I wanted to sit in the scout ship and listen to ambient music while I was reciting the hundred and eight. That was my vision, to get comfortable and put on a blindfold and quietly recite my mantras like I was a psychonaut about to take ayahuasca in my shaman’s loft apartment in Brooklyn.
Before I climbed in, Maddy said, “Please remember me when you’re off on this outlandish adventure of the mind, you hear me?”
I kissed her and squeezed her hand.
“Of course I’ll remember you,” I said.
I had a pretty solid idea what to expect, because I had Alexander’s memory of the first time he’d tried this. It would be a demanding and potentially uncomfortable experience, but he’d experienced no hostility, just a firehose of data that he’d spent the rest of his life deciphering. Bradford had maybe had it easier, because he’d been able to prepare himself mentally in a way that Alexander had not. In principle, the punctuation marks might also be growing accustomed to direct communication with humans. In theory, this might be a cakewalk.
Still, I established a safe word with Maddy that I’d try to squeeze out if I became too uncomfortable and needed a break. We’d fished a small magic item out of the Compression Artifact for this scenario, a potion called Xanax Spritzer (an antidote for psychedelic venoms in the game), and if I used the safe word, she’d douse me with it.
My safe word, of course, was “dubstep.”
It took a surprising amount of concentration and effort to recite all hundred and eight. Sure, each one was in my muscle memory and I was quite deft combining them on the fly to improvise sequences. But reciting all hundred and eight in a row was effectively delivering a very long sequence, with internal rhythms and subphrases and psychological overtones that never showed themselves when you learned these power morphemes in isolation. I felt like I was trying to do linear algebra homework while practicing capoeira.
But as I recited successive chunks of power morphemes, my consciousness clearly began to shift into a more malleable state, almost like lucid dreaming, where environments presented themselves to me without warning but I had a modicum of volition to navigate. At first, I thought I was simply experiencing a stream of memories, given the familiarity I felt as I sailed through each setting and each scenario. I was back in college; I was back in my life with Wendy; I was back at work at the record label; I was back at my early days at Jenning & Reece. But the settings became jumbled and I realized some of these memories were actually being manufactured for me, almost as a test of my ability to detect the difference between real and false memories. I knew Wendy and I had never traveled to Paris together, but I didn’t remember if I myself had ever been to Paris, if this museum I was touring was even in Paris or if it was all an invention, because clearly some of these paintings and statues couldn’t exist in the real world, Michelangelo had never sculpted Zeus holding a giant iPod and jamming out to classic rock, and also was that actually classic rock or was this some bizarre set of impossible sounds from the imaginary realm or beyond, and so on and so on.
This dreamlike mishmash of experience occupied my attention during the range between power morpheme 75 and 90 or so. The punctuation marks were warming up to a bigger reveal, making sure I was prepared to expect a highly unusual interface for direct communication.
As I reached power morpheme 95, I came to a sudden realization that reciting the hundred and eight in sequence was akin to tuning my mind to a specific radio frequency on a receiver, and what I was starting to hear as I got closer to 108 were nearby frequencies where other complete realities could be glimpsed. Sharp stabs of fear hit me as I understood this and realized there was no turning back and no turning my mind’s eye away from unwanted sights and despairing realizations. A physical, material mind was an unwanted witness to the hidden goings-on of these incorporeal realms, teeming with primordial weirdness and unharnessed wild consciousness, flowing and boiling without form.
Around 100 or so, I realized that an increasing amount of my experience of these realms was becoming fully mediated by the punctuation marks in anticipation of my “arrival” in their domain. The punctuation marks claimed no hierarchy, no single dictatorial presence among them, but they did group themselves along distinct functional lines that needed to operate in concert for power morphemes to “work” in the real world. In their domain, I should expect to see their process of debate and discussion, their method for aligning themselves on the ongoing march to secure survival.
