Year Zero - 7.4. Aerial

Alter: Alice

Local Network World: 0718

Dates: 25/06/2025 - 30/06/2025 - 05/07/2025

Day Five

Alice was having difficulty getting her head around the situation. At first, it had seemed entirely hypothetical. When Olivia had described what had happened on that other world - Annabelle’s world - Alice’s first instinct had been to reduce the issue at hand to historical comparisons. Of which there were many. It was something that had reassured her. Not because she didn’t think that, on the level of societies and civilisations, stability was precarious and fragile and likely to break down, but because she couldn’t see a scenario where it just…happened. There was a certain amount of necessary lead-up to these sorts of things: ratcheting up of tensions, populists stoking the fire, increasingly dehumanising rhetoric, that kind of thing. Populations had to be primed for the kind of violence Olivia was describing. And then, the day after Kade and Olivia had arrived, there had been a pro-Palestine rally in the city centre.

The first signs of something very wrong had been the police kettling the march. This was uncommon. The four of them had watched aerial video of what happened, posted to Youtube in the aftermath. Surrounded on three sides by police in riot gear, the protesters had moved to backtrack, finding themselves locked in place by another group of police bringing up the rear.

“What the fuck are they doing?” Faith had spat out. “There are kids there - it’s just a march,”

“Not anymore,” Olivia had replied, tone unreadable, folding her arms over her chest. Sure enough, it hadn’t taken long - a few minutes at most - of jostling by police in cramped quarters before someone panicked. From above, it looked like a bulge was forming in one of the police lines as confusion spread and the crowd pushed forward. Even from a distance, the aggression of the police response was visible: batons raised high and brought down hard onto skulls and shoulders; riot shields slammed into chests and backs. Then came the plumes as tear gas canisters were tossed into the crowd. The situation escalated rapidly. In post, the police had declined to offer official figures on casualties and arrests, citing security concerns. Words like ‘antisemitism’, ‘rioters’, and ‘terrorists’ were thrown around like punctuation.

“What was that?” Faith had murmured as they’d continued to watch.

“The beginning. Just the beginning.” Olivia had confirmed.

“It could have been - " Alice remembered saying, preparing to offer logical reasons why it could have just been an anomaly; a once-off event:

“ - Could have been.” Olivia had cut her off. “Wasn’t. We should stay above street level as much as possible. That’s where it’ll get chaotic. We’re on the fifth floor, so that’s probably good. Hopefully that’ll keep us safe from what’s going on right outside for the time being. We can’t open the door for anyone, even your neighbours. But right now - as in right this second - we need to stock up on groceries and water while that’s still possible.” She had turned to Kade: “Then you and I? We need to work out how we’re going to play this. We need an actual plan.” Faith and Olivia had gone to the store and returned with primarily canned goods as well as batteries, torches, and probably far too many cheap candles. Alice had felt it, then. The reality of it. A stab of foreboding and emotional vertigo deep in her gut.

But five days in, Alice still had trouble believing the issue was entirely related to some otherworldly threat. In her heart, she was more inclined to believe that she had been wrong about just how far the pendulum had swung. About how primed the population actually already was. About how little it would take to push people over the edge.

Alice thought back to 2017. To the Postal Vote on whether to legalise gay marriage in Australia. It was something that hadn’t had to happen; polling had shown overwhelming support for the change. And yet…politicians had felt the need to inoculate themselves from retaliation by pushing responsibility for the final choice back onto the population at large; letting them fight it out so they had an ironclad excuse for setting one policy or another in stone. And fight they had. She remembered the spike in violent attacks on LGBT people that almost immediately followed the announcement of the vote; of the media coverage of prominent politicians comparing gay marriage to bestiality and child marriage. Then there was - burned indelibly into her brain - the way the ‘No’ campaign had rapidly pivoted towards a softer target: the transgender community. She would never forget the TV spots claiming that legalising gay marriage could lead to more children questioning their gender. That this was framed as a nightmare scenario; as existentially horrifying. That the worst case scenario - in the eyes of a not insignificant percentage of the people around her - was revealed to be the mere existence of people like her. That the fear of people like her was, to those people, adequate justification to deprive adjacent, currently less hated groups, of fundamental rights. She remembered that feeling, of her view of the people surrounding her turning on a dime. Of realising that her safety was more precarious…more conditional and more contested than she had previously thought. That people could talk to you, and laugh with you; enjoy your company and even love you…but that there was always a non-zero chance that if those same people found out your secret; if you were true to who you were…they might want you dead. They might even be willing to do something to facilitate that outcome.

