DEBTS
To be perfectly clear, Atlas Blakely doesn’t want to destroy the universe.
He just doesn’t want to exist in this one.
The question is not whether the world can end. There’s no question that it can, that it does every day, in a multitude of highly individualized ways ranging from ordinary to biblical. The question is also not whether one man is capable of ending the world but whether it is this man, and whether such destruction is as inevitable as it may seem. What is the problem? The constancy of fate. The liquidity of prophecy. The problem is Einstein’s theory of relativity. The problem is closed-loop time travel. The problem is Atlas Blakely. The problem is Ezra Fowler. The problem is the invariability of the particular strand of the multiverse in which Ezra and Atlas meet.
The problem is that Ezra Fowler had a sweet tooth, a snacking problem. A habit of humming the same insufferable pop songs while he thought. The problem is he left a thin film of peanut butter on every page of Atlas’s incomprehensible notes. The problem is Ezra, who had an unusual mind because he did not submit to linear time, and often did not know what day it was. The problem is he chewed on Atlas’s pens and occasionally fell asleep at the edge of Atlas’s bed like a loyal hound and did not understand the purpose of knocking. The problem is that Ezra Fowler had night terrors, and hay fever. The problem is he read all the books on Atlas’s shelves and left his own notes in the margins. The problem is Ezra was remarkable at backgammon; could have played table tennis professionally in another, less unusual life. He was addicted to filter coffee and often let his tea go cold. The problem is that Ezra was impossible to reason with before noon and occasionally after dinner. That he did not concern himself with the necessity of things like niceties of speech. That he was socially awkward and often brilliantly, bitingly angry. That he was bright and miserable and full of wonder, and such curiosity was infectious, and it struck a match in the lighter parts of Atlas Blakely’s soul.
The problem is the latent human tendency to create an avatar of a person in our minds, reassembling them from the biases of our memories until the fragment of them in our heads becomes more simplified, and more and more inadequate over time.
The problem is that sometimes, when Atlas looked at Ezra Fowler, he saw himself, like facing down a mirror that showed him all of his best qualities and none of the ugly ones. The problem is that it was not romantic, not platonic, not fraternal.
The problem is that it was closest to alchemical—the feeling like you’ve met the person you want to make magic with for the rest of your life.
The problem is that sometimes, when Atlas looked at Ezra, he only saw an ending; someone to eventually, inevitably lose.
Because it is impossible to remove from the equation of the problem the fundamental nucleus of truth, which is that Atlas Blakely loved and was loved by Ezra Fowler, and that becoming mortal enemies is unfortunately one plausible strand of outcomes of loving and being loved this way.
It would be Ivy’s idea first. From there Atlas would not know whether it was simultaneously occurring in the minds of the others or if it had spread virally, as Ivy had a tendency to do. She was very pragmatic, understandably so, being essentially the equivalent of walking, talking genocide. Her deduction had taken place quietly, almost forgettably, if such a thing could be forgettable. Atlas did not know who had clued her in that one of their cohort would have to die, or how she’d known (Atlas’s theory was Neel, who did have a knack for seeing an illuminating part of the picture, if not the more comprehensible whole) or whether the impetus of the thought had been internally derived or external. Ownership of ideas was difficult to quantify under ordinary circumstances. The sudden materialization of maybe the weird one should die instead of me could have come from any number of places. But however it may have arrived there, the point is that it did.
The installation, wherein the Society’s enemies were tipped off about the date of the new initiates’ arrival, wasn’t a personal practice of Atlas’s. He and his cohort of Society recruits had had their own installation as well, which at the time similarly consisted of an early, crude attempt by James Wessex, various militaristic special operations, and a predictable handful of Forum goons. Atlas’s cohort, which lacked the captaincy of two physicists companionable enough in their rivalry to serve as joint tacticians, split off individually. It was Atlas, standing alone in the drawing room, who alone felt the presence of Ezra Fowler disappear.
Eventually, there would be nothing that Atlas enjoyed more than crafting strategy with Ezra Fowler, who was clever and well-read and adequately trained in multiple specialties the way most medeians were not. Ezra called himself a physicist, and he was one, passably so, though he could also craft illusions well and had a keen mind for the theoretical and arcane. He was secretive, but not threateningly so. Closer to private, and deeply introverted. It was Ezra’s gift in life to appear unremarkable, which in a house full of remarkability was more like a death sentence. Which, at the time, neither he nor Atlas had a reason yet to know.
So, on the night of their installation, Atlas would learn two things: that Ezra was opposed to loss of life, would do anything to avoid it; and that if he, Atlas, had not guessed or intuited that Ezra had slipped through time as well as space, then Ezra would not have told him. Ezra was easily spooked, preternaturally jumpy. Didn’t like to disturb things—the quiet, the peace, the time-space paradox, any situation in which he allowed himself to become comfortable, which he did with a conscientious sense of doom.
“The way I see it,” Ezra had told Atlas once, or at least as Atlas remembered it, “life has the capacity to be very long, and all the worst things are pretty much inevitable. So, you know, might as well rob the bank.”