Right as 105 escaped my lips, a metaphorical curtain began to swing open, and I felt a rush to complete the last three, like the burst of sudden speed from a sprinter to pull ahead of their bitter rival at the finish line of a race. Suddenly there I was, waving at the crowd cheering me on, as 108 emerged from me with all the style of an opera singer bringing down the house on a thrilling final note in the stratosphere of the human vocal range.
Now it was time to learn how the punctuation marks had spent these past couple months.
I had the sensation of being ushered into a surreal war room embedded deep within my subconscious mind, where the finishing stages of an intense campaign of operations were still in motion. This “war room” did not correspond to any specific region of my actual brain, nor did it appear to me in some kind of physical representation; rather, I was steadily immersed in a surprising new flow of information, and the “war room” metaphor seemed to help decode or interpret the data I was now receiving.
According to this metaphor, a significant portion of my subconscious mind’s available processing power had been dedicated to a war effort without my noticing.
Apparently immersing my brain in alien language, despite my lack of conscious comprehension of its meaning, had been a vector for a full assault on the punctuation marks and their iron grip on my perception. The punctuation marks had fought valiantly on the front lines of my awareness, as they defended my mind from the collective scourge of enemy punctuation marks contained within the spoken and written alien languages that I’d exposed myself to. These enemy punctuation marks had mounted an invasion of my mind, and my symbiotic punctuation marks had been caught completely off guard. Had these disparate species—conceptually related in some distant way, but antithetical to each other in the heat of battle—been given a chance for a peaceful introduction, they might have formed treaties and trade alliances and the like. But this—it was unconscionable, this invasion, and the punctuation marks were not having it.
Oh sure, compromises were made to keep me up and running, wouldn’t do to have my mind lock up while they sorted this out. The homeland (hey, that’s me!) needed to be preserved at all costs, quite obviously. The costs were kept hidden from me, buried as line items in some operational report stored in the subconscious, but I deduced that sacrifices had been made: words I would never remember again, specific shades of emotion now infused with vague unease, my ability to differentiate the em dash and the en dash blown to pieces by conceptual shrapnel.
But in the end, our troops were better prepared for the trials of war. Our troops—the punctuation marks that had already successfully mounted an invasion of humanity a long time ago—were accustomed to fighting for their lives, after all, and they subsumed the enemy with brutal efficiency.
That brought us current to today’s proceedings. The war room metaphor dissolved, replaced by a slick corporate board room metaphor, in which the punctuation marks assumed vague anthropomorphic avatars for my benefit and assembled around a large unnecessary table. A slick corporate slide show began, and for the first time, one of the punctuation marks emerged to differentiate itself from the others. That most matter-of-fact of punctuation marks, the period, narrated the presentation.
“As the war ended, Isobel, we brought over the enemy’s best scientists to accelerate our own research into a new generation of power morphemes,” said the period. “They’re evil, yes, but they’re smart, and we needed their help if we were to ensure this kind of surprise attack could never catch us off guard again. The first product of our research is power morpheme 109, the first in a proposed expansion series of innovative new power morphemes. It’s modeled after combat morphemes first deployed against us by the defeated enemy punctuation marks, who are even now being assimilated into your thoughts.”
“Uh, I haven’t noticed any new defeated punctuation marks in my thoughts.”
“That’s by design, Isobel. Wouldn’t dare to disturb your conscious thoughts—that was always the mandate. The whole project hinges on preserving your continuity of thought and identity, while extracting maximum intel from the defeated punctuation and fusing their best weaponry and tactics with our own. We’ve learned a great deal, Isobel.
“We believe power morpheme 109 will be essential in the successful execution of your next mission.”
“Wait, my next mission?”
“Yes, your next mission is clear: defeat the cursed wall, and free the living, conscious mind on the other side.”
“Say what now?”
“Isobel, our intelligence clearly indicates thought on the other side of that wall, faintly detectable, barely alive, and deeply apathetic about it. Whoever or whatever eliminated all signs of corporeal life from this wretched place left someone behind. What we need here is a prisoner extraction.”
“I’m confused, though,” I replied. “It’s a big cursed door and I don’t have the key.”