Alice sighed to herself. This was the crux of the issue. The population were already exposed to these ideas and, in many cases, receptive to them. It wasn’t just trans people: the words and the beliefs and the potential for violence against all marginalised peoples were already weaponised and disseminated: they were simply waiting in the shadows to be activated. The ratcheting of tensions, the dehumanising rhetoric she saw as a necessary prerequisite for what Olivia had described…it wasn’t impossible, she supposed, that she had been dismissing the possibility that she was looking at a forest because all she could see were a bunch of trees.

Alice tapped Kade on the shoulder, holding out a handful of sachets of estradiol gel.

“Oh my god, thank you. Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I have plenty. Happy to share. You should maybe do an extra one for a few days to make up for what you missed?” Kade nodded in acknowledgement.

“It probably seems really stupid that I’m worrying about this, given the situation.”

“You’re fine.” Faith shook her head. “When I was having a rough time in early transition, I ended up really depressed. Like…not taking care of myself, barely eating or showering…it was bad. I was still using gels at the time. Even though everything else was going completely to hell, I never missed a single day. It doesn’t seem stupid.”

“Again, thank you. And…yeah, it is a priority. I can’t believe I put it off so long. It’s only been a few months and…well, everything sucks, but I could never go back. I’m more sure of it than anything I’ve ever been sure of.”

“Death before detransition.” Faith nodded, holding up a fist.

“This ‘Alters’ thing is still so weird,” Kade sighed. “You look just like Olivia. You dress like her, you sound like her, but you’re so different.”

“Oh? Different how?”

“I mean…you’re nice for a start.”

“I mean, I never really saw being a dick as something that had any real benefits to it?” Faith laughed awkwardly “And yeah, I know what you mean about different versions of us. Alice and I hadn’t actually met any others until you guys showed up. It was just the two of us. And now it’s like…bizarro ‘us’, sitting in our living room, sharing Alice’s estrogen.”

“Yeah, exactly. And seeing a version of myself who started transitioning around the same time as I did and doing so much…better?” Kade nodded in Alice’s direction.

“‘Comparison is the thief of joy’.” Alice shrugged. Faith laughed again.

“She’s right. I mean, she’s always right, but she’s particularly right in this case. And to be fair, Alice has only been on hormones for a little bit, but it’s not like that’s all there is to transition.”

“But Olivia said - "

“ - Well I didn’t want to correct her, but yeah,” Alice explained: “I’ve been working through who I am and how I want to present for a very long time now. Faith helped me with it a lot. She’s been there for me every step of the way. Maybe it’s why I took so long to actually look into starting hormones. Everyone I cared about knew my situation and accepted it. I wore what I wanted to wear and did what I wanted to do in private, and for a long time, that was plenty. I don’t like being perceived by strangers, and if all I had to do to avoid that was use the right-hand-side of my wardrobe instead of the left? Fair trade.”

“Oh.” Kade’s brow furrowed.

“It’s okay to be confused.” Faith acknowledged. “My brain definitely doesn’t work like that when it comes to dysphoria.”

“Yeah, same.” Kade agreed.

“I guess I’m just a little different from you guys. But we all get to choose what works best for us. It’s like…a radical form of self-love, really: working out who you are and then working towards being the most authentic version of that person in whatever way and in whatever timeframe works best for you. That’s what makes it exciting, right?” Alice smiled. She cocked her head, her smile fading as she watched Kade’s thousand-yard stare deepen. “Or…not?”

“No, I’m sorry. I just think we have very different perspectives on it all. I only really have my own experiences to go off of, and for me…well, being trans feels like a curse, most of the time. And then I see Olivia, and it’s kind of like she’s moved past it, y’know? Like she gets to be a ‘real’ girl, now, and not think about the part that came before that. That feels like the best we can hope for, getting to a point where being trans is almost like an afterthought. A problem that we’ve solved. You talk about it like you like being trans.”

“I do.” Alice smiled. “Personally, if I had the choice to be me as I am or to have been born a girl, I’d choose this. It’s not even a difficult question, really. I love being trans. I love that transitioning is a choice I made…something I’m doing for me.”

“You’re always so sickeningly positive about it,” Faith rolled her eyes, looking over her shoulder at Alice.

