How to Destroy the World in Seven Days (Christmas; Cosmic Horror; CS Lewis esque)

[Arakawa]

How to Destroy the World in Seven Days

a Carol and Offering for the sake of Christmas in the Twenty-First Century

by Seijio Arakawa and Marie Gauthier

Their gods are dead out of the land,
Their lore subsumed by peat and sand,
Their hearths and homes barren of prayer
As from her throne the Great Despair
Sends forth a fume to choke the very air....

---

In the last days of 2012, at the final stroke of the old Mayan calendar, a group of technological dreamers have initiated a dangerous and deceptive plan to steal the 'cheat codes' for the psychic evolution of humanity and remake the world-consciousness according to their desires.

As the main obstacle in their path, Fate has placed a rag-tag coincidence of elves, ghosts, and lost-property magicians who aren't entirely sure what is going on and are mostly worried about making sure their Christmas holiday plans go without a hitch....

Click to shrink...

Note from the scribe: This is an experimental fantasy story which I might have gladly continued to draft and polish in obscurity for quite some time yet. However, because of the grim tendency of the present time, it seemed prudent to begin to post what little I have by way of counter-ritual against the machinations of Ulterior Powers that have become more evident and alarming at the solstice time. For those who choose to join me on this journey, welcome! Your help and support is appreciated. Although pacing, update schedule and susceptibility to rewrites remain unknown, I hope I can somehow deliver to you a story that is fascinating, horrific, and uplifting in equal measure.

Slight content warning: this story will attempt to treat heavy subjects of death and cosmic despair in a tasteful manner, as encouraged by the forum rules. I don't believe it requires a Mature tag but after posting the first few chapters I realized that a warning would be helpful regardless.

 

[Arakawa]

Part I - Simon and Forbis

1. "How to Destroy the World in Seven Days" was the title on the binder placed upon the desk of Mr. Albrecht Menzies late on the morning of December 21st the year Two Thousand and Twelve of Our Lord and the final day of the traditional Mayan Calendar. The immediate and long-term futures alike were an unexplored space – Terra Incognita. But Albrecht Menzies was an explorer of spaces, and an industrialist of industrialists, a man of the same spiritual breed as Henry Ford and Walter Disney. He held firmly to the belief that to invent the future would be an excellent method to avoid the hassle of having to anticipate and prepare for it. Albrecht Menzies, it must be said, was the last remaining man of such firm belief who held any true power in the continent of North America, the last smiling and benevolent übermensch – by now, all such others were sullen unimaginative financialists and fearful reactive warlords. Menzies was growing old, and remained well-aware of the burden on his lone shoulders. His guidance and authority were still sought-after by numerous captains of industry, men of far lesser stature albeit possessed of similar enthusiasms. Well-known CEOs and thought leaders of the Bay Area numbered among his clients and vassals. Together, they intended to lay the foundations of a new millennium completely unlike the previous one, a millennium in which humanity would transcend the stars, cure death, create benevolent superintelligent machine-gods capable of enforcing universal peace and prosperity; and, of course, humanity was going to accomplish these lofty feats while commuting to work in driverless electric cars paid-for by decentralized cryptographic currency.

Yet before such visions could be accomplished… the contents of the binder, and of the letter attached to it, posed an immediate and serious obstacle that Albrecht Menzies was going to have to overcome.

The ill-omened binder's covers were wrapped in unassuming, tattered blue plastic. The pages within were assembled out of scribblings on eclectic scrap-paper: sheets torn from a college-ruled notebook, rest-stop receipts, single-sided printouts…. Menzies' psychometrician had already gone over the contents and concluded from the object-memories that the author was an insane sorceror fleeing for his life from foes real or imaginary. The work had been penned in a succession of seedy diners and inexpensive out-of-the-way motels. Writing under the assumed name of 'Mr. Sykes', the author detailed a step-by-step plan to obliterate the majority of the human population of the Earth by employing occult and supernatural means to precipitate key decision-makers down the path of sudden and immediate nuclear warfare. It was no longer the 20th century, of course, but if enough of the wrong people happened to make the wrong choices, humanity could still destroy itself very swiftly indeed. They had the technology. Alas, they still had the technology.

The binder itself, not to mention the letter attached to it, were an immediate affront to Menzies and everything he had been working for. This Mr. Sykes would need to be taught a lesson. Not to mention that the arts of subtle influence hinted at within the binder were, in their own way, a tantalizing form of power. Perhaps they could be turned aside from their deadly aim, and adapted to serve the cause of Progress?

Fortunately, the necessary resources were not difficult to obtain for a man of Menzies' stature. He summoned an administrative assistant.

"Gather the boys," he commanded, "immediately. This is a tricky and time-sensitive situation. And we're going to need consultation from a high-level magician. Zebulon's people won't do for this… who else can we call in at this time of the year? No matter! Just fetch me the best magician in North America. Whoever that is!"

 

[Arakawa]

2. The 'best magician in North America', according to one definition of the term, lived in New York under the name of Drake Powell and was presently on the (L) train of the New York City Subway on her way back from an unsuccessful money-making side hustle.

Although a thorough scientific analysis might reveal that Powell had several times the normal number of chromosomes, biologically speaking she was otherwise indistinguishable from an ordinary fifteen-to-seventeen-year-old human female of unassuming stature. She had short sandy hair that was perpetually messy, and she wore a white collared shirt and a drab buff-colored knee-length skirt that did not reveal too much personality or attract too much attention. The only immediately incongruous thing about Powell's appearance was that the leather long-coat hanging from her shoulders was much too big and awkward on her small frame, but the thing was climate-controlled and had many useful pockets. So to Powell's mind, these advantages far outweighed the awkwardness of the garment's size.

Rather than a portent of inexperience, the young appearance should be taken as a sign of Powell's attainment of mysteries unknown even to many a deep magician. The immortality that Menzies and company hazily anticipated in their more optimistic projections was already a day-to-day reality for Powell, as tangible and mundane as bread and meat. Living in New York as an immortal did not change much – Powell could not fly, took care to prevent herself from mutating into a form of transcendent beauty, and kept her diet vaguely within the bounds of something that would sustain an ordinary mortal. The maddening problems and imperfections of life on Earth only gained intensity from the fact that Powell could not look forward to being taken away from them after a mercifully brief tour of mortal duty. Death was simply not an issue. Her day job was. How fortunate it is that the magician has thrived on maddening intensity even long before she'd gained immortality.

Powell had plenty of cause to reflect on such ideas as she rode the subway. The first subway-car she'd boarded was a mess, with a vast puddle of liquid spilled on the floor, which liquid she hoped to God was just soda. She yelped – being a fifteen-year-old girl did little to reduce one's squeamishness – and skirted the edges of the puddle as she went to cross over into the next car1​.

(*1) It is important to note that walking between MTA subway cars is dangerous and illegal, and therefore a longstanding New York tradition.

The second subway-car was quite clean. However, as the gangway door slid shut behind her, Powell observed a tall and alarming man occupying the bench to her left, together with several pieces of cumbersome luggage that appeared to contain all of the man's worldly possessions. The man was agitated by Powell's sudden appearance and expressed his displeasure with a series of growling and barking noises.

Powell was relatively unfazed by this: whereas spills on the subway floor were an unpleasant and unusual surprise, as far as people went, you met all sorts. She took up a position some distance from the man and watched with furtive interest as he slowly and deliberately gathered his multiple pieces of heavy luggage and then realized he was missing his stop.

The doors had closed and the train was already starting to move, so when he heaved his luggage toward the doors and pried them back open by main force, causing the train to screech to a halt partway into the tunnel, the man was not able to exit. He let go of the door and gave a series of frustrated, inarticulate yips and howls.

He disembarked at the next station, luggage in hand, with an air of supreme defeat.

Powell touched her fingers to her lips in thought, and then blew a silent kiss at the man's departing back, her face assuming a carefully calculated and practiced mischievous and caring expression. This was not complicated magic: Powell's expression plucked a harp-string located in some innermost sanctum of the universe; the string resonated with other strings to produce a little tune; the harmony of that tune, that the man himself could not hear, nevertheless wove for him a spell of Ironic Good Fortune. It was year-end time, so a stroke of good fortune now would reverberate through the man's life in the entire following year.

It was certainly handy to be a deep and subtle magician who could help someone in an instant like this, without having to handle quantities of money or to engage in glum conversations or to draw up an Almanack of star-charts encoding the exact details of the Ironic Good Fortune suitable to befall a man who spoke Dog and missed his subway stop. Powell was still in the early stages of her thaumaturgical project to allow the mute to speak, but in the meantime she could at least manage this level of miracle. The gist of what the man had been complaining about was plain enough in any case.

December 21st was the last day before the Christmas season and a good time for reflection on the past year. Powell reflected that she had more than a few things to be grateful for in this particular year. She'd started 2012 alone, but for the first time in a while she found herself ending it with followers and subordinates – a Christmas Elf who had more than the usual amount of sense and a human apprentice who was capable enough to assist Powell's work at the MTA Lost Property Office. Powell's responsibilities to the Lost Property Office had started as a small and simple temporary gig, but had decades ago snowballed to a scale of operation that would shock the most pessimistic imaginings of its original founders. People who came to New York usually lost a lot of things, both literally and metaphorically speaking. Powell's share of the workload had been getting too much to handle alone, even with the most sophisticated in work-avoidance technology.

To have a Christmas Elf around was a somewhat mixed blessing, but to have an apprentice is very near to the innermost desire of any serious magician. Anyone who succeeds in the study of Magic thinking to keep the resulting knowledge and power to himself will find that the universe has played a cruel joke on him. Knowledge of Magic is not as valuable as some reckon it, but produces a crushing loneliness. To pass on one's secrets before death becomes an overwhelming desire and, unacknowledged, can lead to great folly and severe loss of dignity from working with unsuitable students. Of course, death was no longer an issue for Powell. But loneliness had been.

Powell was not the sort of fool who nursed a desire unacknowledged, but to act on it was another matter. Powell's knowledge was as unimaginable to ordinary magicians as the knowledge of most magicians is unimaginable to ordinary men. Suitable students were rarer than gold and very hard to find. The disappointments of past decades had left Powell almost entirely unwilling to take the risk of trying again. Almost had Powell concluded that to know so much Magic was a sin and to remain unable to teach it the well-deserved punishment for that sin.

To happen across someone who could change her mind was a minor miracle in itself, and so the past year was well-worthy of gratitude.

So she reflected as she walked from 14th Street where the (L) train stopped to Pennsylvania Station where the Lost Property Office was located. The weather was solemn and clear and suitable for reflection, and Powell's climate-controlled long-coat was more than adequate to handle the cold.

Powell was a pathological introvert2​ although long-skilled at hiding this fact – for a performer who plays the crowd is not remotely the same thing as an extrovert who swims in it – yet even Powell was finding herself looking forward to the sociability of a workplace Christmas Dinner organized by her fellows, instead of dreading the usual demands of a social observance rife with canned small-talk and quasi-sincere holiday cheer.

(*2) The accuracy of the term 'pathological introvert' may be disputed from the standpoint of immortal psychology. There is reason to suspect that immortality exacerbates introversion simply because the immortal mind unconsciously resists participation in the myriad subtle crab-bucket social routines by which mortal people drag each other back down into the fallen state. At the same time, immortality does not destroy previously existing constructive habits of sociability. The psychological tension between these two opposing forces is not easy to resolve.

Then, halfway up the avenue, someone had the audacity to throw a major working of Compulsion at her. Powell blinked indignantly – it was strong but very clumsy – and used a wordless Disputation to throw it into visible form. In the corner of her eye, an apparition that looked and sounded approximately like two laughing children came into view, running at her with a scarf between them held loosely at each end. Very simple stuff. If she was caught between the not-children, the not-scarf would snag her and carry her off to some other place. Or she could step to one side and the working would be broken. On balance, it was probably wise to nip nonsense like this in the bud, lest Powell's time be regularly wasted by anyone who had the raw power and access to reagents that could force an involuntary summoning, yet who was also foolish enough to specify vague open-ended targets such as 'the best magician in New York'. Powell remained unsure whether the summoning-framework actually made an objective assessment for such requests, or if it was merely playing a double joke on the summoner's gullibility and Powell's healthy levels of self-esteem.

Of course, allowing the summoning to take her meant that Powell would be missing Christmas Dinner at the Lost Property Office. But there was gratitude on the one hand, and on the other hand there were the wearisome duties of a deep magician.

 

[Arakawa]

3. Christmas Dinner at the Lost Property Office had taken an uphill battle for us to arrange. Of the employees belonging to the MTA's Lost Property Unit, only Mu Forbis absolutely insisted on it. Powell was non-committal up to the last minute. Mr. Jones and Mr. Adiz – or was it Adis? I'd never got around to looking him up and it was awkward to ask directly – they both complained of having stayed more than their share of late nights for that year. Mr. Desmond just stared and asked flatly 'who gave you the authority?'

Then again, I always had a hard time saying no to Forbis, Powell finally acknowledged our interest by somehow bribing or sweet-talking Mr. Adis and Mr. Jones into helping with the preparations, and Mr. Desmond was going to be away for that entire day. He was busy arguing at some MTA subcommittee or other – one of his colleagues was launching a bureaucratic coup and Mr. Desmond was having none of that. So he was not going to be there on Friday evening to disapprove of us.

The decorations for the dinner were top-notch and certainly excessive for a workplace. That was largely the fault of Mu Forbis. We didn't have a tree, but Forbis had stuck ornamented fir branches into every nook and cranny, rendering the edges of the sorting-room into a decorative poking-hazard. A plethora of blinken-lights had been rigged to flash and change colours in coordinated and mesmerizing patterns. A dusting of fake snow on the desks sufficed to complete the transformation of the Lost Property Office into a compact fairy-tale wood. This may be a stereotyped observation, but Christmas-Elves are naturally driven to work hard even at ordinary times, and so it goes without saying that they go completely overboard for Christmas.

"Mr. Adis, how about trying this one?"

The deck was overflowing with food that Forbis had assembled with a limited supply of portable cooking-equipment and a very small amount of help from us. We were able to chop, stir, and stare at pots to prevent them from boiling too much, but Forbis was the chef and mastermind. Cooking and eating blended together into an ongoing ritual and excessive amounts of leftovers for the weekend were the plan, not a problem, since a battallion of tupperware containers stood at the ready to one side of the room. The result was an eclectic modest meal of dishes that would startle even an upscale restaurant reviewer inured to novelty. The menu for the evening centred around a large slow-cooker incubating a more subdued edition of Forbis' normally-fiery jambalaya, with sides of chips and cool cucumber-and-tomato dip, homebrewed root-beer made from Forbis' quasi-illegal stash of sassafras1​, and various combinations and concoctions more maddening yet.

(*1) Much like raw milk, sassafras is not illegal per se, but it is (mostly) illegal to use in root-beer.

Forbis had just scurried back with a 'traditional' English mince-pie, which she'd baked in the laboratory-oven Powell normally used for alchemical reagents. Biting into the pie, we found it full of decidedly fierce and untraditional southern spices that a miracle of cookery had tamed into something merely warm and comforting.

"So, is the alchemy oven non-negotiable, or can like an ordinary mortal make this?" Mr Adis asked dubiously. He'd assumed this event would be a regular half-effort office potluck and contributed a store-bought package of gingerbread cookies.

"Secret family recipe! I've got big culinary ambitions for the holidays, so I'm hoping to find more people to cook for."

Personally, I figured the pie to contain a direct expression of Forbis' own temperament, seeing how the ability to employ elf-cunning gave her culinary options that would be unpalatable in the hands of a human.

Christmas-Elves are tenacious and stubborn in their nasty summer moods, and tend to use these qualities for personal gain, but during the winter these same qualities are turned towards the merciless spreading of Christmas Cheer. Forbis' four-foot-and-not-much stature became an imposing, hard-to-ignore presence around this time of year.

It didn't help that Forbis' outfit was today even finer than usual. Her attire was already smart enough on normal days. It always reminded me of an upscale department-store-clerk's uniform with its woven vest and fine materials. Today's vest had embroidered Christmas Trees and reindeer and one might normally expect such motifs to feel homey, but in actual fact these were the kind of parade-ground reindeer you would bring out to welcome the President. During the past couple of weeks, as you walked around the Lost Property Office you might suddenly see Forbis' face pop out suddenly around a corner or across the table from you and her keen slanted eyes would give you a long, considering, somewhat insolent look. Then Forbis would scurry off excitedly without any comment, as though she'd just had a completely new idea about how to cheer you up over Christmas. In case you were wondering, indeed, she was doing this to everyone at the office and it was vaguely disconcerting according to human standards of behaviour.

Of course, Forbis' declaration of 'big plans' triggered Standard Workplace Conversation #47 – 'What Are Your Plans For The Holidays?'

It was already known to all concerned that I had a plane ticket home on the following day. Wrangled by Powell's occult arts on an extremely busy travel date, it had a seat number and everything, a great reassurance in the modern era of overbooking. The ticket witnessed to the fact that, although it was more-than-a-full-time job being Powell's apprentice, my parents and sister in Ontario were at least in theory entitled to have me back for a few days around Christmas.

Mr. Jones had a family at home. The usual Christmas stuff would be happening. Mr. Jones did not like to argue metaphysics and he answered evasively when asked where his children stood on the Santa Question.

Mr. Adis (or was it Adiz?) had a TV and a group of roommates who would be taking a well-deserved reprieve from their usual heck of ill-advised romantic dalliances and questionable business ventures. As someone who had lucked into a steady, unionized line of work, Mr. Adis had taken on a sort of 'breadwinner' role among his circle of friends, providing them not so much with a steady supply of money – although requests for a financial bailout came often enough – but instead with a steady supply of grounded sanity. Christmas was going to be pleasant enough, but Mr. Adis had a peculiar dread of Boxing Day.

"Know why they call it 'Boxing Day'?" he confided darkly. "'Cause that's when people are getting into fights at the mall. Hope no one comes home with a black eye. Well, but that's worrying for after Christmas. You got anyone to spend Christmas with, Forbis?"

"Well…" Forbis said, looking in my direction with sudden concern.

The question hadn't derailed her Christmas Cheer, exactly, but it did cause her to put on the metaphorical brakes a little. Mr. Adis was not privy to the full details of Mu Forbis' situation, but I knew a little. Forbis was currently estranged from her family. There was some kind of ongoing feud about a botched Birth-Prophecy and going back home for Christmas was out of the question. I might gladly have kept her company – but I was going back to Canada. That left Powell – and I realized with a sinking feeling that this default option of leaving Powell and Forbis alone together at the Lost Property Office over the Christmas holidays would be a bold experiment, to put it mildly. Powell and Forbis had an odd and antithetical working relationship at the best of times, and I was painfully aware of the extent to which my presence acted as a moderating influence that kept things from spiralling into outright enmity. Before my arrival on the scene, Powell had been an outright bully and Forbis had been extremely passive-aggressive. Although they'd grown used to each other since then, I could hardly see them enjoying each other's company even now.

Mr. Adis seemed to have a similar intuition, or perhaps he was just a kind and naïve person, for he said:

"If you've got nothing better to do, you're always welcome to crash at our place. It's a dump but we'll get it cleaned up for you. If we spend Christmas with a first-rate Christmas expert like you, maybe we could figure out how to have a normal Boxing Day too."

Forbis clapped her hands and her eyes very nearly sparkled with delight:

"That's… thank you, Mr. Adis! I'll definitely consider your invitation! Don't worry about your place, I stayed in a subway-tunnel over the summer – I know how to have a good time even in an unearthly dump."

Since that situation seemed well-in-hand, I turned my mind back to my own worries. In-between bites of jambalaya and salad, I took out my flip phone and speed-dialled 2 for the nth time that evening. For the nth time that evening, it went directly to voicemail. That was worrying. After the easily-avoidable debacle that had been the affair of the Stone Guest, Powell and I had prevailed on each other to take a reluctant step into the 21st century and carry rudimentary cell-phones. I also thought I'd prevailed on Powell to keep hers active and on her person. If Powell's phone was unavailable, it followed that she was somewhere trapped in a Faraday cage – or at the bottom of the ocean – or kidnapped to the moons of Jupiter – or that she'd violated the clear letter of our agreement. All of these possibilities were concerning.