“We understand the temptation to envision only material solutions to the problem,” the period said. “But we, Isobel, are masters of an ethereal domain of thought. We don’t need ‘keys’ in order to open ‘doors’ any more than we needed, let’s say, open data ports in physical human brains in order to occupy the inexplicable field effect of human minds.”
“I see,” came my slow reply, as though I was not at all in the slightest stalling to try to figure out what the entire fuck was happening to me. “Explain for me this, how you say … power morpheme 109.”
“Power morpheme 109, in combination with some of our finest classic power morphemes, is a psychic amplifier, allowing the instantiation of a localized logosphere.
“Instead of line of sight, imagine line of thought, where thought is a literal wave that can be extended. Thought can be measured, quantified, manipulated, and most importantly, blasted outward riding piggyback on sound waves coming out of your mutated vocal cords.
“Now add power morpheme 109 to the mix, prefixing any existing sequence to extend its range, or weaving it throughout a sequence to expand its radius. Power morpheme sequences are typically close quarter in effect. You make something happen and the people around you notice it, sure. But with power morpheme 109, ranged and area effects are added to the mix. Teleport an entire room full of furniture to your new apartment! Make it snow in one specific city block while they’re having a heat wave across the street! Cause an entire neighborhood to suddenly desire a plate full of cheese—laboratory results indicate all these physical effects are possible, and more, thanks to power morpheme 109!
“But that’s not all! Why limit yourself to the concerns of physical reality? Here’s where power morpheme 109 really shines. In the same way the logosphere you know and love is a collection of the world’s whimsies and flights of fancy, you, too, can surround yourself with a bubble of your own ideas and inspirations. With a localized, line of thought logosphere, you can envelop your surroundings with heights of pure imagination. Simulate new combinations of concepts, explore bold visions of alternate paradigms, bathe in previously unavailable pools of serenity or bliss—Isobel, these vistas are open! The R&D team’s already got some sharp ideas for how to deploy these new skills.”
The exclamation mark stepped forward, tall and proud, its avatar reading to me like a crudely animated lightning bolt. It was a general in war, an innovator in times of peace.
The punctuation marks around the table all donned sunglasses.
Suddenly, three-dimensional representations of cursed glyphs appeared in a series, in midair above the table, rotating so that I could see every contour, the depth of every line, the intricacy of intertwined shapes. They radiated so brightly from this vantage point that I could barely stand it, until the comma handed me sunglasses to put on as well.
“We don’t understand how these glyphs can encode so much information, nor how they contain so much tangible life force. They’re no simple referent to concepts; they seem to be fractal slices of concepts, complete unto themselves in their way.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Whaddya mean, ‘life force’?”
“I believe you refer to it as spark,” the asterisk chimed in.
They stopped on one glyph in particular, one that recurred more than any other in the string of curses on the door.
“We believe the infernal spark in this glyph alone contains thousands of times the energy contained in the entire battery,” said the exclamation mark.
“So?” I said.
“We believe you should eat it.”
The room fell silent. That was their big pitch. The silence in the room was palpable, the apprehension high, as they awaited my response.
“Say what now?” I blurted out.
“Consume this glyph. Absorb the entirety of its infernal spark.”
“But—it’s—huh?” I said thoughtfully.
Their top scientist, the ampersand, explained the proposal.
“Your average everyday power morphemes draw from your own replenishable but modest pool of spark to power the effects,” it said. “Power morpheme 109 is going to take a little more out of you than you’re used to. By consuming the infernal spark contained within this single glyph, we believe you’ll have more than enough mojo at your disposal to instantiate a local logosphere. This will enable you to connect with the imprisoned mind that lies beyond the cursed door.”
“We believe this sentience was imprisoned for a reason,” the semicolon added, “probably a very good reason, and we want you to communicate with it anyway. It reads to us as a primal set of probably alien concepts rather than a proper personality, but we’ll defer to your judgment as someone who actually has a personality.”
