13 Pounds Against a Galaxy – Ryszard Salmanowicz
August 23, 2026
The Many
Alexander Bell invented the telephone 28 years before Oppenheimer was born, predestined to invent the atomic bomb.
Jacob, just like Oppenheimer, had played the grim reaper on Halloween.
He was doomscrolling, he always did when he was sad, a force of habit. He had just started college and had trouble making new friends. They were just arriving at the dorm anyway, but they were already partying. These people must have met before. Many people come to college in groups. At least that is what Jacob thought, sitting alone in his room, watching from his window as parents parked their SUVs, left their kids, then sped off. One after another. An endless stream. That stream poured in from the parking lot, into the building, branched off into separate rooms, but combined again into pools, flying against gravity – they were having parties in the common areas. Jacob wasn’t invited. It’s an impossible game, to get invited someone must know you exist. They must have known each other already.
His friend Lucy sent him an invite to pair up on a language app and do friend challenges. They used to chat a lot more in the past, now it was mostly about her obsession with learning languages. He wished they were more than friends. There were other apps for that, but they were stuck on this one. She was the girlfriend of his brother’s buddy. They were back in their hometown, they were a year younger, finishing high school. But Jacob thought her boyfriend didn’t deserve her. Why wasn’t he doing those German challenges?
“Der Hund ist sehr hungrig.” How do you get that “r” right. Why learn a language at all, soon Metaglasses will translate on the go.
For every “r” he should get points, then cash those out as achievements, and then if he could reach that number one and sapphire league that should win him a train ticket for Lucy to join him here. If the world was fair, that is.
“Why was she learning German, anyway?… Because she’s smart,” thought Jacob, “unlike her boyfriend.” But her boyfriend had to be smart, right? Otherwise it would suggest she isn’t. And a smart person wouldn’t choose an idiot for a partner. Unless they’re good in bed. Jacob shuddered.
Was Lucy good in bed? Maybe it was her boyfriend who was the smart one, like really, really smart, only then it would make sense. Yeah, he could compete with a selfish genius.
“Was möchtest du essen?” What was that bear on about.
The language app had a segment where a bear was a radio host, taking calls and offering his advice. Silly advice. He said he didn’t plan his meals, and ate only what he found. He was talking in a posh English accent while having a trout on his desk. What a waste of time. Selling quirkiness like that. Stupid shit.
Maybe he should buy a plushie for Lucy? He pulled up a different app.
This one had a localisation thing enabled. You have to be smart about it. Jacob set it to a one-mile radius, and then he could see all the girls who just drove up to the campus, who besides partying decided to hook up. Lucy, the bear, the baddies. Thumb up, thumb down. Left, right. What he saw outside the window, he saw on the dating app with a radius of one, an endless stream. Drive up, flex the SUV, park, seal the kid’s future, drive off. All the girls wanted to date older guys, which made Jacob go to the very bottom of the pile, as a freshman. But you have to be smart about it, put your age as 2-3 years older, and when asked – say it’s a glitch. Girls have it in reverse, but later, so it’s ok.
Jacob didn’t feel guilty about lying, or orbiting the girlfriend of his brother’s friend. You cannot be guilty of doing the right thing. And for a girl like Lucy to have a good boyfriend is the right thing. And for him to have a girlfriend even more.
He wasn’t lonely. To say that he was lonely you would have to meet him and know him, and why would you do that? Was there a female Jacob somewhere dreaming of him, who would be up for the challenge? The whole thing on Jacob’s mind was to make Lucy up for the challenge.
“Bauchschmerzen.” What a language.
Jacob had been through it all: drunken texts, covert and overt, them playing instruments, a religious phase, driving her to her hookups, being a shoulder to cry on once, twice, and it would turn out, forever. Still she wouldn’t let him fuck. She wouldn’t even let him kiss, for that matter. But they did hold hands. Like friends do. Fingers intertwined. Hers in an attempt to keep the attention, he thought, his in an attempt to wake something up, he knew. Thumb goes up, thumb goes right. Lucy, the bear, the baddies – but all of these were about her. If he hooked up and managed to get it, he would be fucking a non-Lucy. If he didn’t, he’d be not fucking Lucy, he’d be not-fucking-Lucy type of dude. That terrified him.
But was it about fucking? To Jacob it was. To Jacob it wasn’t. Where there is any touch there is the cosmic recognition. A ray of sunshine. An SUV staying a tad longer. The parking attendant disappearing somewhere, the electric barrier breaking. I don’t know. Someone not wanting to seal anything, and knowing where they’re leaving you, in that stream, and holding your hand because they are there too, drenched wet, scared and small, and that smallness being shared in that SUV staying a tad longer. That SUV refusing to go, engine busted, fuel running out, bank making a call, a meteor falling.
No. It was about fucking. Man, was it about fucking.
So many faces, so many ways to spell the same name. Like a funnel it was, that river drove. Just let me swim. Let me get to the bank at least. Whom do I see about this? Drive up, drop off, fuck, party, graduate, go back, fuck some more, then not fuck at all. That was the timeframe. 8, up to 10 years. Then you are involuntary – that’s what it’s called. But we’re not there yet, there is still time.
One year: convince Lucy to come here, without her boyfriend. She would study fine arts and Jacob would study physics. Oh, and German. Maybe they could bond over whatever is at the other end of what that bear has to offer – reading German poetry? Something an art student would do. Jacob could do that.
Physics is for him, art is for her. He just clicked off the dating app when another non-Lucy talked about her love of travelling, and instead ordered Rilke in the original. But not for her. He would have that in the background for her to notice, and then 60 years from now to remember. Physics for him, art for her. Physics is a lot like art.
