The Stephanie Glitch, parts 2 and 3

Because I love you, that's why.

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TWO

Stephanie looked across the cemetery from her favourite bench. Between the rows of gravestones and spruces there was an encroaching fog, and between her and the fog a visual vagueness lingered that implied more was developing. Stephanie could just about make out the flashing lights of cars on the adjacent street. It felt as if the fog was blocking the sound of morning traffic, turning commuters into ghosts.

She turned to the right and opened her bag, pulling out a small notebook and pen from the darkened mess within. Then she shuffled her feet and got comfortable, as comfortable as she could get on this old bench. A slat had been loose forever, but it was her favourite bench as it was best for sitting on the fringes of movement. From here – on a clear day anyway – she could see college across the road and smell freshly mown grass and hear birds in the few hours between traffic jams. The cemetery was a rectangle of calm in an otherwise unreasonably busy world.

She opened to a random page, then flicked carelessly back to where she was last. Something about morning commutes, something about train tracks, something about not knowing which way to go along two rigid and predetermined rusting routes. Rusting routes. That sounds good, she thought. She clicked the nib of her pen into action and began scribbling a response to her past self, editing and crossing out as she went.

in the space non-space between two destinies

is a compromise or something alien

and it’s so hard to carve a new path

when the old ones are so easy

through these rusting routes

but someone’s must have been here before

in this place

the liminality of trespass criminality

Graffiti on unreachable bridge heights and tunnels

Names I’ll never meet written in stupid places

People risking their lives to be known

She put her pen down, feeling something underfoot. There was a fragment of brick or pottery below her black boot, something she could easily kick aside to continue undistracted. But she kept it, toying with it and glancing back at the poem, feeling it was complete. Stephanie rolled the fragment about some more, looking down at it and picking it up. She wondered where it might have come from, if it once held flowers or was part of a fireplace or foundation. She caught the faint silhouette of the chapel to her right and remembered something. It was ten or more years ago, her first (and so far only) funeral. Her mother and father were there, both together though not happy about it, and Stephanie was a little humanoid thing in a yellow or a red coat. Her uncle on her father’s side had died, and she didn’t want to sit with the other children as they player under, around, and above the pews. Instead Stephanie sat off to one corner poking at a cracked part of the outer wall, squinting under the shattered rainbow laser beam cast upon her by the church windows. She didn’t remember much else beside her father crying and her mother walking her up to the coffin as he followed them. Stephanie remembered remembering, not the event itself. She was afraid of looking in – it was an open casket – and at the last moment her father stepped in and took a weeping Stephanie back to the pews. She pulled loose a fragment of brick and thought the whole place would fall down upon her, or that at least someone would be angry. So she hid the evidence in her yellow or red coat and sobbed until her parents arranged for her grandfather to rescue her from a terror she didn’t understand.

“Hey!” a voice cried, shaking the fog of memory. It was Emma. She was wearing her most summery outfit, green eyeshadow and blue lipstick coupled with a floral dress almost as orange as her hair but not quite. Nothing was ever as orange as her hair. Stephanie closed the notebook on her pen and smiled up at her friend.

“Hey.”

“No, no. I already said that. You need to say something different, that’s how conversations work,” Emma said. Stephanie smiled and put her book to her right side, standing up to hug Emma.

“I missed you, you difficult person,” she said.

“Obviously,” Emma replied. “Nice to see you’re still looming like a thundercloud above the graves, bothered any horny goths today?”

“Can’t see any today,” Steph said.

“Shame.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re late for college,” Emma announced smugly. Stephanie panicked and reached into her bag, pulling out her phone and checking the lock screen.

“You’re a total shit!” she declared, thumping Emma in the arm and putting her phone back, sitting back down.

“I know, that’s why we’re so perfect together. Best friends!” Emma beamed.

“Best friends,” Stephanie repeated, turning her notebook over.

“A new poem?” Emma asked. She turned around and sat down beside Stephanie. The loose slat slipped from under her and she jumped in fright.

“Christ!” Emma yelped and leapt upwards. Stephanie was busy laughing at her.

“It’s not funny!” Emma said, supressing her own laughter.

“Oh, it is.”

“It nearly ate my arse!”

“Grim.”

“Exactly,” Emma said, stepping further away.

“It’s just a bench silly, it’s always been like that. Come back.”

“Well I’ve never needed to sit here and mope,” Emma explained.

“Of course not, you’re always making daisy chains and befriending cartoon wildlife,” Stephanie chided.

“Shut up, queen of the undead.”

“Queen of the undead? Better than queen of cringe.”

