Dark Skies - 1. SeReS

Let’s get started. My approach to researching this series of articles has been a little more ‘gonzo’ than one might typically expect. This is a journalistic choice which I believe is warranted. Warranted because I would like to bring you on this trip with me, and I can’t do that from a distance.

So my name is Michelle Reid. I am 5’3”. My hair is shoulder length, curly, and chestnut brown. My eyes are blue. My skin is white. I am originally from Melbourne, Australia, but have, since the Echoes began, been living in Manchester, England. My Doctor - who I consulted for comment prior to this piece, would classify me as being at moderate to high risk of Acute Sensory Recursion, and as having a mild vitamin D deficiency. My favourite colour is blue. I am a journalist. I write about the Echoes. Because I live with them. Because we all do.

The Battle of Manchester

Mic raised a hand up to her shoulder, squeezing softly at the joint. After all these years, it was still a sort of a sensory stim; a grounding exercise. The minor lance of pain that persisted from the ancient break - never set properly but which had healed well enough to be…mostly fine - was her way of reminding herself of the difference between truths and Echoes.

“You requested an appointment? Who are you again?” Doctor Carter strode imperiously into the room, slumping unceremoniously into the chair behind the desk. His office was small. They felt somehow too close together, from Mic’s perspective, even with the large, heavy hardwood desk sat between them. Mic raised an eyebrow. Carter raised one right back, slightly mockingly. His dark hair was silvering, almost like he’d just walked in from a snowstorm; his long lab-coat covered over what was clearly a very expensive pinstripe suit; his piercing blue eyes were fixed pointedly - if boredly - on her. In Mic’s estimation, Carter looked very much like a self-important dick.

“My name is Michelle? Michelle Reid?”

“Oh, right. We spoke on the phone.”

“We did speak on the phone.”

“You wanted an interview - "

“ - Still do, yes - "

“ - And I told you I was too busy for journalists.”

“You did, yes.” Mic, again, confirmed.

“So instead of taking ’no’ for an answer, you - "

“ - Called your office and made an appointment. As I said: I’d like to interview you.”

“Brash.”

“Billable hours are billable hours, no?”

“If I cared about money, Miss Reid, do you think I’d be in this line of work?”

“So if not money, what does drive your interest in this field?” Mic smiled innocently. Doctor Carter smirked, raising a hand to wag a finger in Mic’s direction.

“Well played, Miss Reid.” He sighed, turning slightly in his chair to look out the window. Mic did the same. The view was gorgeous, frankly. The floor-to-ceiling glass that spanned the entire side of the building looked out - from the second floor of the low-set medical facility - over rolling green hills and a well maintained tree-line-boundary off in the distance. The uncharacteristically sunny Mancunian sky had midday sunlight pouring into the office, bright and warm and soft. “I suppose my interest and yours are likely fairly closely aligned.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning…curiosity.”

“Could you expand on that?”

“No…” He mused, tapping a finger against his chin; eyes still focussed on some distant point outside the office. “I’m still not going to provide you with an interview. So unless you have a relevant medical condition to discuss - "

“ - It can be off the record.” Mic interjected quickly. Slightly too quickly. She clenched her jaw as he turned back towards her and leaned forward in his chair, his full focus shifting on to her. She knew she’d just tipped her hand.

“A journalist…wanting an interview, but not requiring it to be on the record.” He mused: “What’s the game, Miss Reid?”

“Like you said. Curiosity.” She offered.

“Well then. Since we’re both such curious individuals, let’s both try to get something out of this, shall we?”

“I don’t…understand.”

“You can ask your questions. But I have a few of my own. And yes: this will be off the record, to be clear.”

“If you like.” Mic shrugged. “But what could you possibly want to know about me?”

“Miss Reid.” He chuckled a condescending little chuckle: “My field - my passion, if you will - is in examining the longitudinal experiences of Sensory Recursion Syndrome. And here you are. An Australian, in the United Kingdom, in the post-lapserian aftermath of an unprecedented global disaster where a third of the global population was abruptly culled, presumably here to talk about just that…who manipulated her way into my office to that end, and who, it seems, has no interest in taking no for an answer…but who seems to have, reading between the lines, a motivation for doing so which is less professional than personal? I am deeply curious about your personal experiences with SeReS.”