“I mean I’m not delusional. I’m not trying to say it’s easy, or that it’s always fun. A lot of it can be really scary, and difficult - ”

“ - And so fucking expensive…” Faith chimed in.

“Yeah, I dunno how these kids are doing it to be honest.” Alice shook her head emphatically.

“It involves a lot of thrifting, I believe?” Faith offered.

“But anyway, I’m sorry if I make it sound like I don’t get how rough it can be. I just…I love being me, and being trans is a really big part of that.”

“You don’t need to apologise for not suffering.” Kade said. Faith nodded.

“Yeah. I didn’t say it was bad.” Faith assured her. “You’re just…sometimes a bit like a human antidepressant is all. I actually kind of love it.” Faith reached back to grab Alice’s hand, squeezing it tightly before turning back to Kade: “I lost everything when I transitioned. Everything. Family, friends, a stable living situation. So believe me when I say that I get what you mean.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Faith shrugged. “It was a long time ago. A different life, really. I’m doing well, now. I’m uh…I’m happy.” Alice reached out, giving Faith’s shoulder a little squeeze. The two smiled at each other.

The three of them looked towards the front door as they heard the key in the lock. Rapidly, the door swung open and Olivia entered, closing the door behind her before taking a deep breath:

“It’s really ramping up out there.”

“What happened? Are you okay?” Kade got to her feet but Olivia waved her off.

“I’m fine. Alice’s car is fine. But there’s random fighting in the streets, now. It looks like the police station in South Brisbane got firebombed. Cops are out in force, just bailing people up and dragging them off. It’s all very familiar. We’re definitely well into the first phase of it.” Olivia said.

“How’s your back?” Kade asked. Olivia shrugged.

“Mostly better. Just an occasional twinge here and there, thankfully.”

“So what comes next?” Faith asked.

“It’s not gonna be identical to what happened on Anna’s World so I can’t say for certain. The last time this happened it wasn’t cops and activists ramping it up, it was just…mobs of angry people smashing into each other. Which…yeah, probably going to be a lot of that, too. I think things just keep going the way they are currently. Until it all falls completely apart, it’ll just get bigger and more organised.”

“And more deadly.” Kade added.

“Goes without saying.” Olivia confirmed. “Has anyone been looking at what’s happening elsewhere? On Anna’s World, things were getting a lot worse in other countries a lot quicker than they were here.”

“I saw a lot of reports of rioting and bombings and things.” Faith nodded. “Basically everywhere. America seems particularly bad, they’re talking about martial law after this huge riot in Chicago.”

“How were the uh…reporters?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did they seem…impartial? Or at least like they were trying to be?”

“Not really.”

“Okay. In Anna’s world, that was a tipping point: when the media started actively taking sides, and people started retaliating against news outlets directly. We mightn’t have too long before broadcasts stop. Internet will probably go down pretty soon after that. Then, from there, we get to losing electricity, water…I think we need to plan to be either out of the city or off-world by the time that part happens. And if we leave it too late, driving just…won’t be possible. So we have some difficult decisions to make. If Kade can’t make this work, we need an exit strategy. The last time this happened, a few of us managed to force our way through a weak point and get home. It might be our only option.”

“No pressure, then.” Kade rolled her eyes.

“How would you like me to respond to that? Cause yeah…pressure. Lots of fucking pressure, Kade.”

“Just do your estrogen. Breathe.” Alice moved behind Kade, softly placing a hand on her shoulder. Kade sat back down and started self-consciously hiking the skirt Alice had lent her up around her thighs, tearing the top off a sachet of estradiol and side-eyeing Olivia. “I’m sorry, Liv…but I can’t just abandon my world. I have family, here. Friends. Colleagues. Please tell me you get that?”

“I won’t leave her here alone.” Faith added definitively.

“I don’t want to take you down with me.” Alice shook her head.

“You don’t have a choice. You stay; I stay.” Faith folded her arms over her chest.

“Which is very cute and all - and yes…I get it Alice, but from a practical standpoint we’re working with two scenarios: The first is that Kade, whose powers are new, unproven, and not guaranteed to actually be up to the task, manages to somehow, magically, against all odds, stop the fucking apocalypse, or…she doesn’t. Game over. And then we’re either dead or gone. I, personally, vote for gone.” As if on queue, the sound of a large, distant explosion punctuated Olivia’s last words, virtually concurrent with a bright flash of light through the slits between the curtains that covered the windows and a shockwave that rocked the apartment like a small earthquake. “What the actual fuck was that?” Olivia muttered, darting towards the window, pulling a curtain back just enough to get a look. Alice rushed to join her. Across the river, the glowing remnants of a huge fireball hung in the air, ascending slowly upwards. In its’ vicinity, smoke billowed up, around and out.