An atom of hydrogen is just like another atom of hydrogen, it has its quirks and sub-states, it might come from a different star than the next one, but for all intents and purposes it is what it is, like another thing that is… like itself, just somewhere else. If you take that sameness of an atom, you can do crazy wild things with it, man. For example, you can become famous like Richard Feynman, or have a movie made about how you murdered untold millions. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out! Oppenheimer spoke fluent German. A bear now was teaching Jacob German, for her.
But who was Lucy?
The Few
“Can’t make it, super sorry, will explain in person,” a text flashed on a therapist’s screen. Barbra secretly loved the missed appointments: 50 minutes of uninterrupted, paid-for… nothing. A dream job. “If only all our clients paid and didn’t show up,” the joke went, at her supervision. Other therapists found it funny. Gallows humour – the same way EMS workers joke about people being split in half. Lucy’s dad paid for those in advance, so she only pretended to be angry about it: “Lucy, it’s the third time this has happened, let’s discuss this next session.” A clinical boundary is a model for what the client should do. All clients suffer from not being like the therapist.
She was alone in her office, the leather chair unoccupied, words unsaid, but the silence… When a therapist doesn’t speak or isn’t spoken to, she is not a therapist anymore, she’s just Barbra. And Barbra was so uninteresting that it came full circle and would make her super interesting, had there been anyone to even care.
She stood up to reheat her coffee, it smelled good. It was a direct contrast to what her office would have smelled like had Lucy shown up. She wore those candy-like perfumes. Barbra would never wear them, but liked them. She vicariously lived through the excitement of her clients’ troublesome lives. Sex, drugs, the drama, even the self-harm was secretly exciting to her. Academically! When she drank alone to Netflix she pretended the boring alcohol was molly. Something she learnt about when she probed them. But it wasn’t: it was rosé.
She sat down, coffee in hand. Her mind was playing a trick on her – she could smell that candy perfume, even though Lucy wasn’t here, even though coffee was in full swing trying to get rid of anything youthful. That candy perfume was like a cover-up to her, like a mouthwash to hide the stench of cigarettes, the faulty brain of an adolescent. It had a distinct smell. Of someone who enjoys things that Barbra grew out of or never matured enough for. Things she fought against with each of her clients, convincing them of a proper way to be. Like her. Her only experience of “filth” was her own personal Black Mirror she both consumed and directed from her armchair. She would never call it filth though, it was trauma. “You cannot split,” she would say. Like a mantra: “How should we see it beyond black and white?”
Barbra always saw inherent merit in lying to her patients. She would say: “I used to help this girl, very similar, who had this same problem, you know what she did in the end about her dad?” But there was no girl. Or if there had been, she had been the girl they talked about during therapist training, that some psychologist or psychiatrist also made up or misrepresented to prop up their ideas. But it was those ideas that helped people. In a way, all of these people were noble to be lying about this, because that girl of Barbra, that girl of the psychiatrist, that girl of the whole town, was a model for Lucy. A lie to drag her out of her misery.
But she couldn’t lie right now. She was alone, and the silence is the end of all therapy. Now was the time to think. Why did she lie like that when telling her clients they can lie but not to themselves? Was Barbra’s copy inside the true, real Lucy? If so, why did she still divide the world into coffee-smelling and candy-smelling? Young and old. Rosé was the cutoff, the cutoff is pure joy… Friends and clients – like Kristen, she made Barbra go to Punta Cana. Those young guys there. A friend couldn’t be a client, easy now. You were there. Easy now, Barbra. Sick and healthy. Rational and irrational.
How proud she was of helping others, that Lucy, should she want to, of course, could get functional enough to go to college. That was her job.
She opened up an app that therapists use to book and get clients. Much like Tinder, you have to be smart about these things. Sign up to platforms that offer a-sync help so you can cover the shame you feel when you enjoy your coffee while not helping, not talking, not listening, and dreaming of being a sugar momma. Therapists were joking about automating even talking; tech-bros were way ahead of therapists. They funded studies that showed what Barbra is. They were right and that’s why she wasn’t making enough money for the boys at Punta Cana to cave in and make her life a 90-Day Fiancé shit-show.
The app is designed to make extra money on top of the paid-for session that gets missed – overbooking, like airlines do. There is a calculus equation of how much you can push people to get it at Punta Cana. And you would be helping even more people, and everyone deserves your help. You’re a helper. The app also rewards streaks of availability – even more helping.
Her plainly painted fingernails tapped on the armrest. She bit her lip.
If she puts in a couple more years and games those streaks, maybe then the tech-bros will reward her with enough of a bump to her credit score. She could buy another trip to Cana, and make one of the boys come up here, and life would be so glorious – maybe her clients could see her. The looks on their faces. She would have to go to therapy herself. But not for performance, like she did in supervision, for real. Not for self-actualisation. For a fucking rescue mission.
Helicopters, drones, human chains. To save her. Riots, immolations, fathers pulling the trigger for failing to find her. A priest and a coroner, pulling their hair. Begging heavens. For substance abuse, for drama, for self-harm. For the warmth that contact with filth brings. But not through a pane, not on this side of the room. An atomic collapse, pulling in what her clients did. Into her. Ropes, chains tearing their limbs in. Tearing the flesh off their nuclei. Into her! To the brim, until she can’t take any more. Let her burst with filth. A nuclear blast of life. A Nagasaki of psychological fallout. Urakami bathing in radiation. And rushing of air into the vacuum of… Barbra.
And ding. A girl just like her, like Lucy, reached out, a-sync: “I’ve done it, again.” Barbra wiped her leather chair and set to work.
#
“What do you mean she doesn’t want to. I paid the fucking mortgage last year so we have the money to send her to college,” Lucy’s dad Karl said, only slightly agitated, as he drove his SUV into a parking lot. He was on speaker, as if to include Lucy, who, he hadn’t noticed, had already left his car, mid pull-up, parkour-style.