“There’s nothing interesting about me,” Mic rolled her eyes. “I promise you that.”

“Oh? Tell me, Miss Reid: How many people do you suppose engage with SeReS in any way other than wanting to work out how to not have to deal with it? There’s not a human being on this planet who doesn’t spend their lives managing the affliction, navigating the present in the context of their histories with it: how often do you think I get approached by anyone with a question outside of the realm of ‘how do I make it stop’?”

“I have no clue.”

“It doesn’t happen. So…you ask your questions, and I’ll ask mine?”

“Okay. Sure. We’ll do it your way: go for it, Doctor Lecter: quid pro quo it is.” Mic conceded. She filed away a minor mental note as Carter smiled broadly. He seemed - in Mic’s estimation - to like that.

“We’ll start with the basics. The early days. Who did you lose first?”

“Bold of you to assume - "

“ - We all lost someone, Michelle. Statistically speaking, if you are currently alive, you not only lost people but have…had to do what it took to survive at least some of the people you lost. We’re both adults, here. We both lived through it. Who did you lose first?”

“My brother.” Michelle deadpanned.

“What was his Locus?”

“Quid pro quo. It’s my turn.” Mic reminded him. He leaned in, settling his elbows on the desk and leaning forward. He held one hand out, palm open. “My understanding is that you participated in the battle of Manchester - ”

“ - ‘Participated’…” Carter shook his head with a muted scoff.

“What happened? What really happened?” Carter shrugged, leaning back into his chair. He stared upwards towards the light fittings, folding one leg over the other and steepling his fingers together.

“The same thing that happened everywhere, broadly speaking. I suppose the key difference was that we hadn’t seen anything like it, prior. The primary weapon that we have against SeReS is the awareness that it’s happening, I think you’d agree? Without that…sensory delusions, unaligned thoughts and impulses; inherently they drive paranoia. I tend to reflect on the ‘Battle’ as a result of a sort of...shared psychosis, if you will. The city descended into chaos, as most others would in the weeks and months to come. I, and many medical professionals like myself, found ourselves co-opted into a kind of…battlefield triage, assisting with the classification and treatment of cases as they were…’brought in’. The only exceptional thing about Manchester was chronological. That it was, at that time, an exception. We just happened to be the first. Now…your brother’s Locus?” Mic sighed. She folded her arms tightly across her chest, and one leg over the other. She consciously forced herself to not tap her foot on the floor. She could feel it: prickling on her skin and fogging her brain, memories of her brother from well before. His smile, his laugh…a hug, a playful shove…Mic did her best to force it down.

“I don’t really buy the ‘Locus’ thing, to be honest? This idea that…those of us that survived did so through a combination of being lucky enough to not get gutted by our nearest and dearest, and being…what? Numb enough - broken enough - that we didn’t go psychotic over some cluster of shitty, toxic frustration buried in our cortex - "

“ - Amygdala, technically, to simplify the current research - “

“ - What the fuck ever. You know what I mean. It sounds an awful lot like you all - "

“ - ‘You all’ - "

“ - Medical professions: that you all think that the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was that ‘we’ were already crazy, so we were better at dealing with getting a bit crazier.”

“Come, now, Michelle. That’s not an answer. I answered your question.” Michelle tapped her foot against the carpet several times before, again, forcing herself to stop. She sighed. She started slowly:

“I was over at his place. Manchester was meant to be a holiday. We were watching a movie. The Echoes had only just started. We were all still in that early stage where we weren’t really talking about it, y’know? Or, if we were, we were treating them as weird dreams, or funny little unexplainable incidents. No one had quite clocked the scale of it, let alone the danger. God, I remember this one conversation I had with my partner at the time where I was describing an Echo, and she’d had something similar, and we just…laughed it off.” Mic paused, realising she was rambling; reminded herself Carter was neither a friend, nor a confidante: “But anyway, me and Ryan were watching a film, and we were having this discussion about our parents. And he…must have had an Echo. A bad one. He started getting angry. It didn’t make any sense. Just…stuff about our parents, about growing up, and then he just…attacked. I swear it wasn’t him: I can still remember the look in his eyes, it’s burned into my brain, and that was not my brother. So…” Mic shook her head, clicking her tongue. “I guess his ‘Locus’, from your perspective…would be family.”