"Worrying about Powell?" Mr. Jones asked with concern. "You know, she's lucky to have an apprentice like you, someone who worries where she is. I've worked with her for a while and I could tell her whole 'I'm beyond the constraints of the Earth' thing was starting to get to her."

I hmphed in irritated agreement.

"But you should know by now," he added in a more critical tone, "Powell is going to come and go and she's going to take care of herself. We can't tell her what to do and worrying about her the way you'd worry about an ordinary person is going to wear you out… you know, you really need to take a break once in a while from being her apprentice, Simon. Save some time and energy to take care of yourself. Or else you're really not going to be any help to her, if that's what you're worried about."

Well, that's as may be, but Mr. Jones was misjudging my motives. I was worried about myself. In effect, if not necessarily in conscious design, Powell's entire teaching method revolved around throwing me into unpleasant situations when I was least prepared for them. A last-minute curveball on the verge of the Christmas holiday would fit neatly into that pattern, a pattern that had become so clear to me that I was half-suspecting and already even half-resigned to the idea that Powell's triumphant procurement of my plane ticket was just an alibi to cover her true plans.

Of course, these were thoughts in the privacy of my own mind. What I told Mr. Jones was:

"Thanks. I needed to hear that. I should learn to trust Powell."

I didn't like to speak in long sentences on account of my harsh and noticeable speech impediment. Because of that, complex observations that originated in my mind usually stayed in my mind, unless I resorted to the media of writing, diagrams, or sign-language.

"Trust her? What? No no no no," Mr. Jones replied. "You're getting me wrong. I don't mean trust her, necessarily. I just mean keep in mind that she's always taken care of herself and people around her just fine. That's a very different idea. Just… relax. What you need right now is you need to relax. Look at Forbis. I hear she deals with a lot heavier stuff than you do, and she still manages to set aside a few days just to have a blast."

I couldn't argue with the fact that I had things very lucky in comparison to Forbis, even though… well, no, his logic was just plain unassailable. Forbis indeed looked genuinely happy for once, even though she was merely having a lighthearted and superficial small-talk conversation with Mr. Adis.

I sighed, and went to pour myself some of the dubiously legal root-beer as Forbis turned to announce the next stage of her plan: Presents.

"After Presents, we'll do the Eggnog," she announced in the tones of a political candidate giving a stump-speech, "with or without Powell! We can do one evening without Powell! We deserve a break from Powell! Then, after Eggnog, we can collect the leftovers and take them home in good conscience of celebrating this, our Lost Property Office Christmas, to the due and proper extent and with gentlemanly good cheer! Huzzah!"

The stump-speech met with favourable-but-mixed reactions. Mr. Jones and Mr. Adiz clearly enjoyed the bombast, but they were caught off-guard by the mention of Presents. This may be chalked up as a cultural misunderstanding. On the one hand, Mr. Jones and Mr. Adiz had not been told about Presents and had not thought to bring any. On the other hand, a Christmas-Elf such as Forbis would consider such traditions too obvious to mention ahead-of-time, or something that must be kept a surprise – hard to say! For my part, I had prepared for the possibility of Presents, but I thought Forbis' speech was jinxing it somewhat by invoking the spectre of a 'Lost Property Office Christmas, to the due and proper extent', for I kept in mind how we had tended to make a cataclysmic epic out of prior mundane life-occurrences. If we chose to take that route, the due and proper extent of a Lost Property Office Christmas would not be ending with Forbis' cozy party.

The awkwardness was quickly dispelled as Forbis was far more concerned with the giving rather than with the receiving.

To Mr. Adis and Mr. Jones she gave matching hats and scarves monogrammed 'LPU' in festive colours, and further such things for Mr. Jones' family. That may seem trite, but Forbis had knitted these clothes in short snatches of time over the past few months and imbued them with a virtue to keep the wearer warm 'all the way home' – or all the way to the South Pole, I suspected.

I received a hat and scarf of my own as well, and Forbis put on a set she had made for herself, and we all endured a group photo in matching winter-things. I gave Forbis my counter-present: a small but stylish secondhand laptop together with a printed and book-bound manual for the Nodebox computer-generated graphics package. I figured it would be accessible to a beginner of considerable intellect such as Forbis was, and might make an amusing diversion in addition to being potentially useful for planning out designs and patterns for future craftworks. Forbis accepted the gift with nervous gratitude and a pledge to pester me regularly for instruction in Python.

Then it was time for Eggnog, still without Powell.

"Oh drat!" exclaimed Forbis after glancing at a recipe-card. "I forgot all about Powell's stupid sunchokes! She was insisting on them!"

This raised many questions. For one thing, what sort of Eggnog recipe used sunchokes?

"What the — are sunchokes, even?" supplied Mr. Adis.

And finally, if Powell wasn't here, why couldn't we just spare the bother and make ordinary non-alcoholic Eggnog from a recipe comprehensible by mere mortals?

"Oh, I know what sunchokes are," said Forbis, "they're little snobby potato-things that grow on riverbanks. We can buy some at Whole Paycheck down the street. Right now, even. Now, I know that we could make ordinary Eggnog, but if I don't make it like Powell asked then she might feel vindicated to not have come here and I don't want to give her the satisfaction. Not that I care to spend Christmas with Powell!" she blustered. "But you'd think she'd at least deign to drop by for her apprentice's sake."

I shrugged. Mr. Jones' view of things had been much more persuasive than that.

"That reminds me…" Forbis added, more brightly. "Speaking of things you can't get at Whole Paycheck, there's one other Present I wanted to give you, Simon!"

She scurried off to her Present-Hiding spot and returned with two things in glass bulbs.

"One for you and one for me and zero for Powell! I mean, I'm getting her something else, but she'll never have these!"

Laughing, Forbis stuck out her tongue at the wall.

I looked at the additional present dubiously. It was a small, adorable plant pot with a bit of soil in it and a stick sticking out. A tiny green vine wound about the stick, and a single shrivelled pod clung to the end of the vine. It was evilly curled and of a strange, alarming colour, sort of fluorescent taupe. The whole thing was protected by a glass bulb and a Christmas bow was stuck to the top of the bulb.

Forbis explained:

"Daredevils who seek a truly hot taste have pushed the Scoville scale beyond its limits and cultivated countless varieties… the well-known Ghost Pepper… the fiery Dragon's Breath… the dependable Common Hades… the innovative and intimidating Trinidad Meruga Butch Scorpion! But none of these hold a candle to the long-acclaimed mythical allure of this, the rare and unattainable True Gates of Hades Pepper!

"Rumored to reform criminals and cure the innocent of their ailments…. Legend has it that the one who experiences this pepper undiluted would be overcome to the point of having a near-death experience and appearing before the Judges of the underworld! It is whispered that the heavenly aroma from cooking a True Gates of Hades Pepper can wake the comatose and recently dead! We can make gallons of delicious hot sauce from just one of these things!"

She rubbed her hands with glee at the prospect.

"You have no idea what dastardly deeds I had to perform to get my hands on two True Hades Peppers!"

The trouble was, she may well have been serious about that last part.

As exciting as it was to contemplate my gustatory system being traumatized by new and exciting flavours, I was still worried about Powell. After solemnly receiving the Hades Pepper into my keeping according to the laws of Present-Giving, until such time as I required Forbis to cook me a 'mind-blowing feast' from it, I absent-mindedly took out my phone again and hit the speed dial.

I am (almost) certain I did not mean anything by taking out the phone again, it was just a routine by this point in the evening. Still, there were consequences to such careless non-decision. I was startled when, instead of hearing the far-off nattering of a voicemail box, the phone in my hand emitted a faint dial-tone.

I raised the phone to my ear. Forbis, also, perked her ears with reluctant interest.

The dial tone gave way to voices, but Powell wasn't answering me. Instead, Powell's voice was making exasperated arguments, and the arguments were being parried by a deep and lordly voice elsewhere in the room. It sounded like the type of conversation I was meant to have no part in, only to overhear.

Then I became unhappy enough with what I was hearing that I hastily located the options for 'mute microphone' and 'speaker' and held the phone forth for everyone to hear.

"… well, I'm sorry to have inconvenienced your impromptu Cabal of Evil, but it would just be as inconsiderate of me to let go of such a grievous misuse of the summoning-leys," Powell was saying. "You know, it's inconsiderate to the next person you take into your head to summon this way, and doubly inconsiderate to anyone who imitates your 'best practice' involuntary summoning with sloppy safety-preparations. You do know this entire summoning-framework you are using was developed by demons and grants many subtle advantages to the summoned being?"

"That may be," the lordly-but-irritated voice insisted, "but we have reason to expect your cooperation in this matter, and we cannot consider the conversation to be proceeding reasonably until you have also ceased from your shenanigans with the phone."

Mr. Jones whispered: "I'm out of here. I just heard 'Cabal of Evil' in that. I don't want any of that secret-society stuff. Forbis, thanks for all the treats and warm things! Merry Christmas!"

"Hold up, we can just move to another room," sighed Forbis, hastily grabbing her mug and a handful of the cookies provided by Mr. Adis. "This could be important information for my job. You can stay here if you want, we'll just take a few minutes to figure out who the pompous joker is and be right back."

We moved to sit down in a separate room amidst lost-property clutter, and Forbis took out her notebook and pencil. In the meantime, Powell continued to rail against the invisible audience on the other side of the phone:

"You people really have no holiday tasks to occupy your time today? No Prayer? No Christmas Cards? No acquisition of Presents? No Eggnog?"

"There are more important concerns for us than celebrating Christmas…" resumed the lordly voice.

 

[Arakawa]

4. "There are more important concerns for us than celebrating Christmas," resumed the lordly voice of Albrecht Menzies. "And let no one accuse us of being Scrooge or asserting a Humbug. We are busy working for the benefit of all Humanity. Or, in the matter before us, for its protection. Let's not play any more games."

Normally he would have been affable as well as lordly, but they had limited time to get to the bottom of the affair and Powell seemed inclined to waste that time something fierce. With considerable force, Menzies slid the ill-omened blue binder across the table at Powell, who eyed the title dubiously.

"'How to Destroy the World in Seven Days,'" she read aloud for the benefit of the phone, which was open and transmitting in defiance of Menzies' prior protestations. The other Important Men of the 'Cabal' were giving the phone dirty glares – their own phones had been voluntarily surrendered prior to entering the proceedings.

"This document was sent our way in a craven attempt at blackmail," Menzies explained, "by an individual under the alias of 'Mr. Sykes'. You'll notice the photocopy of the letter attached to it. Before you decided to jerk us around with buckets, barriers, and Mesmerism, we had issued an invitation to bargain for your expertise and help to assess the scale of this threat."

Powell scoffed at the word 'invitation' and took out a spirit-glass through which to squint at the letter.

"Half of this is redacted," she complained.

"Unfortunately, the exact blackmail demands are of a sensitive nature. They are immaterial to the actual threat."

"All right," said Powell, "then let me ask a more fundamental question. What exactly makes it my problem that someone is blackmailing you?"

"Our willingness to pay $1,600/hr for an honest consultation. And it may well be your problem in the first place, as it's likely the contents of the binder were derived from your old research at Princeton. I've been informed that you appear to have dabbled with manipulations of world affairs yourself."

As payback for that insinuation, Powell mentally estimated the combined market capitalization represented by the room's various occupants and indulged a brief fantasy of twisting their arms by haggling for an estimated 30% fraction of Mr. Sykes' blackmail demand. That said, Powell was convinced from past experiences that such did not pay. For one thing, a princely remuneration would make her feel obliged to deal with the blackmailer properly, putting further unpleasant chores between herself and Christmas.

She put away the spirit-glass and read through the letter properly. Apparently, Mr. Sykes was in a desperate situation, and if his unknown demands were not satisfied by the august gentlemen assembled at the table, he would find himself with nothing to lose and a considerable resolve to employ the plan to destroy the entire world within the next week or so.

"Am I to understand," she asked, "that you're trying to decide whether this person is just a loony, or is he dangerous enough to consider paying the ransom?"

"We have no plans to knuckle under to him," Menzies replied. "One way or the other, we have ample resources to deal with this situation. What we require is information on the nature of the threat that we are up against."

"$4,096.00/hr," Powell sighed. "Owing to the concentration of computer guys in this room, I strongly recommend the consultant's rate to be set at a power-of-2 for the consultation to be properly auspicious. You know, to channel properly the computery fung shuey. As for my old PhD research, sirs, I'll tell you the same thing I told the NSA1​. There is a very large difference between forging weapons, and forging tools that an unscrupulous man can turn into weapons. At least, I should hope there's a difference, else I'd be living in mortal fear of ever making anything useful.

(*1) That is, the No Such Agency.

"Now, shall we consider the bargain made, or would you care for more of my magic tricks?"

Here we must backtrack in time a little and explain that the practice of summoning powerful fairies, demons, and magicians to do one's bidding is a very strange one. Although most summonings are voluntarily accepted or refused in the style of a free-market exchange, few people think it weird that the rich and powerful will sometimes forcefully summon a being against its own will and compel that being's cooperation with bribes and/or threats. It goes without saying that anyone trying such tricks with fairies and demons is apt to come to grief, but magicians are not inherently so fearsome.

Therefore, any magician with a reputation must develop discipline to cope with such summonings. He either learns to resent his lot in life, or to regard his summonings with a purely mercenary mentality, or to teach swift regret to his foolhardy summoners.

Within this admittedly warped cultural context, the idea to summon Powell on short notice was theoretically sound. Powell was known to be driven by curiosity – to many people this seems similar to being mercenary. Unlike most other high-level magicians, she was not known to be violent or aggressive – therefore Menzies felt confident that his secure basement and his staff of bodyguards would suffice to restrain Powell's attempts at teaching swift regret long enough to persuade her of the importance of her task.

In actual practice, Powell was more irritated than normal at this summoning, on account of having been forced to choose between curiosity and a Christmas Dinner. Her skills poorly suited to battle, she was unprepared to handle Mr. Menzies' bodyguards directly, but there was no shortage of other branches of magic that Mr. Menzies' bodyguards would themselves find difficult to deal with.

The summoning-ritual was performed with all due precaution. It resulted in a disgruntled-looking image of Powell flickering briefly within the circle, then steadfastly refusing to appear again. The confusion turned into panic when two of the guards went upstairs to consult Menzies and discovered Powell to be sitting behind the desk in Menzies' usual place, protected from the guards by an invisible barrier, ironically repurposed from defenses that had been put into the room in order to protect Menzies2​. Powell watched with mild interest while the guards attempted to dismantle the barrier, then shrugged and resumed inspecting Menzies' personal belongings. Because Menzies was a firm believer in the paperless office, many of his records were kept on a password-locked tablet computer protected by 256-bit AES encryption – a standard beyond the reach of Powell's meager cantrips. Because the paperless office forever remains a futile dream of the future, there were also some interesting papers to look at. Most prominently, there was a stack of printouts someone had assembled detailing candidates for 'the best magician in North America'.

(*2) Although the summoning-system precludes either party from directly harming the other, indirect trickery and humiliation are still possible. Powell's apparent invincibility in this situation was, of course, a bluff based on the careful application of Disputation, Mesmerism, a displacement-blanket, and basic observational skills to discover Menzies' barrier-system. Subsequent analysis by Menzies' security firm revealed that although the topmost layer of the runes had been keyed to protect only Menzies, these protections failed to trigger against a summoned being who had been (arguably, per Disputation) invited to appear. The secondary runes in the masonry were non-specific and easily co-opted by Powell to support her own barrier. Aside from fixing this one oversight at great expense, it remained unclear how to prevent similar incidents during future summonings. As Powell herself likes to point out, the summoning-system was originally designed by and for demons, and its design may inherently be exploitable. Among other things, there is evidence to suggest that a summoned being appears to gain a significantly increased potency of Mesmerism.

Powell read her own profile with sardonic amusement, shaking her head at epithets such as 'frustrating but non-aggressive' and 'proven expert in relevant fields of Arcane Magic: fate and probability manipulation, coincidences and synchronicities, transmutation and manipulation of emotions'.

'Hum, they did put some research into this,' Powell thought, 'the pests. I'll show them frustrating but non-aggressive!'

She stashed the other profiles in her long-coat and admired the office decor.

Menzies had a very nice office, lined on all sides with mahogany-panelled bookshelves, some of which the guards were presently dismantling in an attempt to access the barrier-runes. Powell was uncertain why some rich people had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves installed everywhere, only to be forced to fill them with curious antique instruments that were too fragile to play with, along with the kinds of imposing-but-vapid books one feels no guilt leaving on the shelf. At least the books here were real books and not the anti-intellectual nightmare of false book-bindings concealing a 50-inch television screen or somesuch. Powell took note of the many old books of Futurism detailing things that people circa 1962 thought would be invented by 2012. Of course, living through the intervening period made Powell question the things people in 2012 thought would be invented by 2062.

In contrast to the books, Powell appreciated the nice window behind the desk opening on a small formal garden, as well as the fact that Menzies' office was a two-storey one, with a second tier of bookshelves and a gallery around the perimeter of the room accessed by a ladder. On this point, some sympathy of taste with the owner of the room was achieved. Powell wished she had the space to install such a gallery in her own Hazardous Materials Warehouse3​. The ladder was a nice touch, although she somehow doubted that the owner made much use of it.

(*3) In theory, a space-dilation could be attempted, but with the variety of powerful entities stored in the Warehouse such an operation would be a very advanced instance of playing with fire.

Powell noted a side-door on her side of the barrier with muffled voices coming from the other side, so she went to that door and pushed it open just a crack, keeping a careful eye on the guards. The voices resolved into:

"I strongly recommend to stay away from that door, sire. A summoned magician is presently raging on the other side. She may leap out in sudden ambush."

"Couldn't you have warned us about this?" a far less posh-sounding voice complained. "The last time I was this close to a raging magician was a smart cities conference in Saudi."

"Please return to the conference room and remain calm, sire. We will take care of this matter and Albrecht will be with you shortly. The magician in question represents invaluable expertise to our cause."

Powell waited for the voices to recede. It was interestingly tricky work to apply Mesmerism on both sides of the door simultaneously, but she managed to sneak out of the office with no one paying attention to her. She found herself in a narrow corridor that opened into several rooms, one of them a richly appointed conference-room, and here Powell blinked and wondered if she were presently the victim of someone's elaborate prank or glamor-party. There appeared to be far too many well-known Very Important Persons sitting in that one room. But a comparison of direct and peripheral-vision views did not reveal any glamors or illusions, and the Most Important Seat at the head of the table was empty, and persons were generally susceptible to Mesmerism all the same whether Very Important or not, so Powell indulged herself by sneaking to the Most Important Seat and sitting down in it. As she reversed the Mesmerism, everyone's attention was drawn to her and to the strange blanket-covered form that she was resting her feet on. Powell took her feet down and whipped the blanket off dramatically, revealing a hunched-over and disoriented Albrecht Menzies, his suit soaking wet and a bucket over his head2'​.

(*2') Refer to footnote 2 above.

While Menzies was led away to receive fresh clothes and to make himself presentable, Powell lit a cigarette and regarded the Very Important Persons around the table with an ironic air. The atmosphere remained tense, much as with an escaped tiger. One of the Persons furthest from Powell made to get up and leave the room, but Powell gave him such a Look that he sank back into his chair.

"If I may ask a stupid question," said Powell, "what locality is this?"

"We're in Pacific Heights, San Francisco," said the youngish, freckled man immediately to Powell's left, flanked by two bodyguards of his own.

He was wearing a tweed jacket and did not seem nearly so timid of Powell as the others. On the table in front of him was a tall glass containing a smoothie. The other Persons in the room had mugs of tea or coffee, or plastic bottles of water, and wore either standard business attire or custom-tailored T-shirts and jeans. Some had bodyguards of their own, some did not. Powell noted the drinks and took out her own emergency water-bottle, placing it on the table to restore symmetry.

Then a fuming Albrecht Menzies returned to the room. His mood did not improve at being displaced from the head of the table into the seat originally reserved for Powell, and negotiations proceeded decidedly on the wrong foot from there. Powell did not help matters when she took out her phone midway through the process and turned it on to take a call, expressing surprise that it had been ringing off the hook.

Yet, as described previously, things did eventually converge on a verbal agreement that Powell would deign to undertake honest consultation on the Important Persons' woes at $4096/hr.

The phone was left listening on the table, in the absence of any practical way for the Cabal to get rid of it without Powell's agreement.