“Yes, I do remember what her therapist said, *she is her own person*,” he put on a fake high pitch as he said it. “In fact we are there, I will pick her up in an hour.” “Get off your phone and get your ass out there faster, you’re going to be late, Barbra is a fucking saint,” he pulled his window down and shouted in the direction of many teenagers going that way, knowing one of them must have been his daughter. All of them ignored him. Most of them had their AirPods in.
#
Back in their house, a Jack Russell terrier, named Falstaff, was alone in Lucy’s room. He anticipated Thursdays, because these were special days. Days when his duty to his human friend was thrice the normal. Should Lucy come home from therapy sad, he was there to notice it and do something about it. Either join in, and look longingly out the window with her, or intervene when it was too much and do something silly to restart her aching heart – like poop on the bedspread. Or should she come happy, he would rejoice with her, doing a little doggy dance which is mostly ass, no hips. Those days were much rarer, but he had to be ready! You absolutely have no idea which type of Thursday it’s going to be.
Her whole room smelled of the candy perfume. Falstaff knew this smell so well, he wore it, unashamedly. It made him make the cutest “achoo” each time she overapplied it, but he loved those achoos so much! He needed more! Every brush against his owner transferred it, and made the waiting game on Thursdays so much more bearable afterwards. A dog’s job is a serious one – and for a serious job you need serious tools.
Lucy’s parents bought Falstaff when Lucy was only 10. They drove their SUV to a parking lot, Lucy in the backseat, waiting. They disappeared, cash in hand, and returned with it and its papers. (Lucy looked into his eyes the whole way home. Would you believe – both were watery just the same!). Her parents talked about themselves as the bearers of that gift: every kid needs a dog. Every kid… (she could feel his tender little heart, and he could feel her arms, arms he would know and seek for eternity, in all his future lives). It was them who bought it. It is them who gave it to Lucy. (His fur was perfection, as was her hair, which gently tickled the puppy’s nose). It is them who oversee her being good and responsible. Every kid needs… when I was younger my dad… (as Lucy was petting Falstaff, she made the crazy discovery that they both had a spine, how funny his spine felt, just like hers – keeping both of them together. Falstaff knew it too and loved that it did keep them together.) It is them who birthed Lucy in the first place. And it will be them. (Lucy put in her AirPods, “Make You Feel My Love”, Dylan’s song but Adele sang it better). And a collection of them – aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, policemen, the reverend, the artists – who will make her into another one of them. But here, in her room, it was only them.
“The winds of change are blowing wild and free
You ain’t seen nothing like me yet”
The SUV pulled up to the driveway. The song stopped. In a way, the dog was also them, maybe not it, but its appearance, short and funny. They domesticated it. Again, not them literally, but a version of them from the past, a version of Falstaff from the past. Falstaff must have been much fiercer then, but probably it matched how fierce her dad was back then. And now they put that dog in a house, at best a fenced yard.
Woods have no doors. Woods have no fences. It certainly has no windows. But Falstaff was pressed against one now, translucent, damp on the outside, but warm on the inside. Thus now Falstaff, a product of so much, that only a few realised, was waiting for the love of his life, for Lucy.
But who was Lucy?
The Two
Karl’s phone dinged. He ignored it, because he was about to order his drink, and the Starbucks barista was super cute. Her name tag said Zoe. It was just around the corner from the therapist’s office. He didn’t have to drive far to have his guilty pleasure.
“Yes, for Karl. And you can remember that name, with a K!” he rolled a natural one on flirting. Paid for with an eye roll by the master of transforming all creepiness into a joke – a retail worker.
Karl took his drink, sat down, and opened up Slack. Now it was his turn to roll his eyes. His company introduced an AI channel and a bot did stand-ups for them, inferring from previous stand-ups, which were also done by the same AI, just the day before. Karl’s role was to tell the robot if what it said was right or wrong – and the bot’s job was to then rat on him to his supervisors. So this, by virtue of happening on a public channel, meant they were instructed on what to do by a technology that knew what should be happening. They should be making money for their bosses, while believing that they were making a lot, while making a hundred thousand a year, two hundred, three hundred – and that money flowing like a river, against gravity, to other bosses, just down the street, just at the other office. The mortgage was paid for, for the same walls and fences, and panes and roof, and curbs and floodlights, which defined the domain of his family. He overpaid it, he worked his ass off to have these floodlights operational, to have the walls be cold on the outside, and warm on the inside, on his terms. The money flowed to, hmm, Karl thought. The bank?
“/report Fixed context runoff in Claude”, he typed. It was hell to type on a phone. So he pressed that little microphone icon and ended with: “Slash, it was a forward slash,” he said while getting comfortable to drink his coffee. Zoe heard him say that, she didn’t understand him.
He was a programmer’s programmer. At least that’s how his boss used to butter him up. Fiercely intelligent. Used to study physics, then software engineering. He was proud of his ability to tell machines what to do and to tell other people that he could do it better than them, better, probably, than anybody. To tell electricity what to do. And to tell other people that he can tell electricity what to do. Or if there are no other people to impress, you can play for an internal audience. So not only are you an electricity-bender, you are a summoner. It’s a wizard’s job.
At least it used to be.
Karl hadn’t written any code in two years. Now, he conversed. He used non-Turing-complete words. He conversed with a more sophisticated version of that stand-up bot about how to bend that electricity – now it was its job. Connecting these wires. Creating that first battery. Sitting there with Galvani and Volta – thinking of the mystery of the electromagnetic force, rushing it out there to push a muscle, to push a lever, to burn a light off to signify something, to make a screen glow. That gave his company a massive advantage, advantage that would die off because everyone else was doing it. So it wasn’t an advantage, it was an attempt not to die. Still, Karl had way more time thanks to this, because he would lie that AI took more time to do something.
He spent some of that time looking at baristas, and some of that time stealing his company’s AI tokens to… converse some more.
