ACCOUNTS
There is a sob story here, obviously. In Atlas’s defense, he won’t burden you much longer with the rest of it. The fundamental questions have been answered; the important details have been shared. What else is left to ask? What can be made of nature or nurture? There is only choice. There are only ends. This is what Atlas Blakely believes and we are in his story now, so this is all you need to know.
It isn’t sad right away, the series of events that follows Alexis Lai proverbially knocking on Atlas’s door. She’s thirty when she does it, or maybe thirty-one—time has dulled that particular significance, but Atlas knows it was mere months after their exit from the Society manor house, no more than half a year. Atlas was twenty-six then, a researcher, learning the ins and outs of the Caretaker job; studying the Society like an exam he’s soon to take, and planning—but not yet meeting—with Ezra Fowler, his accomplice in time.
As you have likely gathered by now, Atlas is not exactly what one might call a good person. There’s a lot to be said about what the system produces—a lot to be said about systems in general—so, in some ways, Atlas is a product of a maths equation, the parameters for which are so predictable they form the basis of any political platform by the left. There are the virtuous poor, the good immigrants, the martyrs and saints of an underfed class, and Atlas is not one of those. He’s not without his tools or choices. A person with Atlas Blakely’s propensity for magic is not exactly helpless and, likewise, a person with his ambitions and desires is not completely heaven-sent. If he hadn’t grown up running jobs as a telepath for hire then maybe he wouldn’t see everything that way, like an endgame with a clever workaround. In another world, Atlas Blakely does something with much smaller consequences, like becoming very rich and living a life of unethically derived capital investment that ends in the occasional bloodshed rather than outright societal collapse.
(In terms of Atlas’s early life, there are the years he spends with his mother before she begins to experience an uptick in bad thoughts, thoughts that Atlas can hear but not make sense of, which go away when she drinks—a form of self-medication that can also swallow her good voices up. Like building a wall that shrinks her smaller and smaller until not even Atlas can get in. Bolstering his mother’s crumbling mind requires keeping them both alive, which, simply put, requires money. It also requires sympathy, kindness, and love, things that no one but Atlas seems to have for her, but money is the easiest of those things to procure, even if the others are a lot more valuable. Too valuable, and in worryingly short supply.
So, simply put: until Atlas is recruited by the Society, Atlas agrees to stand there and hold things and not look too closely at any of the thoughts involved when people assign him directives. He simply turns the money into groceries and rent and doesn’t trouble himself with whatever comes next. Anyway—)
“Neel’s dead,” Alexis says, explaining apologetically that Neel also believes Atlas has killed him, does Atlas know anything about this? Atlas, plausible denier that he is, says that’s ridiculous, he has an alibi which is that he was several countries away and not a murderer, to which Alexis says—with a faint flush in her cheeks that suggests she really isn’t a fan of confrontation by the living—that she figured as much but, well, anyway, here’s Neel.
She steps aside and in the doorway there he is, Neel Mishra, telescope in hand, perfectly fine. Well, sort of. Atlas is uniquely positioned to know that Neel’s not as fine as he looks—that there are … things missing, or perhaps new things where the old ones were, the equivalent of oxidation over the place where his instincts or sense of self should be, or maybe, optimistically, his depth perception has merely worsened, or he’s lost a few centimeters here and there; can no longer see the world from the same position, instead just a little bit below it?—but as we know, Atlas is not and has never been the paragon of virtue we all want him to be. Instead, Atlas points out to Alexis that it’s rude to openly accuse someone of murder when one is a necromancer who can clearly ask the victim about the alleged murder. In reply, Alexis waves a hand, impatiently stomping off while Neel is sheepish but adamant. He saw it in the stars. Atlas Blakely will kill them all.
Yikes, says Atlas, or something of that equivalent, and he plays it off like he doesn’t know exactly what it means, even though he does, because he is not an idiot and he knows, as Neel has not thought to ask the cosmos, that the man that Atlas Blakely supposedly murdered to honor the Society’s initiation terms is very much alive—in fact, they have an appointment looming. In lieu of divulging such obviously problematic details, Atlas asks Neel how he died. Alexis returns with chips, says aneurysm. He seems fine now, observes Atlas. Yes, he was hardly even dead, basically just sleeping. They laugh about it. Atlas puts them both at ease, dismantles the bomb in Neel’s head, which is something that can be done with brains that are resurrected and mostly lucid but not the ones besieged by voices and left behind by their lovers to care for their illegitimate sons. (Ironic, isn’t it? The powers we have and the ones we don’t. The people we can save and the ones we can’t.)
“You’re probably right, oh well, I guess even though I’m the most powerful divinist in the world it remains slimly possible that the stars might have lied,” says Neel. This is lightly paraphrased on Atlas’s part.
Neel returns to his telescope and the woman he loves, which the stars have unfortunately determined he will not live long enough to marry. Alexis, however, stays behind with Atlas, or rather, she stays behind. The “with Atlas” part is an afterthought. She tells him that she’d just come from a meeting with someone in the offices of the Society. They asked her career aspirations and she said, well, pretty much exactly what she was doing before, except with more government clearance. It’s granted. Just like that.