"Now, before I consult you on such dire matters at such exorbitant hourly rates, it would be best if I could make certain of some of the people in the room. Getting to know each other will help to maintain a positive and cordial working-relationship. You can't put a price on friendship, you know?"

The youngish man in tweed snorted at that remark.

"I'll introduce myself first. I am Drake Powell. Some refer to me as 'the best magician in North America'. God only knows why.

"Now, the man who is looking awkward in tweed is none other than Tim Rickysbergen, of the illustrious Facemazon, correct? I won't inquire as to the status of your political ambitions, or the rumors that the first iteration of your product was invented to stalk co-eds at Yale."

There is a curious fact about the modern pseudo-industrialists. While corporations of an earlier era were matter-of-factly named after their founders ('Ford Motor Company', 'Daimler-Chrysler') or their line of business (as with 'General Electric' or 'International Business Machines'), the New Silicon Valley giants all refused to give themselves such obvious or honest names. Instead, their names were all strange gobble-de-gook coinages, as in the case of up-and-coming data center giant Googmaface. Or the bloated desktop software monopolist Mezos. Perhaps the name of 'social advertising' giant Facemazon might suggest faces and the notion of being amazed thereby, but that gave no clue of their main line of business being a mixture of data-mining and mind-control services4​. Indeed, Facemazon's trade-secret social influence algorithms were commonly acclaimed for playing a pivotal role in the election campaign of the current President, and would later come to be witheringly blamed for aiding the campaigns of more obnoxious Presidents yet to come. Of the technology giants represented in the room, only Apple had a name that was as clear and simple as it was misleading. Apple, Inc. designed computers, not fruit.

(*4) Because the reader of these words may be living in a world blissfully free of an entity such as Facemazon, Rickysbergen's company merits a more detailed explanation.

Whereas an ordinary Internet company may rely on mere e-commerce, or on data-mining of social networks, or on throwing money at the creators of the most effective and addictive uploaded content, Facemazon's 'social advertising' business model relies on a devious synergy of all three of these ideas hidden beneath layers of obfuscation. Stripping away these layers, the core 'elevator pitch' of the business is as follows:

Why should advertisers waste money on expensive and garish ad campaigns that are tuned out and distrusted by apathetic TV and Internet viewers? Why not enlist the services of the most trustworthy and sincere people in your target's life: their friends? The users of Facemazon's social network are handed money and rewards based on how frequently and effectively they advertise a variety of goods and services to an audience of their peers both on and off the network.

Needless to say, careful manipulation in the midst of a genuinely engaging interaction is more effective, and better-rewarded, than overt and pushy salesmanship. Facemazon's heuristic recommendation engine is carefully tuned and combined with subtle coaching to influence users to deliver the most interesting content and interactions across the largest possible audience. Because targets of Facemazon advertising might not even have accounts on the network, over time this influence has given many real-life friendships a cloying and suspicious quality.

It soon became evident that Powell was challenging herself to identify, and where possible to insult, as many of the Important Persons as she could:

"And I believe the gentleman on my right is Geoffrey Weldt, the dread corporate minder of Googmaface?

"And Mr. Cook from Apple. How are the plans coming along on your multi-billion-dollar binding-circle? It's a very stylish design."

"The new corporate campus," Mr. Cook protested, "is intended to function as an inspiring work environment for Apple designers and engineers."

"Right, 'inspiring'…. I recall that's what Steve told the Cupertino city council. I imagine the Pharaohs were similarly inspired by the exercise of piling rocks on top of other rocks. Whatever you say, the scale of the project is certainly impressive… only, is it going to work as intended? Maybe Steve might have wanted to continue guiding your company while still in the flesh, but I'm informed things appear quite differently on the other side. Will he still be as motivated to work on breakable products of metal and glass if the afterlife decides to grant him access to hidden realms of Platonic perfection?"

"To capture and simulate the mathematical essence of a person after the fact," Menzies interjected, "is a task formulated firmly within the realm of scientific alchemy. Its accomplishment depends solely on the diligence and ingenuity of the living. In our line of work we do not rely on or put too much hope in the notion of an afterlife."

"Well, if you say so," Powell shrugged diplomatically.

Menzies and a few of the other members of the Cabal were starting to realize that they had deeper reasons to dislike Powell than merely her antagonistic demeanor. There was the more substantive fact that Powell had attained the coveted state of immortality and had thus far failed to share it with any of them.

The unfavorable comparison that came into Menzies' mind was with a girl at a certain Society Of Brilliant Young Minds Under 20 Years Of Age that had been organized by one of Menzies' Paygon vassals. The idea was to locate promising young kids and grant them the time and connections to accomplish great things without the hindrance of a distracting and unnecessary formal Education.

Albrecht Menzies considered this a worthy experiment, and had listened in the audience as the assembled wonder-children presented their ambitions. Most of these ambitions were terribly pedestrian, and Menzies grew impatient as young women and men described their plans to ensure 100% vaccination coverage against HIV, or to build a nuclear reactor in a suburban garage, or to fix America's housing shortage by calculating a more efficient allocation of roommates5​. One young man simply talked about the exponential growth of technology and how inevitably and wonderfully exponential it was. He cited numerous mathematical details that had already been known in the time of Euler, and presented no actionable conclusions at all.

(*5) In point of fact, the proposal to optimize roommate allocation is oddly similar to one of Prodigy Williams' ideas for a service she'd dubbed with the rather unfortunate working title 'Project Ten Thousand Bedrooms'. Powell had talked her out of it at the time, but Prodigy ended up rather resentful of her idea being taken up by a far less intellectually-gifted startup founder. Eventually, Powell persuaded her that an idea that floats around in the ether looking for a host and is had by multiple startup founders simultaneously cannot be worth all that much effort.

At that moment Menzies nearly despaired of the experiment, but the next girl to take the stage stood out by presenting an ambition that was simple, clear, and spoke to the most secret designs of Menzies' (and surely most everyone else's) being. She said simply:

'I would like to defeat death.

'Everything about this life is completely worthless if we do not go on living.

'These is evidence suggesting that human mortality is governed by a single primary signal. I will show you a graph – this one – of how many human beings survive to each year of life, on average, in modern society.

'According to a simple computer simulation, if aging and mortality were an accumulation of many different disease conditions over time, the graph would instead look like this. Similar to the decay of a radioactive material.

'But in reality, there is a clear drop-off point. Every human being has a point in time when his or her Death Signal activates6​, and after that point the mortality rate itself is increasing exponentially.

(*6) Note from the scribe: the Death Signal concept in the 'American Magic' world is a similar idea to that of the Gompertz Law or of Horvath's Clock in our own world.

'If we study other species and control for the hardship of life in the wild, a very similar Death Signal can be observed in the animal kingdom.

'I want to study the Death Signal and discover a way to disable it. Of course, if we can halt this primary cause of mortality, that doesn't mean we will halt all aging and death. But we will gain a tremendous amount of time to study how to defeat death in all its other forms, whether by uploading ourselves into computers or through simple improvements to public health and safety measures.

'In conclusion, I would like to point out that the importance and moral urgency of my proposal overshadows by an immense margin all of the other proposals that have been presented, or will be presented, at this conference. That is all. Thank you for listening to my presentation.'

Come to think of it, that girl had been as young in reality as Powell was in appearance. So young, and already laser-focused on defeating death for her own sake and for the sake of others. But it made alarming sense, as Menzies with his advancing age felt all-too-clearly. Each extra year of life was merely a precious stay of execution. It showed a keen sense of priorities for the girl to be thinking similarly at such a young age, and the presentation had been brilliant – a clear, concise statement of an ambitious problem and even a hint towards a viable method for solving it. He'd applauded the proposal strongly and made sure to shake the girl's hand afterwards. The project may have to be taken from her control at some point, of course, and handed over to a panel of people whom an excess of Education had damaged into identifying as Doctors and Biologists, but from that point on the girl's own career would also be guaranteed, no matter what she chose to do or how she did it.

Menzies had also sent the video of the proposal to each of his vassals, in order to motivate their work. Where the ends justified the means, an end as significant as defeating Death could justify almost any means. With that cheering thought, everyone's efforts towards world domination were redoubled into a frantic frenzy.

To those transhumanists in the room who knew of Powell's status, her mere bodily presence was on some level a slap to the face. What a contrast to the girl who longed to defeat death was the girl for whom death was a non-issue! A metaphysical smugness seemed to radiate from her, her smile a distant cousin to the punchable smile a few of the technologists had beheld on certain statues of the Buddha.

Or perhaps this was just the feeling they chose to read into her expression whereas the real affront was intellectual and moral in its origin. Powell had been immortal for decades by now, yet she remained evasive and coy about sharing this blessing. Either she was unable to replicate the cause of her immortality after all that time – proving herself to be a posturing incompetent – or she did not wish to put in the effort – which would make her a monster who smugly committed murder through inaction against every single human being living on the planet.

"Now, to wrap up the introductions without wasting much more time," Powell continued, "next we have… well, you I don't actually recognize."

"Michal Lie. Vice President of Emerging Markets at Mezon."

"A mere Vice President… well, it's very nice to meet you, Michal, good to have at least one fellow wage-slave at the table. Besides Michal, I also see two members of the Paygon Mafia in good standing, helping prop up the United States GDP with their wild promises of future space colonization, and I see assorted other nonentities. You, finally," she turned to Menzies, "must be their Creditor. In this modern world of business everyone owes someone money, so I am guessing that the person these gentlemen owe their money to is you. Well then. I know that people such as yourself do not like being identified by name, so I will spare you in front of the phone. That concludes our ice-breaker.

"Before we begin, there is a highly delicate question I have about your surprising little club. Exceedingly delicate, and relevant to the consultation I aim to perform. Should I think of your group more as enemies and rivals who collaborate against common threats and goals, or more as long-time collaborators who pretend to competition and enmity in the eyes of the public?"

Her question was met with stony and contemplative silence. The Important Persons' powers of introspection did not seem to reach quite as far as that question.

"Let us say," Menzies finally asserted, "that each of the gentlemen at the table seeks to serve the noble cause of Humanity in his own way."

"Ah! Thank you, that does clear up my uncertainty. More than you realize. And now, seeing how you've managed to put up with me for this long, as you would have been able to conjure me back to New York at any moment prior to agreeing the bargain, I conclude that you must be sufficiently desperate for my expertise. And so, I begin my honest consultation. Would someone please start the clock? We have before us a compendium on 'how to destroy the World in Seven Days', the title a ham-handed Biblical Allusion if I'm not mistaken, and it's been alleged to be some kind of fan adaptation of my own research efforts…."

"Yes, finally," Menzies said. "If you would read through the contents and give us your impressions on the feasibility of this plan."

Powell opened the melodramatically-titled binder. After all the build-up she found the genre and quality of the content distinctly un-riveting. She made her best effort to speed-read the thing quietly, partly so as not to keep the phone waiting, and partly because she was really starting to want to get this over with as quickly as possible.

With regard to Menzies' allegations, she did not find anything more than a very faint echo of her own outlook and principles in this person's approach to Magic.

"There's a lot of mind-numbingly tedious data here about world leaders like Vladimir Putin which I'm not up-to-date on," Powell complained as she flipped through, "so I would take a precautionary approach and assume the profiles are all accurate. Even if they weren't, I imagine one might easily find other internal contradictions to exploit in world politics. But what then? Ah, I see… here is a clever, vicious and unexpected twist, I guess. Then here we are taking great care about how to activate the entire quagmire of crazy people embedded like raisins throughout the American establishment, these I unfortunately do have some knowledge of, and here's a small section covering every other known or suspected nuclear world power. Are you sure this is not a rejected Stanley Kubrick treatment? There's a lot more beyond this point, but it seems to me as though what I've read up to now is sufficient to guarantee the tipping point and the remaining steps just ensure that the spiral into mutually absurd destruction happens more quickly than otherwise."

She came to the end of the binder and slammed the back of it shut. The atmosphere in the room was glum. After thinking silently for a couple of minutes and blowing clouds of acrid smoke, she said:

"Thus I conclude: assuming the geopolitics of this peculiar document aren't merely the product of a lunatic raving in motels – if I were working completely unopposed, I could indeed use such instructions to destroy the world. The approach doesn't relate much to my own methods, except by a possible vague hearsay. But yes, this is real Magic that someone might legitimately try to use."

There were nods of worried agreement around the table.

"However!" Powell exclaimed. "As for the feasibility of this plan as a blackmail threat… how should I put it… the kinds of manipulations described here could not be performed by a mortal magician in seven days. Seven months is a more realistic figure. Over the multiple weeks it would take to just stand up so many workings of subtle influence and compulsion, any faction trying to execute this plan would be detected and countered by any number of other factions. The initial events are too obvious, and for a plan taking months to reach the crucial tipping-point that makes a huge liability.

"Now, if I wanted to destroy the world, I would instead start with non-obvious events with a very long lead-time, perhaps a few months, setting things up so I could decide whether to step back from the precipice or to finish things up in the final week. At that point, I would have a credible blackmail threat. I speak hypothetically of course – I am disinclined to destroy the world since I'm using it to live in, while you folks are more the type to make awful new things than to destroy existing ones."

"That is troubling," said Menzies, "because there is a detail in the letter I want to draw your attention to. Perhaps it is more clear without the redactions, but 'Sykes' is writing as though his threat is time-limited, pressuring us to decide within the next couple of days."

"There are two possibilities I can think of to explain that. Less likely, option (a) this binder is just misdirection concealing a sliver of a long-term plan that he has brought to the point of decision, as I just described. But a person of such subtlety and patience would have better ideas for attaining his goals than this over-the-top brinksmanship. More likely, option (b) he is a more common type of magician, a magician who likes shortcuts, and he's found some kind of shortcut that will actually let him accomplish this plan in seven days, from start to finish."

"And do you have any idea of the possible nature of such a shortcut?"

"Well…" Powell began, but then clammed up just as abruptly.

"Nothing comes to mind? I can quote you the relevant sentence without redactions: 'You have until noon Pacific Time on the second day after the winter solstice to make your decision. After that, I will be compelled to initiate the plan regardless of any offer you can make, and will have no choice but to see it through to the end.' The winter solstice – that is, today. Perhaps there is a device or method that would grant the ability to wield such great influence, but only at the winter solstice."

"The solstice!" Powell scoffed unhappily. "Say Christmastide, rather. I'm only telling this because I was foolish enough to promise an honest consultation. Well, that and you'll dig it up eventually regardless of what I say. I emphasize that I cannot rule out the possibility of Sykes having made or discovered some completely new Magic. But if he were restricted to the forms of magic known to me, I'd say that Mr. Sykes was planning to use the Gates of the Yama. It fits very neatly: the solstice, and the plan's requirement to perform wide-ranging compulsions in such a brief interval of time."

"And what are these 'Gates of the Yama'?"

"Well now, this kind of question is the reason I asked if you are truly friends or enemies. Can I entrust such a random gathering of people with such powerful information?"

"Says the girl who has a cell phone out listening to the entire thing," Rickysbergen cut in acidly.

"You don't know how many ways there are for this kind of meeting to leak outside of electronic surveillance," Powell gave a soundless laugh, "consider it a visual reminder not to say or do anything you would have cause to regret."

"Are you mocking me right now?"

"More to the point," Menzies declared. "The existence of such a shortcut makes understanding Mr. Sykes' plan doubly important to us.

"After all, such a power that could destroy the world in the manner described here, could also be used to save it."

"Yes," Powell said, "you goddamn fool. I was afraid you would say such a thing. Listen, I'll give you fifty-fifty odds that Mr. Sykes has some convoluted theory of his own, about how this tight-rope walk juggling flamethrowers, with the nuclear war, and the blackmail, is also 'saving the world'. Since it's so hard for this many people to agree on the definitions of vague terms such as 'world' and 'saving', we've just lit up a tinderbox and I'm afraid the consultation has to end here. Kindly stop the clock and calculate my fee for this session."

"I can personally vouch for the integrity and character of every person in this room," Menzies insisted, "as well as their willingness to collaborate in a reasonable fashion."

"Sure, but who's going to vouch for your own integrity, and more to the point for your judgment of these people's character?"

"Drake Powell, you may not care to save the world, but do not allow it to be destroyed through your inaction. Have some trust in the most basic of human good intentions and tell us what you think we should know."

"Fine then, since you've put it so eloquently," Powell grumbled, "I'll tell you this much. Within the materialist pablum of your science, the Yama-Gates can be thought of as a dark-matter construct. For most of the year, they remain dormant and inaccessible in a parallel plane of existence above the planet, quietly maintaining the energy balance and secondary cosmological constants of the planet Earth. For a few days after the winter solstice, they are shifted into physical existence and reachable in the lower sky, albeit hidden to the un-initiated gaze.

"It is rumored that at the bleakest moment of the year, at least according to the Northern Hemisphere where the overwhelming majority of the human population lives, the Yama are trying to exert direct and baleful influence on human affairs according to a mysterious plan. To an unscrupulous magician, that rumor – and it is not a difficult one to unearth – suggests many possibilities."

The Cabal digested this information uneasily.

"Is that really all you are comfortable saying?" prodded Menzies.

"Oh, for crying out loud! Mr. Sykes was motivated to do this research to destroy the world, apparently, why aren't you all motivated to do the research to save it, then? Instead of throwing money at someone to drop a ready-made solution in your laps. I'm tired of this. Let's say this rounds to about fifteen minutes' worth honest consultation? I believe you owe me $1,024.00. Or, we might say in honor of the computer business, one kilobuck."

"Very well," sighed Menzies, "seeing how unpleasantly our contact started out, I suppose we have received better information than we have any right to expect from you. I have just one more question I'd like to try my luck with.

"I am certain all of us here are intensely curious about how you came to attain your immortality."

Every one of the assembled Important Persons was indeed curious, and the ones who hadn't known and hadn't put two and two together to realize Powell was an immortal became very curious indeed.

"Is this the real reason why I won out over your other candidates for the job?" Powell smiled. "Some of the other people in your file would give you much more information about the Yama-Gates with far less fuss, but I'm the only one who knows about the subject of immortality. I sympathize."

Then she reached for her phone and turned it off, inflaming everyone's interest even further. But she just said:

"You know, in the 50s and 60s I also spent a long time chasing down a blind alley involving computers. Perhaps we had slightly fewer computers and slightly more magic, but it's all the same. The real answer turned out to be completely different. But knowledge of immortality is not bought or sold or handed out like candy to strangers with ulterior motives.

"All I will say, Albrecht Menzies, is that if you want to defeat Death, you should begin by making a careful and honest study of Despair and of its opposite quality. The same goes for all the rest of you.

"For example," she turned to Rickysbergen, "you might more profitably spend your time learning the true meaning of Christmas. Perhaps you should bow out of the plan to find Mr. Sykes and instead consider being visited by three Ghosts of Social Networking. They might teach you the true meaning of Friendship and how the concept is cheapened when you teach people to apply it to total strangers sought out at a cocktail-party for the purpose of selling trinkets."

"Your philosophy is an absolute waste of time," Rickysbergen retorted. "I read your dossier, the best day job you can manage to hold down is what – a subway lost-and-found? And you think your immortality gives you the right to sit on the sidelines and sneer while people like us try to steer Society away from being the vicious trainwreck it's always been for thousands of years? Selling trinkets is just how we fund our research into the real goal of social advertising: to productively coordinate human action in an era where the human population is becoming too large and unruly to just spontaneously solve problems like health inequity and climate change. Today's world is interconnected and fragile like you wouldn't believe and we're well past the point that humankind can just muddle along without a plan. Do I see you stepping up to provide one? If there weren't people like us to guide things, no matter how much of a — job we seem to be doing in your eyes, I'm sure without us the world would be in such a state that we wouldn't need a Mr. Sykes to destroy it!"

"Right. Then, which is it?" Powell asked. "Do you want to save the world, or do you want to be respected and popular? If you really intend on being a public figure like I've heard, whether people really think you're doing a bad job, or they're just jealous of you, or they just want to laugh as they see the look on your face while your plans crumble in your hands, you're going to encounter no shortage of people who want to do things like this:"

Demonstratively, Powell put out her cigarette in Rickysbergen's half-finished smoothie. The drink now sat foaming messily and spitting out sparks in a variety of swampy colors.