This he typed, this he didn’t dare say out loud:
“Play the role of a good and understanding father, like Andy Griffith was to Opie…”
“You know the song,” – this he deleted, of course it didn’t. Karl wasn’t that far gone.
“Imagine you have a daughter who doesn’t want to go to college, doesn’t want to study. Disappears and does god-knows-what.”
He typed some more, with each response he felt he understood it better. It really did help him. He finally understood that Lucy was her own person, and, while the model didn’t say that, he got a glimpse of the reality that his world is ending, his world of bending this, bending that. For example, the house was paid for. Bending streams of money is done. At least for now. Maybe a vacation house in Florida? His world was ending and Lucy wasn’t a part of the new one. The model didn’t say it. But that goes by implication: “she is her own person.”
Karl was whistling that theme song all the way to his car. Whistling and fingers snapping. That’s how they say bravo in poetry meetings. He now had some ideas on how to talk to his daughter.
The song was cut short, just before Aunt Bee could finish that sweet cherry pie.
His car was gone.
He froze. Was it a repo man, did he forget to send his car payment? Was it stolen? It couldn’t be, it was a Model Y, it would deploy defender drones if someone fucked with its sentry. Karl looked at his Tesla app, and saw that it was his wife’s profile that was supposedly driving his, bank’s, car.
It was speeding away. His wife was speeding away in his car. She had her own car. Did she get suspicious of him disappearing like that? Did she see him flirting with the barista? What flirting, Karl corrected himself and immediately called his wife, Sandra.
“What the hell, Sandra, nice prank, can you please cut it out and let me get to work.”
“What are you on about? No. It’s not me, I swear. Wait, where is my Tesla card. It’s not in my purse, Karl. Maybe it’s… Barbra called and said Lucy didn’t show up. Call her, Karl!”
The car was driving away. The app showed it drive very carefully but steadfastly. It took a minute of watching that map, before Karl speed-dialled his daughter. She had a habit of not answering, but maybe if she was so brazen as to steal the SUV, she had something to say. She didn’t.
Karl froze, his wife still waiting for a three-way empathy theatre, courtesy of Alexander Bell’s most important feature: a conference call. Most importantly she was waiting for a coaxing towards the safe return of the most valuable thing in their lives.
Karl hesitated some more, then ended the call with his wife. His fingers started typing into the textbox which previously made him whistle: “Same daughter. How do you make her return a stolen SUV without alarming the authorities?”
What seemed to be Officer Fife responded:
“Your immediate priority is safety and tracking the vehicles without a high-stress confrontation. Because she is driving safely right now, you have a window of time to use technology to locate her and plan a calm, supportive intervention.
When a teenager or adult child is having a mental health crisis, high-stress text messages or repeated angry phone calls can cause panic, leading to reckless driving. You know your daughter, this chat proves it.
When you catch up to her, or if she returns, approach her calmly. Keep your hands visible, your voice low, and your language entirely focused on her well-being. Use phrases like, I’m here because I care about you, rather than Why did you steal this?”
The pin on the map moved further and further. Sandra picked up Karl, and both were now in pursuit – calm, trauma- and mental-health-aware pursuit – of their daughter, Lucy.
But who was Lucy?
The One
Karl was riding shotgun with Sandra, whose much cheaper Toyota was making good progress on catching up to Karl’s, family’s, Tesla, who had been stolen by Lucy. Sandra asked the only reasonable question:
“What do we do when we get close?”
“I, I don’t know,” said Karl.
“We can’t just pull her out, or block her in traffic – have a scene. Remember, we need to be calm. She might be on something.”
“Karl, she never did drugs…”
“She stole no Teslas either.”
“Do NOT use Remote Stop: Turning off the car while she is driving can cause a crash or trigger extreme panic. Keep the car running.
Avoid calling emergency services if possible: Since she is driving safely and listening to calm music, involving the police runs a high risk of escalation, arrest, or an involuntary psychiatric hold.
Do not block her in: When you find her parked or at a light, do not pull your car sideways to trap her. This triggers a ‘trapped’ fight-or-flight response. Pull up nearby or behind her calmly.”
“So we stay close, but don’t do anything, wait for her to pull over, give her a moment, and just plan our approach?”
“Do you have a better plan? I don’t.”
“She will eventually stop, because the car will run out of battery or she will have to use the restroom. If she has a full battery and is just driving in circles or down a highway, give her 1 to 2 hours. Many BPD emotional storms peak and begin to fade within 60 to 90 minutes. Her brain will get tired from the adrenaline, and she will start to look for a way out of the situation.”
The battery showed 73%, 7% off the recommended 80% for daily driving. Exactly a drop-off at therapy and an ogling of a barista.
“What is BPD?”
“A personality disorder,” Sandra answered.
“Makes sense.”
“Should we call Barbra? She can help us do the ‘approach’, or maybe she can call Lucy.”
“Yes, call her therapist immediately. This is one of the best moves you can make right now.”
“Barbra, this is Karl, yes, yeah. She’s taken the Tesla, stole it from me, now heading god-knows-where, we’re following in Sandra’s car… No, I said I don’t know where… She’s not picking up. What? What’s molly? Oh, will calm down after 90 minutes? Yeah, I won’t startle her.”
Karl paused.
“Listen, Barbra, I know this isn’t your job, but would you mind coming to our place when we go back? Like an intervention? 500 dollars? No, I won’t have you do it for free. I’ll give you a ping when we’re all heading there. I want you to keep us all in check and maybe that’ll be a lesson to Lucy? Yeah, yeah, to all of us. You’re a saint.”
