: New insight into five years of loneliness trends,” The Cigna Group Newsroom, November 20, 2023, https://newsroom.thecignagroup.com/vitality-research-new-insight-into-five-years-of-loneliness.

I wonder if I’ll see her again.

Out on the water, two ships were visible—one approaching from the north, the other from the south, both with nondescript white sails. “Even the fishermen must know of the coming war,” Atuma remarked. “The seas are bare this evening.”

“Look, Captain!” Pedral pointed.

“Is that an Orahim ship? Moving towards our heading?”

“It had better be the Yellow Lady, after all the trouble that mutiny caused us.”

Does he mean Eltisse?

“Did you make a deal with her? To find the Spiral Stair on her behalf?” Atuma asked.

Pedral didn’t answer, and a sense of dread settled in. Far below, the ship coming from the south veered toward the small inlet known as Stoney Bay.

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I hope that’s Amali.

“What happened back in that tent?” Atuma asked as they made their way onto a narrow, rocky ledge that wound down toward the shore. “Did you use some sort of magic trick on Cardichi?”

“It was no trick. You could do something similar if you allowed yourself.”

“Why did you come to Prehanda? To find recruits for your journey through the Spiral Stair?”

“The unknown world grows smaller, and the more a sphere like Nonova learns about the Sopvendi, the more it will understand the terrible power we wield.”

“Nonova?”

“It’s what we call your world, Captain. Try and keep up!” Pedral replied.

Atuma couldn’t tell if Pedral was urging his horse faster or questioning his intelligence.

“So you came as conquerors to make us submit?”

“Trask and I may not agree on much, but we aren’t warlords. Our power is a great responsibility. Our Order forbids us from using lethal force unless our lives are threatened. You can imagine how quickly your world would unravel if Sopvendi were constantly using their abilities like I did on your friend Cardichi.”

“But you still hurt him.”

“I didn’t kill Cardichi. He’ll be fine with a good rest. Doubt he’ll be the last person caught in my quasar tonight,” Pedral warned.

“That’s what you call it? A quasar?”

“Everything moves,” Pedral said. “Even what feels still—the air, the ground, the blood in your veins—it’s all moving, all carrying charge. I just push or pull on that flow.” He curled his fingers as if gathering invisible threads. “I can squeeze the air tight enough to make it feel like stone. I can pull the earth apart along the lines where it’s weakest. And if I listen, really listen, I can feel every flicker of movement—a heartbeat, a footstep, even far away.” A smile touched his mouth. “It’s all the same thing. I just listen to the current, and decide where it goes.”

“Do the Blahsaj have warriors like you?”

“The Blahsaj have a great number of weapons at their disposal. But no, they have shut themselves off from Sopvendi for hundreds of years—at their own peril.”

Torchlight flickered on the shore below.

“Will we face others with your powers?” Atuma asked.

“That’s why we’ve come to Nonova, Captain. Enemies of our order—forces that would see this world turn to darkness. We believe they’ve found a way into Nonova besides the Passage in Giyon.”

Pedral’s horse found footing on the beachhead, striding confidently towards the waiting Orahim.

Atuma’s horse, however, sensed hesitation. “Let me do the talking,” he said.

Eltisse stood with the hulking guard Atuma had seen in the cellar, Koro. Sulran and Blotched Raven were also present.

Pedral ignored the warning, swinging off his horse and calling, “My lady! My lord. I appreciate your making the treacherous journey, per our most recent communication.”

“Our air is your air, Traveler,” Eltisse replied. “House Orahim kept its side of the bargain. Does not the Order? Tonight, I see you share the trail with our enemy.”

“An enemy. Not the enemy,” Pedral said, chuckling. “You would have me kill a capable adversary instead of using him?”

Sulran stepped forward. “You could have ended him with the flick of a wrist, Traveler. Yet now you are collaborators? After he’s spilled Orahim blood?! We assured you of a Passage on the Day of Waiting, so long as you gave us control of the excavation.” He pointed at Atuma. “Now that battle is lost, these duplicitous suits have no reason to fight for Prehanda!”

Atuma met Eltisse’s gaze calmly. “We neutralized a poorly organized coup attempt at camp this morning. Our brave Talverin conscripts are safer for it.”

Eltisse scowled. Pedral added, “Captain Harksgard means to say that Imperium organized the laborers into a fit fighting force—save for the mutineers, of course. We will be ready to hold the Twilight Gate. These men have a fighting chance, my lady. Can you abide that?”

“A fighting chance in chains, no doubt,” she said.

“It was your gamble, my lady. You can hardly fault this man for valuing his life and those in his charge. Had that fool Kirila consulted me, I’d have told her there are Sopvendi among Imperium ranks—too many to be a coincidence.”

“All the more reason to end them.” Eltisse said. “At first sight of the jergun vanguard, the suits will climb their mounts and run for the Fort—if they’ve not already done so.”

“We have six Jerpath. Barge has three thousand. No Talverin would hide us. There’s no safe harbor until we reach the Fort. You think we can outrun a Blahsaj pursuit? There’s good ground at Prehanda. The Blahsaj are our enemy, too. Let us die with honor. You would kill forty of Imperium’s best academés, just to trip on our entrails for selfish pride?”