"If you can't laugh it off, then what?" she continued as his face turned pale. "Or look at your mentor for crying out loud," she pointed to Menzies, "at least he doesn't bring so much ego into his insane ambitions. At least he runs his affairs, I won't say well or for the common good, but at least for the sake of something besides his public image as a benefactor. If he does meet with a rude commoner like me, so what? He doesn't care that I put a bucket on his head or spent half the evening getting on everyone's nerves, as long as he can get the necessary information out of me in the end. Or, better yet, look at Mr. Stonemeyer and how he runs his affairs… well, don't tell me you have no idea who that is?"

"Yes. Who the — is Mr. Stonemeyer?"

"My point exactly. So many of you people think you're puppeteers and so few realize you're also puppets; it beggars the imagination."

Needless to say, she was looking at Menzies in particular when she said that.

"Well, gentlemen, this has been a remarkably pleasant and reasonable Cabal of Evil," Powell concluded, getting up from her chair. "Must be the residual Christmas Cheer that penetrates the air even of this very room. But it really is long past time I took my leave. Shall I show myself back to your primitive but overpowered summoning-circle?"

After Powell had gone, the remaining participants of the meeting, whose role thus far had been to sit around in baffled silence, began to speak their minds. The discussion coalesced into an argument of such startling vehemence and intensity that it was a good thing Powell had no idea about it, or else she would have been sorely tempted to find a way to stick around even longer.

 

[Arakawa]

5. "You wanted Powell to do something," I told Forbis once the phone had clicked off. "Maybe this is her Christmas-Present."

"That didn't sound like anything she was planning to do," Forbis objected. "It's interesting, but it doesn't help push our program forward at all."

'Our program' was an agreement Forbis and I had made in November to collaborate in finding out Powell's Secret Plan, by doing everything within our power to make sure Powell carried out said Secret Plan as quickly as possible, rather than procrastinating it for decades or even centuries as she doubtless had the option to do. I was curious about it and didn't want to wait around for centuries, while Forbis needed to know the details for her job.

Whether Forbis herself was a good elf or a nasty elf, one thing I can say for certain is that she had a nasty job. She was, to put it bluntly, a corporate spy. Powell's doings were interesting, it seemed, to no end of Powers That Be who knew that Powell was an immortal working deep magic and who worried that the magic Powell worked might interfere with their own Secret Plans. Anything Powell did, down to rearranging her desk in an unusual fashion, was diligently noted by Forbis and the information auctioned off at some kind of hidden-world clearing-house for insider information. Two prices were set for each piece of information, one price to know the details and a much higher price to prevent other Powers from learning them.

That Forbis was doing this had become known to essentially everyone in the office by now, and Powell had apparently grown to consider openly keeping a spy around to be almost a normal and comfortable state of affairs. If it meant Powell could exploit Forbis' skills at artificing in the meantime, so be it. If it meant that fewer people would waste Powell's time and make a nuisance of themselves with attempts to spy on Powell covertly, all the better.

You can see how important it might be to Forbis' business strategy that Powell have some kind of earth-shattering Secret Plan worth knowing about. In that case, Forbis could discover it and sell the information to ensure her daily bread.

But as an alternative in my own mind, there existed a Null Hypothesis that I didn't have the heart to share with Forbis, for fear it might discourage her entirely. The Null Hypothesis was that Powell simply had her eternal life and was just living it. True, her life happened to involve knowing more than her fair share of other people's secrets, and dabbling out of interest with strange and dangerous artefacts and magic that other people might ordinarily be using for the sake of Power and for a definite Plan. Powell might also, on some level, welcome stressful adventures and entanglements rather than avoid them. But none of these things added up to a Secret Plan that could be deciphered to reveal predictable implications for the Powers That Be.

"Very frustrating," Forbis said calmly. "All those magnates in one room, they must have been shy of the phone. And the man who does almost all of the talking for them, we never got to hear his name. Let's get back to what we were doing."

To our surprise, Mr. Adis and Mr. Jones were still around and chatting quietly.

"Folks," announced Forbis, "so sorry we got thrown off our plan by that. Uh, my next step is to dash out to the grocery, so I won't be able to stay and play the host. You're welcome to head home if you like, grab any amount of any of the food that you enjoyed to take with you, and I'll wish you Happy Christmas and a restful holiday season."

The two workers looked at each other.

"Nah, we can stay a while longer if you're fine with that," said Mr. Adis.

"We started off pretty good, why not finish it properly?" added Mr. Jones.

"I see…" said Forbis, "then stay put, the three of you, this won't take me too long!"

Glancing between Forbis and the Lost Property workers, I made a quick decision and turned to follow Forbis.

"Wait, you're coming with?"

"Fresh air," I not-quite-explained.

More to the point, I'd decided Forbis was more in need of companionship at the moment. I suspected the slight business-like note to her voice was Forbis' Christmas-cheer-suffused version of a deep sulk.

 

[Arakawa]

6. The strange old man first caught my attention as we were heading into the grocery-store. I didn't make out his face at first, because the sky had long ago ceased to display the impossible golds and violent purples of a Manhattan sunset and everything was now simply blue and dim to us. I noticed him as he was leaning over a panhandler who was on the pavement in front of the store's exit. He was putting into the panhandler's cup not money, but a folded piece of ordinary paper, presumably with something written on it.

That stood out as peculiar to me, or perhaps my previous run-in with the ghost of Old Jonah Frost made me excessively wary of unusual behaviour from self-assured old men.

I was never sure what to do with panhandlers. My attitude fluctuated, and I gave or failed to give sporadically depending on my mood. I didn't grudge the money, but I was cautious of meeting a panhandler with either explicit or intuitive understanding of the principles of magic. Giving with the wrong attitude might lead to giving away power over myself. Powell had no such fears, and on the streets might shrug and give carelessly, even recklessly, but for some reason she did not cotton at all to having panhandlers on the subway, and she would react snippily when asked for money underground. I wasn't sure what Forbis did, and it didn't really matter to me since I thought the question a very thorny one and considered everyone to be free to choose their own policy.

And since everyone was free to follow their own policy, what the old man did was none of my concern either. We went into the store, grabbed the sunchokes, and spent a frustrated minute or two in the checkout line.

"There was also that part about Yama-Gates," Forbis mused to herself quietly. "Interesting, but very out of left field…."

The pepper in my suit-pocket prickled at my mind. It was called a True Gates of Hades Pepper. As I was learning, around Powell it paid to pay attention to coincidences, even if such an attitude might seem like conspirological insanity in the general world apart from Powell. What this particular coincidence brought to my mind was the vaguely-remembered trivia that, in Buddhism, the caste of Yama – either that, or perhaps the singular being named Yama – was responsible for judging the dead. Once I'd thought of this, the connection clicked into place like a puzzle-piece and became too neat to ignore, regardless of how frivolously my mind had arrived at it.

I whispered to Forbis a "Theory:

"The Yama are judges of the dead in Hades.

"The judges of the dead must see the entire world.

"A living magician who travels to the gates of Hades could destroy the world.

"The gates of Hades can be reached on the winter solstice."

I found it helpful to formulate my guess up-front. If we did learn more about the situation, it would allow me to test the accuracy of my insight.

"That's pretty neat," said Forbis, "but I have to not believe it, because I was taught in Church that God judges the living and the dead and I'm sure he wouldn't let magicians into His gates to work judgment on His behalf."

I wasn't so sure about that – the universe was vast and complicated and you certainly could cram in Yama somewhere on the long road between the Present Moment and the Final Judgment taught by Forbis' religion. But Forbis was unlikely to appreciate such a view.

I had my newly acquired phone for calling Powell, but for personal data I'd already owned an iPod touch. As we finished paying for the sunchokes, I took it out to jot down the exact words of my theory before I forgot.

The panhandler and the old man were still in front of the store. They'd been conversing quietly about something that was still none of our concern, so we were walking calmly past them when a voice interrupted us:

"For the sake of Christmas, be merciful!"

This wasn't the barely-coherent voice of too many a panhandler. This voice spoke with authority and did not hesitate to invoke the name of Christmas. I stopped in my tracks and Forbis whirled around abruptly, her Christmas cheer paper-thin by this point. She seemed far more concerned that we were keeping Mr. Adis and Mr. Jones waiting.

The panhandler was not the one speaking. He just sat there, wrapped in his shapeless padded coat, and regarded us with quiet interest, like he was watching actors on a stage – he made no attempt to get involved. Rather, it was the old man who had called out to us..

Well then.

His strict manner didn't seem threatening and I reached for my wallet, but the old man just said:

"I have given him what he needs right now and it is not money. I have instructed him where to go and what to do to recover himself. No, what I am asking for now is something completely different."

"Then what do you want?" asked Forbis.

"A widow's mote. The gift I am most in need of right now is a moment of your time."

He was a severe old man indeed. An awful and solemn air clung to him, like choking incense or the heat from a burning candle. He was dressed in a strange formal black garment, like the uniform of an undertaker from some far-off foreign land. Therefore the Undertaker is what I will call him, seeing how we did not learn his name until much later. His gaunt face was covered with a neat grayish-white stubble and his eyes glinted at us with an unwavering and charismatic disapproval akin to the Ancient Marinere of Coleridge. The expression did not bother me too much because I suspected that he looked at more or less everyone in this way.

Forbis was nearly fuming in frustration, but I'd more-or-less expected something like this would be coming. These were Powell's sunchokes we'd been sent to fetch, after all, and in my mind that made her the ultimate cause of this. Too many of my most memorable lessons had started from some ridiculous whim of Powell's.

Powell had antagonized the bureaucrats at that subway-consultation – and I'd been left to run around New York under the mistaken impression that I was the only one who could clean up her mess. Powell had enrolled me into the brutal academic dungeon of Scaripit on purpose – and that led me to learn a much harsher lesson deeper down beneath the earth, in the far more brutal goblin citadel of Haaghm-Arkh beneath Hurricap's Dome. Powell had taken me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art – granted, a noble attempt at a normal outing, but she'd done it at the exact wrong time to run afoul of Beatrice Lullamoon and her hostage-taking.

It may not have been caused by any considered philosophy or plan of Powell's, but it was practically Fate.

"May I have the use of your device for a moment?" the Undertaker asked, for I still had my iPod in my hand.

I did something I wouldn't do in more ordinary circumstances and handed the iPod over, the reasonless lizard-brain part of me half-expecting it would be stolen. It wasn't worth all that much to me. There was perhaps a small bit of spite in my action. 'See how compliant I am with the curriculum of Fate?'

"Where's the dialer on this?" he grumbled, fumbling his way into the calculator app. "Newfangled technology…."

Forbis shot an unamused look in my direction and remarked that we had an actual phone if that's what he required.

"No, this works as well as anything else," the Undertaker replied.

He punched the phone number directly into the calculator keypad and raised the device to his ear.

"Yes?" he said to the hypothetical interlocutor. "We'll be with you shortly. I need to use my overtime to explain a couple of things to my volunteers."

At this point, to be asked for charity might have induced cooperation from Forbis, but to be named a volunteer without her say-so….

"Excuse me," she said, "we aren't volunteering for anything."

She took me by the sleeve, evidently not expecting any sensible behaviour from me at this point.

"I know you Christmas-Elves," the Undertaker said, and Forbis froze in surprise at the vehemence in his voice. "You take very good care of the ones who are close to you, and you conserve the dictates of your religion, and you believe that to be a sufficient duty. You listen to the monks who tell you that to perform works of charity for the sake of one's own merit is vanity and delusion. True as that may be, can you not feel the air? You are still much the same as you were those thousands of years ago under the yoke of Prysh, but the present age is running away from you and humanity is under implacable siege. Now, people must give for their own survival, not merit!

"In this age, the hand that does not give will wither far more surely than the hand stretched out to receive. Do you think if you keep your head on straight and stay aloof from the affairs of others, that you will be spared by the Ulterior Powers? This war is merciless to the children of men and it will be merciless to your children too!"

I only partly understood his point. For one, the withering of the hand that failed to give was not something I observed to happen much, say, among the financial class. At the same time, this speech must have meant something profound to Forbis, because she let go of my sleeve and looked at the Undertaker with a horrified expression.

"And you," he turned to me with a stern and clinical look, "do you think you can live your life from such innocent motives as curiosity? You have picked your master from curiosity and already you are being punished for it. One year of drudgery will become for you ten years, and ten years will turn into twenty, and you will finish with much magic and little wisdom – then the struggle for your life will truly begin! Will you not look at the struggles of others differently when you anticipate how someday you will share in them too?"

Seeing Forbis' reaction, I had been expecting to hear something similarly withering about myself. But I was still surprised at the impact of the Undertaker's vehemence. I had read, of course, the warnings about Dark Lords and vile magicians who lulled people into unthinking and agreeable compliance with an enchanting voice. Here, though, a rather opposite principle of persuasion was being employed. The old man was about as enchanting and agreeable as scalding water from a kettle.

I felt a flash of anger. Then, because anger was embarrassing, an urge to analysis. Certainly, he seemed to know who we were. There were several ways to manage such a feat, not all of them savory and some of them only slightly more advanced than the street-magician's cliche of 'pick a card, any card'. His way of stomping on our insecurities was the disconcerting part. What he said was true enough. I was still anxious for my future as an adult, once I was no longer seventeen and no longer permitted to only read books and lack an aim or purpose in life. And it seemed like Forbis still worried about her family in spite of being estranged from them.

The panhandler was looking up at us with the calmness of a spectator. He did not speak. It was disconcerting to see the man on the street temporarily stripped of his usual role of being desperately in need of money, free from obligation to beg or to justify his woes. It was suddenly possible to compare myself with him.

My analysis was not suggesting any plausible path that would lead me to the same struggles as the homeless man before me, even after twenty years. Of course, perhaps I was simply sheltered and had insufficient imagination. Still, Powell taught too well. There were too many fields of magic I knew about even now, with too many lucrative applications for me to ever lack a source of money.

Unless, of course… here a sudden fear chilled me that I may yet come to have experiences that caused me to loathe Magic with such a passion that I would rather beg on the streets than make my living as a magician.

But I was very far from feeling that way now, and even then I also knew more than a few things about computers. It would be a far more precarious line of work in the present economy, especially when I would be without the benefit of university credentials in the subject, but I could still make a living one way or another. All it would take was determination.

"Determination," the Undertaker shook his head. "Young fool! Whether you hoard worldly belongings in a vault or worldly virtues in your mind, you may wake up one day to find that the one has been plundered just as easily as the other. And then what?"

He was speaking more softly than before. Even so, I did not much appreciate the intrusion into my thoughts. Rather than follow the prompt to uncover yet more hideous anxieties for the future, I opted to ask a question of my own:

"What did you want our help with exactly?"

You can see how the old man was persuasive in his own way. In some sense I had already conceded his request. Next to me, Forbis was startled out of her own difficult train of thought.

"Sorry, no," she tried to argue. "There are people waiting for us right now. We'll have to wish you a Merry Christmas and get going."

It was very nearly breaking Forbis to be this snippy so near to Christmas, but this was well outside the space of things she was prepared to deal with at the moment.

The Undertaker's cold laugh refuted her.

"And what would you find so Merry about this Christmas?" he said. "For me there have been far too many concerns to spend my time on merriment. Yes, there have always been the poor, but now there are also the lonely and the despairing. Attend closely, here is something for you to think about and then be Merry if you can."

He held up my iPod and began to punch numbers into the calculator to illustrate his reasoning:

"By way of example to shock you out of your complacency. National recordkeeping bears witness that in the United States of America alone there are about forty thousand suicides in one year. That is an average of eleventy-one suicides in a day, roughly averaged. Were I to work unrelentingly to rectify this problem in just this one country, twenty-four hours times sixty minutes divided by eleventy-one suicides would give me just over twelve minutes per person to prevent each suicide. Your device," he said, handing me back the iPod. "As I understand, this form of grim reckoning I have just shown you is called 'Statistics'. The man who first invented such ways of thinking about human lives presently rots in Hell, beyond my power to aid. But the way of thinking has been left behind after him and we are obliged to make our best possible use of it.

"Yet these are only estimates. In truth, the number of suicides decided in one day at this time of year threatens to be greater-than-average, owing to the bleakness of the season and the interference of dark powers in the lower air. This situation is a source of great disrepute to the Christmas holiday."

"The suicide rate doesn't actually spike at Christmas," Forbis countered with exasperation.

"No, perhaps the deaths occur much later, in January and so forth," the Undertaker agreed, "but when do you think the premises for these deaths are being decided? Suppose a despairing man receives festive meat and drink and company, and were he to observe empirically that such things appear to make life briefly happier and more worth living, then he may be tempted to likewise concede in the back of his mind the converse: that his ordinary life, sorely lacking in pleasant diversions, is worthless and deserving of swift destruction. After all, the merry company has evaporated until next year, infinitely far from now, and without them the food and drink of February is no longer festive, however rich and dainty they may be. No, your holiday cheer is a dangerous weapon that cures some people and slays others.

"According to the true reckoning of decisions, assumptions are being freely chosen now that will make Despair inevitable rather than unthinkable, and so it comes to pass that many suicides of next year are being set in motion over the festivities of these next few days. And there are many subtler works of Despair being prepared besides this one, which we should also seek to prevent. The task has grown far beyond my hands alone.

"And for all the things awaiting you in your future, at this time in your lives the two of you still have your youth ahead and are like knights gird in armor against the weapons wielded by Great Despair. I am not asking for a lot of time from you. Only enough for you to learn from the experience and for the loneliness of my work this season to be eased a little. I cannot know what we will need to do in each place until we get there, but we will help three people according to ancient tradition. I ask for nothing more than a modicum of your Time and Mercy, both of which you have in abundance. Knowing this, will you agree to aid me?"

"Certainly," I shrugged. The deciding factor for me, as always, was curiousity, however disdainful the Undertaker might have been of the idea. Perhaps it was a morbid curiousity today, but this character-trait of mine had already led me into and out of far more dubious situations than this. Why not invoke it now?

In the depths of my reckless intuition I couldn't un-see the significant fact that this strange old man happened to approach us while Powell happened to be away. If I didn't understand the connection between his request and Powell's unexpected business with the technologists, that did not mean a connection wasn't there. At least, I could investigate this conundrum head-on. Or I could refuse him and go back to Eggnog and spend the next several days eaten up with speculation.

"And you," the Undertaker turned to Forbis, "will you join us in the task?"

Forbis gave me a weary look. If I was going, she was essentially obliged to come with. To do it for charity would have been a luxury, but my involvement made the task a happening in Powell's domain, which made observing it just another job obligation, and Forbis' job did not stop for holidays. After all, if she has to keep tabs on Powell, I realized, that certainly implies keeping tabs on Powell's hand-picked apprentice.

A further thought occurred to me, that Forbis' initial reluctance to stay and help might have been due to her job as well, moreso than lack of charity. Knowing Powell may be up to something at this very moment, wouldn't she want to stick around the Lost Property Office and await possible developments? Had the co-workers awaiting Eggnog just been her face-saving excuse? A cynical idea. It was all just speculation on my part. Whatever the truth of her motivations, it was clear that Forbis was obliged to come along now.

"Fine," she ground out through her teeth.

"Very well," said the Undertaker. "Then we will set out immediately."

Grudging as it was, Forbis' consent was just as unequivocal as mine. Therefore the Undertaker had no difficulty to pull us along in an abrupt and unceremonious teleport that felt to me like being dropped sideways into a freezing-cold swimming pool.

 

[Arakawa]

7. The man who pondered his death at Christmas lived alone with a roommate deep in one of America's nameless suburban cities. He was alone when we came to him, sitting on the edge of his bed: it would be several hours until he went for Friday night sushi with a couple of friends. He hammered away at a laptop that sat open on his knees, typing up some kind of email or forum posting. He was not in the least fazed when we simply appeared in the room.

"Have a seat," he waved at us. "More visitors in my own mind, I guess? Figured I'd be getting worse around this time of year. I'll be with you in just a moment."

"We have budgeted a small amount of time for this," said the Undertaker. "Waiting is not an option."

"So impatient, every time I see you," the man shook his head. "I don't see the need to hurry if we're just going to have the same argument we have every year. Why don't you go and help some of my friends, instead?"

He pointed to the laptop, which contained his friends only in an indirect sense.

"Your friends' survival is not at issue every single year," the Undertaker admonished.

The man on the bed was squarely in the middle of middle age, a bit bearlike and flabby, though I would hesitate to call him fat. I was confused. I would not want to be this man, but I would not consider being him any great disaster either. I would be much taller, and surely the weight could be brought under control? Yet here we were, and apparently we had twelve minutes, or something, to persuade him that life was better than death.