“What did you tell them?” she asks Atlas suspiciously, and he sees something in her mind that’s very unnerving. Neel trusted him, but Alexis doesn’t, and Atlas considers changing her opinion. A little tweak, small but structural, which is something he does with everyone else in the Society, because what they think of him is critical to the plan that he and Ezra have made to one day have the Society and its archives under their command. Criminals who leave signatures are always caught, though, so Atlas doesn’t go so far as to make people like him. He repairs any doubt they might have, plants their opinions on a faultless platform of rationality. What is there to fear from Atlas Blakely? Nothing at all, especially then, at twenty-six, when he has yet to know the full extent of what the archives contain, or what kind of moral necessity can drive a man to betray his only friend.
But Atlas has inherited something from his mother. Illness, mostly, but also exhaustion. A misfiring in the very brain that can overpower other thoughts; an alteration in the very mind that can alter others however Atlas wishes, whenever Atlas wishes to, which Atlas does not do to Alexis at that moment, because he’s feeling tired and guilty and a bit like perhaps things would be better for everyone had he not been born. He feels this a lot. In recent years he’s given himself an answer, obviously, which is the part of the story you already know, because you can clearly see that he has a goal in mind and a plan in motion. He’s going to find a way out of this world, the one where the Society hoards its own shit and only doles it out to the rich and classically powerful for the price of a ritual slaughter. Even at twenty-six, Atlas Blakely knows he’s going to make a new world. He just doesn’t mean it literally yet.
So anyway, in the moment when Alexis Lai asks Atlas what his future is, he’s angry and tired of burning, unable to concentrate, missing the very same mother he resents while craving some falseness to dull the noise. (At times like these, Atlas still hears everything the same way he always does, but his interpretations of what he hears changes, not unlike the weather. Magic is not the same thing as clarity. Knowledge is not the same as wisdom. That is the duality of man, in a way. A person can see everything and nothing all at once.)
“I told them I just want to be happy,” Atlas says.
“Ah,” says Alexis. “What’d they say?”
(Consider a change in vocation, Mr. Blakely. See what the archives have to say about that. On a whim, he’d written “happiness” on a slip of parchment, then watched the pneumatic tubes deliver his response. It had come from a place of sarcasm, so he probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the reply. REQUEST DENIED.)
“They said they’ll get back to me in four to six business days,” Atlas replies.
Later, Alexis comes back to the Society manor house (where, for the record, Atlas now lives alone, their Caretaker Huntington choosing to remain in his country house in Norfolk whenever there are no fresh minds present to train or corrupt) with Folade, who was recently poisoned. When Folade insists on consulting the archives and Alexis, staring hard at Atlas, says nothing, Atlas wonders if he should have been a bit more proactive. Alexis’s doubt in him has now grown roots, which is a difficult condition to remove. Not impossible—very doable, in fact—but he doesn’t, and at the time he thinks this is his great error, the grave mistake that will be his undoing. Folade is clever, a physicist, very science-minded. She spends the evening trying a variety of different requests to the archives while Alexis and Atlas quietly eat a bowl of noodles in the kitchen. Eventually, Folade stomps back in and tells Atlas she thinks it’s a curse. Not the most scientific of conclusions and even Folade seems disappointed by it. She asks Alexis if she’s heard anything more from Neel, so Alexis calls, no answer. She wipes sesame oil from the edge of the bowl and says with a heavy sigh: Fuck.
After Alexis brings Neel back the second time, the doubt is flowering. She says, “Has anyone heard from Ivy?” and when Atlas says no, Alexis gives a similar sigh and storms out.
By the third time Neel is revived from a lethal bout of pneumonia, Alexis no longer has any doubt. Now it’s just barrels of accusation. “At least don’t sit there denying it anymore. Either take the thought away from me—I know you can do that, don’t lie—or tell me what the hell is going on!”
How many times can a woman look you dead in the eye and dare you to change her mind before you finally realize you’re kind of in love with her? Three, it turns out. But this isn’t the part of the story you’re interested in, so we’ll go right ahead and move on.
At what point does Atlas Blakely, idiot with a past, become Caretaker of the Alexandrian Society, and thus a man capable of destroying the world? Arguably he was born with that power, because if there are blueprints for our lives, then this was always one of the outcomes. This was always a possibility for Atlas, or perhaps it’s a possibility, period, because if one tiny grain of sand in the ocean of human history can be capable of such a thing, then can’t any one of them be in danger of causing it? If life is just a system of dominos falling that then leads to the collapse of the world as we know it, then who’s to say where it really begins? Perhaps it’s his mother’s fault, or his father’s, or it goes back even further than that, or perhaps something set in motion cannot be stopped. Perhaps the only way to stop something is to cancel reality altogether; to pull the rug out from beneath it so that reality is not reality at all.
This is the problem with knowledge: its inexhaustible craving. The madness inherent in knowing there is only more to know. It’s a problem of mortality, of seeing the invariable end from the immovable beginning, of determining that the more you try to fix it, the more beginnings there are to discover, the more ways to reach the same unavoidable end. What version of Atlas Blakely does what he’s told and simply pulls the trigger he’s been given? He runs it in his head, the calculations, the projections where things go differently, and yet they never do. Neel could see the future—he warned Atlas this would happen—but did that change anything? Cassandra can’t save Troy and Atlas can’t save Alexis.
All that matters are the ends—and where can any of this end, apart from death?