“There’s no honor for you on any battlefield, suit. I hear you used your own academé as bait at the Twilight Gate last night,” she spat.

“Amali made a choice when they and Brandon bowed to your bribery. We’ll give every Talverin a similar choice when Barge approaches. They can turn their bolter on us and die, or towards the Blahsaj and live.”

“Our men won’t fight for you,” Eltisse said. “Looks like we all die, suit.”

“Do you think, despite your brother’s failure at the Twilight Gate, that you’re still in a position of power? Fine. Name your price for the firing pins then, Lady Orahim. We can strike a deal—not as captors or colonizers—but fellow damned.”

“I will survive this Day of Waiting, as sure as I make no promises with suits.”

“How long will your faithful servants follow you after seeing the suffering you allow?” Atuma said.

Koro shifted forward, but Eltisse raised her hand. “It’s all right. A cornered dog is still a dog.” She turned to Pedral. “Does this man speak for the Sopvendi now?”

“He is Sopvendi.”

“Very well. You want the firing pins? Come and take them, Traveler.”

Koro whirled his bladestaff and lunged forward while Sulran drew his bolter. The Raven stepped forward to cover his lady. Atuma parried Koro’s first thrust, extending his shockstick at the last instant; the force knocked both off-balance and they rolled back.

Pedral’s wall of air would be useful about now.

As the first salvo of boltershot cut towards them, bright bursts of light slammed into Pedral’s quasar and hung suspended, screeching between the belligerents.

On the near side of the wall, Koro kept Atuma on his heels. The captain found a rhythm to the thrusts and lashed out between parries. His shockstick sent showers of sparks as it connected with the guard’s staff. Panic gripped him when the shockstick became lodged. The stronger Koro had the momentary advantage with their blades interlocked.

Instead of pushing, Atuma pulled using Koro’s momentum. In a whirl, he drew his bolter with his right hand and cracked the barrel against Koro’s jaw. The guard toppled toward the waves; his bladestaff lapping in the surf.

The Raven and Sulran were still firing, but their shots merged with the quasar, turning into a lattice of light. The display consumed all of Pedral’s concentration. “Can you move it?” Atuma hollered, wanting Pedral to shove the trio into the sea.

Pedral grunted, but neither he nor the quasar budged.

Atuma’s eyes locked on Sulran, pacing on the other side.

I’ve got to kill him.

He strafed toward the left edge of the barrier and leaned his bolter around it, squeezing off three shots at the boy-heir. The quasar’s edge extended, catching his own bolts and adding them to the net.

He won’t let me kill them. Why?

Sulran smiled, savoring Atuma’s frustration. Eltisse shoved the Raven aside and gestured with her hands; a glowing orb formed between her palms.

Snakes—she has powers too!

She strained, rocking as the glow grew brighter. The quasar wall pulsed at its edges with unspent bolts still stuck within it. It was too much force to hold back for long.

When the orb reached the size of a skull, she hurled it. “Move!” Pedral yelled.

Atuma dove as the orb tore through the quasar like a blade through ribbon, absorbing the trapped bolts. It swelled to the size of a building as it passed, searing the hairs on his neck.

The explosion struck the cliffs with the force of a hundred mortars, burrowing into the escarpment; the earth thrummed with rock crashing to the sea. Their horses, previously unperturbed by the dispute, neighed and bolted down the narrow beach toward safety.

The ground shook and threw everyone toward the water. Koro’s slumped form was gone, claimed by the waves. Dust and stones fell around them. Pedral hauled Atuma up by the collar and reached out to the northernmost cog ship, jittering the torches aboard. Amid the roar of waves and rock, Atuma heard wood splinter and fire spread across the bow.

Pedral had broken their ship with a flick of his wrist.

Eltisse dragged an injured Raven toward the rowboat while Sulran stood frozen, staring at the mountain coming down. “Leaving so soon?!” Pedral shouted.

“You cannot destroy the other ship. Amali could be on board,” Atuma said, pulling at Pedral’s arm.

“I know.”

Pedral gestured; Sulran froze mid-stride toward the other boat—another quasar. The young heir strained against the outworlder’s magic but was rooted to the spot. Eltisse cried out in anger. “Leave now, Eltisse!” Pedral said. “I will keep him safe. You can have him back when this is over. Now, summon your army. Leave the rest to us!”

“I will kill you for this, Pedral Kelmo! I will find you wherever you run!” she snarled. In the whipping waves, she locked eyes with him, then helped the Raven row. When they were far enough from shore, Pedral released Sulran. The boy collapsed onto his knees in the sand.

“I need a moment, Captain. Will you gather the horses?” Pedral asked. Atuma nodded and set off down the beach, trying not to look at the heir convulsing on the shore.

When he returned with the mounts, Pedral said, “The way back is buried in rubble. But the tide is going out. We should be able to ride along the shore until we find a place to climb to the Transverse Gap.”

Atuma nodded and glanced at Sulran. “He looks worse than Cardichi did.”

“He should recover soon. In the meantime, secure him to your saddle.”

The noble was surprisingly light; soon he was tied to the back of Atuma’s mount. Once Pedral had his own horse ready, he handed Atuma a mintsmoke cigarette.