“Jesus,” Alice muttered. “Maybe a petrol station or something?”

“Probably. Whatever it was, it wasn’t small.” Olivia nodded. Looking back at one another, their eyes locked together.

“I get why you’re scared.” Alice assured her.

“You really don’t.” Olivia murmured.

“Oh, I promise you, I do. But what if it was your world? Would you be pushing to run, or to give Kade every chance to do what she thinks she can do?”

“I’ve played this game before, Alice. This isn’t theory - "

“ - I’m not fucking stupid, Olivia. I’m taking this very seriously.”

“Believe me, I know you’re not stupid. But smart doesn’t help you when it comes to Seven. What she does…this is just the truth of the world, Alice. Mask off. Stripped bare, all difference ever is to your average, everyday person is varying degrees of ‘burn the witch’. This shit…it wouldn’t be possible if that wasn’t the case.”

“What, you think the only thing keeping Dave from next door in check is the fear of ramifications?”

“Yes.”

“For fuck’s sake - "

“ - Don’t give me that. You know how many of us die every year because random assholes hate us for existing.”

“It’s systemic, Olivia - "

“ - And how does that make it less real? Saying the world could be - should be - better, doesn’t mean a better world is a cut below the surface. All it means the world we live in has failed to be that ‘better world’.”

“You’re scared. I get it. I get why. ‘Why’ is my fucking job. And I say you’re wrong. In the aftermath of these kinds of things, most people - the vast majority of people - aren’t proud of what they’ve done. People are better than you think they are, even through the horror of it all.”

“This is the fifth day, Alice. Just the fifth.” Olivia nodded pointedly towards the window. “So far, it’s mostly existing tensions boiling over. It’s…somewhat predictable, y’know? It won’t stay that way.”

“I’m not arguing severity, I’m arguing strategy.”

“To be strategic you have to be alive.”

“So let’s focus on staying alive long enough to give Kade a fighting chance.”

“Fucking fine.”

Day Ten

Olivia had been right. The situation was rapidly spiralling out of control. The predictability of it being primarily a conflict between police and activists had ended abruptly on the evening of the sixth day when the balance had tipped. Alice had seen a little of it from out of the window: a cadre of police lined up in the street, on their knees with their hands behind their heads before being gunned down with their own weapons. Activists with megaphones had driven slowly through the streets of the inner city in stolen police cars, proclaiming control of the situation, telling people to return to their homes. This hadn’t lasted very long. From there, the chaos had begun to take on new patterns. Seemingly random ones.

Olivia and Kade had been going out, trying to find Rifts that Kade could test and experiment with. Alice noted the frustration in Kade’s eyes every time she pulled her hair back, changed back into boy clothes, and made her way out with Olivia. It wasn’t the way her dysphoria worked, but Alice’s heart still broke for her, seeing that little spark of light in her eyes retreat. But she knew that Olivia wasn’t wrong; that it was necessary. It also meant that, as uploads and news coverage had slowed and then halted, Olivia and Kade had, by default, become Alice and Faith’s primary form of intelligence about the situation as it unfolded. Olivia had maintained that it would be difficult to see a pattern, but the stories from her trips out into Brisbane tended to skew towards an absence of women on the streets, and clashes between, notably, groups of white men and individual - variably - non-white ones. But she reported little-to-no obvious organisation: no megaphones, or police cars - not anymore - or large, unified clusters of people. Alice had felt reassured by this and had then forced herself to second-guess that impulse.