Sandra didn’t listen much to that exchange. She was ambivalent about Barbra. Proof that she had failed as a parent. She listened to all the podcasts, she read so many books. She knew about ADDs, BPDs, APDs, MDDs, ASDs, OCDs, and all the letter-soups, she listened to it all on repeat as she cleaned, cooked, worked. She opened her suburban ears to psychiatrists, psychologists, mediums, priests, educators, grifters, even shamans – Barbra’s teachers – all to get to know Lucy. She educated herself so much, she probably knew more than Barbra. And better than her. Barbra had no kids. Karl told her. And still she had to outsource her parenting like that. That genuinely hurt. How it hurt.
If Sandra were spiteful she’d see Barbra’s reign coming down like this, to this scenario, and she’d smirk. But it didn’t register. She was one with that Toyota. Her central nervous system was beaming life to her muscles. On repeat, electricity, then biochemistry, and back again, until it reaches a goal, that’s how neurons work. That’s how you save or raise a daughter. Like a stream, against gravity. The muscles obeyed, and using the repulsion of electromagnetism applied torque to the wheel, that travelled into the column and into the steering gear, which again translated into electromagnetic hate of sameness causing wheels to turn and pivot her Toyota. She changed lanes.
Was it hate for Barbra? Was it hate for Karl? There was no time to have articulated thoughts. These are too heavy when you have a job to do. To drive. What would Barbra know about it? Had she had to juggle letter-soups with literal soup? What if you mix the two? What if your daughter eats her ADDs and is diagnosed with ABCs? Had she ever had to clean poop while having a session with a client that lasted not 50 minutes, but 18 years? Any serious or comedic thought was decapitated, all energy: on driving, moving against the more and more congested traffic. If you looked from outside, you wouldn’t see Sandra, a thin and tired mother panicking about her daughter, it was Vin Diesel. Who to Sandra was the perfect mother because he was a doer of things, not a thinker of things.
#
About an hour before that, Falstaff was put outside. Sandra anticipated her daughter’s antics could take some time, so she didn’t want to deal with pee in the house. She also thought Falstaff greeting her, should she somehow outmanoeuvre them and get home before them, would calm her down. He would outshine Barbra. No pee, no drama.
Falstaff being out logistically meant the hatch from the doggy-door was off and Lucy’s door was a tad ajar, enough for his paw to decide. This also meant the backyard was closed off by the gate.
Since it was Thursday, and the timeline wasn’t extended too much, Falstaff was on duty. No time for nonsense – it was all about Lucy. Ready for an ass wiggle, ready for a cry. Ready to see and enjoy either her suffering or joy. Nothing should distract the love of his life from giving herself fully to either.
But he noticed something that might.
At first Falstaff thought that it was a telephone repeater sticking out, with those bulkier transmitters. The ones that rotate. This thing sat on top of their neighbour’s roof. Watching. Falstaff thought that was just the sun reflecting off the metal parts. But here, there was no metal. Flesh and bone. But how strange. A bald eagle. A beaked abomination.
It saw Falstaff way before it saw it. Ages ago. It looked at Falstaff fluffing about in his Thursday duties in what felt like previous lives even. It knew Falstaff. Primordially. And what was worse to both, it seemed, at least to Falstaff, that it knew Lucy.
Good thing he was let out – he had two vantage points – in Lucy’s room, almost eye to eye with the beast, and in the yard, lower, but with full manoeuvrability. He could put on a show down there, for the feathered intruder to fear. He ran upstairs to check on it and why it was so devilishly interested in his master’s bedroom, and back to the yard, to just have a go at it, from 12 feet below.
The eagle sat on a branch just outside Lucy’s window. The sausage-shaped lieutenant and his military parade below it, and espionage from within the house, amused it. Once, it meant nothing. Twice, the circles in the grass were funny, like offerings to what the bird could do. Thrice is enough. The barking. The four-legged shit. Yapping below, running, the paws making clickity clack on the stairs, the ruckus, then threats at eye level. From a mammal?
M-m.
When Falstaff was on his madman-in-the-backyard end of the cycle, the eagle looked at it, and gently, like a brown spectre, spread its wings. It felt like every feather spread itself, hydraulically elongated into a threat. Like knives merging into a sword, claws into a leviathan of claws. For a moment it stopped being a bird and became a statue symbol of that assembly. A Roman banner. A long gone Aztec god of terror.
It swooped.
Falstaff couldn’t do anything. Don’t judge Falstaff for this, he weighed only 13 pounds. An Aztec god weighs a galaxy or two. The doggy-door was a life-of-a-little-dog away. Falstaff didn’t hide in the bushes though, he was on Thursday duty!
The thunderbird didn’t move, it was the rest of the surroundings not catching up with it. It didn’t fly, it was the tree branch and earth itself that fell off its grip. In that moment, Falstaff realised this is what he fought against with Lucy every Thursday. Exactly. Come talons, come the end of the Fifth Era. That bird has been, to Falstaff, and to not no one, the reason for her suffering. She knew it. And it’s a hound’s duty to join in his master’s mortality. That’s why he decided: a prey-shake for even just a feather, to not let it. So the brood could see the cost, even if it’s just a laugh, and shame of being 13 pounds.
But his cosmic brood was also a biomass, hydrogen rolled, stretched, and kneaded by endless reorganisation, there, quite real, outside all of poetry. Behind the Aztec god. On the tallest branch, two, three trees down, overseeing Lucy’s room. The whole coop. There would be no laugh at the prey-shake and a feather gone, there would be only hunger.
Still probably the best death a dog of his size could imagine.
But it wasn’t his today.
The sun was setting, its rays parallel to the ground. Hydrogen heating hydrogen, reorganizing. It hit the solar panels Karl installed last summer – hit them just wrong, and a coup against the Aztec religion was started, just so that the Hydrogen-kin, the Beak, confused Falstaff’s cycles. Was he in his room? Who was? Shadow or trick… It chose Lucy’s room. And it chose wrong. Falstaff wasn’t there. Only light was, off the solar panel, off the sun. The eagle struck the pane with such force that it shattered. It fell down. It was alive, but unconscious, a streak of blood highlighted its landing like a runway in reverse.