“Hmm.” Carter ‘hmm’’d after a few moments, just - it seemed to Mic - to fill the silence. She looked back at him, her brow furrowing as she watched him process the information; watched the gears turn behind his cold, dispassionate eyes. She felt like there was something else there, too. A spark; a light? “Family is a common Locus, from what we know. Very common. Family, romantic partners, contested identity: all very common precursors to a ‘break’ in these scenarios.”

“Well I’m sorry he didn’t try to murder me over something with a little more…texture.” Mic’s jaw clenched involuntarily. She had meant it as a joke, but it came out saturated in bitterness. And that felt…correct.

“Not to worry.” He chirped, glibly dismissive. “Your question, I believe?”

“What happened to the survivors of The Battle of Manchester?” Carter simply shrugged.

“They received medical treatment.”

“No, I mean the other ones. Manchester set the blueprint for mitigation, cleanup, triage, but in…say, London, there are specific records about treatment and rehabilitation for - "

“ - Ahh, Acute cases.”

“Sure. ‘Acute cases’.” Mic nodded slowly. She’d heard the phrase before. Everyone had. It was a nice, sanitised way of categorising the third of the population who almost burned down the world. After all - whether dead or under permanent medical observation - they weren’t presently in a position to argue the finer details or how they were being classified. She paused, her eyes narrowing as she felt the sensation of a finger tracing its way down the back of her neck. Vivid. Unmistakeable. ‘Memory recursion’, they called it. Slowly, calmly, she raised a hand to her shoulder, massaging gently. Applying just enough force.

“You’re correct that those records are not publicly available in the case of Manchester.”

“Why not?”

“I believe it would be my question?”

“No, that was a clarifying question.” Mic insisted. Carter smiled and shook his head.

“As you wish. However, I’m not able to answer questions on that topic. Classified, as it were.”

“So what, I’d need to…log a Freedom of Information Request or something?”

“Miss Reid.” Carter sighed. “We both know you’re smarter than that. Since SeReS entered our lives, certain aspects of the day-to-day have gotten significantly less…permissive. And that’s a net good. More now than ever in our species history, we need to be protected from one another. But if this is the core purpose for this conversation, I can assure you: there is nothing useful to you in those records.” Carter paused, smiling a small, private smile before continuing: “So that would make it my question. How did it feel?”

“What?” Mic’s eyes narrowed.

“When you took your brothers’ life?” Mic felt her head slowly loll to the side as she met Carter’s eyes. There it was again: that spark. That…light.

“What’s your ‘Locus’, Doctor?” She murmured.

“My question first, if you please?” Mic felt her lips folding inwards, pursing slightly uncomfortably as she debated whether to answer, or simply to get up and leave. But she’d never…she could never…but…

“It felt quiet. In the moment, the way he’d come at me, the way we’d fought and shouted; It was loud, and there was nothing but panic.” Mic paused - hand drifting reflexively back to her shoulder as it all came flooding back. Clattering and shouting. A scream - hers. Frantic shouting - his. A slap, a flail, a punch, a shove. Him falling, her getting dragged down, too. A table corner, suddenly bloody. A room, suddenly silent. Just a ticking clock, a hammering heart…Mic squeezed down. Hard. “And then just…quiet. And then relief. And then…surprise that it was him and not me. And then came…the rest of it.”

“The rest of it?”

“That’s another question.”

“That’s a clarifying question.”

“Fine. Guilt, shame, pain, shock…all of that. Unfolding unevenly and every time I wasn’t running for my life or fighting for survival, it’d just…rise up in me. Different every time. The Echoes of him were the hardest in the early days.” Michelle shook her head. Her gaze had become unfixed; roaming. She dragged herself back to the room, and her eyes back to the doctor. “So my question: why didn’t you break? According to your theory - "

“ - The consensus, more accurately - "

“ - Sure, the consensus…according to that, those of us who didn’t break, it was because of what we’d been through. What we’d dealt with. Our…our trauma, our mental illness, it meant we were practiced at working with a brain that we couldn’t trust to be on our side, or to reflect the reality most people lived in. We were…inoculated. Why didn’t you break?”

“Well, in simple terms, there are other variables which may impact the likelihood of Acute responses to SeReS. Among them, differential development of the Amygdala - "

“ - Meaning?”

“I think you know what I mean by that, Mic.” Carter smiled, his lip rising at the right hand side to show a hint of teeth.