“That’s fair,” Emma said. “You do look undead though. Rough night biting mortals?”

“Not all pale people are vampires Emma. That’s a vicious stereotype.”

“When did I mention vampires?” Emma asked. She turned and sat back down beside Stephanie, being careful to sit on the secure slats of the bench. The two sat in silence for a moment, as sparse and isolated hailstones appeared soundlessly on the stone path around them.

“Why must you always talk this way. Why not just sit and be silent?” Stephanie finally asked, sarcastically. Emma frowned and replied, “Oh, so you want an ornamental friend. Fine. I’ll let you continue your campaign of cosmic misery. If you need me, I’ll be silent over here.” She turned away on the bench in mock exasperation, nearly moving onto the loose slat again. Stephanie tentatively flipped the notebook back over and tried to write again. But there was a new distraction in the air, a faint humming. Something very close and very irritating was happening, and she didn’t like when things happened, especially if those things were close and irritating.

“Are you singing to yourself?” Stephanie asked. Emma looked indignantly over her shoulder, clarifying, “No, I am humming to myself.”

“You’re such a shit,” Stephanie said. Emma smiled at her, then scrunched up her nose.

“Bit cold,” she said. “Is it hailing?”

“Hailing?”

“You know, rain, but hard,” Emma clarified. Stephanie looked up and felt a single cold bullet strike her right cheek, just below her eye.

“I suppose it is hailing,” she said.

“Then we should probably be getting in,” Emma said. Stephanie shook her head and turned her head down, facing the notebook and saying, “No, it’s fine. Poem.”

A few silent minutes passed, with Emma checking her phone for texts and Stephanie editing only one or two more words. As much as she liked Emma (she had to, as they were best friends) she couldn’t really work around her. It wasn’t as bad as with other people, but Stephanie felt a repulsive need to be perfect first try, which very rarely happened. She also had now grown slightly older since writing and then rewriting the poem, and had lost whatever spark had started it. It wasn’t like a story, something that could be picked up and rescued after a few quiet months in the bottom of her bag, it was something more fleeting. A poem wasn’t really there at all in any other moment than the one in which it was written. At best poetry was an echo of a moment, a flash of an idea. A hailstone undissolved.

That’s it! Stephanie thought, focusing again on reality and the page in front of her face. She moved the pen, noticing an Orion’s Belt of hailstones had arrived in triplicate upon the page. As she hurried to write the next lines a few more appeared, punching the page like hits on a little typewriter.

Graffiti on unreachable bridge heights and tunnels

Names I’ll never meet written in stupid places

People risking their lives to be known

And we are like hailstones undissolved

Just formed and already melting

Just fixed and already bleeding

hurtling to our graves

It didn’t all fit into a coherent whole. Perhaps it would be better as two poems. Stephanie thought about it then reached the conclusion that thinking about it would only lead to over-engineering it. Instead she turned to her friend, tentatively holding out the notebook.

“Hey Em,” Stephanie said. “I made this one nice and dark, just for you,” Stephanie said, pushing the book toward Emma but not letting her take it completely.

“Just this page,” she explained.

“Just this page,” Emma repeated, sealing another of many nondisclosure agreements between them. The hailstones fell harder now, and before reading Emma looked out across what little cemetery could be seen, thinking something imperceptible. The path ahead of them both was slowly fading to white as new hailstone pixels appeared faster than they could dissolve.

A minute or so passed before they spoke again.

“It’s good,” Emma said. “But it’s cold and my head hurts. Shall we go in?”

“Yeah,” Stephanie said, packing her things and standing up. “Do you really like it?”

“I like the rusting routes bit. I always wonder how people get up there, then I realise I probably know some of them.”

“You know everyone.” Stephanie said.

“It doesn’t hurt to be social,” Emma replied. She started walking and Stephanie followed her, tracing the thinning stone path that would take them to the cemetery gates. The atmosphere on this fringe of the cemetery was so grey, so oppressively bland and depressing that even Emma in her summer dress and bright hair was dulled by it. As she walked ahead of Stephanie some of her colour went missing with each passing car, each increase in hail and sound and smell that pushed into the quit cemetery from the living world.

“I have friends,” Stephanie said, interrupting her own thoughts.

“They don’t count if they’re buried.”

“I’ll write that down, say it when you pass,” Stephanie replied. Emma stopped and turned, putting on a serious face and tone.