“Looks like you need this more than me, Are you okay to ride?” Atuma asked, passing it back after a drag.

Pedral nodded and thereafter coughed, having taken strong one himself.

They rode along the shore until they came to the northern rim of the caldera. The path up was easy enough, and as they ascended, Atuma’s thoughts drifted to the Spiral Stair. For another hour, they raced across the gap’s main ridge until they found a trail to the northeastern rim. Darkness wore on the horses; Atuma’s mare mis-stepped twice but kept her legs through sheer agility. Pedral hardly noticed, disappearing ahead and circling back to prod him onward.

Pedral finally stopped at a bend in a lightly trod footpath between two conifers, out of place among the low brush. An ill feeling settled over Atuma as they passed. A branch knocked Sulran awake. “Not now, Eltisse. Mother hasn’t bid me leave yet,” he murmured, wearing a boyish grin in his sleep-talking, which made enduring him slightly easier.

The footpath smoothed, but the incline taxed the horses. Atuma called out in protest. “Easy, Pedral! We’re making good time!” Pedral scoffed but slowed.

This is not like him.

“You’ll need to stop talking,” the Sopvendi muttered after a spell. “We’re not alone here.”

No sooner had he spoken than the clash of blades and the crackle of bolter fire echoed ahead. They crested a hill in time to see flashes from a bolter within a circle of trees. Three Blahsaj riders in metal helms and armor were circling two academés. Pedral sped into the fray just as one of the academés’ horses fell.

Yuthdun!

The other rider—a woman—held a bolter in one hand and a sword in the other. Atuma drew his own bolter and fired from a distance—

Zmmpt. Zmmpt.

His shots had the Blahsaj back. Pedral, brandishing the rapier he’d taken from Sulran, swooped in and felled a rider. Atuma tore a hole through another Blahsaj horse’s flank, sending its rider tumbling. Seeing the battle turn, the third rider fled with Pedral giving chase.

Atuma hurried down the slope. In the clearing, Kranis Yuthdun delivered a deathblow to the fallen rider. “Imperium Yuthdun. Imperium Destirn,” Atuma said. “Glad we found you in time.”

“Thank the snakes you did, sir,” Yuthdun replied.

“Should we follow him?” Emilé said, gesturing after the fleeing rider.

“The outlander can manage. Are you hurt?” She nodded, her face pale, and Atuma inspected her wound. It was deep and pouring blood. “Yuthdun, wrap her!”

“How bad is it?” Emilé whispered.

“Keep your eyes on me, Emilé,” Atuma said. Yuthdun applied a salve and bandaged the gash.

“Emilé, can you hear me?”

“Their armor was so bright. I couldn’t hit them, sir. I—I—”

“Imperium, you did so well! East Division is safe because of you. Keep your eyes open, Emilé.”

“Oh, Captain, I want so badly to sleep.”

“You cannot sleep. We must get back to Ubaudi,” Atuma said. “He’ll want a full report. You know how particular he is.”

“You’re right. He won’t want to hear it from you. He doesn’t like you much,” she said weakly.

“You’ve got good instincts,” Atuma chuckled. “I need you to use them and stay with me.”

I knew my disaffection with our grifty, handheld world went deeper than its choosable skins—the phubbing, the death of place, the commodification of identity.

Being nonreligious and generally uncooperative, I don’t belong anywhere outside of reality, which, you can imagine, makes dealing in this world quite difficult.

New media forms in and of themselves are not the problem. Nor is social media itself, though its weaponization is at fault for extending our capacity to compromise in the name of connection.

Framed another way: would you approve of what this has all turned into, ten years ago? If you had known and had a vote, would you have wanted this?

Suppose a vote ‘no’ makes me a stodgy Luddite, wary of diving headlong into an unready world craving the rod of a billionaire.

After many nights hunting answers and expanding my horizons, I struck institutional bedrock tracing this agentic dilemma, digging clear into the Neolithic Age.

It’s the first place we find archaeological evidence of shared meaning among disparate human groups, which, to me, is much more important than writing (which comes six thousand years later), because it’s where we seed the idea of having something worth writing about.

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Records far predate written stories, after all. Books, idea permanence—those have always been secondary to measuring the worth of our collective labors.

Preceding the written word, we have humans living in peaceful, multi-ethnic, mercantile societies. There are no major burn scars in the fossil record. There is no evidence of war. More importantly, there were no kings.

Law, as we conceptualize it, had no footprint. Yet pottery, fields, farms, villages show us undisputable evidence of order. Temples and sacrificial altars show elaborate ritual and collaborative construction—a societal resonance we could only dream about today.

But that’s the problem when you square it with today, where what we consume isn’t memorable, but white noise to drown out. A dying society has no resonance.

Technology advertised itself as that agentic change—the thing that would claw back some pastoral dignity from the grip of power and social rigidity. But what indelible mark will this '‘Information Age’ leave in the cosmos?

In fifty years, our descendants’ critiques will look past our ease and taste to see a people who failed to adapt, who chose to desecrate and devolve instead of making appends.

What does making appends mean? It means we add on, enumerate, orient society to coalesce around and distribute meaning carefully, transparently, and reflectively.