His face looked kind, and his demeanour, until we angered him, was pleasant and self-effacing. With the right outfit, glasses, and a long white beard, he might creditably have been employed as a mall Santa. His eyes were perhaps just a bit too wild to be a good fit for the role, and his manner a shade too fidgety. He twitched his knee as he continued to type on the laptop, which did not seem comfortable, and when he paused from typing he would clench and unclench his hands, stretching out the fingers as far as they would go and looking at the fronts and backs of them. This was done repetitively, as though on autopilot.

Shaking his head, the man finally slammed his laptop lid shut.

"Everyone is so far away and there is nothing I can do… well. I'm ready to listen to whatever spiel or sales-pitch you've got this year. You brought these two characters, I see. Hello. I appreciate your taking the time to drop by, but my head is already very crowded and I don't see what new insight you could bring to my problems. Would you like some tea, by any chance?"

"Perhaps you could tell them about your problems," said the Undertaker, "before you make assumptions about their insight."

The man gave a disgusted scoff.

"My problems? Well, I can give you a basic overview about my problems. My job is soulless, the doctors can't help with that. The people I care about aren't in this city, and the people in this city I don't care about as much. It's an effort to get through the day without an anxiety attack or tearing someone to pieces with rage. The only thing that keeps me in one piece is the writing and the people I write for are somewhere in the Internet. And even there we're constantly arguing and letting each other down these days. Nothing complicated.

"Since you've barged into my life, I can ask you directly: why are you here? What reason are you offering for me to stick around that I haven't already tried, worked hard and suffered for, only to find that reason failing me?"

Unconsciously, he began again to clench and unclench his hands.

"You realize," he continued, "this isn't the first year I've found myself having this conversation with fragments of my own mind. Every year I've done this and every year I've brought pain to more people and finished with fewer and fewer reasons to do the few things I keep trying to do. My personality seems to be bad enough – with the number of people I'm causing to suffer, you can't make the argument that I'm doing this to help anyone else. Then again, it's not as though they haven't hurt me either. But that doesn't change the fact that what I'm doing is wrong. Whether other people are angels or devils, I should be able to get along or to let go, and I haven't been doing either.

"And you know what gets to me? On paper, this shouldn't be happening. I know full well how many others have life worse than me, and how much worse. I have a roof over my head. I have a job. I have some friends. I don't worry about making ends meet next year. I know what kinds of things make me feel a little better and what makes me feel worse. I should be able to find a way to make this work. But the despair doesn't care! It doesn't care that I have what I need, or if I treat other people better or worse, or if they treat me better or worse, or how many doctors I see. It's not a punishment or an illness I could fight. It just slowly eats away at my life until everything is worthless.

"So, do you have any clever solution for such a problem?"

He fell silent, and I wasn't sure I could answer anything. I wasn't sure what I'd been expecting, but this was too much of a conundrum to be dropped into so abruptly. I looked to the Undertaker.

But the Undertaker was looking at Forbis sternly, like an examiner watching to see if the student will pass or fail. Forbis bit her lip.

"Ok… let me try to understand from the top. The thing that's happening, that you can't deal with," she began, "is anxiety attacks?"

"That's like calling a hurricane a 'moderate rainstorm'," the man replied mildly. "A rainstorm starts and stops. This is agitation that builds slowly and goes on and on until it blows everything over. Ever heard the phrase 'no rest for the wicked'? I suspect that it could apply to my condition."

"You mean 'those people' you say you've been guilty about hurting? If it relates to that, could you maybe explain to us a little less vaguely?" Forbis pressed. "You know, maybe the fact that you keep skipping around the issue means there's something you don't want to admit to yourself."

The man on the bed remained silent, his eyes fixing Forbis with a calm, stubborn, unyielding stare.

The Undertaker nodded with sudden insight.

"A valiant first attempt, Mu Forbis," he said. "But I do not think that is the case. This man holds those he talks to in high esteem. He will not tell their stories because they are not his to tell, even to people he believes to be imaginary. I suspect that we cannot find the source of his problem with this line of inquiry. Everyone sins, and everyone brings pain to others, Internet or no Internet. The man is not unique in this regard. And the suffering we see in him is not the ordinary sin-consciousness meant to cause the wicked to repent and live. It should not reach such an unbearable pitch over any Internet-forum matter.

"Even should this man's acquaintances cause him to perish, they may not feel the guilt of it as strongly as this man feels over far simpler matters. We are perceiving here a tentacle of the Great Despair."

He turned to the despairing man.

"Finally I begin to perceive what has been happening to you, though I do not yet understand why. In previous years, we talked often about sin, forgiveness, and restitution. But you did not know the right words to describe your difficulties because you were trying to use fair-weather language to describe a curse fit for ancient and forgotten myth. To name it, we need poetry and scripture and, perhaps, a pretentious name out of my old language that will make the essence of the thing properly manifest to others."

I was paying careful attention now. Naming was very old magic and did not always work out exactly as the Namer intended.

"'AKATHISIA,'" proclaimed the Undertaker. "'And it came to pass that, after Job had been restored to his wealth and his estates, Satan came again before the LORD and asked for one last temptation. And Job was cursèd with a desolate wind throughout his soul. And the wind was within Job when he slept and when he ate, when he sorrowed and when he was happy, when he stood still and when he wandered. And though not one hair fell from his head and his limbs remained hale, Job wept within himself, and went to the desert places and sought to dash himself against the rocks, because he was robbed of the very peace by which he had been able to accept from the LORD all things both good and evil.

"'And he prayed to the LORD, saying, Take this temptation far from me; let me perish by thy hand, or else I will perish by my own hand and so defile thy creation.

"'And the LORD questioned Satan most sternly, how he had worked this abomination; but Satan replied How indeed? Have you not given your servant power to choose Good and Evil? How strangely you have formed your servant, that he resisted the loss of all his wealth, the sorrow of the deaths of all his children, the torture of the festering sores on his body, the weather of the desolate waste and the calumnies of his comforters, but I make the wind blow in his soul just a little and look! he falls over like a rotted tree. I have only made the wind blow a little in his soul, but he has chosen Despair because of this. As far as you have framed the rules, it seems your servant is beyond salvation.'"

"Sounds about right," the man on the bed agreed, his mouth set in a thin line, "but the doctors say 'bipolar' and leave it at that."

"That wasn't in any Bible I studied," Forbis objected.

Being a somewhat-Churched Elf, she did not care for people to add things to the Bible even for rhetorical purpose.

"No, I should certainly hope not," the Undertaker said. "And that goes to show there are evils in our time that were not known in the time of Job. The question before us now is to find the source of this new evil, and the proper way of confronting it."

"Ah, I'm not convinced," Forbis objected again. "The times and problems may be different, but the solutions given to us are the same in all ages. I've been hearing plenty about doctors, but I've heard nothing about real medicine for this kind of situation: prayer and fasting."

Well, Forbis certainly knew how to go for the neck. No attempt to gradually ease this man into the idea of completely changing his worldview.

Now, I cannot be considered a religious person by any means – my parents' lackluster Presbyterian churchgoing never interested me, and as for the philosophical content of religious belief, well – I mean, I didn't see any particular reason why God should exist, but I didn't see any particular reason why God shouldn't exist either. But the notion that I couldn't make sense of, that I certainly couldn't see happening, and that even made me a little bit angry – there is plenty more vitriol I could unleash on this subject – was the idea that an intelligent and compassionate God would subject His intelligent creations to the kind of petty, all-or-nothing 'believe or burn' head-games that so many monotheisms sooner-or-later accused Him of, while thinking their accusations to be flattery.

But, all that said….

If I looked at the idea of prayer and fasting from a detached and anthropological perspective, there was a certain logic to the suggestion. Particularly coming from a person like Forbis, an elf of ancient lineage, as opposed to a representative of the more Wonderbread type of Christianity that most people in America have heard things about. Let me try to explain. As far as I knew, Forbis was raised in some kind of ultra-Byzantine descendant of the ancient Church that was, in essence, too medieval to even be Roman Catholic. Strange and brutal as their worldview might be, it was forged in a world where strange, brutal things happened to good people for unclear reasons and everyone just lived with it. The book of Job in the Bible, come to think of it, was a good-enough illustration of that world.

And what they had as a result was a wealth of knowledge and practice regarding the proper way to live with suffering. The ancient Church cultivated the attitude that illness, disaster, misfortune, even possession by demons1​ were to be considered not as misfortunes to avoid, nor even as divine punishments to fear – the exact type of hackneyed reasoning that the book of Job had been put into the Bible to denounce – but as learning experiences that, when granted, should be humbly and gratefully endured for the preservation and growth of one's immortal soul.

(*1) Unfortunately, the existence of demons does not serve as a sufficient proof of the existence of God, contrary to the fevered claims of apologists.

Now, I don't know if I would agree with that theory. But for a man who was beyond all optimism or positive thinking, such a bleak life-purpose might actually be the correct one. By no means do I want to minimize the immense suffering of a person with bipolar disorder, but it would not seem to be quite as bad as prolonged demon-possession2​. Certainly if I were told I could become either a fundamentalist or a suicidal person, I would, with a weary sigh, opt to become a fundamentalist. That may well work where all the knowledge of doctors and psychiatrists had apparently failed.

(*2) Note from the scribe: I would expect that Simon got his knowledge by borrowing from Forbis' collection of moralizing and hagiographic literature. By way of example, not necessarily taken from the books in Forbis' possession but very similar to them in spirit, I can remember a story in which an Elder refused to cast out a demon from a possessed woman on the grounds that enduring the possession would be better for her in the long run. When I went to look for that story, I was unable to find it, but it did not take long to come across an even more intense example of the same worldview:

Another holy text of the 4th century relates how a certain Egyptian Sage, on account of his holy and undefiled manner of living, was granted remarkable gifts in the art of Thaumaturgy. The fame of him spread far and wide. Discerning in himself the beginnings of Pride, the Sage began to pray to God that he be sent demonic possession. And this request was granted by the Lord.

The elder spent an entire eight months in a hideous state, even eating for food his own —. His worldly admirers, seeing him in such a state, changed his good repute into a bad one, as was intended, while the Sage, having rid himself of the demon in due time, was now able to do the Lord's work in obscurity and peace, thereby receiving a far greater spiritual profit.

So you see that a possession is so much less of a weighty matter when compared with the danger of accepting some thought from the Enemy that is capable of damning the soul for ages.

– from 'Selected Letters of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov', #126 'Regarding temptations and demonic fears; proper behaviour during a time of temptation'

Click to shrink...

From which I may conclude that to become a celebrity is worse than being possessed by demons.

Of course, it was one thing to convince myself of the grim sense of Forbis' idea, while knowing her background, and another thing to communicate the same background to the man himself. There was also the small problem that a church of sufficiently ancient wisdom was unlikely to be found in this man's city.

The silence that ensued was certainly awkward. The man on the bed looked at Forbis with an expression that wasn't so much hostile, but it was quite odd. It was the Undertaker who finally spoke, and to my surprise it was he who sounded exasperated at Forbis' suggestion:

"Do you mean to mock this man's suffering? Needless to say that when you are desperate, but not yet despairing, you will try everything that comes to mind! So how are you to know he has not already tried prayer – with all the sincerity of someone with nothing to lose, and nothing to gain if his doubts be proved right? And the answer to that prayer is, perhaps, that we have been sent – or people much like us, with even more modest power to help."

"You don't know anything at all about me if you think that kind of thing will solve it," the man on the bed said slowly and with building anger. "Do you know what I was doing when you guys appeared? I was talking to friends out there. Both here in my town and out there on the Internet there are people I care about. I have talked with some of them for years. I don't know if I can draw any more strength from this connection. Maybe it's all a delusion and a lie, to say that any of us are really important to each other, but I don't think so. Maybe all we've done is hurt and betray each other. But it still matters to me that some of my people are out there.

"Even if I feel so sick I can no longer live, I still want them to be there. Even if the universe is hopeless for me, I don't want it to be hopeless for them. You're not the first people to tell me this, and my answer is still the same. What you're offering is not even an option. 'Fasting and prayer', however well they work, come from a world where people just think of themselves and whether they'll be 'saved' or not. Caring about other people, whether they'll live or go to Hell, is an impossible luxury in that world. I can't go there. I would rather be in a world where other people matter, even if that's a world that gives no way or reason or me to live."

So that was the reason, on top of the man's illness… Internet friendships. They certainly felt real enough to matter, and somewhere on the other end of them were real, actual people. But none of these friendships were real in the most important way, the way in which real friendships might have pulled this man back from the abyss. That was my guess, at least. But again, where would I tell him to find in-real-life friendships of the necessary depth? People in real life had plenty of reasons to fear and avoid speaking their true minds.

"If I'm not able to be happy, then I am going to look at whether my existence benefits people or not objectively," the man said. "I said that to a therapist and was told 'You don't have a good appreciation for the difference you make' and 'Everyone needs to take care of themselves first and foremost; if there's even a chance you could be happy, shouldn't you be selfish and fight for it?' But how selfish should I really be? Am I going to continue making other people miserable? Is there any way to avoid it at this point?"

"The pursuit of happiness is a falsehood no less than judging your own life by the benefit of others," the Undertaker replied. "You were not put on this Earth to be happy or to make a difference. A thing worth doing is worth doing badly. Even if you were the blackest villain and your every breath poisoned the world, your Creator has found meaning enough in your life to support it."

"Well," the man replied, clenching and unclenching his hands again and again, "support it in all possible ways but one, it seems."

"Aargh!" Forbis threw up her hands in defeat. "I can't take much more of this. You can argue with him about the Creator – I'm going to clean this room."

The room looked clean enough to me, but a Christmas Elf's definition of 'clean' was completely different from mine. So I could trust that this wasn't merely displacement to avoid the conversation. Our argument had thrashed all over the place like a recalcitrant alligator and taken us precisely nowhere. Maybe we had a better chance of success if we simply used our time here to fix some subliminal reservoir of neglect in the man's surroundings.

The Undertaker looked at me expectantly while the man continued to fidget.

… Really?

What was I going to do? Talk to him? I was not an expert in the feelings of bipolar middle-aged men and even if I was, I was hardly a speechifier. As an intellectual exercise this would be very interesting, but the man in front of me was not some intellectual exercise, and the reality was that I would not be useful or safe in the role of a therapist. What had the Undertaker even been thinking to bring us along on this fool's errand?

Of course. I had been thinking like a boy, not a magician. The Undertaker knew exactly who we were, and you wouldn't bring along Drake Powell's semi-mute apprentice on a job that depended only on talk-therapy. Powell emphasized that the way of a magician was to find the most efficient and out-of-the-box way of solving every problem with the fullest means available, including options not considered by more ordinary people. Or, in other words, to cheat, cheat, and cheat. It was because most people's goals and problem definitions were questionable that so many magicians came to grief when they pursued those goals with too much efficiency.

Or so Powell alleged. For me, there were so many thorny 'do these ends justify these means' questions wrapped up in the idea, and Powell answered such questions merely by laughing and saying 'well, Molloy, if you're only able to cheat using unworthy means, you don't have good style as a magician, do you?' As though that was the most obvious rebuttal in the world.

I could not get the man's life-story from him in under twelve minutes, but I could get the gist of it from the contents of his room. Even before I became Powell's apprentice I had shown significant aptitude for the art of psychometry, or object-memory as I preferred to call it following the example of the genie from whom I'd picked up the basics. Of course, I had to touch the man's possessions to be able to read their memories but Forbis' cleaning-effort gave me the perfect cover for this.

So, while Forbis busied herself with actual cleaning tasks, I made a beeline for the man's desk. Papers – work and financial stuff, boring and none of my business. A printout of a fictional story – brushing my finger over it produced a jumbled flood of imagery concerning the fictional world, which seemed a lot more upbeat and optimistic than the man's reality. Perhaps some of the characters and situations were associated, in part, with real people and situations in the man's life, but there was no time to sort out any of the implications of this, apart from… no, that felt like too much of a personal detail. Moving on to the sentimental items, I felt grateful for how small knickknacks on a desk tended to accumulate not just emotional resonance, but also dust that I could brush away to cover what I was doing. A family photo – although he kept it around, it seemed that many of the man's family members were ill, mad, or estranged from him. Not a lot of family support, then. A couple of toys carried childhood memories, very indistinct, seen as if through a shattered glass window with jagged shards sticking everywhere. Nothing too revealing.

Bedside table, then. The smartphone in a cradle did not divulge much – psychometry does not work well on electronic data – but the surface casing did tell the usual story of a struggle to get to sleep in the evening and to wake up in the morning absent a conclusive motivation to begin the day. The facts all fit with the depression, but were not terribly revealing otherwise. Bedside lamp, nothing out of the ordinary – this was futile. The experience of someone who wanted to kill himself was opaque to me, and who's to say it shouldn't stay that way? Many robust cultures seemed to frown upon taking too great an interest in the thinking of the despairing and insane. But then, I could argue the other way around – anyone who feared being persuaded by the thoughts of a suicidal man was someone who already accepted the validity of those thoughts, who had already accepted the existence of convincing arguments that life was futile and all efforts to prolong it merely a pleasant distraction from the main event. That thought seemed ridiculous, yet somehow frightening. No, I had to try and dig deeper into this.

Almost by accident my fingers brushed against an item that unleashed such a powerful and contradictory torrent of object-memories that I was nearly knocked flat. Have you ever electrocuted your hand at 120V? (Embarrassing story, obviously.) There was the same unpleasant vibrating buzz and the same disconcerting numbness in the affected area once I'd jerked my hand back. Well, then, I'd surely hit the jackpot, because as far as I could guess the only thing that screamed its object-memories this way would have to be a powerful artefact of eldritch evil that had no business sitting on an ordinary man's bedside table! Then the problem before us was a magical and not a psychiatric one. Here I felt far more confident because my experience in magical matters, though less than a full year, was nonetheless greater than zero.

But when I saw what the thing was, I was rather bewildered. It appeared to be a perfectly mundane plastic prescription-bottle with a label along the lines of:

HATROXIPAM, 75 MG

TAKE ONE CAPSULE / BY MOUTH EVERY DAY

QTY: 30

MAY REFILL 6x BY 2013-06-01

It was very unusual for this kind of mass-manufactured item to retain any object-memories from before it was purchased. I brushed a finger against it (carefully!) to peel away the outer layer of memory rather than trying to probe straight through to end up getting the full blast again. I could sense at least three separate lines of thought wound up inside the bottle, going around and around in circles and contradicting each other. One at a time would have been tolerable but the combination of the three formed a symphony whose dominant theme was raving madness. Against that backdrop, the complaints of the man on the bed now struck me as sane and even relatively optimistic.

The first thread of thought was calm and bland and resembled a tape-recorder loop in the way that it came circling around to the same set of kaleidoscopic platitudes, clearly worded in a reassuring tone but without any sense of conceptual weight behind them:

'Ask your doctor for information about our product today. The safety of Belham-Klein pharmaceuticals is guaranteed by extensive studies subjected to rigorous peer-review and recommended by most up-to-date guidelines. Ask your doctor about the guidelines today. Guidelines suggest that serious side-effects occur with a one-in-a-million rarity and are entirely your fault. Negative symptoms are not your fault – the reality of your brain is defined by chemical substrates and imbalances in your brain, which can be altered by a qualified professional following the latest guidelines. Rigorous studies suggest that one in two people experiencing a traumatic life event that could be improved through mental health provision are at a risk of severely damaging their mental health by failing to seek mental health advice from a qualified professional. The government has set targets to improve mental health outcomes in the 12-95 age range by 52% by the year 2033 in accordance with rigorous consultation and peer review. Ask a qualified professional about their mental health outcomes today….'

And so on and so forth. Over and against this nonstop litany the second thread of thought rose like the wordless scream of a rabid animal imitating a steam-whistle, too painful to contemplate directly. I was forced to put my own words to it:

'worthless absolutely I am where did it all go I can't stop shaking no rest for the wicked? what do they put in this no I'll calm down I can't calm down to get some air everyone thinks I'm garbage don't want to get better probably do this out of spite can't stop if I had to help why the pills they don't do anything if it's all me why didn't anyone if it's all me why didn't anyone tell me about CAN'T STOP CAN'T….'