“So that’s it, huh?” She sighed, glancing sadly out the window. “That’s who’s left? Survivors and psychopaths? Surprising, really…”

“Is it?” Carter queried.

“Surprising there’re so many of us, I meant.”

“Again I ask: is it?” Mic chuckled bitterly.

“Guess not.”

The Orphean Collective

“I’m surprised The Herald is taking an interest in us. It does feel as if everyone has already decided they know everything they need to about us: aren’t we…old news by now?” Miguel asked. Mic shrugged, looking around. The commune - her second appointment for the day and the first on her actual itinerary - was larger and better organised than she had expected. Built out from the former Wythenshawe campus of Manchester College, the Orpheans had managed to purchase an air of legitimacy and permanency that, Mic suspected, wouldn’t have been possible to organically build from the foundations up.

She knew the story: everyone did. Shadowy backers, scions to the wealth of the recently collapsed Old World Order had stepped in to offer - to say the absolute least - a radical alternative to the hopelessness and uncertainty of the post-watershed era. Where the typical response to the Echoes was to run from them; mitigate them; ignore them, the Orphean raison d’etre was to foster the embrace of them.

“Well, it’s not really a news story,” Mic admitted.

“Oh?” Miguel paused, fishing around in his pockets for a small THC vape, taking a brief drag and politely exhaling away from Mic. He held it out to her in offering. She held up a hand and shook her head.

“Thanks though. It’s more of an…exploration of experiences following on from the emergence of SeReS. Accounts, stories…and, as I’m sure you’d agree, The Orphean Collective’s story is usually told in…uh…broad brushstrokes, lacking nuance. I think maybe it’s time we present a counterpoint to that; don’t you?”

“‘SeReS’?” Miguel smiled ironically. “We don’t really buy into all that pseudo-scientific propaganda, here.”

“Can I quote you on that?” Mic smirked.

“Sure - I agreed to speak to you, right? We’re on the record.”

“Great, I should probably…uh…” Mic reached down, unzipping and fishing through her purse for her recorder. “Sorry, it’s early. God I miss coffee, y’know?”

“I think we all do.” Miguel admitted. “I think we all miss a lot of things about the Old World. Ironic, really, given how much of it stays with us through the Echoes.”

“Right, and that’s what all of this is about, isn’t it?” Mic asked, holding the recorder up at chest height between them. “The Orphean Collective want people to embrace the Echoes?”

“Well, there’s a little more nuance to it. The reality is that, for better or worse, they aren’t going anywhere. Medication doesn’t alleviate symptoms. Mitigation strategies are so individuated that there often seems to be no rhyme or reason to what works or what doesn’t. They seem to react to endogenous stimuli with chaotic unpredictability. Our one constant is that nothing works for everyone, and yet…all of us have found strategies that work for us as individuals. Call them a curse, or a blessing, or whatever you see fit, but you can’t deny that they’re fascinating. Can you blame us for wanting to better understand them?”

“And understanding them is, I guess, arguably, your claim to fame? Like you said, most people have already made up their minds about the Collective, and yet…your people are co-authoring every new paper on the Echoes, you’ve got someone on every medical panel, helping to oversee every clinical trial. Recently, quite a lot of political momentum?”

“It’s true. We have seen a lot of success. A lot of failure, too. But failure is instructive.”

“How did all of this get started?”

“Oh, you know our story.” Mic raised an eyebrow, jiggling the recorder slightly.

“For posterity, yeah?”

“Oh, sorry. Easy to forget we’re not just having a conversation.” He chuckled in a humourless way that made it clear to Mic that it was very much not something he had trouble remembering. “Well, it grew as anything based around hope for the future does. Reactively, organically, and from the fertile dirt of pain and loss. There was the Battle of Manchester, of course, and suddenly England was in crisis. I remember at the time…I kept trying to take steps back. View it from a distance. Which is a hard thing to do when you’re running for your life; hiding yourself away, just in case John or Jane Doe on the street had heard something or felt something that morning that flipped a switch in their Amygdala and…” Miguel trailed off, shaking his head. Mic decided to stay quiet, letting him continue. “My world shrunk down to the head of a pin, just trying to survive, waiting for it to be over…one way or another. And that seemed to go on forever. Found out later it was about a year, give or take. And then there was the cleanup. That was when we found out what had happened in the rest of the world. Those stories about the East Coast Collapse and the New Civil War in the States, the Purge of Novgorod…all that and the rest.” Miguel paused before asking: “Do you ever wonder about the lack of footage? We lived in a digital world. Everything was a camera. And yet…”

“I do wonder about that, actually.”