“What makes you think you won’t die first?” she said darkly. For a second Stephanie was taken aback, then Emma smirked and turned away again, continuing their walk to the gates. The hail grew heavier now, but a thin outline of dying oak trees protected the girls from the worst of it as parked cars clattered to their left and gravestones rattled to their right. Stephanie breathed in through her nose and pretended she was somewhere tropical, that the flowers on Emma’s dress were real, and that the hailstones were heavy hot raindrops. Then they reached the grey gates of the grey cemetery that was on two sides surrounded by grey roads and grey shops, and the green and orange illusion of warmth and of life slipped away.

“My little beacon of hope,” Stephanie said to Emma, placing a hand on her friend’s shoulder.

“It’s not prematurely aged you has it, all that moping? You don’t need me to help you cross the street?” Emma said. Stephanie removed her hand and Emma replied tenderly, “It’s alright. I was kidding, you can tag on if you need to.”

“No, I’m fine, just being nice.”

“Okay, well, don’t overdo it. It’s sort of my thing,” Emma said. The pair of them checked the road for cars now, waiting patiently until it was empty, then rushing across into the college car park. The building was a mass of silver and brown panels, rectangular windows and doors punched into something build like a yacht thrown inland. Stephanie took the lead now, rushing in as the hail grew more violent, forcing crowds of people in through wedged open double doors. They squeezed in and passed reception, then the disused water fountain, then the arts corridor. Around every corner here was the same black and red poster, advertising a Battle Of The Bands.

“Looks bollocks,” Stephanie said.

“You’re just saying that because humans are going,” Emma snapped back.

“Is that a band?” Stephanie asked. Emma chuckled to herself and said, “No, I mean you’re not a real person. Anyway I was going to ask you if you wanted to go to it, but since it’s bollocks I guess that’s a no?”

“No, it’s not a no. I just thought the poster was bollocks. The event might be good,” Stephanie said. She had immediately felt bad for insulting it, wondering if one of Emma’s enormous circle of friends had designed it after witnessing a terrible tragedy that had impacted their artistic abilities.

“It’s the flames isn’t it?” Emma asked. They walked past another poster on their way to the stairwell, and Stephanie leaned in to inspect the pixelated flames at the base.

“Probably the flames. So you want me to go?”

“I do, I would very much like for someone who looks low budget goth to sit with me at the bar, so I can look like I was dragged there, rather than it being the other way round.”

“I’ve never been to that bar,” Stephanie said.

“Lucy’s? Seriously?”

“Yeah, sorry,” Stephanie said. They climbed to the top of the stairs and stopped along one of the carpeted corridors. This was where they usually parted ways, where Stephanie went to her class and Emma went to her own. They had stopped just in front of a poster for exchange students that was a decade old.

“Nothing to be sorry about, I’m just surprised. I mean I’ve only been once,” Emma said. There was a silence between them as a line of students filtered into a nearby classroom and a tutor hurried past them.

“We should go together one day, just you and me, when it’s quiet,” Emma added. Stephanie adjusted the strap of her bag and smiled slightly, nodding at her.

“Yeah, yeah that’ll be nice.”

“It’s settled then. See you at break. Oh, if you get to the canteen before me could you get a choccy milk?”

“Sure,” Stephanie said. She high-fived Emma and the pair parted ways. Outside the metal panels covering the college rattled like caravan roofs, the hailstorm growing angrier and angrier as it battered cars and students alike.

THREE

The Artifice fell like a blood drop through a vortex of rock and dust. Behind it countless interstellar objects clattered and converged upon the space it left behind, spinning into a makeshift shell that the Virtualist cruisers could barely penetrate.

“We knocked two down,” Toumai said emotionlessly.

“Be more excited,” LP said. “That’s two less for me to deal with when this plan stops working.” She looked to the diagnostic screen and waited. Upon it was a digital reconstruction of events behind the ship, objects mapped and rendered in real time. She pulled the image loose from the screen and watched as the Virtualist cruisers slipped between larger rocks, but got caught by smaller fragments.

“Any way to smash the rocks up a bit?” she asked.

“More intense gravity bursts,” Toumai replied.

“Which you don’t have,” LP said.

“Correct.”

Behind the lumbering form of the Artifice, the steep shape of Virtualist cruisers zipped between and around the rocks, following the invisible path carved by the gravity bursts. LP knew it was only a matter of time before one of them got through, and then a matter of days before they caught up to the ship.

“Talk to me,” LP said. “Just what the hell happened here?”

“Surely we should be discussing strategy,” Toumai said.

“We are. Once we know more about each other we’ll find more common ground, perhaps between us is some conclusion we might not otherwise reach,” LP explained in a mocking tone. She glanced over at the image and saw another Virtualist cruiser battered by a storm of cosmic debris.