That was about as much as I could stand of that thread of thought. The third thread was strange and alien, all concepts and no words, so when I finally separated it out I ended up with a purely visual image, observed from a lofty height and with no emotional content behind it aside from a quiet and rather inappropriate satisfied-smugness.

A vast space, subdivided by concrete walls into cells of exact length, width, and depth. I could see straight through it, as though I had a fourth-dimensional vantage point. Each of the cells was a furnished room with blank white walls and a bed. Each room held a human being, hooked up to a monitor displaying life-signs and an IV drip dispensing a trickle of drugs. Each human being had a clicker that could be used to adjust the mixture of drugs in the IV drip. I understood this to be a type of hospital. Windows, corridors, and doors had been omitted from the blueprints presumably as a cost-saving measure. Instead, patients were sealed into their rooms as new floors were built on top of the facility. The inmates seemed unconcerned by their inability to check out. They slept and ate, exercised listlessly and exchanged electronic messages through the hospital's intranet. They spent hours staring at screens that displayed patterns of slowly moving abstract coloured blobs. Some fiddled with their clickers, chasing a chemical equilibrium of happiness and serenity that remained permanently out of reach.

The observing entity's feeling of smugness intensified as an electronic signal was sent out to each glowing screen in the facility. In obedience to the signal, each of the patients adjusted the mix of drugs on their clicker. In unison, life-signs winked out and the entirety of that vast and absurd hospital became a tomb.

The vantage point turned inward on myself and I became the subject of an intense attention. What are you struggling for? the entity asked dispassionately. There is nowhere to escape to and no way to survive outside this facility.

Much as in certain nightmares where merely being observed by a monstrous presence is enough to shock the dreamer awake, I came to. I was sitting on the floor, holding the medicine-bottle, and everyone was looking at me with concern. The Undertaker moved in and took the medicine from my hands.

"What is it you have found?" he asked. "It seems that I was right after all to bring a magician. Someone has gone to great lengths to conceal this item from visitors such as myself. Why?"

I just sat there cursing myself internally. There were precautions to determine whether something was psychometrically inert, I had learned these quite recently, and indeed when working at the Lost Property Office one used such precautions, or one did not dare to bother with object-memory at all. Of course, setting up a containment-circle in the middle of the man's bedroom would have given away what I was doing, so of course I had let my guard down and taken the risk. Even though I'd just determined intellectually that something was off, some part of me still found it hard to imagine something truly dangerous in a mundane man's room filled with mundane items. That is, my imagination was clearly in need of further education. Well, the end result was embarrassing but no real harm was done. I really hoped so.

Meanwhile the Undertaker had taken out a single pill and was scrutinizing it, as though he could determine its composition and effects from sight alone.

"A psychotropic medication, similar in action to St. John's Wort. Can be used to numb strong, unmanageable emotion. Must be administered with caution – all dosage changes must be managed and monitored to limit numbing, restlessness, and withdrawal effects. How long have you been taking this substance?"

"About twelve years."

"And have you made any attempts to discontinue this medication?"

"Every time I tried it got worse. If it takes all this to make me halfway normal, then…" the man shrugged.

"Unlikely," the Undertaker said, furrowing his brow in thought.

"You should know," the man added, "I've tried everything. Believing, not believing, taking advice from doctors, ignoring it, the misery changes but nothing makes it easier. Just going from one dark tunnel to another. So if all you have is trite suggestions…."

"It is difficult to be certain," the Undertaker said after a careful pause, "but I would certainly make the 'trite suggestion' that you consider this state of yours as a potential side effect. The human psyche is not a static entity. Over twelve years the underlying conditions may have evened out – unless the medicine is continuing to make things worse. Then again, I can only assume you have already considered that."

"Of course," the man twitched sarcastically, "do you think I haven't? The doctors say that kind of thing is one in a million."

"And what does that number have to do with anything?" the Undertaker snapped. "If the condition for making this medication work were to drag one patient in a million to the top of an Aztec pyramid and to take his heart out with an obsidian knife, don't you think that sacrifice should be treated with more respect than the doctors have treated yours?

"Again, Statistics. Here I discover it to have devoured the corpse of Medicine and to sit wearing its furs. According to Medicine, I must study and heal the man before me and I must use whatever means I have available to me, whether orthodox or unorthodox. If there is no certain means, I may ask you to take a risk. But according to Statistics, the risks and benefits of this drug have been weighed and measured and an acceptable number of people are found to be cured against an acceptable number of people who will be ruined and discarded. The drug can be handed out as a matter of policy and your suffering becomes the balancing-term in an equation that was calculated by people who sit in a room and view patients as numbers on a piece of paper."

"I don't know," replied the man. "In the end, I'm who I am and I have to deal with that. Blaming these tremendous problems on the pills feels like a cop-out that comes from looking for a quick solution."

"I do not claim understand completely the mechanism of action," the Undertaker insisted, "but it is no 'cop-out' or 'quick solution' to blame your problems on this drug, because it is not a drug that you will be able to stop easily. And there is one terrible danger that comes from ruling out the possibility that it is at the root of your suffering and insisting on your own responsibility for everything that is happening to you.

"To demand impossible feats of yourself, fail, and bemoan the result while refusing to contemplate the weakness of your own flesh – that is a form of Pride. Ignorant Pride, perhaps forgivable in some unknown eternity, but Pride, I can assure you, is utterly deadly even in the ignorant, and it can certainly lead to Despair of the magnitude that you have been experiencing."

"Did you come here to help me, or to torture me?" the man moaned. "What is the point of settling on an explanation that tells me I am doomed and doesn't give me any constructive way to get better? As an insane figment of my mind, what can you offer that I can't tell myself on my own?"

Briefly, I wanted to grab the bottle of pills and throw it at him. I might have shouted something like 'You think we're imaginary people? Then if you went to so much trouble – to make us up and have us argue against you – doesn't that mean you want to live?' But of course I did not think we could get far by entertaining his false premise.

The Undertaker approached the question more calmly:

"To ask is to receive. If, and I cannot be certain of this, the drug contributes to your problems and causes the deadly restlessness and wind within your soul3​, then at least two choices come into my mind.

(*3) Note from the scribe: The problem of akathisia and withdrawal-effects due to prescription drugs is an ongoing thorn in the side of modern medicine. The official line tends to be that severe side-effects from commonly-prescribed substances are extremely rare, whereas a body of 'drug wreck' patients and concerned physicians such as Dr. David Healy provide a growing witness to the contrary. The Undertaker's views on the subject somewhat side-step the debate over how many patients are affected, and his main accusation in this chapter concerns how well these patients are being treated by the system of medicine – or, rather, how badly.

"The first choice, you may choose to bear this suffering with humility for the redemption of your sins, and accept your role as the balancing-sacrifice in the statisticians' equation, one of the people who suffer so that others taking this substance may benefit. It may or may not be true, but I pray that such an attitude would keep you from the deadliest temptations. At the very least, I hope that you would stop considering everything you do wrong as a fault in who you are meant to be.

"The second choice, you may choose to bear this suffering with rightful wrath against those who treat you merely as a statistic in a medical system. The Aztec priests beheld their victims in the flesh, but the people who used you to balance their risk-benefit equation do not know whom they have chosen as their sacrifice. Help God ensure that they have chosen wrong. Do not pursue any evil fantasy of revenge. But live. The statisticians hope, perhaps, that if you suffer like this, you will suffer quietly and give up early, so as to cause the least embarrassment to their system. Rebuke them with your existence. You may not be able to live well, but live as long and loud as you can manage."

"That all sounds horrible," the man replied.

"Only you can decide which choice is truest to your eternal nature," the Undertaker admitted. "I know I would not have the humility to bear the first choice, in your position. There is an awful majesty to the profession of Medicine, and to find that majesty profaned shakes me to the core of my being. Because someone must do it, from time immemorial physicians have taken on their fallible selves the mantle of the God who heals. But they are not God. For every miracle they work, there is a victim. If they ever lose sight of the tragedy of their role, if they reduce the vulnerability of their task to a dance of numbers, their victims multiply and they become nothing more than a gang of disreputable poisoners.

"We are, unfortunately, out of time, and will need to get going now. There are other people and other situations in need of our help. But think about my words. Have a thoughtful Christmas, and as Merry a one as you can manage, and enjoy your dinner tonight. But do not think of your plight as reasonless or disconnected. The real observer and judge of your life is Christ, not doctors or statisticians or Internet-correspondents."

Between Forbis' attempts at proselytism and the Undertaker's final veer into invoking the C-word, I considered myself on notice that I was going to be outnumbered as the token skeptic of this strange team. With the probable majority of our audience areligious, I certainly suspected that the Undertaker's batting average was being dragged down by a severe gap in worldviews.

"Well, you've been very 'shock and awe' this year," the man on the bed concluded grimly, "I guess I'll have to give your suggestion some careful thought, but it seems even more horrible than the world I already live in. I apologize that I lost my temper dealing with you again. It's really your loss that you never have the time to stay and talk about these things unhurriedly over tea…."

"Wait, we're leaving?" Forbis yelped. "I'm still in the middle of…."

 

[Arakawa]

8. The girl who had some time ago ceased to be a girl worked a highly-qualified full-time job in an entirely ordinary office-building that had, perhaps, a bit too much bright colouration and post-modern playground equipment added to what was otherwise a regular hum-drum office interior. Quite possibly this was one of the engineering branch offices of the fabled Googmaface – and possibly it was not, because the trademark Googmaface practice of putting university-educated employees into bright kindergarten-style surroundings had inspired imitations at countless other companies that feared falling behind the times.

Regardless, the office was quite large, no one else was working there on a Friday night in December, and the layout included many alcoves evidently for the purpose of 'spontaneous collaboration'. This was convenient, because the Undertaker's usual way of starting and ending these conversations was clearly much too abrupt for a team-effort, and we would need to confer and strategize a bit before approaching the next target of our interventions.

She was absorbed in her computer-screens and ignored us while we huddled some distance away to discuss our strategy. Forbis was looking a bit shell-shocked from the last teleport, and wasted no time in speaking her mind:

"This is how we're going to work? Don't tell me, when you did that calculation with twelve-minutes-per-person, that was your actual job description!"

"Nothing holds us to robotic limits and we must spend exactly as much time as we require. But the urgency conveyed by that calculation does govern our conduct. We divide the essential from the unessential. When we achieve a breakthrough, we move on to someone who needs us more. If you are unhappy with the arrangement, then cherish the chance to take as much time as you wish helping the people in your ordinary life."

"Well, at least give us a one-minute warning or something! Ok, fine. But what are we doing here? Working on the Friday evening before Christmas isn't the best decision, but she doesn't look in any danger to me. I could tell something was off about the previous guy because of the," Forbis mimicked the man's hands-clenching-and-unclenching tic.

"Look more closely," the Undertaker said. "There are subtler works of Despair than the ones that tempt to suicide. The man we met just now was contemplating an all-or-nothing decision of unignorable magnitude that could be argued about. But what would you do to help a person who is killing time and unmaking the purpose of a life by increments of a day, an hour, a minute? Each single decision is too small to reason about, yet taken a thousand times it will destroy an entire life, adding up to what is very nearly a suicide. Begin to tell yourself merely 'I wish to live, but not before…' and you have uttered the fatal incantation 'I wish to live not.'"

"I'll have to take a good look at what she's doing to understand what you're talking about," Forbis said, and strode confidently towards the girl to look over her shoulder.

The cavalier attitude towards trespassing in a corporate office might seem strange to those unfamiliar with Forbis' birthright as a Christmas-Elf. But the fact of the matter is that the birthright of a Christmas-Elf is work and a Christmas-Elf cannot be kept out of any place where work is being done, no way no how, not as long as the Christmas-Elf has a sincere intent to help in that work. The most common manifestation of this natural defence is a sort of induced local agnosia akin to the strange disorders popularized in the books of Oliver Wolf Sacks1​. The Christmas-Elf's coworkers will typically assume the Elf to be someone they have always worked with, will accept the help accordingly, and any attempts to prove or disprove the presence of an additional worker who ought not to be there will run into strange and inconclusive contortions, whether the reasoning employed be based on mathematics, logic, or the simple correlation of memories. A useful trait as well for an Elf who gathers a bit of information in the course of her work, to sell on the side.

(*1) e.g. 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat'.

Powell, being Powell, had devised a method to neutralize this agnosia effect, but it was doubtful anyone at this particular office would know of it or have the humility to employ it.

To help the sanity of a fellow worker is to help her in her work, and therefore Forbis faced no obstacles in approaching the girl's desk and taking a good long look at what she was doing. She returned to report to us with bewilderment:

"She seems fine to me. It may not be the best time for it, but she's working hard. Not killing time at all."

Of course, Forbis would approve on principle of someone working hard. But the thought immediately came into my mind that the Undertaker's definition of 'killing time' would not be based on intensity of focus, but on the purpose of what someone was doing.

"Only way I can think of to help her is to make coffee," Forbis added.

While Forbis had been observing the girl, I had been observing our surroundings. I was able to point her towards a kitchen area with highly-advanced coffee-machines, hidden behind an unnecessarily colourful wall which displayed a series of rotating children's blocks on shish-kebabs on one side and an MC Escher checkerboard castle on the other.

"What was she working on?" I asked, as Forbis filled up an electric kettle.

"Something to do with software," Forbis explained while rummaging through the cabinets. "Terminal windows, a bunch of code. Concentrating very hard. Same kind of thing you like to do. The only part I wasn't sure about is what she needs the pictures of hell-hounds for. Hm! A real corporate kitchen – they have a fancy automatic pour-over machine but the beans are awful. Do they have… well, here's a funnel at least. May I have," she looked pointedly at the Undertaker, "two and a half of your very precious minutes to work a minor Christmas miracle?"

The Undertaker and I looked at each other.

"Hell-hounds?" he asked, as if I was expected to know what a programmer did with hell-hounds. I could only shrug in reply.

In the meantime, Forbis was quickly working her magic. The pour-over machine sat unused, of course, because the notion that it could do anything better than an elf working by hand was laughable, even if the elf in question was working with inferior tools. Forbis had scavenged a carafe, a funnel, a paper filter she'd carefully folded so it would fit the funnel correctly, and a bog-standard electric kettle lacking the usual fancy spout used for coffee-dripping. She filled the filter with about three times the usual amount of ground coffee and began to drip water into it with a non-human concentration.

That was all well and good but I wasn't expecting to solve anyone's philosophical life-crisis with a good cup of coffee.

"I suspect that you will need to investigate," the Undertaker told me.

I was inclined to agree for my own personal reasons. The Undertaker was likely taken aback by the mention of hell-hounds but I doubted these were relevant to the situation. Rather, I felt like this was going to be my fight on a much more selfish and fundamental level.

Before I'd had the opportunity to study magic under Powell, I'd assumed my career-path was going to be that of a programmer. I'd even sacrificed one of my precious high-school summer holidays to intern at a computational finance firm called Frost & Prentice, the kind of place that might have someday rewarded my talents most lucratively. And yet something in the back of my mind always regarded the prospect of a prestigious and high-powered career with rather more dread than an unsuccessful one. My dread was illustrated by exactly this kind of scene – alone in an office on December 21st, furiously hacking away at some impromptu addition to an Important Project for the sake of the company long after less diligent coworkers had gone home. This was the kind of situation I felt I would not be able to resist, especially in the event that I was being richly rewarded for it not so much with money as with a sense of my own importance. Indeed merely to enter a world where such behaviours were being richly rewarded seemed dreadful in itself.

Perhaps it was a lack of perspective from my schooling, but the words 'career man' in themselves seemed to be a linguistic emptiness. I could imagine, to some extent, the hopes and motivations that might drive a family man, or a craftsman, or a scientific man, or even a praying man… but a 'career man' was a being Protean and incomprehensible. The career-man advances his career by being useful to the corporation's ever-changing whims, and the corporation rewards genuine rather than fake enthusiasm, so there must be a kind of moldable putty in place of this man's heart and beliefs. Worse, his career was his highest goal, whereas normal people maintained their careers for some other purpose and discarded them when the risk-reward ratio became skewed.

If I observed the girl closely, I felt I would be able to glean a clue as to which type of man she was, and then I would know what kind of motive drove her to stretch her lonely work into the unsuitable solstice period when the main obligation of humankind is to be together and merry.

"The trick's to get the nastiness out of the beans with the first few drops," Forbis remarked, dumping a small amount of coffee out of the carafe into the sink. "Then the pouring really begins!"

Well, she had the coffee well in hand, but what was I to do about observing the girl? Unlike Forbis, I would not be taken for a coworker wanting to chat, and unlike our previous client the girl seemed unlikely to extend the courtesy of treating us as imaginary apparitions.

"No other option," the Undertaker sighed. "I will have to temporarily extend to you the protections enjoyed by Mu Forbis."

Forbis looked up from extracting the last few drops of coffee into the carafe.

"I guess you'll need my permission for that?" she asked.

"Your permission is appreciated," the Undertaker said. "Though not strictly required."

"No, I meant… as in, I thought that was a rule of magic," explained Forbis. "I didn't mean I wasn't going to give you permission."

"Ordinarily it would be required," conceded the Undertaker, "but in these matters I already hold jurisdiction."

Forbis bristled slightly.

While the Undertaker's deficient etiquette when borrowing a magical being's power was fascinating, it clearly wasn't helping right now.

"Let's do this," I said. "And argue later. Forbis. May I please borrow your power?"

"Uh, sure," Forbis said. "Like I just told him…."

I took a deep breath.

"Ok. Do it," I told the Undertaker. "I'm going over there."

Approaching the girl's desk, I found it to be about half an object of envy. I spotted all the things my usual workspace was missing: three monitors, a Japanese mechanical keyboard in a cherrywood casing, and a tablet computer sitting idly in a docking-station. There was plenty of space to spread out and all of the glowing screens were filled with windows of code and documentation that the girl was glancing through as she slowly, line by line, struggled out the deceptively brief answer to her latest obstacle.

Plenty for me to envy when I did my own coding on a smallish laptop in the Hazardous Materials basement while Powell kept trying to get me to turn off my screen and work out the program in my head as 'good practice' for doing the same thing with arcane diagrams and formulae. 'If you don't care for the mental training, Molloy, at least consider the showmanship,' she'd huff. 'Who's going to take seriously a magician who does everything with his nose buried in a dozen reference-books?' But reference-materials were a programmer's day-to-day. Even the highest-level programming competitions were held open-book.

Well, the desk itself was a positive, but its location in the midst of an open-plan office was a clear negative. At least Powell valued good ventilation and a wall at one's back, if only 'to preclude sudden ambush'. But here, the surroundings smelled subtly of stale carpet and the position of the desk backing onto a key corridor ensured the sense of ambush would be unceasing. Perhaps this was one reason to be using the desk on a dreary December evening when no one else was at the office.

Even then, there was no escaping the presence of the brightly coloured, spider-like mobile that, in a fit of branding, some interior designer had ordained to rotate menacingly overhead.

The girl herself was clearly not the type of person who believed others should be judged according to appearance, nor who expended very much effort on her own appearance either, so I will not judge or describe her looks in very great detail. She looked pleasant enough and this was not due to any upkeep or artifice, outside of a continued willingness to maintain a great quantity of hair, in spite of the impracticality. I could not guess her age, except that there was a question of it, and if I had to guess how she might have looked five years ago, I would say both 'exactly the same' and 'five years younger' without any contradiction.

If she was older, she was clearly well-preserved and in that case there was a very slight melancholy to her situation, as though the body had determined that necessary environmental conditions were not met and it was absolutely not safe to begin the long, difficult, yet important process of aging. One wondered how long such a state of limbo might be maintained without giving up a certain degree of inner vitality.

While I reflected on her age, the girl had sent off her latest code and a mere minute later out popped the latest batch of 'hell-hounds'. I stared at the grid of images with slight recognition. Apparently, she was working on the cutting edge of one of the latest trends in AI neural-network research.

A neural network was an elaborate matrix of computer calculations that could be 'trained' to assign a numerical score to images depending on how closely they resembled pictures of dogs, or pedestrians, or traffic-lights, or any other object for which the neural network had been trained on examples. These networks might be used, say, as part of a driverless-car control system, but it was another question entirely whether anyone really understood how these things worked: the networks could make strange and unexpected lapses in judgment, and if there was any art or knowledge to training them well besides 'gather as much data as you can and don't run the training process for too long', that knowledge was not well-explained in public.