Whether Falstaff took his revenge no one knew until later. What we do know is that the window shattering caused their neighbour to go into the yard to check on things. He forgot to close the gate. A gate which fenced off everything of Lucy’s.
But who was Lucy?
The None
Vin Diesel was rushing through the streets as fast as he could, while the rest of the gang listened in on their rivals – Karl’s phone and the Tesla app were centre stage, magnetically tied to the dashboard, tracking their runaway daughter.
But as kick-ass as Vin Diesel is, he is no match for afternoon traffic. At least not in a Toyota. Life wasn’t a movie.
They could see the Tesla getting away, going on the interstate, which encircled the city. It would be congested in half an hour. But now the city was. And the interstate was where Musk’s baby shines best – driving forward on autopilot, while the driver is free to think.
While Lucy was speeding away, Sandra and Karl were not.
The fuse between Sandra and her Toyota had to let go. It was all about friction and momentum. Friction there was plenty of, momentum none. Not holding the forces of electrostatic attraction at her command, not having anything to do, Sandra’s bandwidth went to dangerous territory. She wanted to take stock of what happened. Not now, but throughout her life, hers and Karl’s.
But the air can contain only so many particles of thinking, and Karl was oversaturating it.
The de Neuvillette of ideas was in full swing, while Bell’s Cyrano hid in his pocket. Giving advice on BPD, traffic, involuntary psychiatric hold, on lost daughters. Googled, stolen ideas, laundered by going through multi-dimensional coordinate spaces of words. Karl was smart enough to understand it, but he did not. Before Cyrano and Bell it was Rousseau: it was his education, and before that it was just copying his father. Who did he copy it from? How many Frenchmen were there in this Japanese car? The same force who moments ago was fusing Sandra’s central nervous system to the steering wheel and asphalt, and previously to her house, to her vacation planning, to her cooking, poop duty, goodbyes and welcomes, air coming in and out of lungs. That same force had been steering Karl’s lips to first win his profession, win his wife, and now to win control of the situation.
He was the thinker of things. A fair division of labour. Sandra thought so. In her family it was the other way around, or rather, there was no division – her mom both thought and did, while her father just wasn’t there. He was there physically, but that was a hologram, a puppet for her mother. Oh, and she didn’t want to repeat that. She let Karl be his own person, a thinker.
And though his Cyrano sang like a bird, no new thought was uttered. Karl thought he sang with it, but he said as much as Sandra’s podcasts did – it really angered her. Yeah, yeah.
When you can’t drive, or when the stove is off, or the job is off, you get weird thoughts. If Barbra were there, she’d claim ownership of these thoughts. Sandra thought. But they belonged to the podcast, Sandra knew this. Karl thought they belonged to him. Cyrano and its latest, tech-bro, incarnation, as always, is the ugly provider of thoughts, charging Karl to be able to think that it was him, when in fact it was the uggo in the bushes being a cuck, one who dreams of ultimate control. In turn they stole it from podcasters who charged Barbra and Sandra. Barbra could think that because she was charged by these people first, she could charge Karl extra. That extra was because she was a doer, not just a thinker – podcasters and her teachers just revealed a truth which Rousseau said is universal, belongs to no one. Barbra charged $100 an hour, the Apple One for Sandra’s podcasts costs about $120 a year, the AI subscription Karl stole from his work was about $200, a therapy school adds up to $20-30k, but returns that investment in two to three years if you overbook. Both Frenchmen, Rostand and Rousseau, are in the public domain. A used 2015 Toyota Corolla is about $12k.
Sandra was terrified that she had overstepped and did Karl’s job here. She let it go, and had a go at him.
“This is your fault, you’re too controlling!”
Karl looked at his phone, it would be obvious if he prompted right there, so he let his heart respond.
“Possible.”
The traffic was a standing river at this point, no current, high amperage – everyone wanted to get home quickly. They’d get there faster if they walked. But if everyone walked, you’d be stupid not to remain in the car and zip past them. So everyone stayed. They played the same game of chicken every day of the week, every month, every year. It was getting late. The rescue mission grew tired. The golden hour. Cyrano and de Neuvillette were sleeping in the bushes, their mission of getting the girl got the best of them. They had each other, and Sandra had her little suburban reverie:
The Tesla app said Lucy was listening to her usual sentimental playlist on Spotify – hence Sandra knew she was fine. Adele, Billie, Gracie, Lizzy’s “Staying”. Sandra, not being able to be Vin Diesel anymore, became a DJ, and Lucy’s best friend, she played the same songs, and for a brief moment felt the serenity that Lucy must have been feeling, there, free on the interstate, Lizzy crooning:
And you’re fallin’ asleep
How can you look so peaceful
When you know I’m gonna leave?
Sandra, glued to the asphalt by the collective renunciation of Covid freedom of remote work by the many people in their many cars, for a second could, she thought, relate to her daughter. Get away like that, in the setting sun. That music… She’d probably drive to a hillside, smoke a blunt, and think about it all. About college, about her boyfriend. Then drive to some other boy she met. This wasn’t a getaway or a mental health crisis, Sandra thought, it was her coming of age, with the world colluding, them being stuck here, her narrating her mood by songs. It was beautiful. She then would come back. Like many girls do. Then no longer be a child of Sandra, but her friend.
“She will be just fine, Karl.”
Karl knew what she meant.
Hold me until someone sends me a sign
Mm-mm, mm, mm-mm, mm-mm
Many songs cemented them in the belief that their daughter finally spoke to them, not via the phone which never answered, but by her love of music. As did the red sun slowly giving up, peacefully, and wrapping everyone tight in the last part of the day.