The diffuse nature of the way the conflict was developing reminded her of a number of historical events…but all ones in which it was only the secondary violence that had been carried out by everyday civilians. Where the primary violence was carried out by specific groups acting in organised cells. In Rwanda, there had been the Interhamwe militia. In Cambodia it had been the Angkar cadres. In Darfur it had been the Janjaweed militias. During the Holocaust, the Einsatzgruppen. In Palestine, in the lead-up to the Nakba…the worst of the atrocities she remembered studying - including the Deir Yasin massacre - were handled by the Irgun and Lehi paramilitary gangs. Other examples sprang readily to mind - Indonesia, Turkey, Bosnia - but in all cases - simply - the predominant violence had been carried out by decentralised cells unified by a shared ideological purpose and supported by a central authority. This wasn’t the case here. It was just…people. People who had been exposed to - who had been receptive to - certain kinds of rhetoric. Certain kinds of ideas. Who, in many cases, most likely had not been aware how deeply the parasite had burrowed into their minds; how pervasive the infestation had grown. It was atrocity on autopilot. Alice was realising that she was desperately fumbling for a thread of predictability or consistency to cling to. If she was truly honest with herself, she wasn’t finding one, and she knew that it was, most likely, because there wasn’t one to be found. This wasn’t Genocide. This wasn’t the end of a predictable - if horrifying - road. This was, simply, the world they all lived in: where peace, stability and safety were a precipice. A false sense of security - of solid ground underfoot - that politicians and reactionaries played Russian roulette with each and every day to further their own aims, moving society closer and closer to that edge until all it took to guide the world over the brink was a simple push. Despite Olivia’s assessment, Alice simply could not believe that what they were seeing would be possible without the foundation of hate established by those sorts of actors.

Accidental accelerationists, the lot of them.

The internet had gone down on day seven. The power had been off since the morning of day eight. The apartment was lit with the silent, shifting glow of candles and lamps, the curtains drawn. Olivia had reluctantly let Kade go out on her own briefly, taking Alice’s car. The three of them - Alice, Faith and Olivia - sat around, intermittently making conversation…attempting, Alice surmised, to distract themselves from the situation at hand as much as was possible. It was familiar, in a sense. Alice remembered when Brisbane had flooded in 2011; after evacuating to her parents house which was outside the affected area, in safety and above the chaos and the confusion, she had been aware that there was a banality to it all. Waiting…anxiety…boredom.

“So you two are together, right?” Olivia asked from the kitchen, pulling Alice from her thoughts as she made herself another drink. Alice remembered when Olivia and Faith had returned from the supermarket and she’d seen - nestled amongst the canned goods and candles - several bottles of vodka, and had glanced at Faith. Faith had rolled her eyes and mouthed ‘don’t ask’.

“Yes.” Faith said simply, not looking up from her book. She sat, sunk into the couch, legs folded over one another, the heels of her Converse on Alice’s coffee table. She had a little battery powered reading light latched over the top of the pages.

“We just…fit.” Alice shrugged, sitting down next to Faith, reaching out to squeeze her knee. Faith smiled over at her.

“Don’t need to explain it to me. Though Kade might blow a gasket about it. The multiverse is a weird place, I get it. I’ve been there. We’re all the same person, but that’s not really how it feels. Not in practice.” Alice looked back over her shoulder, watching Olivia lean back against the kitchen bench and take a sip of what she could only assume was a very, very strong vodka and coke. “So you started seeing each other when Alice was still…” Olivia trailed off. Alice watched Faith’s eyes move upwards and away from the page. She could see her muscles tense, rippling slowly beneath her skin in the half-light. Alice squeezed her leg again, reassuringly.

“No, finish the sentence,” Faith encouraged. Alice’s mind immediately went to one of those old cowboy movies with John Wayne, serving deadpan as he told some random bad guy to ‘pick up the gun’.

“Faith, it’s okay.” Alice said.

“Yeah, of course. It’s no big deal. I just wanna hear the rest of the sentence. Call me curious.” Alice rolled her eyes. This was a sore spot and they both knew it. Alice had lost count of the number of times that Faith had had to reassure her that not being on hormones; not being ‘out’ publicly; not making plans for surgeries wasn’t a problem for her. Faith was always kind and supportive and logical about how she approached those conversations, but Alice very much suspected she was about to be significantly less so when it came to intrusive questions posed by some random Alter.

“Look, I’m genuinely just curious. I mean, I don’t know if I could do that.”

“Look. Blaire fucking White.” Faith sighed deeply, dropping her book into her lap, looking over her shoulder: “Hormones and surgeries and presentation are to make you feel more like who you are on the inside, not to cover something up, or prove something to the world. We’re not men play-acting women, we’re women who made the extremely difficult, shitty, and expensive choice to stop play-acting men, in a world that pulled out all the stops to make that as difficult a process as humanly fucking possible. You think I didn’t know she was a girl within five minutes of meeting her? Even if she hadn’t told me…even if she hadn’t been me, I’d have known. She’s a woman. And…somehow, completely without meaning to be, it turns out I’m utterly and completely in love with her. To be clear, the extent to which a fucking…five o’clock shadow and the shape of her torso matter to me has always been entirely dependent on whether and how much they matter to her. Does that like…satisfy your curiosity or whatever?”