“It makes sense now.” Miguel continued, raising the vape to his lips and taking a brief drag. “After the social media bans, the dumb-phone edicts…after we realised the cost of distraction, of escapism. But then, even if just in the early stages, you would have thought…” He shook his head.

“From memory it was about that time that the Collective formed?”

“That’s right. Depopulation changed things. The attempts to simply…regress to the old way of doing things left a lot of people like me - privileged, directionless, traumatised - with dead families and broken dreams and - "

“ - very deep pockets.” Mic finished.

“Exactly.” Miguel acknowledged. “Some of us burned through it. Some of us…well, we all know what happened in America. And a handful of people - people like me - decided something had to be done. We had all this…” He paused, considering.

“Wealth?” Mic suggested.

“Agency.” Miguel clarified. “And we lived in a present defined by the Echoes. Our pasts had their claws in us, dragging us back and away from any hope of any sort of future. The Orphean Collective, you have to understand, didn’t start with hope. That was a byproduct, a lucky evolution of boredom, trauma, capacity and nihilism. We bought this place,” He held out his arms, indicating the campus and environs “Almost as monument to irony? Or maybe as a way of saying ‘fine: we’ll teach ourselves’.”

“And how did that go?”

“Predictably.” He nodded. “We burned through most of our resources, buying up campuses, staffing our events, throwing everything we had at the wall to see what stuck. But like social media, it was distraction. And when it comes to distraction, the Echoes are...”

“Unforgiving.”

“Mmm. The thing about psychosis is that it feels sane. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be that. There was a lot of manic inspiration in the early days. Quite a few of us fell into it. Gave in to the Echoes completely, lost ourselves and ended up just like the rest of those early casualties. All of the Orpheans, their funds were willed to the Collective, so that kept us afloat for awhile. These days, though, our running expenses come mostly from the outside.”

“Speaking of which, do you mind if I ask what you’d say to those who have questions about how you’re funded?”

“I’d say…politicians, corporations and religions benefit from the support of the wealthy. There are valid critiques to be made around that, but they’re not actually arguments against institutions, they’re arguments against capitalism as a system.”

“Nice. Quotable. Thanks for that.”

“You’re welcome.”

“So a bunch of nihilistic rich kids bought the world, half went crazy and died, and the other half found…what?”

“Clarity. Or clarity in search of clarity, I guess you could say?”

“Y’know what I always think about?”

“Tell me.”

“I always think about how the Orpheans came first. Before the doctors, and the analysis, and the Interim Authority and their laws. I’m still not sure if that makes you dinosaurs or trend-setters, but I feel as if it’s one of the two.”

“I think about that too. But I think about it from a slightly different angle. The Greeks came before the Renaissance; the Renaissance couldn’t have happened without the Greeks. I mean, it’s a deeply Eurocentric metaphor and the reality of it is that the Renaissance was a pale imitation of the Islamic progress happening around the same time, but still…it’s a metaphor about foundations, about the persistence, rediscovery and tenacity of ideas. We’re a foundation, in that sense.”

“A foundation for what?” Miguel simply shrugged.

“I’ve no idea. That’s for someone else to imagine. But it’s not going to be these politicians peddling autocracy that attempt - in vain, I suspect - to protect people from their own interiority, or these doctors trying to pathologise a part of what being human has become. The Echoes aren’t an illusion, but they also aren’t real beyond the self. That’s makes them ours, for better or worse. It’s beyond medical; beyond political. They’re simultaneously personal and collective, and that begs the question.”

“What question does it beg?”

“All of them. For example, in the context of sensory recursion, did you know that there are theories out there that approach the idea of ‘time’ as an illusion? That suggest - perhaps - the idea of time is simply a way of consciousness rationalising itself in a context where all time and space is singular?”

“Interesting. Is that the Collective’s position on it?”

“I wouldn’t say so, no. Just an idea worth considering. And that’s the truth of us, Mic - of the Orphean Collective - what we want is to ensure the consideration of ideas worth considering.”

