You understand, of course, that everything out of Atlas Blakely’s mouth at the time of his demise is the testimony of a dying man. The eulogizing of the person he might have been. Pardon the narcissism, but if a man can’t rhapsodize himself in a moment of certain doom, when exactly can he? He poses the question of betrayal because he already knows he is a traitor. He posits that you alone can understand his story because, frankly, he already knows you can. When you were born, the world was already ending. In fact, it’s already over.
It’s just you and Atlas now.
In Atlas Blakely’s final moments, he doesn’t see his life flash before his eyes. He doesn’t see all the versions of lives unlived, the many paths he left untaken. The worlds he tasked himself with making that he will never see; the outcomes he tasked himself with seeking that he will never truly understand. It doesn’t matter. If the human mind is good at anything—and Atlas does know the human mind—it is the projection of alternative realities, the thing that some people call regret and others call wonder. The thing that anyone who has ever looked at the stars has come to observe. Atlas’s is a very human psyche, and so it is irreparably fragmented in some ways, regenerated more perfectly in others. If people are good or if they are bad, Atlas Blakely doesn’t know. He is and has always been both.
Hard to say if Atlas is still making a desperate play at redemption. There’s a lot on the line, what with the unknowable nature of consciousness and how it will feel to blink out as if he never existed at all. He does have a series of misfiring neurons and he can hear your opinion of him as plainly as if you nailed it to the door, so the circumstances for his confession are not exactly ideal. Then again, you don’t get to pick your audience. You don’t get to choose how you take your final bow.
Could he have done anything differently? Yes, probably, maybe. Unclear how much it matters, the alternative routes. Maybe they’re left untaken for a reason. Maybe we’re all just swimming around in the mind of a giant or a computer simulation after all. Maybe what we think of as humanity is just statistics in action, pattern recognition in a time loop that none of us can actually control. Maybe the archives dreamed you up for their own amusement. Maybe these aren’t the questions you should be asking yourself. Maybe you should put aside the fireballs and calm the fuck down.
Before she dies, Alexis Lai tells Atlas Blakely don’t waste it. But before that, she says something else. Not aloud, because the things we say out loud traverse a lot of filters to get there (usually). But in her head, Alexis plants a seed that bears fruit that only Atlas can see. He fails to understand it, of course, in something of a willful stubbornness that is either his Achilles’ heel or just, you know, an everyday, non-prophetic sort of problem, but he carries it around for just long enough that he can hold it here in his head—a drop of sweetness to melt fortuitously on his tongue. It’s similar to what Ezra Fowler thinks in the moments before his death. At a certain point, you really have to give up on the question of existence. It all just starts to funnel inward, tighter and tighter, until the only thing you can possibly summon to wonder is hm, will it hurt?
But right before that, there’s a little bubble of clarity that, for Alexis, is the sudden craving for soup dumplings. They’re a street food she likes because they remind her of a perfect day spent making perfect choices, like soup dumplings and comfortable shoes and remembering to pack a raincoat, just in case. For Ezra, it’s a note in a song that his mother liked to sing, something she hummed to herself while she did the dishes. Catchy pop, because life is too short to be too cool for disco. Too unpredictable not to sing along to boy band serenades.
For Atlas, the thing is the slight treacle stickiness of something mislaid among the crumbling monuments to his mother’s fractured genius. He has just come from a university lecture. Well, more accurately he has just come from work, but before that it was the lecture, right after breaking up with the girlfriend whose new boyfriend will later cheat on her until she pines for the thing she once had with Atlas, which of course Atlas will never know. At the lecture, Atlas sat and listened, doing the telepath thing where he listens to the things people decide not to say and deeming them more important, even though choice is the crux of it. What leaves your tongue is what you actually control. So he’s observing the thought in the professor’s mind which is holy shit that lad in the back row looks just like me, how odd, I suppose I do miss what’s-her-name, before dissolving into the frivolity of a man reliving tawdry desk sex with a faceless student after hours. Years will pass, the possibility of new worlds will bloom without his knowledge, and the man called Professor Blakely will never discover that the only takeaway his son will get from meeting him is that life is meaningless and people are total crap.
Until Atlas comes home to his passed-out mother, that is.
Until, specifically, he finds the Alexandrian Society’s calling card waiting patiently beside the bin.
So that’s where it ends. A treacle-slick of gin and hope.
You’d like to think it’s more romantic, wouldn’t you? Life and death, meaning and existence, purpose and power, the weight of the world. We are stardust on earth, we are impossible beings—the moral of the story shouldn’t revolve so absurdly on the behaviors of a condom or the decision one man makes to buy a gun and act out his hate. And yet it does, because what else can matter?
The world as you believe it to exist is not a thing. The world is not an idea, something to be made or exalted or saved. It is an ecosystem of other people’s pain, a chorus of other people’s street foods, the variety of magic that people can make with the same set of chords. The world is pretty simple, in the end. People are bad. People are good. Inescapably there will be people, some who will disappoint you, some who will define you, unravel you, inspire you. These are facts. In every culture there is bread, and it is good.
There is power to be taken if you wish to seek it. Knowledge to be gained if you really want to know. You should be warned, though, whatever else you take from this, that knowledge is always carnage. Power is a siren song, bloodstained and miserly hoarded. Forgiveness is not a given. Redemption is not a right. It eats away at you, the things you know. The price you pay, and it will be costly, is yours to bear alone. For all you cast aside for glory, what prize could ever be enough?
Which is not to say stop seeking. Which is not to say stop learning. Make the next world better. Take the next right step.
Though, as a matter of professional courtesy, one last cautionary tale from a dying man: the power you have will never be enough compared to the power you’ll always lack.
Do you understand? Are you listening?
Put the book away, Miss Rhodes. You won’t find what you’re looking for in there.