“I am a starship intelligence, and you are a human from outside of time. We do not have much in common,” Toumai said coldly. LP laughed and leaned on the edge of a console, loosening the straps on the wrists of her spacesuit.

“Where I’m from the computers aren’t very funny. That was funny.”

“It was not meant to be,” Toumai said.

“I know, and to be honest, that helped it,” LP said. She stretched and cracked her joints, the noise filling up her spacesuit. It was as if she hadn’t moved in centuries, as if she had only recently been thawed from deep sleep. She twisted and cracked again and said, “New body, a bit stiff.”

“I know the feeling,” Toumai replied, “This particular shell needs oil.” He whirred and moved his eyestalk, flexing a joint that creaked as it moved. LP smirked and exhaled through her nose.

“See. Robots here are funny. I’ll miss that when reality collapses.”

“I’m sorry?” Toumai said.

“You know, because the multiverse is ending. We have that in common. That and her,” LP said. She pointed to an empty patch of air in the room, pretending to be pointing at Stephanie.

“She is not invisible,” Toumai said.

“I know that. You said she doesn’t have a body yet, I’m pointing – literally – toward that fact. It needs to be resolved. You intelligences have strange holes in your intelligence.”

“She is not ready,” Toumai said assertively.

“Well neither was I and I turned out fine, only died four times, or was it five? And I’m pretty well-adjusted.”

“You are right. We should know more about each other,” Toumai admitted. LP sighed in relief and slumped to the floor, clanking a part of her suit on her way down.

“I never thought you’d ask,” she said, seemingly ignorant of the imminent danger. She reached up to the loose hologram of the debris field behind the Artifice and pushed it back into its screen.

“My name is Long Play, like the records,” she said softly. Toumai’s eyestalk whirred over to her, extending to reach down and face her. All the while LP knew that he would be keeping track of the cruisers following them, his machine mind never truly in one moment. In that way she felt very similar to him. Underneath all the skin and metal and beliefs and programs was something almost imperceptibly pure, an insatiable curiosity as emergent as planetary orbits or life itself. It was beyond human and beyond machine, something other, something that guided them both.

“Why?” Toumai asked, shaking LP from her thoughts.

“What do you mean why?”

“Why are you called Long Play?”

“Because that’s the name I liked. That’s reason enough.”

“Understood,” Toumai said, returning to idle silence. LP noticed in Toumai’s huge eye a hint of purple underneath the lens, perhaps circuitry reflecting back up close, or her own face seen through his perception.

“What was it like, the atmosphere, when the researchers found out about her?” LP asked.

“It was electric, as humans would describe. They were noticeably more animated for several weeks, but plagued too by worries about the implications.”

“And how did the Virtualists find out?”

“I believe they had been tracking the project for many years. Their beliefs could be proved or disproved by our findings. Most of them were curious, but a small group were actively out to stop us from ever answering the question,” Toumai explained.

“Classic. And now they know the answer,” LP said, “And they don’t like it.”

“Indeed.”

“So what was the plan, before I arrived?” LP asked, “What would you have done if the Virtualists turned up?” She adjusted her position on the floor, wriggled a little, then got back to her feet, using Toumai’s eyestalk to pull herself up. She patted him on the head before moving sluggishly to a chair and sitting down, sighing as she reclined.

“Why didn’t this occur to me before. Chairs. I love chairs,” she said. Toumai whirred and moved around on his rails, gliding effortlessly toward the middle of the room and looking down at LP.

“Very few scientific projects are equipped for interstellar battles,” Toumai said.

“Fair point.”

“The experiment would be conducted in uncharted space, so as to discourage potential attackers. The creators knew the connotations of their work, and as such wrote a cover story. Officially the Artifice is testing a new propulsion system.”

“And that lie worked?” LP asked. She unclipped the boots from her spacesuit and sighed in relief, stretching her legs.

“It was the truth,” Toumai said simply.

“I see, so try out a new propulsion system, create universes as a hobby,” LP said.

“Discover,” Toumai clarified. LP shook her head and smiled.

“It gets a bit fuzzy doesn’t it. A bit complicated,” she said.

“I believe that if damage to me would cause damage to the universe, then I created it, whether I remember doing so or not,” Toumai explained. LP nodded knowingly.

“I heard one theory, that in the same way these little cosmoses expand into their own space, so too do they expand in their own time. So it’s linked to you in a weird way. Not quite a paradox if you think about it hard enough, as it’s got its own existence. It won’t die if you die, the link to it will just be severed, and it will vanish. Universes naturally want some distance between themselves, we’re holding it close,” LP said.