“Ideas like Recursive Alignment.” Miguel paused, raising an eyebrow in Mic’s direction:

“Are we being combative?”

“Not at all. But it was very public, wasn’t it? Very high profile.”

“Our position on the RA project is as it has been since the project ceased operations.”

“I’d love to get a quote to include on that front?”

“I’m sure you would.” He sighed. “Simply: Recursive Alignment was never something we pursued beyond…academic speculation. The idea of integrating the Echoes, of harmonising them with the day-to-day, it was - and is - an appealing idea because it would…well, it would solve everything. If it were possible.”

“Which the Collective no longer believes it to be?”

“As I said, our interest was always theoretical. Torrence was…troubled, Mic. She didn’t speak for us. When she started ‘experimenting’,” Miguel made direct and pointed eye contact as he held up a hand to mime inverted commas: “It wasn’t sanctioned, or funded, or endorsed by the Collective.”

“So the ‘Ides of March’ was - "

“ - a deeply regrettable event that was the result of group of misguided but well-meaning individuals acting of their own accords.”

“Can we go off the record for a second?” Mic asked. Miguel shrugged and nodded. “C’mon, man. Really?”

“It’s not just the ‘Party Line’, Mic. It was a nightmare for us. Everyone thinks we’re idealistic anarchists and…well, I guess maybe that’s true, but we’re not stupid. Do you really think there’s a universe in which we wanted one of the faces of our organisation to…”

“Do terrorism?” Miguel’s eyes narrowed. “The bombings in London? Taking hostages at the UN? I don’t think it’s an exaggeration.”

“Recursive Alignment - the theory, the way we were investigating it - was sort of like EMDR - "

“ - EMDR?” Mic raised an eyebrow.

“Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, it’s a form of therapy that focusses on processing trauma through…literally processing it. Working repetitively through difficult memories or thoughts in a clinical setting with physical ‘interruptors’ which…can help with distress and anxiety. That’s what we wanted to do. To approach the Echoes in much the same way as intrusive and painful experiences of trauma. Torrence was obsessed with the idea of integrating Echoes, but she ignored both the therapeutic context, and…well, taking EMDR as an example, there are people who you don’t do EMDR on. People who are actively delusional or in psychosis, for example. And the line between the Echoes as memory and the Echoes as…”

“Psychosis?”

“Mmm. It’s a hazy line, Mic. One that Torrence neither respected, nor cared to try to respect. So when she took a group of confused, traumatised kids and taught them to go cold turkey on managing the Echoes? To just…let them lead where they would? Things spiralled. The Collective didn’t know what she was doing until it was too late. And by that point - "

“ - ‘The Ides of March’.” Miguel nodded. “So, basically, the Collective wanted to help people live with the Echoes better, and Torrence convinced them to listen to the voices in their heads?”

“In a nutshell…yes. Y’know what the problem is, Mic? Just because a Press Release is sanitised for public consumption doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a lie. And yet…your kind hears that sort of language and immediately smells blood in the water, and - "

“ - My kind?” Mic snorted. “Let’s be real, here. I’m a journalist the way you’re a researcher; the way anyone is anything anymore. We’re all just survivors play-acting that the world didn’t end a few years back.”

“That’s all we ever were. Survivors playing make believe in the ruins of what could have been. I think that’s the difference between the Collective and the rest of you. We know that the world was never not…this. The difference, now, is that it’s harder to pretend we’re creatures of the present when the past sits constantly behind us, tracing cold fingers up and down our spines.”

“Poetic.”

“Well, I’m a little high.” Miguel smirked.

“On the record…” Mic pivoted: “The Collective has been doing a lot of damage control since the ‘Ides of March’ incident - "

“ - Outreach, yes.” Miguel gently corrected.

“Sure. ‘Outreach’. It looks like it’s working: recruitment - "

“ - Membership - "

“ - Membership is up, we’ve seen a lot of publicity around the wellness programs and ‘grounding’ seminars…is this reflective, would you say, of the Collective’s long term aims?”

“Of course, these programs help people, and that’s always been our fundamental aim.”

“You wouldn’t view it as image management?”

“Would you?”

“I mean…it does represent a pivot away from - "

“ - like I said, what we stand for is ensuring the consideration of ideas worth considering, and helping people live, day-to-day, is no less worthy than solving for macro-scale problems.”