Of the many people, the first one to get home already got there, and fired up their suppers. The traffic started moving faster. They also saw on the app Lucy drive around the city, the way the interstate bends around it, following that multi-million dollar marvel of engineering and city planning. They decided that their interpretation of this was that she was going to one of the college towns outside, probably to meet a boy there to tie her future to a romantic interest. They knew she had to break her boyfriend’s heart, because he wasn’t going to college.
How big their surprise was when the car got off the highway, at the other end of the city. She was making a U-turn, a giant one. Karl also saw something peculiar on the phone at that – a cover of Lucy’s playlist changing, now it was a podcast, it said: “Episode 4: Teufelsaustreibung & Mysteriöse Anrufe” – she was listening to a podcast in German. That meant she simply got tired of her own sentimentality! And yeah, about 90 minutes had passed by this point. The crisis was over!
They knew the chase now was a chase to see who gets home first. They had to, to welcome her, and tell her all about how they loved her. Falstaff would be there. Karl had just called Barbra to pick her up on the way. Maybe there would be enough time to get her something to eat? Burger King? They like that in Germany.
The mood in that Toyota was completely changed, all fusing of Sandra, and thinking of Karl, all of that stopped. In this instant their whole worth was tied to getting home before their prodigal daughter pulls up, to offer her that calf as a sign of their lesson being learnt: she was her own person.
They picked up the Burger King, the roads opened up. Barbra joined them, and Sandra, so excited, told her of that lesson, of the traffic, of Lizzy, and what the lyrics meant, and how she now knew that she, and Barbra too, were once like Lucy. And that what happened is a good thing in the end. Barbra got in on the sentiment, and felt that it was all her accomplishment. But that egotism was paired up with genuine concern for Lucy, seeing how proud her parents were of connecting the dots, that she liked German things, and the smell of Burger King filling up the Toyota. She thought that this is what therapy is about. Homecoming. Reconciliation. Families tied together.
As they pulled up to their driveway, they jumped out of the car, not noticing that the fence gate was open, and rushed into the house, to microwave the fries. Tesla was just around the bend. Karl stayed with the fries, and called for Falstaff, who was busy somewhere, but who was supposed to be the main member of the welcome committee. He couldn’t find it. But he knew, as soon as that candy perfume rolls out of his Tesla, Falstaff would teleport or parachute in. Karl didn’t really know Falstaff that well, but he knew he loved her.
Tesla was one mile away, they could almost see it. Karl joined them on the driveway. Rehearsing what he would say, what he learnt. Sandra crying, and holding Barbra by the hand. Their roles as women finally uniting in that one welcome. Floodlights illuminating the whole scene.
They could see it! The lights of the Tesla equalling those of the floodlights, composing right in, highlighting the path towards their daughter’s safe return. The car pulled up. The door opened. Weirdly, that didn’t materialise Falstaff. It wasn’t her in the car.
It was Jacob.
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What happened next was a blur. A frenzy of questions, anger, tears. A frenzy of words. Karl seeing red.
Jacob said Lucy gave him the card and told him where to pick up the car. She needed that of him. To do that round trip, play those songs – hence the playlist. She told him that he should drive for a bit, then out on the interstate, kill time, make a big U-turn, and come back within 2-3 hours. He got bored of it all, he said. And cut it short because the music was really annoying. As he was narrating this, Jacob felt a pang of remorse that he didn’t do exactly what Lucy asked him to. He thought that this is what her family was angry about. To offset that shame he said that Lucy promised him something in return – he was smug about it, and he was there to collect it.
When he thought of them seeing him that way, as a collector of that promise, he felt bigger than anyone on that driveway.
The welcome party was for him, not Lucy.
When that high ran dry, he got terrified of Karl who pressed him against the Tesla and demanded answers. To which Jacob capitulated and showed on his phone texts between him and Lucy in German. Both were terrified of the mess they got themselves in, and Lucy.
The Falstaff Experiment
Almost two hours had passed since Falstaff’s heroic ploy and collusion with the solar panels, but to the eagle, it was seconds.
From an Aztec god to a faux bush of feathers, crash-landed next to a drain pipe. But dignity and her fallen state weren’t on her mind. Neither were the crushed ribcage and the internal bleeding, and the devastating reality that would break even a galaxy-eater. She would never fly again.
But all of that was nothing to her. Maybe things like that couldn’t register at all to a non-mammal. The price: excruciating pain and a ribcage torn to shreds; the goal: get on her back, to fuck up Falstaff with her talons. He sure was coming to finish her off.
The bush moved and became prickly.
The pure will of the eagle registered a capacity, she could trade in agony for action. With that hope her eyes went up, past the antennas and gizmos she had previously perched on. That is where her kids were, waiting for her.
She traded in more blood-soaked agony and stood up. She could barely do it, her ribcage was shattered and her head with its mighty beak drooped to the side. As she hopped, her whole neck flapped like a trout, and dropped to the ground.
That way she made a series of hops, from below Lucy’s window, through the length of the yard, to the tree-trunk which held her children prisoner, way high. Insurmountably high. Each hop was more pathetic than the last. And with each her head smashed against the ground. For each she traded not only agony, but also inborn defensiveness for Falstaff coming to finish her off. He respected that and didn’t. Falstaff was long gone.
The bird then waited by the tree. This was as far as a will can take. But even then, the bird tried several times to jump onto the trunk, and maybe climb it. At first it was a movement of muscles, generating some lift, then it was a sigh, at long last, it was a breath, and a certainty of what’s next.
Will is different from hope: a gaze is more than a life well lived. She pressed her broken torso against the ground, which pinched and shattered what shouldn’t be pinched and shattered, to turn and get the angle just right. She shrieked with pain, but with that she bought it. The prize was won. A clear eye to eye with her children.
She looked at them. And they looked at her.
They looked at her.
They looked at each other.
And looked some more.