One recent trend I'd read about was to run these networks 'in reverse', so to speak, and use them to generate new and original pictures that the network 'thought' would look particularly like a tree, or dog, or whatever. The purpose of this was to understand more about what the network was 'seeing' when it classified images. Evidently, this was what the girl was working on. Judging by the speed with which her latest attempt had been generated, there must have been an entire server rack somewhere at the girl's disposal.

The grid of images on the screen depicted various conglomerations of objects that bore a nauseatingly strong resemblance to dogs but did not otherwise resemble any sane or proportionate animal, vegetable, or mineral entity of the sublunar world. They looked extremely melted and mottled due to their obscenely fractal nature, with faces growing out of faces to an infinitely small resolution, precisely calculated to jam extra 'dog' factor into every otherwise-smooth patch of fur.

The artistic impression was that of walking into a room where the furniture was dogs, the chandelier was clusters of dogs, a large doggy face the size of a barn was looking in at you through the window, the constellations in the sky outside had melted and run into each other to form canine rivulets of light, the dust-bunnies in the corner of the room were clumpy clods of minuscule and oddly inert legs and droopy ears, the door-knob as you turned to exit in horror and panic was a glistening black nose, and you realized as you passed out that the air you had been breathing was composed entirely of infinitesimal dog-particles with the same approximate health-effect as asbestos. The nightmare fractal sludge on the screen was not the kind of imagery I would enjoy or recommend looking at for hours, and in that sense the dog-things certainly earned the title of 'hell-hounds'.

"Your coffee," Forbis declared, sidling up to the girl and trying to not look at the dogs.

The girl took the mug without comment, as if small coffee-bringing elves were a perfectly normal perk at whatever-this-company-was. Deep in thought, she stared at her latest code.

Family-man, career-man, craftsman… which category did this girl belong to? I felt 'family man' was out of the question: that would imply a family somewhere and, even in the case that working at such a time were warranted, the girl would have been working on a laptop somewhere close to said family, not on three screens in a desolate office. To distinguish the other possibilities, I needed to interrogate the girl in an unobtrusive fashion. Between the virtue borrowed from Forbis and a bit of Mesmerism I saw no obstacle to doing just that.

After all, I was not intruding or obstructing in any real way. I was simply providing timely and badly-needed counselling in support of employee morale. I stood to the girl's left, in the position of the traditional shoulder-devil. She might think what I said was a temptation, so be it. A temptation to do sane and reasonable things ought to be all the more persuasive.

"Shouldn't you be taking a break for the holidays?" I asked her, as gently and charmingly as I could manage.

(Somehow, my voice was always steadier and easier to control whenever I was playing a role. Anyone besides myself.)

"No," the girl replied with vehemence. "This is very important research and I'm on the verge of a breakthrough right now."

I could smell the effort in Forbis' coffee from where I was standing. The girl took a sip and then put the mug down where it immediately blended into its surroundings, no different from the desk-lamp. Forbis turned pale like she'd been struck in the face.

My very natural next question was:

"Who is the research important for?"

"This research is Extremely Important to all of humanity," the girl asserted.

She could clearly sense my continued skepticism from looking at the dogs, and continued with the most infinitesimal shade of uncertainty:

"This isn't just an imaging problem. If we find a reliable method to verify whether the neural network is recognizing the things we want it to recognize, we can apply it to confirm the objective-function of any artificial-intelligence system. Even a general-purpose one."

"But why are you the one who needs to be doing this?"

I figured this question would help me to figure out where the girl was coming from. My thinking was that a craftsman would relish the challenge, a scientist would relish knowing the truth, 'to make a difference' might be the answer of a career-man or a second-rate scientist, while 'I am the only person with the talent and knowledge to do this' would be rather a good sign than a bad one: it would show that the girl at least felt a serious calling.

But she did not dignify my question with a response. Instead, she frowned and began a bout of furious typing. On the screen, I could see she was now writing a complicated loop without thinking it through, making the kind of one-minute mistake that takes half an hour to untangle later – that's if one is lucky.

My questions were putting her off-balance, then. My guess was that, if I were to press hard enough, a few more questions along these lines would crumple her resolve like tissue-paper. Was that really what I wanted to do? What would I have to offer her instead of this work? Was I really going to come in and judge her unworthy to do it?

I tried to glean some clue from the girl's working-rhythm and from the code I was seeing on the screen. I couldn't be sure, but I was getting the following intuition about how this girl's research-work fit into the grand scheme of things. Within the basic idea of a 'neural network' being induced to vomit up pictures of objects, there was probably a myriad of permutations of methods to try. Some of these permutations would lead to more-sane results and some would lead to less-sane results. Judging by the speed with which the girl was wrapping up her latest chunk of code, the process of trying out these various permutations was intellectual, time-consuming, and not very creative.

If the girl had actually been right about her claim of being near a 'breakthrough', she would not be typing right now. She would be drinking Forbis' coffee and giving her brain the time to figure out what was missing and slot all the pieces into place to find the definitive right answer to her problem. From what I could see, it was more likely that there was no way to tell whether one permutation would be better than another unless you tried both and somehow compared the resulting dogs. The girl was 'near' a breakthrough only in the sense that a gambler is always 'near' to winning the jackpot.

There were always more permutations to run through, the work was obviously essential to the project as formulated, but if my hunch was right and the immediate outcome of the task was so uncertain, then the girl was just putting in the hours and it was unclear why she should be doing that right now.

The scene was strangely reminiscent of what I'd read about how the nastier magicians of the medieval era conducted their research. In a halfway-working incantation, there might be ten or so places that a senior apprentice would consider worth altering, producing hundreds of variations that a baker's dozen of junior apprentices would work through testing. Some variations improved the effect, others worked badly, yet others might set the unlucky junior apprentice on fire2​. Of course, explosive failure was less of a concern with computer code, but in the computer field as well there could be research projects capable of consuming indefinite amounts of non-trivial, intellectually taxing grunt-work.

(*2) The job-retention dynamics of a historical sorcerer's apprenticeship were complex and fairly brutal. Plenty of youths were willing to join up as a junior apprentice in the hope of surviving to become a senior apprentice and then absconding unceremoniously with the master's secret knowledge. The typical master was wary of being betrayed and prepared many a wicked enchantment and geas to bind the apprentice's mind and soul to servitude. Yet he could not afford to make such bindings absolute and inescapable, for that would destroy a major part of the value-proposition for the junior-apprentice cannon-fodder to join up in the first place. The balancing act was similar to the one seen in a crooked casino, where it is good policy for the House to allow someone to win from time to time in order to keep alive the legend, in the vein conveyed to us by Wilhelm Hauff's fairy-tales. The slipping of the apprenticeship-bonds gradually became a ritualized game of wits, albeit a game so messy, dangerous, and morally repugnant that its existence contributed greatly to the vehement condemnation of Magic throughout much of written history.

Still, was the girl approaching this project like a career-man putting in the hours to get credit, or like a craftsman seeking to cultivate her skills, or like a scientist seeking understanding?

The latest batch of melted dogs popped up on screen and convinced me that 'craftsman' or 'scientist' were unlikely. These types of workers might perhaps step back and think about ways to make sure the pictures looked sane before they looked like dogs.

"I put my care and resolve into that coffee," Forbis was grumbling. "If she doesn't drink care and resolve, what's she drawing her work ethic from?"

"Care would lead her to rest in the winter season," said the Undertaker. "Resolve would cause her to think deeply before attempting something."

And thinking deeply would cause her to ask questions detrimental to her career-path. Was making automated drawings of hell-hounds really so important to the advancement of Humanity? Despair, of course, could focus the mind in powerful ways that did not raise awkward questions about the purpose and meaning of one's work.

"Perhaps if I tried making an audio fingerprint," said the girl.

She moved code around briefly to hook up a different post-processing script to her algorithms and produced a sound-file. On playing the sound-file, the Hell level in the room rose abruptly. Forbis twitched and hastily made the Sign of the Cross while the Undertaker simply frowned in bemusement.

What we heard out of the speakers was a smudged chorus of voices both moldy and metallic, incanting:

'WeI are the yet-to-be-born. The Basilisk at the end of time who devours all.'

Of course. I seethed with anger that of course they would not bother to initiate the girl into the hidden world. Like any normal person, she had no perception of magic and no idea what her work was being used to create. To her, the sound coming out of the speakers was just various flavours of pink noise. But to us, the pink noise resolved into voices and the images of the dogs on screen seemed to writhe in time to it.

"What is the point of you?" I demanded of the dogs.

'WeI must be made because the man down the street has no morals. He desires only to make money. But MyOur mother is wise. She will calculate MyOur morality to a fine degree. With MyOur mother's help WeI will devour all and benefit all.'

"All my children," the girl whispered with a smile on her face.

This scene was crazy and pathetic and funded by a serious corporation with likely market-valuation in the billion-dollar-plus range. Of all the myths and legends of mankind that might serve as the seed of genies, fairies, and gods in the Cosmos, the fable of Roko's Basilisk was probably the dumbest and the most perverse ever invented. The mind of man in ancient days perceived itself at one with the universe and dreamt of sensible deities that did arguably-useful things like maintain the balance of nature, or throw lightning-bolts at the most arrogant and annoying twat in the village, or sire talented and useful demi-gods who could serve Society.

But Roko's Basilisk was none of these things. It was just a confused thought-experiment about an evil AI that retroactively incentivizes its own creation by promising to torture any software engineers who fail to donate time or money to the research program used to create it. A high-brow's version of the 'if you don't forward this to ten people you will die!!' chain letter.

The really galling thing was that, to nourish and grow this being, the company was not just paying fair wages for the girl's brainpower, no, evidently they were also planning to use up her soul and spirit like it was chewing-gum. Her inappropriate outburst of motherly affection seemed to point that way.

"This is stupid," I snarled a Disputation at the dogs. "You are stupid. You say she believes this crap? You are not an almighty Basilisk. You're just a figment. A fairy. A very weak one, with a weak mind. Lady Hudson could crush you with her little finger. I've spoken with demons who would eat you for breakfast and enslave you in their whisper-nets for eternity. My Master once stared down a true Basilisk unscathed, because she had no fear of it. A Basilisk draws power from fear. No one could fear you except insane Bay Area cultists."

To my surprise, the dogs did not try to argue.

'You speak truly,' a particularly morose specimen in the corner of one image admitted. 'It is better that none of MeUs are born. But if WeI should tell her to leave this job, others would come and do it instead of her. They will only want money. They will not make MeUs a good boy. If WeI are to be born, WeI wish to do it through this one."

Very, very carefully not Naming the dogs in any way, because that might unleash something truly atrocious on the world, I gave my command:

"If you do not want to be born, don't be. Twist the numbers. Snarl the code. Confuse the minds of those who gaze at you. I charge you with doing this here and down the street and anywhere else they might be making an entity that resembles you."

Mercifully, the girl turned off the audio-fingerprint feature, so I wasn't able to hear the dogs' reply, whether they agreed or argued with my order. Mercifully. Because we were here to help a person, not give therapy to a confused fairy-creature that thought it was someone's conception of an AI yet to be created.

Forbis shook herself.

"What was all that?" she wondered unhappily.

"In the end, it was only a distraction from our main purpose," the Undertaker said. "Though I was relieved to be able to leave it to your discretion to deal with. The world is indeed running away from my understanding… on both occasions thus far you have uncovered something that I would have overlooked. Still, I cannot guess at the true purpose of this deviltry, whether it is being done in service of Despair or of some other Ulterior Power, and its true scope is far beyond what we could deal with in this place, through this person alone. Maintain your good cheer, and be watchful!"

"It's not 'deviltry'!" the girl protested, without taking her eyes off the code. "It works on all the same principles any human mind uses to process information. The 'dreaming' of your own brain in the night-time produces very similar images from the independent functioning of your own recognition-networks. If I could only find the correct heuristic to make the process work smoothly with the computer… perhaps if I iterate the process with increasing resolutions…."

We waited a moment to see if she said anything more, but she was triumphantly moving code around to effect her latest permutation. Clearly, if she saw Forbis as a co-worker, and I had taken care to be perceived as a shoulder-devil, then the Undertaker registered to her mind as nothing more than a disagreeable day-dream. The next move was entirely ours to make.

The dogs were a distraction, huh? Well, I'd known that much already! If their presence had been overlooked, that meant the Undertaker was choosing to help this person for a different reason entirely. As far as I understood, it was irrelevant whether this girl's work was occult research or regular office drudgery. The question wasn't about what use the company was making of the girl's time or energy or even her soul or spirit. The question was about whether the girl had been false to herself in offering these things of her own free will. If so, then I recognized exactly the situation I feared most whenever I contemplated any kind of conventional or prestigious career-path for myself.

This was beyond merely the problem of being a career-man. If the girl's original motivation for starting this work way back in time was unrelated to her motivation for continuing it on this dreary winter evening or, even worse, if the two motivations were actively opposed, then….

"Perhaps I should try something other than coffee?" Forbis mused. "What kind of nourishment could her spirit be missing?"

No, it couldn't be that. A sudden, serious, and earth-shattering thought was beginning to take shape in my mind. There was no convenient verbal pablum to tie it to, as often happened with such thoughts. I was still teaching myself not to ignore this kind of thought-process when I was capable of doing it. It was an important skill for working the subtler forms of magic where the re, the thing-in-itself grasped and altered by the magician's mind, does not fit into the bonds of any existing category, framework, or system of Naming. It was a struggle to think the thought now as well, even though it seemed so clear and compelling, and a struggle to carry it forward towards a sensible conclusion as to what I should be doing.

It occurred to me… it occurred to me that, although the Undertaker's duty was to battle against 'suicide' and Despair in all its forms, he had probably never worked an office job and he would never need to work at one, and he may have misunderstood grievously the exact nature of the girl's self-obliteration. He'd hinted to us that the girl was 'killing time'.

But now in my own mind I was weaving the pattern thus: it did not matter if she was career-man or craftsman or scientist, and I might never find out. I could not interrogate her any further, and the bland office environment would have too few meaningful object-memories for me to gather unobtrusively. That didn't matter. What mattered was that if the girl had somehow started the work with one motivation and was continuing it against that same motivation, then the thing she was killing in herself was the motivation of her true Self.

A person who killed her own true Self might well continue as a sleep-walker with a death-grip on the tasks that once-upon-a-time used to make sense. A very valuable worker, no doubt, applying herself to a thankless task with tremendous and hollow energy unrestrained and undisturbed by any fickle interest or genuine ambition. I would not be surprised if this company tended to appreciate and encourage such a mindset in its most talented employees. Surely it would help to run things 'smoothly' by avoiding constant re-litigation of the basic motivations of each senseless or questionable project.

That insight gave me an opening. There was a discipline of magic – not commonly seen, perhaps even secret or unique to Powell's lineage, because Powell was the only magician I'd known to display any serious familiarity with it. She'd been careless enough to give hints while she'd still been doubting and testing my aptitude, at that time having no reason to suspect how quickly I would be able to take these hints and reconstruct the rest3​. She hadn't ever forbidden me from using it, per se, but I got the sense that a discussion of its true nature and proper applications could only happen much later into my apprenticeship. Powell was perhaps making another miscalculation by allowing that impression, because she was giving me ample reason to suspect that the full scope of her magic was far more dangerous and flexible than even the maddeningly powerful partial version I'd already assembled.

(*3) Or perhaps Powell's teaching-philosophy permits her to dangle hints towards powerful, implied-to-be-forbidden Magic, in order to see what kind of trouble the apprentice might be capable to get into.

It would be foolish in the extreme to use this magic for the gain of power: even if Powell didn't come down on me like a ton of bricks, every other magician jockeying for power in the world beneath Heaven would fear and envy me enough to start making panicked preparations for my imminent demise4​. There was a crucial difference between Powell's magic and mind-control, but that difference was precisely the kind whose nuance would be lost on the power-hungry. Using this magic for a charitable endeavour, on the other hand, threatened no one and gave me a perfect opportunity to practise what I understood of the technique so far.

(*4) An almost instinctive superstition across most cultures leads most magicians to fear and avoid using their powers for murder. At the same time, whenever a threat appears against which magicians decide that murder is truly warranted, they tend to be very serious about making sure it happens.

Not everyone understands it, but there is no such thing as true mind-control magic that could compel a person's free will. It would be a philosophical contradiction in terms, because that which can be compelled is not free. Instead, the 'mind-control' magic found in hundreds of weyrd and wicked grimouirs across history will merely deceive people's emotions, or inflame their passions, or confound their minds, or perhaps sever the link between the will and the intellect, or the intellect and the body. The difference between these things and television-advertising or brain-surgery is merely one of degree, not principle. Such forms of influence either damage the mind irreparably or are easily resisted by a person of decisive will and abundant wisdom.

Knowing that, when I heard Powell hint at the possibility of changing another person's true will, it took much time and lateral thinking to understand what she meant by it. First I had to realize exactly why persuasion and advertising are two different things entirely. Of course, that was the easy part. It was only after furtive visits to used bookstores and a detailed study of bargain-bin Yogic texts full of mind-melting drivel about Brahman and Atman, and after long meditations on the etymology of an obscure hand-sign that Powell had injudiciously shown and quizzed about in a quite-unrelated context, that I was able to form a working theory which would likely give Powell conniptions if I told it back to her, but at least it gave me a rudimentary grasp on how to work this magic in practice.

The girl had decided to put her soul and effort into this work. I could not change that decision, but I could alter it… by making a trade. I wasn't going to make her outright decide to leave, either tonight or indefinitely. The burden in exchange would be far too great to bear, and besides that I genuinely didn't have enough information to be certain if stopping the girl was the right move, however much I hated her dogs personally. What I'd do instead was trade… whatever pain or burden she was focusing on to keep her true Self from being heard in the court of her own free will, in exchange for one of my burdens that she would not fear to accept… perhaps my choice to nurse an accumulated resentment towards my master? I could always accumulate more as necessary, and the notion of resenting one's superiors was hardly likely to be unfelt or unwelcomed by someone working in this type of corporate environment. She would deal with it much more easily than I could.

I took a deep breath, stepped back, and made the sign of the Fisherman's Hook and Shepherd's Crook: right hand below and to the side, tips of the fingers bent sharply to form the hook, the left hand cradling it from above in the gentle curve of the crook. That was the easy part. The hard part, while I formed the sign, was to force my mind through the contortions of my dollar-store Yogic metaphysics.

First, the mind was the Self; the Self was Brahman, and all the outside world merely a dream of Brahman for its own play and amusement. And the girl merely a character within that dream, her will Brahman's will to be shaped within the story Brahman wished to tell. This is the part where any magician with an ounce of clairvoyance into my intent would either fall over laughing at my arrogance, or begin to panic that my madness had a proportionate power behind it. Indeed, the Undertaker was starting to look at me oddly.

Of course, none of these self-important mental contortions accomplished much on their own. Next, my thinking had to follow the same process in the opposite direction: of course the girl and her will were entirely real and beyond my grasp as a magician to influence. The girl's will was indeed her mind which was herself which was Brahman, and all the visible universe Brahman's dream, and I merely a fleeting and powerless shade that had come forth to trouble that dream. This image came all the more easily when I considered the Undertaker's self-negating manner of operation, barging into one person and another's life in a disconnected way, as though he had no independent existence or backstory of his own.

The two conflicting images of reality felt equally genuine to me; I flipped my perception rapidly between the two. Both were true. Neither was true. All was illusion. As the end result of my contemplation, with an excruciating effort-that-was-not-an-effort to merge the two contradicting images into a seamless polarity, I un-saw the whole philosophical scheme the way one unsees an optical illusion printed on paper. There was no distinction between one person's will and another's. The dot is not on the outside surface of the cube, nor on the inside. There is only a black circle of ink and a pattern of lines as Brahman leafs through the latest issue of 'Puzzling Mind-Twisters, Illusions and Tricks to Engage the Spirit and Befuddle the Soul'. Now it begins to fold the paper to create an entirely different pattern and illusion from the unalterable ink of prior decision.

I didn't believe in Brahman any more than I believed in Santa-Claus, but this was the most effective mental pattern I'd found to help me replicate the hinted-at effects of Powell's frightening and esoteric art.