“Cool.” Mic paused, eyeing Miguel’s vape. With a small smile he held it out again.

“Yeah, fuck it. Here’s to surviving the day-to-day.” Mic took a deep inhale, holding in the acrid vapour before breathing it out her nose with a squeaky little hiccup. It burned slightly in her nostrils.

Utility

“Well, that was a bust.” Mic slammed the door shut and threw her purse at the couch. “Fucking…predatory clinicians and hippie cultists. Mediocre copy, at best. I wish I could dig deeper, go broader. Get to something with some god damned teeth, y’know?”

“Hmm.” Dylan croaked, hunched over the dining table on the far side of the room. She was holding a pen tentatively above a blank page, lost in thought.

“You okay?” Mic cocked her head.

“Yeah,” Dylan shook her head vigorously. “Yeah, I’m good.” Mic could pick up a slight tremor in her voice; something she recognised as a side-effect of chronic episodes of sleep deprivation. An outward signifier, cracking through an otherwise well-managed facade covering over the roiling dysregulation of a nervous system in crisis.

“Liar.” Mic chuckled. “Must be nearing the seventy-two hour mark at this point, no?”

“Just passed.” Dylan shrugged.

“Journaling not helping?”

“The doctors don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“No one knows what they’re talking about.” Mic concurred. “All the research on Echoes is just…speculation. Armchair psychology and approximation in post. They have no clue. We have no clue. Just gotta…keep testing coping mechanisms until something sticks, I guess.”

“Mic…” Dylan groaned: “I just need to fucking sleep.”

“I know, baby.” Mic made her way over to where Dylan was sitting, sliding her hands over Dylan’s shoulders - frowning as Dylan momentarily flinched at her touch before acclimating - and began to slowly squeeze and massage her over the bumpy protrusions of the tops of her bra and tank top. “Been there, y’know?”

“Tell me about the interview.” Looking down at her, Mic watched Dylan’s head fall bonelessly back, her eyes fluttering closed and a small, tired smile blow across her face like a brief, rapidly passing breeze.

“The second one was okay. Miguel was…charming. Nice to talk to.”

“Miguel?”

“Orpheans.”

“Oh, the cultists.”

“They’re not…” Mic trailed off, before shrugging. “Well yeah. Them. The other one…it was barely an interview. Just some…sociopath doctor. Wouldn’t give me anything real. Just wanted to poke at me; try and get at the fault lines, y’know?”

“Ryan or Lia?”

“Ryan.”

“Dick move.”

“Yeah. It’s okay. I held it together. Always manage to.”

“Must be nice.”

“Are you kidding me?” Mic chuckled. “You hold it together so well. You’ve been up for days and you’re still trying to work the problem. It’s…admirable.”

“Desperate, more like. I can’t remember the last time it was this bad. I can hear them all from the other room, it’s like they’re here with me…it hasn’t let up.”

“Are you in it now?”

“Yeah.” Dylan admitted. Mic nodded. She reached down to the back of Dylan’s chair and with a grunt of exertion - her shoulder aching with strained alarm - pulled it back and away from the table. She moved around in front of Dylan, straddling her lap and wrapping her arms around her neck. Naturally, Dylan’s face settled into Mic’s chest with a sigh of…not relief; more like resignation.

“What, grounding exercises now?” Dylan mumbled. Mic felt the vibrations of her voice in her ribs and collar bone, smiling to herself.

“Just try, you stubborn asshole.” Mic chuckled. “This is real. Feel me. Smell me. Touch me. Let me centre you.”

“Taste?”

“Oh really?” Mic smirked down at the top of Dylan’s head. “You think that’s a good idea? You know that makes them worse.”

“God.” Dylan groaned softly: “I miss getting fucked without the entire history of it flooding back.”

“Me too, baby. Believe me.” Mic shifted her hand, stroking the back of Dylan’s head tenderly; pushing her fingers deep into her thick mane of unkempt - slightly oily - hair. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna need to shower.”

“I know.”

“Have you eaten? When’s the last time you drank some fucking water? Have you done your shot? That’s meant to be Mondays, right?”

“Please stop…” Dylan sighed.

“Okay. For now.” Mic conceded. She felt Dylan’s head nodding into her. “Let’s try talking it out a bit. Tell me about the current one.” She felt Dylan nod again. More slowly this time.