Sounds too good to be true, yada yada, I get that. Most philosophers, after all, are chasing a transcendence they can’t find because transcendence is perfect, and nothing’s perfect.

Well, almost. I’d say there’s a theoretical perfect.

Take the Fifth Amendment. Theoretically, it’s perfect. Among other things, it states that “[no person] shall be compelled to be a witness against himself”—essentially, no one has to testify and possibly incriminate themselves in a court of law, as a defendant or otherwise.

However, over time, Supreme Court decisions have morphed its meaning into two wildly different choices for someone planning their defense. Today, you either a) get on the stand and answer everything about the “topic” related to your alleged crime, or b) stay off the stand and say nothing at all.

The very agency implied by the First and Fifth Amendments—the idea that you can disbelieve the premise of a prosecutor’s question, that you can refuse to walk into their framing—is now null and void once you choose to testify while being charged with a crime.

That wasn’t always the case. But Supreme Court rulings in the ’50s (Rogers and Brown decisions) changed all that. Before, you could selectively answer what a prosecutor was asking you; now, once you open your mouth on a subject, the privilege is treated as waived on that terrain. Navigating the truth—what we ask every jury to do—was too much of a headache for appeals courts, apparently.

If you’re a defendant in a criminal trial, you’ve already got odds stacked against you. The State has resources, time, and a knowledge bank that far outstrips whatever public defender has been assigned to you if, God forbid, you’re not a multi-millionaire.

Now, naysayers may insist that for testimony to be considered “tested” and “viable,” it should hold up under cross-examination. Fine. But if we’re already implying that the defendant has a right to their version of the truth (given the First Amendment) and shouldn’t be compelled to stray from that (the Fifth Amendment), then this all-or-nothing model of waiver hollows those protections out.

The Supreme Court and other legal decisions have effectively decided that what the Founders “meant” was whatever would prove easiest for the appellate courts to administer.

And we’re supposed to comply. Gleefully. And call it order. Justice. Transcendence.

That gap between the text of a right and the way it’s administered is not an exception; it’s the template.

Today, obedience has become ambient. There is no need for force. Social and political systems no longer manufacture consensus—they simply continue, indifferent to whether their rituals are believed, so long as they are repeated.

The form persists, but the function and meaning have dissolved, leading to ethical inertness.

If the 20th century collapsed through violence, the 21st dissipates through euphemism. And in the absence of rupture, the subject does not rebel. They adapt. They perform. They persist inside systems that no longer return a signal. That persistence—mechanical, exhausted, and directionless—is the residue of collapse.

The defining characteristic of modern participation is not conviction, but compliance. You recite the pledge, cast the ballot, complete the onboarding module, file your taxes, submit the evaluation form—not because you believe in the process, but because opting out has been made illegible.

Social rituals have not disappeared; they have multiplied, becoming thinner and more procedural with each iteration. Their persistence is no longer proof of shared meaning, only of the inertia that keeps systems moving after the reason for their motion has been lost.

This is not a postmodern drift into irony—it is a structural entrenchment of performance. Institutions no longer expect belief; they require simulation. What once served as symbolic orientation now functions as user interface. You log in. You comply. You certify that you have read and understood.

No one verifies if you did. Everyone assumes you didn’t.

Really, he wouldn’t be thinking about things, more about the absence of a thing.

Gold Bond. His travel size expired the week prior, and while a standard container sat in his legal drawer (a name that implied he had schooling in statutory sciences—he did not), he wouldn’t tarnish a carefully crafted image by carrying such a garish looking orange bottle to the hallway lavatory. He could pass it into his backpack, but carrying a JanSport to the toilet wouldn’t be appropriate so early in mid-morning.

Let’s say if it were nearing end of business, he could take his backpack to the restroom, as it was assumed he would leave the building shortly after the conspicuously timed sojourn. That would make sense.

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Thus it came to pass that Glover Peerless would be at least two minutes late to this meeting, but it didn’t matter because the more aeration his soreness received before a lengthy encasement meant less a chance for swamp stench and more chance for being able to say and think things in the meeting.

‘Sorry, I’m running late.’

‘No problem, take a seat, Glover.’

Right cheek first, Glover spreads while acting like he’s stretching. Very good. With the left cheek down, we still have airflow, and we have, for now, only the specter of impending pain. There is proto-pain, yes, but it is subtle, and we can work with that.

In fact, it was better for Glover to have background noise swimming in his head as Stefany Beleecker went about the normal Monday rigmarole, of which he had missed a tiny portion. The sensation allows Glover his usual thoughts when Stefany spoke:

Bridge! The bridge of your nose had work done! I think about you naked a lot! Your husband cannot please you like I can!

‘And Glover has the amended reporting?’

‘Yes, boss, no problem.’

‘You have it or will do it?’

‘I have it, and can send it after the meeting, but wanted to run it by Amory first.’

‘Amory’s not in until Thursday.’

‘Is he? Well, yeah, I’ll send it to you by end of day.’

Vagueness usually worked on Dryden Andrews, who just wanted to seem authoritative before going on to the next thing to think and say about. Dryden nods at Stefany, who resumes control over continuing the ritual.