They knew what would happen, and here it was. That gaze got intercepted. Crows had been eyeing the younglings since they hatched. What stopped them from devouring them was the majesty of their mother. But now that majesty looked like a garden hose had a run-in with a pillow, all bloodied for good measure. There was no majesty, just a stench of death, which to crows meant life.
The leader of the murder knew a change in cosmology had just happened, in his backyard. He froze. And like the eagle once in the sun, he did now in the darkness, he spread his wings. And his feathers glistened, and assembled themselves into a prince of death. Like razors assembling into a dagger.
But his Catholic-black swoop was cut short.
“What the fuck is that?”
Said the officer who was checking if there was any foul play in the house, after Karl reported the whole thing to the police. The bodycam footage showed an officer’s flashlight catching the streak of blood from Lucy’s window all the way to the tree, where the bird was dying, and the crows were living. To this day people think that was somehow related to Lucy’s disappearance that night.
They called in animal control, who took the eagle to a wildlife clinic, Raptor Sanctuary. If a human had this level of internal damage, they’d employ a fully automated robotic surgeon, but for a bird there were the tender and loving hands of a human, an avian surgeon, who, in a Unitarian fashion, saw all gods as equal and loved them, even Aztec gods of death. Loved them enough to suffer through veterinary school rather than the thrill of overseeing a drone, who in the papers got all the credit for each save it did.
The eaglets were cared for, with a lot of effort not to get an imprint, which is when a parent is mistaken for the one who loves, and a bird thinks it’s something it’s not. To that end, the caretakers use “eagle-puppets” and never speak to the babies, and interact with them only via that proxy. They hide behind mirror and covers in the feeding room, to not reveal who they are. Seeing the reality of their care would render the bird useless.
Both the babies and their mother were released three months later, with some time in between. Then they found each other in the wild again, where the mother taught them how to hunt and kill. Small dogs, possibly.
Crows, knowing no puppet is held up for a scavenger, disappeared into the night.
Context Runoff
A runoff is when hydrogen atoms combined with oxygen reach the soil and wash out all nutrients from it. It’s a polar molecule, it gives life, it washes away life. Similarly, data scientists and AI researchers are, on brand, always stealing things. Terms also.
What was stolen? A guy’s hippocampus got removed in 1953. H.M.’s short-term memory would reset every few minutes. But those are rookie numbers: he got one-upped by Clive Wearing whose anterograde and retrograde amnesia would be constant. 7-second memory, they called it. Imagine not remembering what there was to remember in the first place, or the need to do so.
But that analogy is stupid and shows how squishy human brains are – at best, a deadly virus or a violent brain surgery can hurt them, whereas you can always throw more GPUs at an actual runoff. Or maybe it’s not silly, Karl thought, there is a foolproof logic that all that H.M. needed was a… new hippocampus. That is what his doctors also thought, and all of neuroscience. There was a long wait list to get one, so long, in fact, it had to be jump-started by placing Wearing in front of it. Manufactured demand, you see. That is what Karl did: he ordered an RTX 5090.
There were endless papers written about both gentlemen and other unfortunate zombies, even ones who made it back to human form! But few papers on necromancy itself. Isn’t the demon just an aspect of the summoner’s psyche? His connection to the Immaterium. Where is the Golden Throne? Who eats the eaters?
Since Karl was let go from his job, he could afford neither Warhammer minis nor enterprise-grade GPUs. So he used his savings to run a local model, in hopes that he could outperform data-centres. He knew he wouldn’t do that in terms of raw power, so he decided to use his severance to take time off. He wanted to create his own custom fine-tuning of an open-source model and host his own chatbot with context orchestration and model pruning for irrelevant data.
Shakespeare-out-Rilke-in, type of thing. Spotify playlists, text transcripts, phone records, surveillance cameras, psychology books, and all the podcasts, all of them.
Sandra gave him space to do that, massive amounts of space. He was free to do it. And boy, did he do it.
Every day he would wake up already knowing how to tweak it, that came to him during sleep, between sessions. After a breakfast which was just coffee he would go to his den and check on the results of the overnight test that Claude ran on his own model’s output. They say never to let AI train AI, but what worse could happen that hasn’t already happened?
Karl thought this would be a start-up idea should it run. Or even a billion-dollar idea if it doesn’t.
Data-centre-AI would pinpoint where Karl went wrong, at which point, using text analysis, the context he needed to stay there had gone away completely or started degenerating. There were confidence scores, inferential statistics, inference scaling, coffee, tears, pauses, and then more work.
Breakfast to noon was implementing fixes to this overnight snitching of corporate vs private. With each iteration, private getting closer and closer to beyond-science capabilities of local models to retain context endlessly. Why local?
Privacy. No one should listen in on this.
what is the most touching poem of rilke that can be interpreted to be about a missing or rebellious teenage girl?
why would people self-describe as involuntary celibate?
what statistically is likely to happen to a small dog if it runs away?
why would a small dog run away?
would a dog whose owner is gone learn to love other people?
does that depend on the breed?
Thank you, that Rilke passage is beautiful, can the themes in his poetry link to the story in the .md file?
You are a therapist
Trauma-informed therapist
Claude, how can I make my local model keep .md files attached to each prompt?
BPD.
Interpret Child in Red in the light of all those .md files, but keep in mind the focus on how to deal with this
What would happen to a
Does that make me
Assuming this is someone else
Each afternoon, after automated self-calibration, Karl would sit down and engage with his offspring like this. Day after day, night after night.
The Infinite
The overnight tests were running longer, it was 6 am. Karl was tired of looking at quirky messages on Claude’s console, gaslighting him. He stood up from his computer, left his den, and went to the living room.
“He’d be dead in any other time period. Why don’t they just let Mr Wearing die?”
There he reached for his phone and considered calling Barbra. But didn’t. He was distracted by Sandra leaving the house, probably to drive his other two daughters to school.
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