“I can feel her lips on my neck. I can smell her perfume.”

“Now?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Left or right side?”

“Left.” Mic nodded, crouching herself into Dylan, gently pulling her head to the side using her hand in Dylan’s hair as a lever, and letting her lips drag up the side of Dylan’s neck eliciting a brief, involuntary shiver and a quiet guttural moan.

“Focus on this. This is real. Know the difference. Live in the difference, sweetheart: you have to differentiate.”

“It’s getting harder.” Dylan admitted. Mic growled, baring her teeth and biting down firmly against the warm flesh of Dylan’s neck. Not enough to break skin, just enough to force Dylan to feel the resistance of teeth against it. “That’s a little better. It’s fading. How are you so good at this?”

“You know how I’m so good at this…” Mic pulled her head back, making eye contact. She raised an eyebrow. “So it’s just been…this? For days?”

“No, it’s…playing the hits, y’know? Josie, the old sharehouse…occasionally I’ll stop hearing their voices, feeling her, and then there’ll be movement out of the corner of my eye and I’ll see one of them just walk by in the hallway. Clear as day. That kind of thing.”

“At least it’s the good stuff.”

“Not just the good stuff, unfortunately. But the bad stuff is…easier somehow? I don’t know how to make that make sense.”

“I do. The bad stuff is easy because you’ve already like…mitigated it. Even before the Echoes, that shit echoed. The good stuff is harder because pushing it away feels like betrayal, or like a waste, or…I don’t know - "

“ - like self-harm.”

“Exactly. It’s easier to run from the things you were never not running from than the things you wish you could run towards.”

“Clever.”

“No, just experienced. There’s a difference.” Mic assured her.

“Did you…” Dylan paused, averting her eyes. Mic reached down, taking Dylan’s chin between her thumb and forefinger, guiding her face back so their eyes met again.

“Just ask it.”

“Did you ever get lost in it? Stop fighting?” Mic nodded slowly.

“Yeah. A few times, for...a little while. Mostly it was when things got really bad. In like…” Mic gestured expansively: “The world. I was constantly running, sleeping out of this little backpack in random houses I managed to break into, and I just got…” She paused, smiling sympathetically down at Dylan: “Tired. I just got so tired.”

“Right.”

“But I didn’t have an anchor. You’ve got me.”

“All the same. Sometimes it feels like the Orpheans have a point.”

“They might do.” Mic acknowledged. “If so, not sure they know what it is.”

“Was seeing them for the story?”

“Yeah, it was on the itinerary.” Mic shrugged. “Felt a bit futile, though.”

“I dunno about that. Getting paid to travel round and collect stories about the Echoes? It actually seems…kind of important.”

“Yeah, but…you should have heard this guy, Dylan. He was good to talk to, but it was like having chemistry with a fucking Press Release.”

“Chemistry, huh?”

“Easy, there. I have chemistry with everyone. Anyway, maybe what I got’ll be useful. Guess we’ll see.”

“Well, it’s like you said: the doctors don’t know what they’re talking about. We don’t know what we’re talking about. Maybe this is the way forward? Qualitative research?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m sorry the other interview didn’t give you anything useful.”

“Eh. He wasn’t even on the itinerary. I was just…pulling a thread.” Dylan raised an eyebrow.

“Oh.”

“‘Oh’ what?”

“It was about the Manchester files again?”

“And…?”

“It wasn’t about work. It was about Lia, wasn’t it?”

“Dylan, just…” Mic sighed.

“It’s fine.”

“Is it?”

“What, you think I’m jealous? You want closure. You two were in it together when things got bad, then she was just…gone. It makes sense. I get it. Also, you’ve just been comforting me about my three days of torturing myself over imagining my ex touching me. This world we live in…we can’t afford to play around with ownership tropes in relationships. None of us are ever escaping having once been someone else’s. None of us are ever entirely not still someone else’s. Those moments we shared with the people in our pasts, they’re…burn-in. Permanent. I just…” Dylan paused, considering. “This world we live in, it’s not very forgiving when it comes to uh…pulling at threads. You know what I mean.”

“I do and you’re right. But I’m being careful.”

“Are you?”

“I promise you, I won’t dig where there’s resistance. I know better than that.”