Client visit Wednesday, and the month-end accounting is on Friday. All the typical topics are touched, as they were during the same slot last month, and the one before that provided it wasn’t a subnational holiday on a month’s third Monday.

‘As a reminder, our annual charity drive is Saturday at Warmbringer Park, so bring those extra clothes and toilet paper for the feral. We’re serving coffee and donuts at 7:30, so plan accordingly for shuttle disembark.’

‘Serving the volunteers or the homeless?’ Glover asks.

‘I don’t think you can call them homeless anymore.’ Dryden says.

‘It’s too early for this,’ Stefany says.

Not too early to get it up for you, toots. Gold Bond or no Gold Bond.

With the desecrating thought expunged, Glover metabolizes the hollow ring of Stefany’s comment versus its accuracy. She has the right idea of a place to say, ‘it’s too early.’ It is the Monday morning meeting, after all.

The first meeting of many, in what would be a long week, culminating, of course, at the company outing where employees awkwardly interact with Warmbringer Park’s feral population on a day Glover normally reserved for endurance wanking and bowls of Cinnabar Toast Crush. The weed strain, not the archaic breakfast cereal of corpulent children.

But since Dryden moved the Monday morning meeting to mid-morning and not start of business, theoretically Stefany should be at her cognitive peak by this time, and able to parse whether her and Glover’s feral folk characterization was above board, or subject to human resource disciplinary action for purporting harmful labels, which is indeed the point of a label. Purporting harm.

Do not ingest. Do not collect $200k settlement for choke-dead child.

Glover didn’t care about his wording being polite. The homeless in Warmbringer Park didn’t have the luxury of labels. Or the need. As if being without a permanently structured domicile was worse than being purposeless.

‘Let’s circulate a memo once we figure out the right term. I don’t want to piss off the nonprofit team,’ Dryden says.

Happy to take the win of his ass not itching within fifteen minutes of last wipe, Glover leaves the adjourned meeting without clarity whether he’d be ingesting the coffee and/or donuts come Saturday.

Monday luncheon brings with it the typical encumbrances of the crammed cafetorium—people jockeying for position at the distributive islands called ‘bars of varying degrees of temperature.’ Namely hot, working all the way down to salad and then finally, very optionally, dessert.

By Friday, the harangues of the week would have forced most of these individuals to nearby restaurants with the very boss whom earlier, on Monday (today), would order them to finish swallowing their quinoa scramble faster so they can finish and send adjustments to analytically superior yet ideologically derivative spreadsheets of said bosses’ own bastardized ideations that occur between the preceding idle Friday’s happy hour and now, the end of the two-day interregnum where the worker-self is wiped clean, only for the golem’s exhumation earlier that morning. This morning.

Incidentally, Dryden, aside from being repulsed at the idea of Glover pondering ideas with dogface Glenn Amory instead, would never ask Glover to lunch on a Friday. However, nor would he impede Glover from enjoying an itch-free, thought-free luncheon today.

Dryden isn’t all bad.

Realizing there is no honor in assuming a ‘rightful’ place in this trough, Glover turns for the door and walks two blocks to the alcohol bar. Reemer’s. [1]

‘The usual?’

‘Mondays aren’t usual, Cliff. But yes, the normal usual.’ Glover says.

Cliff isn’t Reemer, nor is he related to the namesake, who likely sold the idea of their [2] dive bar to a property management group whose founder offers Cliff a job because they attended high school together. That’s why Cliff is the last of his breed in this neighborhood teeming with insufferable fools stumbling through different striations of believability.

Circumstance.

Cliff was in proximity to a person who would matter in a time and instance later to be named, where their superposition allowed Cliff to get back on his feet after his crippling dependence on speed hollowed out any other career prospects.

Where Cliff and his meth mouth would amble after this place closed in favor of some new, colder industry, Glover hadn’t the slightest clue.

Two frothy glasses came and went under his (Glover’s) mustache before the Cuban Dip, chemically unchanged from two weeks ago when it was unloaded from a 53’ wheeled Sysco truck, came to rest at his elbows after being slid over by a despondent Cliff.

That’s when he noticed the itching again.

‘Say, Cliff, did you guys upgrade your toilet paper like I asked?’

~/footnotes/~

[1] Note: Reemer’s is not a sanctioned eating and drinking establishment of GoJuBranCo—Glover’s employer. In fact, as an establishment, it is the antithesis of what GoJuBranCo would advocate for its employees to healthily consume.

[2] We find ourselves using the ungendered ‘their’ because we are not sure the biological sex, nor the identified gender of that person, and despite it being a dive bar frequented nearly entirely by downtrodden ironworkers performing various enhancements to the neighborhood’s girding, we cannot assume a woman/NB didn’t opportunize serving such a demographic.

He lay on his back. The pounding in his skull means he tripped, fell on a rock, and otherwise conked out. He turns his head, but his body cannot keep pace with the swirl. He knows the sense of spinning is mostly invention; the neck’s firing synapses cannot lift body or arms when they’re as heavy as sandbags.

The body—his body—feels sloppy drunk while the mind, it bulges, sways, floats, recedes. His vision hasn’t decided if it wants to coalesce. He’s not stressed, though he should be. Logically, he’s more sure than ever he struck his head.