Shortly thereafter, Atlas and Ezra experimented with hallucinogens and began modeling the particle physics mechanism for cosmic inflation that would later be casually referred to as the Atlas Blakely Sinister Plot. They told no one, which at the time felt like the right thing to do. Right up until Atlas realized that Ivy suspected Ezra of possessing insufficient magic to tie his shoes.
(This, to be clear, was not her fault. Ivy Breton, as previously mentioned, was most at risk for group-determined elimination from a philanthropic, humanity-embracing standpoint, which is the one Atlas tended toward as a person of generally utilitarian belief. Her particular strand of biomancy—viral disease—was an explosive, unrivaled output of magic that was not so much useful as powerful. An interesting conversion of Reina Mori’s gifts, but that is obviously not a matter for current contemplation. Just a sort of quietly tickling aside.)
After Ivy, Folade was next. She didn’t like Ivy, but she also didn’t like Atlas, and she liked Ezra even less. Neel, beloved idiot Neel, he sweated over it, but he had a tendency to leave things up to the divine, which in his case was a matter of the other five. Atlas would not discover until many years later what Alexis thought about all this, which by then would be too late to make a difference. But Atlas was a good enough friend and a better liar to conceal the entire nature of the truth, which was that Ezra had been marked by the others for one of two bad options: death, or more proactively, murder.
Or, for the dastardly clever and edgily punk, there was an additional opportunity to simply trick the powers that be, dazzling them right to their faces and gradually ousting them in favor of two slightly stoned near-men who both happened to think murder is bad.
Thus, from between a rock and a hard place appeared the option of time travel, a potential third.
(The problem, of course, is Atlas Blakely. The problem is his tendency to believe that he is smarter than the others, better, quicker, more prepared, when really what he happens to be is the universal answer key without properly listening to the questions. The problem is his lifelong necessity of being that way—of confusing telepathy with wisdom or worse, with understanding. The problem is also money, and most definitely capitalism. The problem is stolen knowledge! The problem is colonialism! The problem is institutional religion! The problem is corporate greed! The problem is entire populations forgoing equitable labor for the fleeting high of cheap consumer goods! The problem is generational! The problem is historical! The problem is the English! The problem is—)
“Cool,” said Ezra.
(“Did you actually kill him?” Alexis would ask later, in private, after the others had already accepted that the explanation Atlas gave was true. Easy enough to do, since there was no reason to question something they all desperately wanted to believe. No more murder, only books. A heady, collective relief, minus one necromancer’s ambivalent qualms. “Wasn’t he your best friend?”
“We didn’t come here for friends” was Atlas’s nuanced reply. “And what else might I have done if not kill him? Stash him in the cupboards?”
“Hm,” said Alexis, who despite considerable telepathic evidence otherwise would later claim that she knew, or at very least suspected. She’d be dying at the time, so Atlas would give her the benefit of the doubt.
“What made you think it was a lie?” asked Atlas.
“Because,” she said. “You didn’t ask me to bring him back.”)
So essentially, what started with Ivy had an irreversible tumble of consequence, one that Atlas would encounter again the next decade and learn from, choosing to use it to his advantage. It was unavoidable, that initial spark, born from a place of defensiveness as well as ambition, and a noble—if such a thing was possible—greed. Kill the weak one, kill the dangerous one, it doesn’t matter your particular school of thought. You can always find a reason. Once the idea of death becomes necessary, even palatable, there is always someone the rest of the herd can stand to lose.
The first time Ezra meets secretly with Atlas, five seconds from his exit that also happens to be five years on from his manufactured “death,” Neel has already died three times, Folade twice, and as a method of experimentation, Atlas and Alexis are letting Ivy stay dead, just in case that happens to appease the archives for a time. What Ezra incorrectly reads in Atlas’s posture as a continuation of his former swagger is a new-old coping mechanism built from panic, arrogance, and the final vestiges of youth. In that moment, minutes away from the decision they’ve both made to make the Society bow righteously to them, Ezra loves Atlas still, and Atlas loves Ezra enough to keep it from him. The storm brewing, which will eventually become a critical error, and an all-encompassing truth.
He knows you want to ask him. Go ahead, do it. Knowing what he knows—what you know—then surely by now Atlas understands the story he’s been telling. You’ll notice he hasn’t yet made the claim that what Ezra Fowler predicted cannot possibly come to light. Thus, if Atlas already knows what Ezra was trying to stop—if he himself does nothing to deny it—then surely Atlas understands he is the villain.
Okay, so then Atlas is the villain. There, are you happy now? Of course not. Because in life there are no true villains. No real heroes. There is only Atlas Blakely left to settle his accounts.
By the time Atlas Blakely meets Dalton Ellery, he already knows that everything in the universe has a cost. He has told you this himself, in justifying the price he has asked others to pay, which he himself did not. Because now he understands the meaning of sacrifice, and therefore he understands what comes for free, and what can be spontaneously created.
Which is to say: nothing.
Which is one way of saying that Atlas Blakely knows exactly how dangerous Dalton Ellery is, but by the time such a thought occurs to him, the debt of his life has already been acquired, and he is already much too late.