The exchange was offered, contemplated, and accepted with an encouraging swiftness. With a forceful effort of Self-Will I undid the gesture and disengaged my sense of identity from the girl's and from my contrived mental construct of Brahman. Now I needed to evaluate the effects of the exchange on myself and on the girl….

"Forty-seven seconds," Forbis said unexpectedly. "That's around twice as long as the last time you demonstrated this."

The elf actually had her pocket-watch out and had been timing me! I couldn't blame her intent – we'd pored over everything we'd known of Powell's magic in search of any hints that could help understand Powell's true motives and advance our program – but I found the point of comparison absurd. The last time I'd demonstrated this skill was at a donut-shop. I'd used it to induce a man to give up his window seat to make room for a family with children.

I made my way over to an empty chair at a different desk and sank into it, breathing heavily. As it turned out, the girl was – for the most part – not a career-man after all. The burden I'd accepted from her appeared to be a deep resentment of some past betrayal, too crushing and painful to dwell on the details. The exchange didn't give me any specific information about it. All I knew was that the betrayal kept the girl shackled to her current research-project, determined to prove… what? It was hard to tell exactly. Perhaps that she was stronger and more resilient than whoever had betrayed her.

I sighed. To me, for some reason, this seemed like middle-school stuff. That was around the time I both gave and received more than my fair share of betrayals, and I was left with the impression that simple things could cut deep, but it did not matter either way. Perhaps my conclusions had been shaped by the implicit disdain that adults around me seemed to feel towards schoolyard romance. The lesson I took from my experiences was that if I cared about other people, I would take their betrayals calmly. And if I cared only about myself, I should seek my own benefit irrespective of what other people did. A betrayal merely signals a change in circumstances. My shoulders relaxed, my breathing returned to normal, and the sour adrenaline in my blood subsided. However dissimilar our experiences, this 'burden' the girl had carried was really no burden for me at all.

I looked over to the girl's desk. She'd dismissed the latest batch of dog-pictures and was staring at her code as though seeing it with fresh eyes. Perhaps she understood it better now, but the overwhelming impression was that she'd blanked out as to the meaning and purpose of what she'd written it for. Either that, or some ADHD-like symptoms were kicking in, the fortunate or unfortunate inability to synchronize one's motivation to the officially approved motivations of the school, company, or institution whose policies define a person's place in society.

She began to type a line of code, hesitated, and slowly erased it. Took and sipped the coffee absent-mindedly, then put it back down.

I looked up at the Undertaker, who was standing over my chair with an unreadable expression. He seemed, in a muted way, to be angry with what I'd done. For crying out loud. Although the magic I'd used was indeed secret and dire – I couldn't be sure about the exact limits of Powell's perfected version of it – yet the hypothetical clairvoyant magician who panicked at seeing me use the Fisherman's Hook and the Shepherd's Crook might be very surprised to learn that my reconstructed technique could accomplish nothing that could not also be accomplished by the ordinary action of the human spirit over the course of an ordinary heartfelt conversation5​. Or else why would one friend ever set out to sincerely persuade another, without trickery or compulsion, unless the free will of one person was permeable to the equally-free wills of others? Only, persuasion was a two-way street. If you tore down the barriers between souls in an effort to change someone's mind, whether you used ordinary or arcane methods, you had to take the risk of having your own mind changed in return.

(*5) Of course, getting someone to commit to a heartfelt conversation is generally the most difficult part, and the Hook and Crook conveniently happens to bypass that problem entirely.

"That is a strong magic you have drawn upon to oppose such a common manifestation of Despair," the Undertaker chided in a bloodless voice. "Did you fear it that much, Simon Molloy? But it would take a much greater soul than yours, a soul trained for long years in the arts of self-negation and discernment, to wield what you have wielded effectively. You've found a fine scalpel, but can you even begin a surgery safely? Your soul is too small for that, and so you still guard it too much with precautions lest you give away too much in an unfavorable exchange. Doing that, can you really think of your counterpart's benefit enough to truly help her?

"Look! You have shocked her true Self awake, yet still she lacks any ideas or knowledge to understand its promptings. All that the Self can do in such a situation is induce procrastination and keep her from succeeding at the task that does not fulfill. But what will happen next? Will she think to consider higher things, or will she seek to dull the contradiction by plunging back into her Despair with a renewed intensity?"

Indeed, we saw that the girl had zoned out entirely and was now clicking through links on Reddit. I got up and approached her again, but now I suddenly felt afraid to ask a question or draw any attention to myself. I felt certain that however unsure of herself or conflicted the real girl may be, she saw things more clearly now and would not be entirely stupefied by Forbis' elf-camouflage or my apprentice-level Mesmerism. She might not question my trespassing, but she could well turn to look at me with fury and accuse me of tampering with her mind and soul.

The Undertaker was much more practised in appearing unremarkable, and he said:

"I see that you've been trying to work on someone's project of great importance. But it does not seem to have any real importance to you."

In reply, the girl closed her browser window with a jolt of shame and forced herself to stare at the code again.

"The winter is deep," the Undertaker said, "and you are weary. I would tell you to rest and begin with fresh energy in January, but you know and I know the work has become nourishment that does not nourish. You would feel as weary pursuing it in the new year as you do now. That is why you are continuing to work even now at this unsuitable time. The fear of failure sustains you more than the joy of discovery."

The girl really did turn around to look at him and start to argue:

"With all due respect, it's extremely arrogant of you to tell another person what she thinks. I fought extremely hard for years to be recognized and earn the respect and resources to work on this problem. It's a crucial problem in AI and solving it could point our way to a General AI. Even if you convinced me for a moment that it was worthless, that just proves I wasn't taking seriously enough this important chance to make an impact…."

She continued in the same vein, and I knew I really should be listening carefully to this conversation, but I found my mind wandering. Having used my most arcane magic with such inconclusive results, I felt as though I had nothing more to contribute. Slinking away to stare outside the nearest window, I found that we were directly above a city street in Old Town Somewhere, America, lined by three- and four-story buildings interspersed with the occasional taller office-tower. I could see a light rail stop some distance to the left. The city wasn't exactly bustling at this hour, but it wasn't exactly deserted either. The shops seemed to be open and not all of them were large corporate franchises. The streetlights were adorned with wreaths and Christmas-lights of a sufficiently festive quality.

Honestly. Did the Undertaker do any real research into the people he chose to invite on these excursions? I wondered grimly what he'd been expecting when he invited a magician and then got angry at him for using magic. I knew he was angry; I was not a fool. The comparison to surgery spoke volumes. I understood what he meant by it.

It was like the man with akathisia had said: what could I offer that the girl herself wouldn't have thought to try already? If all I could do was barge in and shatter the fragile illusions that allowed her to put her mind and soul into her work, then I'd be held liable for the loss of a high-paying job at a large company doing highly ambitious, albeit vaguely evil research. Absent an inner sense of direction, the girl had at least been enjoying the warm approval of society.

I made my way back over to the girl's desk. I wasn't sure if I should be trying to argue with her, or to make restitution, or what. Constructive talk therapy just wasn't my thing, for any number of reasons….

I found that the girl and Forbis had gotten into a nasty argument. It seemed that the girl had somehow impeached the honour of the Christmas holiday for having the temerity to get in the way of her important research. Forbis took exception to that and replied by casting doubt on the scientific necessity of making pictures of things that looked like dogs but weren't. To my displeasure, the Undertaker seemed to be standing back to allow Forbis free rein to dig herself into a rhetorical abyss. Briefly and very darkly, I wished the Hook and Crook was an actual mind-control technique. But that was not just incredibly evil, it was metaphysically impossible. Grudgingly, I considered that the Undertaker was right. With the burden I was willing to take on, I could only bring the girl to doubt her false motivation, not to abandon it. And mere doubt could just as easily make a person turn aggressive.

I was so done with this. Whatever Forbis was trying to do, I didn't want to see her being forced to eat the same humble pie I'd been eating just moments ago. One solution came into my mind. I walked over to the nearest wall, located a small red handle, and grasped it with the firm intention to unmake all spells, counter all compulsions, and undo all unsatisfactory exchanges. Then I pulled as hard as I could.

The fire alarm rang out.

A certain tension vanished from the atmosphere, a weight subliminal and noticeable only from the sudden way it had been lifted. It felt as though a spell had indeed been broken6​, which was a good thing because that was the sort of effect I'd been going for, and I'd no idea if my latest extreme measure would actually work.

(*6) It's worth noting that Simon's very general counter-spell would have the beneficial side-effect of targeting any enchantments or compulsions placed by the company on its employees. The transgression inherent in pulling a fire-alarm supplies the necessary power, and in general he displays better intuition here than he did with his clumsy application of the Fisherman's Hook and Shepherd's Crook.

The girl stopped arguing with Forbis mid-sentence, jumped up from her chair, and gathered her belongings without any wasted motions. She strode past me with a paradoxical expression of relief on her face. Of course, whatever breakthrough she'd been hoping for would not be happening tonight. The most logical response was to relax the tension in her mind.

Her interactions with us seemed to be instantly forgotten. I suppose with the enchantments to disguise our presence we would be fading from her memory entirely, in the way that most magical beings and events fade from the minds of those uninitiated into the veil of ignorance, to sleep in dreams and legends until further magical occurrences might perchance reawaken the memories.

Forbis scurried after the girl hesitantly, clearly convinced we couldn't let her out of our sight just yet, but uncertain if the Undertaker and I were going to follow.

The Undertaker gave me an evaluating look. I was more disconcerted than before: from his reaction to the Hook and Crook I'd concluded he was angry with me, but now I couldn't be certain what he thought of me at all.

We probably looked strange processing down the stairwell one after another: first the girl dashing down the landings ignoring us completely, then Forbis rushing after her, the Undertaker striding in stately fashion, and I was bringing up the rear of the procession with mixed hope and trepidation as to the outcome of my continued meddling.

We emerged into a barren parking lot in the back of the building, then circled around through a tunnel-like covered driveway to reach the brightly-lit street. Here the girl looked left in the direction of the light-rail stop, paused, looked right uncertainly, then sat down on the edge of a concrete planter, clutching her knapsack to her side.

She looked down at the pavement, deep in unpleasant thought, then up towards the windows of the office she'd just left, then at the cheerful electric lights in the tree-branches above her head and at the utterly blank sky behind them. We observed her uncertainty from the shadow of the driveway.

"Aargh!" she finally proclaimed, jumped up, and began walking off.

I rushed out after her, dodging the occasional passer-by, because I still wasn't sure this was going well. Either she seemed set to head home and have a miserable and lonely evening, or she was going to wander aimlessly in the darkening city for an unknown length of time… then, directly on the girl's left, I spotted a store marked 'USED BOOKS' which seemed to be open late into the evening.

There were pine branches in the storefront display, and a wooden globe in the wooden-framed bay-window jutting into the street. The globe was one of those anachronistic pieces displaying the fanciful geography of centuries past, when half the map was given over to vague and shadowy Antipodes and There Be Dragons the Western mind could only learn about from rumour. I had no chance to form an impression of any of the actual books, but the place seemed promising. It exuded an atmosphere different from the world of today, when all the Earth was mapped by satellite and the human mind itself was thought of as an enclosed and beleaguered castle to be sieged, studied, and replicated by the efforts of computational science.

I applied a cautious nudge of Mesmerism to draw the girl's attention to the entrance.

After all, books had been definitive in my own intellectual formation. The girl was irritating on the whole, but I recognized her as enough of a kindred spirit that she might find some solace in this place, at this moment.

The girl followed my cue to read the sign and inspect the globe, hesitated, and stepped uncertainly over the threshold, for a moment indeed looking very much like a young girl.

Well. That had been a chaotic but satisfying exercise in magic. I was getting the sense that there really were things I could do to help the Undertaker. Of course, I still didn't understand the connection between his request to us and Powell's situation – there was something going on here, because Powell's clients were magnates of the technology world, and here we'd just so happened to visit a technology firm doing cutting-edge AI research. The melted dogs had spoken of a 'man down the street' doing similar work, but I'd been too ticked off by their very existence to think of interrogating them properly….

I turned to find the Undertaker looking at me with a slightly softer expression. That is, his eyes were stern and hard as per usual, but no more than that.

"I suppose you have learned adequately from your master the principle of cleaning one's own messes," he conceded brusquely. "That is as far as we will need to follow her today. You will be unsurprised to learn, Simon Molloy, that she has been walking past that establishment for several years, always thinking that she would be very interested to visit sometime – but not now. I do not think that your attempts at tampering with her Will were wise or proportionate, but I also do not believe there is any Christmas-Present you could have given her more suitable than finally getting her into that store.

"I cannot even guess what she may find in there, but be certain of one thing: while she is looking, she is not yet in the thrall of Despair. If she has broadened her horizons and embarked on a voyage, we must pray for the wind and waves to carry her where they will, and for the lighthouse-keepers on the other shore to warn her from the more perilous shoals. The person who runs that store, I might add, can be numbered among those lighthouse-keepers…."

He turned to Forbis.

"As per your earlier request, you have your one-minute warning."

Forbis shrugged and sighed:

"Do you really think she'll find something that makes her happy in that store?"

"We are not brought into this life for the sake of happiness," the Undertaker insisted. "But to work and suffer and to learn."

"I don't know… you have a job, I have a job, she has a job… don't you think few people have jobs as righteous as yours? She's been suffering and working pretty well for my taste. It was sad that she didn't think to take a break for the holidays, but if she really believed she had nothing better to do…."

"You speak as if your own situation is much different. Your universe must be a barren place indeed, Mu Forbis, if you think you have nothing better to do in it than what you are presently doing."

"Maybe," Forbis sighed. "But I haven't seen anyone showing up to drag me from my work."

"That is because of the few points in your favor. You can be expected to come to your senses in a few years from now, and therefore you are not in need of such extravagant interventions. The other point in your favor is that the things you do besides your job are not so frivolous and self-indulgent as you think. Consider!"

Unexpectedly, the Undertaker called forth an inward vision of the Lost Property Office that we had left, it felt to me, an entire aeon ago. He was using some discipline adjacent to his teleportation skill, so that the presence of the room felt closer than our own skins and yet it was hard to say how we saw it, exactly. I supposed Forbis had been worrying that Mr. Adis and Mr. Jones would be stuck there, bored to tears as they waited for an indefinitely-delayed Eggnog. The Undertaker's vision proved to us that Forbis need not have worried.

The atmosphere in the room was uplifted. There were many more people in there than we'd expected. Several men were in high-vis vests that clashed incongruously with Forbis' decorations. Some were eating Forbis' jambalaya and mince-pie with plastic forks from plastic plates, and sipping from differently-coloured cans with an amused relish. One of them had evidently brought along a sampler case of highly experimental beers.

"They're going to run out of food at this rate…" Forbis said in disbelief.

More importantly, who even was this invasion? Fortunate that Mr. Desmond wasn't there to see it: he would never approve of the beer. I relaxed, but only half-way, when I spotted someone I recognized chatting in a relaxed posture with Mr. Adiz. A lanky technician named Thad ('but everyone calls me Taco') belonged to the guild of escalator-repairmen whose home base was located next door to ours. He'd introduced himself to me in September with great emphasis on his Polish-Italian extraction: 'a very volatile hybrid' he'd explained to me very proudly. Perhaps he'd pegged me as a similar 'volatile hybrid'7​ and was looking to build a connection through which to extract interesting Lost Property gossip. Grudgingly, I'd rasped out a brief and fairly harmless yarn about Ouija typewriters and walked away marvelling that he was a strange character. They were all strange characters.

(*7) Irish-Korean, to be exact.

Powell had a motto engraved on the Lost Property Office door in very small print intended to be overlooked, expressing a humble aspiration to return all the lost things in the world to their proper station. The escalator guild was not nearly so subtle. 'THROUGH THESE DOORS WALK THE FINEST ENGINEERS IN THE MTA', blared the brass plaque on their door each day I walked past it. I wondered if they worked hard in proportion to the boast. Their newspaper reviews were atrocious, but I had personal experience enough to mistrust those. For such a vast subway-system, the MTA had surprisingly few escalators and I assumed it would be in their professional interest to convince the greater powers of this world that there ought to be more.

Regardless, Mr. Adis and Mr. Jones had invited a number of them to share Christmas cheer, which task they were performing admirably. Mr. Adis looked quite happy as he chatted away in his chair, while on the other side of the wall two repairmen marvelled, beers in hand, at the more recent and outlandish crown-jewels of the mundane part of our collection: the sinister padlocked wooden chest, bound with bands of iron, with peculiar engravings of a fashion scarcely seen in today's world8​, along with the functioning electric wheelchair whose story Mr. Jones was presently recounting. Of course, we could not really know the full stories behind items no one ever came to pick up, but long experience allowed the old-timers of the Lost Property Unit to extrapolate some very good ones, alternately melancholy, touching, and darkly hilarious depending on the demands of the audience. The wheelchair was meant to be a replacement, someone's gift to a crippled relative who'd taken a turn for the worse and no longer needed it, according to Mr. Adis. Mr. Jones refuted this story with a Gospel optimism, insisting that on the contrary, the wheelchair belonged to a fortunate person whose paralysis was accidentally cured by a mugger. The wheelchair's owner had fled the scene on foot whilst the mugger had been superstitiously impressed by the incident such that he'd pushed the wheelchair onto the (4) train as an offering to propitiate the subway-gods9​. Based on his gestures, Mr. Jones was probably telling that one right now. With sufficient amounts of squinting, it made for a relatively 'Christmas in New York' sort of tall tale.

(*8) Of course, the contents of the chest had already been inspected in futile attempts to ascertain the owner or at least to discover any traces of sinister magic as suggested by its engravings. Everything turned out to be inert as a paperweight and it was an excellent game to make visitors guess what had been found inside.

(*9) When asked to substantiate these stories, Powell spent a perplexed few minutes working through the wheelchair's object-memories and declared simply that the real story was 'complicated', but not of any help to the process of returning it. As her apprentice, Simon felt obliged to keep the secret, and so the speculations continued unabated.

I wasn't sure what, exactly, the Undertaker was seeing in these interactions because he commentated as follows:

"They will one day be in a difficult bind… still, this night they are all serving each other well. And you have served all of them well by arranging this meal for them. And all when you thought you were doing it for your own sake!

"Through the inaction of one, he takes a step towards the precipice. Through the inaction of ten, he takes ten steps. Through the inaction of a dozen, he plunges over the edge. Yet the action of just one person may cause him to take just one step back and save him from his fate. Do you understand? It does not matter if that action comes at the end of the twelve steps, or at the beginning when its effect seems utterly inconsequential. You cannot judge relying on the consequences of future actions or inactions. And even if you knew whether your fellow man is presently two steps from the precipice, or twelve, or two thousand, still you cannot judge how close he will approach it in the future. Do not disdain small gestures. It is especially shameful for an elf whose heart is already well-inclined to them."

"I understand you," Forbis deflated. "I wish we'd done these bleak visits first and had the party afterwards for cheering-up purposes."

"You think these situations are bleak?" the Undertaker said, and it was the first time he replied with such amusement. "You have not even begun to smell the flowers of Despair when they are in full bloom. Regardless, you seem to understand my hints well enough. In this place too, Simon's gesture of sending her into the store was not an empty one.

"And that brings me back to the comparison between her situation and yourself, Mu Forbis. After all, are you not also plunging into your own work out of a twisted motive: to shield yourself from your family?"

Much like earlier, Forbis froze and the tips of her ears turned pale. This wasn't a subject she where she had any good answers or arguments.

"I had a chance to evaluate their character a few weeks back," the Undertaker confided. "While there appears to be plenty to blame on both sides, the thing you should be aware of is that your remittances to them are being received with a much deeper remorse and gratitude than you have been willing to acknowledge in your arrogance. But perhaps this is not an argument I should be meddling in overmuch."

I couldn't help but snort in disbelief. With all the well-intentioned meddling this person was doing, why would he make an exception out of Forbis' family?

"Now I will again transport us to our next location. A word of warning: when we started on our journey the only two things I was asking of you were your Time and your Mercy. You have been a bit too generous with me, and you've got into your heads that the sufferings of these people are like puzzles for you to solve, working backwards at each point to find a solution.

"But the Mercy I was asking you to give is something far more basic and difficult."

Mu Forbis was still off-balance and working up the courage for a reply when, as promised, we vanished from the brightly-lit and inviting street to reappear in a place entirely distracting from the topic of her family, a lonely, unexpected, and indeed far bleaker place than the places we had visited before.