‘You were growling in your sleep.’

The domed-shaped den—sprinkled with bone—carries the sound out from everywhere. A soft voice, not predatory, possessing nothing—yet knowing each thing—each iteration of affect, perfectly.

‘Strange,’ William says.

Avoiding anything untoward; he knows he cannot move. Like some natural force has commanded that he stay, collect, process—before walking back the trail and driving home. Before he calls his aunt to spin a yarn about trudging into the boondocks and leaving with a bruise. He closes one eye like the Scouts taught him, which helps the rods or cones do something or other.

‘Oh God—oh, my,’ William says.

‘Easy, easy,’ says the form, stacking bones in the corner. Thighs beside thighs. Wing over wing—and so on.

‘You’re a—’

‘Just tidying up.’

The firmness—still polite—settles William. There are rules here, not unlike a house call. His face swells hot for being rude. The figure’s deformations include a head larger than its torso, and a waist barely rising to one’s knee. He hobbles to pick up a broom made of twigs, requiring a hand to brace every wobbly step with its outward-bending “knees.”

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‘Did Jimmy Carmel give you those?’

Meaning the bones.

‘Who?’

‘Jimmy…he lives down the way. Where this path ends.’

‘There are many paths here, William.’

‘How do you know my name?’

The person holds out a spindly, long-nailed finger. In the relief, despite the dying-ember light, their nakedness is clear, as is their pointing at William’s nametag.

‘You got a pet dog…or something more exotic crawling around here? I thought I saw—’

‘It’s the tranqs; they’re strong,’ the person says.

William isn’t surprised at the feeling. He’d seen the effects each time he uses his gun.

‘You mean I fell on my Bidley? I’m on tranqs?’

‘Try not to move your entire body. There’s some water by your bed.’

It’s a feculent little pool, good for only a few slurps. William appreciates the critter trying, but declines stagnant bone slime until a greater desperation.

‘You get on alright? Up here, by yourself?’ William asks.

‘I’m where I need to be.’

‘Right.’

‘You’re getting nervous.’

‘I am. I’d also like my tranq gun back, if you wouldn’t mind.’

‘So you can do what?’

‘So I can get home.’

‘What happens when you arrive home?’

‘I suppose I’ll have a bite of supper. Just a normal night.’

‘Normal? You’d go back to normal? After this?’

‘I work in animal control, friend. This ain’t abnormal. Maybe it’s the tranqs talking and I need some time before operating a vehicle; but surely you see where I’m coming from? I’m not against what you’re doing here. I imagine there’s a certain freedom to it, but—’

‘Not where you prefer to be.’

‘No, it’s not,’ William says.

‘I didn’t always live here. Used to be all sorts of cared for. However, time and space—life, really—jettisoned me away. I wasn’t always as I appear, nor always am.’

‘Haven’t you found a purpose here? Taking care of creatures, maybe?’

‘A Master cannot deign purpose.’

‘Can’t you receive purpose?’ William’s more settled when he asks questions that catch the person’s interest.

‘In my experience, service only staves off barks and bites.’

‘So you do care for the creature?’ William feels a rush of blood to the head. Body and mind, free to conduct. ‘The one I followed in here?’

‘Oh, yes. Quite incisive, my Master.’

‘Your Master?’ William asks, straining. His foggy mind, no longer what’s holding him down.

‘William, I’m going to need your help.’

‘Hold on, wait—you’ve bound my feet and hands! Let me go!’

‘I pose no danger to you now, I promise. And I much prefer being down-range. Please, I need your help.’

‘Untie me at once!’

‘William, there’s not much time. I’ll explain everything later.’

The person’s hands start to bulge and sway. The little slack between William’s wrists and waist tells him all his cartridges are gone.

‘What do you want?’ William strains.

‘I need to know where you keep your tranqs.’

‘Mr. Carmel, I’m Service Officer Davies with Animal Control. What seems to be the problem?’

‘Is that a Bidley?’

‘Yeah. Mr. Carmel, you called about a bear?’

‘Oh, yeah. Been seeing bears for the last few days. I’ve got a video if you need it.’

‘So, bears the last few days, but you called it in today?’

‘If I called you every time I saw a bear up here…’

‘What made you call today, sir?’

‘Well, I…’

‘Mr. Carmel, is everything okay? You seem a little…anxious.’

‘Can you keep a secret?’

For all the chaos stretching across his yard, Jimmy Carmel keeps a neat operation of chickens, goats, and root vegetables out back.

‘I was supposed to harvest next week. That ain’t happenin’ now.’

Jimmy Carmel’s garden is by no means ruined. This part of November, he’s down to root vegetables and hardy greens. Whatever thrashed and chewed on his plants touched a very minor portion and failed to dig up a single beet.

‘Is that blood?’ William asks.

‘I had every right! He was chewing my crop!’

This “bear” chewed some leaves in the corner. It was a tiny bear, if indeed it was a bear.

‘You shot this creature, didn’t you, Mr. Carmel?’

‘I ain’t sayin’ no more until there’s a lawyer present.’

‘Mr. Carmel, I’m not here to prosecute you. Just wanna find this creature, end its suffering, and dispose of the carcass. I got no desire to file more paperwork than I need to. Alright?’