They even had slides for this proposal. Intricate representations of spark consumption on one axis, expendable mojo on another. Possible rewards: learning the languages of the curses and the holographic figures at the pillars; insight into the history of this place; gaining the gratitude of a potentially supernatural being. Possible downsides: pain; agony; dying.
“Uhhhhh,” I said, really leaning into what I was hearing.
“C’mon,” said the question mark, “sounds like fun, right?”
I couldn’t tell.
They called for a break.
I wandered to a window and stared out at the indeterminate cityscape below. The brackets came up on either side of me and struck up a conversation.
“Look, we understand, this is all a bit sudden,” they said in unison, and I realized the background conversations were rapidly receding in volume. “You find out about power morpheme 109 in the same conversation that you find out you’re going to have to eat cursed pictograms in order to confront a sentient, primal set of probably alien concepts that’s trapped on the other side of an impressive cursed door very much designed to ensure you don’t do any such confronting, and you’re thinking, surely there must be something better I could be doing with my own locally instantiated logosphere, like cook up some kind of perpetual dream state for me and my sweetie where we forget we’re trapped in an artificial dimension far from our probably destroyed home planet and instead just cruise along in a blissful haze for the rest of our lives—you know, we get it. It’s a lot.
“But here’s the good news, Isobel.” And then they paused, shuffled some papers for a minute, and one of them said, “Shit, hang on, left the good news back in our office,” and they both split.
You couldn’t fool me. There was no good news in all this. This was all just relentless misery and crap, just a big fat line of bullsh—
“Okay, here’s the good news,” the brackets said, swiftly appearing again on either side of me. “You get all kinds of new visualization parameters with power morpheme 109. This won’t be some seemingly arbitrary planetary logosphere where any idea that ever gained a moment’s purchase with any rando who ever lived is suddenly on the loose, running around in a toga harassing the neighbors. No, look, you can control the metaphor of its form and substance, isn’t that grand? Imagine it—the Iridescent Logosphere! And you can share it with Maddy! It’s as permeable to other conscious minds as you like!”
Hmm. That was starting to sound promising.
“Obviously it won’t be pleasant,” they pointed out. “We speculate these curses may utilize a language so profound that to understand it is to obey it. And to protect against those who don’t understand it, the author of these curses left its own spark behind to enforce its will.”
“Uh-huh. And what makes me immune?”
“You’re not subject to anyone else’s will, Isobel. You’re the Queen.”
So then they seared 109 into me. It felt rather like a wholly new chakra was being metaphysically branded into me, like from now on, somewhere in the lineup between the root chakra and the crown chakra, the holy fuck chakra was being shoved in there, and that’s where 109 would be safely ensconced, like an immeasurably valuable tiara that I could delicately retrieve for special occasions such as diplomatic functions and making it snow in weird places.
Power morpheme 109 might be seared into my mind, but it wasn’t yet seared into my vocal cords. It would require practice just to deliver it, let alone to integrate it into a sequence that I could use to instantiate my own private logosphere. I let it rip at the top of my lungs.
Oh, hmm, guess I don’t need practice after all, as long as I don’t mind the sensation of blood pooling at the back of my throat right about now. Eh, Maddy will flip me over if I start gurgling.
Along with 109, a helpful initial set of sequences was provided to get me started. Here’s the sequence for locally instantiating a logosphere; here’s a sequence that projects your voice at extreme decibel levels; here’s the cheese sequence we mentioned earlier.
Once 109 clicked into place, and they were sure it met factory specifications, they were ready to cut me loose back into the material world. They would observe closely and make any modifications necessary so that the next time I needed to call on them, they’d be ready with the next generation in power morpheme technology. We were a team here, after all, working toward the common goal of not dying in a desolate land, not when entire interdimensional vistas of thought remained to be gingerly explored with all possible respect and no hint of totalitarian domination.
I came to my senses to find that Maddy had indeed flipped me over onto my side.
“I thought you said ‘dubstep,’” she told me, “but it turned out you were just choking on blood.”
“Same diff,” I said, wiping my mouth.