‘Alright, but I don’t know you. Where’s Victor?’

‘Victor retired. I’m his replacement.’

‘Oh, okay.’

‘So, can I look at your video footage?’

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The amount of time William spends on Jimmy Carmel’s front porch, not being offered coffee or water for that matter means Jimmy Carmel is in at his computer, doctoring, editing or splicing the raw footage to omit any sort of proof he indeed shot this animal as it nibbled at some plants.

The only stalk damage would have come after he shot it, as it writhed on the ground before absconding for its den or hollow.

‘You alright in there?’

‘Can’t seem to get the footage to cooperate.’

‘Your exterior cameras looks like one of those that sends videos right to your phone.’

‘Don’t got no phone.’

William chooses not to ask: Then how’d you set up the camera?

‘Mr. Carmel, I don’t want to waste any more of your precious time. But can I access your back fence to go track this animal? Shouldn’t take more than an hour.’

‘You’re not gonna prosecute if you find anything?’

‘Like I said, I just want what’s best for the bear.’

William’s halfway to the line dividing Jimmy Carmel’s plot from state land before thinking to walkie Leila.

‘Any word from Fish & Game?’

‘Not a peep.’

‘Can you try getting through to the county supervisor?’

‘Didn’t the mayor ask you to do that?’

‘I’ve been trying, but I got a full-on hike for this creature and there’s no signal up here.’

‘Fine, fine.’

William wishes he were firmer with his staff. Being distracted with paperwork is no reason not to warn him about a cougar. Come to mention, Leila’s not the slightest bit curious about his going to find a bear, either.

The chicken bones start twenty paces from the property line. Their age could exceed the dirt, judging by the protrusion. Jimmy Carmel hasn’t got much of a choice in the dump servicing his property, what with his own personal dump blocking access to his garbage bin.

William’s taken as many paces as the amount of weeks needed to clear all the trash in Jimmy Carmel’s yard relying only on the county-provided bin (and that no other trash accumulated in that time). The chicken bones are getting newer. Bits of blackened gristle at the ends. They might’ve been remnants of meat that withered, turned black, and became maggot husks.

Every twenty steps, William spots a drop of blood, growing fainter, like the animal is healing, or running faster, or more desperate. He cannot tell. He’s never seen animal blood this shiny. If not shine, then a sheen. A reflective, beautiful ruby.

He’s way past the point of lackadaisical bone-tossing, into the number of steps needed to mark the years since the Visigoths sacked Rome. He’s noticing the path is just as-trodden, relatively clear of overgrowth, like an entire ecosystem is relying on the runoff from the discarded bones of this homestead.

William thinks about the number of chickens he saw in Jimmy Carmel’s coop, and crosses that with the volume of fresher bones he’s seeing. The math isn’t squaring.

The flatter ground and spaced-out pines are becoming less flat and less spaced-out. He’s lost sight of Jimmy Carmel’s homestead and carburetor farm. The wind whooshes like blowing in a jug. He loses the blood trail in a patch of damp leaves, dried by death then dew-dampened to mush. Something’s not right.

Scratchy brush closes in around the bone path. He winds around a ridge, its shadows bringing coolness. He’s found a little cave at the trail’s end. It’s tall enough to hunch under, and there are no piles of bones.

‘What in tarnation?’

A flicker inside the den. Like a cat’s eye. He draws his flashlight slow, then sends it basking. He sees was a whirl—possibly fins, horns, or a tail. It couldn’t have been higher than his waist, but it could have been crouching as it retreated deeper into the cave.

Regulations plus instinct tell him not to follow, but he’s comfortable with a closer look because the den will tell him what he’s dealing with.

The ground is dug out past the threshold, where it’s roomy and rock ledges hold bones in stacked patterns too specific to be random. William sees two offshoot caverns at the far end—unsure of which the creature took.

He takes a step in, just a step. It’s too weird not to check out. Circles, triangles, spirals clawed in the dirt. His heart sinks.

‘Time to go.’

Something wet taps his shoulder. He can’t tell the color, but he knows that shine. He points the flashlight above, straight into bared teeth, sharp and encircling the mouth like a fish. Quadrupedal. Claws. Slimy reptile skin. It pounces from the roof, but not before letting out a laugh.

‘Did it—in fact—shake when asked?’

‘I didn’t ask; just seemed like it could. Like it possessed carpal joints. I’m not sure about its training.’

‘And what happened next? Where did it go?’

‘After the strange experience, I suppose it ran away toward the Johnstons. They live right over there.’

‘Anything else you can remember?’

‘Not remember, no.’

‘Well, alright then, I suppose I’ll be on my way.’

‘Oh, mister. Please be careful. It means a whole lot that the creature makes it into your car safely. I won’t abide their getting hurt.’

‘Right. Have a good one, Ms. Brendt. Thanks for the tip.’

Bert Johnston has a different story.

‘That what Sheila Brendt has to say? The cougar came up our way? I leave feline scat and piss clumps all around the boundary so they don’t come my way and spook the chickens. Saw it as I took my morning coffee; passed through the woods to the north, going toward Sheila’s. Mean looking thing. Kinda look you’d find on a man leaving family court. Was gonna grab my .308, but only had my tranq handy. Fran doesn’t want me killing every little creature that comes around for a peek. But—as I’m sure you know—Bidley Co. tranqs don’t have much range on them. Quality tool overall, no disrespect. Glad I bought one, but it can’t carry four hundred feet across my yard like my .308. It just can’t. They let you shoot real guns in your line of duty?’

‘Can’t say they do, sir. Fran’s the missus of the house? She around, or see anything?’

‘Fran’s my older sister. She’s out grocery shopping.’

‘I see. And you last saw it heading towards Ms. Brendt’s house, you say?’

‘Bet ya saw the cougar pelt hanging on her banister. Her father loved hunting them up-range. She knew I’d call animal control on it, so she kilt it and beat me to the buzzer.’

‘Up-range?’

‘Past Winsome Peak. State land, on the other side of Jimmy Carmel’s place. Reckon there’s a cougar den close to where ol’ Jimmy dumps his chicken bones. You didn’t hear it from me, but Jimmy don’t like paying the county dump to service his chicken coops. Say, what model year is that Bidley?’

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Back at the office, Leila’s stumped, too.

‘You get a call from Bert Johnston, Leila?’

‘Yep, came in just before Sheila’s.’

‘Then why didn’t you send me there first?’

‘Well, Bert was talkin’ cougar, and Sheila spoke of a dog. I didn’t want that poor dog gettin’ mauled by no cougar. Plus, a cougar’s Fish & Game purview.’

‘Did Fish & Game send anyone out to Bert’s?’

‘They might; but they gotta come up from the field office in Kenmore. Don’t expect them until after lunch. Why? What’s wrong, William?’

‘Nothing’s wrong; we just may need to call Mr. Johnston so he’s primed to give the same story to Fish & Game.’

‘Oh my, I never thought of that. Bert’s the type to get steamin’ mad about givin’ the same story to a different agency.’

‘You call Bert and warn him, and I can warn the mayor.’

‘Why the mayor?’

‘Who do you think Bert’s calling right after he’s done with Fish & Game?’

‘Fair point.’

The mayor welcomes the call.

‘William! How are things getting settled down there?’

‘Just fine, Madame Mayor. Things good at City Hall?’

‘Lovely weather for the season. The tax code needs some de-coding if you know what I mean. But otherwise, no complaints. What can I do for you?’

‘Nothing major, ma’am. Just wanted to give you a heads-up about a possible cougar sighting over at Bert Johnston’s place.’

‘A cougar at Bert’s? Pretty far down-range this time of year. You think it’s the weather?’

‘Not sure as of yet, ma’am. He might be a little worked up about it. Giving you the heads-up.’

‘I appreciate you telling me this, William. Have you called the county supervisor’s office? He’s who really needs to know about cougars.’

‘I can call him.’

‘Please do. Is there anything else?’

The county supervisor’s office is set up on a voice menu, and after pressing three for the supervisor, there’s no answer and no answering machine.

‘Any luck with Bert?’ William asks over to Leila.

‘He got me off the cougar topic pretty quick. Wanted to know if I’d tried out the new range in Bryson. I think he was trying to ask me out.’

‘They don’t specify in the job description the kind of animals we work with.’

Leila smiles at the joke, but a heaping portion of expense reports and other paperwork is weighing her spirit. Willam tips the brim of his hat then heads to the pound to lend Hattie a hand.

State inspectors prefer cat and dog feedings at sunup and sundown, which correspond with a crepuscular animal’s natural instincts.

In his three weeks as Hedgeville’s dogcatcher, William had never let Hattie stay past two. Not that she wanted to—she had a daughter she enjoyed picking up from school. William’s predecessor hadn’t seen the pointlessness of having her stand around doing nothing, waiting until an ambiguously mandated time to set food out for sad and mangy creatures who were going to pick at it throughout the night, anyway. Well, most creatures.

‘Beefy’s having a good day.’

‘Sure is,’ Hattie says.

She’s holding out kibble to a ruddy-faced dog hellbent on choking on its food without the meted hand of human intervention.

The internet sells special bowls and feeders for dogs with this condition, but the state funds arbitrary rules, not frivolity.

‘How we looking appointment-wise this Saturday?’

‘Not many. Expect we’ll run pretty thin until the holidays. Same family up in Springvale wants to come see Huntley, yet can’t find the time.’

Hattie’s done this work for more than a decade—longer than Leila—and is worn down by the flood. A flood, not in the sense of capacity, but pain. The pain keeps coming, year after year.

William doesn’t know this. But he expects it by the way Hattie looks at Beefy. Not love or admiration, but curtailed curiosity.

‘Want me down at the end and work up this way?’ he asks.

‘Sure thing.’

William gets more than halfway through doling out kibble and water. Through all the pit bulls, then terriers, and finally the hounds. He stops to give some pets and fetches, but there aren’t many takers today.

Hattie goes slower, taking her time. Getting more opportunities, probably. He’s about to open Duchess’s cage when his radio goes off, which he can’t hear all that well.

‘What’d you say, Leila?’

‘I said it’s Jimmy Carmel. Says he saw a bear cub tearing up his squash.’

The dogs keep barking.

‘On my way.’