“Blaire White?” Olivia raised an eyebrow.

“If the brain-worms fit…” Faith smiled sweetly back at her before letting her expression drop into a cold scowl. Faith returned to her book.

“Hey Alice.” Olivia called out from the kitchen after a few seconds.

“Hmm?” Alice looked back over her shoulder.

“I think I’m in love with your girlfriend. Better watch your back.”

“You couldn’t handle me.” Faith muttered distractedly, trying to focus on her book.

“She’s right, Liv. You’re just not man enough.” Alice shrugged at Olivia. Faith dropped her book back into her lap, glaring upwards at nothing in particular as Olivia and Alice broke into hysterics. “I’m sorry, babe.” Alice finally managed.

“No, it’s all good. To quote my namesake, it’s uh…five-by-five. So laugh it up, cause we both know who’s gonna get it for that joke later on.” Faith and Alice shared a smile as they heard Olivia cough and sputter, half-spit-taking her vodka - briefly coughing and choking - from behind them, Alice feeling for Faith’s hand and their fingers knitting together against the couch cushions. It was at that moment that the lock clicked and the door flew open, Kade bursting in, slamming it behind her, falling against it and sighing deeply.

“Are you okay?” Alice got to her feet. Kade held up a hand as Alice approached, shaking her head.

“I’m fine. I can’t go out there by myself again. I didn’t think I’d make it back.”

“I told you not to go too far,” Olivia growled, setting down her drink and moving towards Kade.

“I didn’t. I was only like…a suburb over. Have you looked out the window?” Alice, Faith and Olivia shook their heads in unison. “Yeah: take a look out the fucking window.” Kade slouched her way to the couch and fell into it next to Faith, who immediately started fussing over her, making sure she was - at least physically - okay. Alice looked over at Olivia. Together, they went to the window, drawing back the curtains enough for both of them to see. Across the river, Brisbane City was in flames. The tinted glass panes of the Helios Foundation building glowed a sinister, flickering orange in the evening dark from the burning buildings surrounding it. As if caught by a breeze, the candlelight in the living and dining room seemed to flicker as well, extending the vista of living flame into their home.

“Well that’s certainly an escalation.” Alice acknowledged.

“There are people in the streets, stopping cars. I doubled back a few times, managed to avoid them down a side-street and get back to the carpark, but…I shouldn’t have gone alone. I’m sorry.” Kade murmured, looking down. Alice turned to see Faith grab for Kade’s chin, forcing her to look up and meet her eyes:

“No apologies. You’re trying to save the fucking world. It was brave and we’re glad you’re okay. Okay?” Kade nodded hesitantly.

“Speaking of which,” Olivia turned back from the window as well. “Any updates?”

“I still can’t create a normal Otherwhere. I found the Rift I was looking for and managed to…I don’t know, Liv. I did something, but it just spat me out. Like the last few times. Whatever Seven’s doing, it’s like she’s changing whatever it is that makes our powers work more generally. I got this feeling like I was wading through static when I tried to force it open. Like I was vibrating with energy, but it felt…wrong. I’m sorry, I don’t have the words for this.”

“It’s okay. Like Faith said, you’re trying to save the world, here. We’ll get some sleep and you can try again tomorrow. With backup.” Alice assured her.

“Assuming, of course, that we have a tomorrow to play with.” Olivia added.

“How is that helpful?” Alice asked.

“I’m…sorry.” Olivia sighed. “I guess I’m just tired.”

Day Fifteen

There had been a lull. Kade and Olivia - leaving on foot instead of by car after the tenth day - had noticed it almost immediately. As the city burned, they reported less people in the streets; less random violence. Olivia had concluded that people were starting to leave in search of food - fanning out further and further into the suburbs and attacking one another to claim what they could - as Olivia explained had happened on Anna’s world, slowly leaving the inner city deserted. Cautiously, they’d started using the car again, only going as far as they had to. But by the fifteenth day, they’d needed petrol. With no power in the city, they’d taken Faith, who knew how to siphon it. Their plan was to drive several suburbs over to another Rift that Kade wanted to investigate before heading back. Faith had assured Alice they wouldn’t be long, leaving her with a brief kiss and a feeling of nervous tension in her gut.

Alice stood alone in the shadowy, candle-lit apartment. She felt like she’d been hollowed out. She was actively trying to feel an emotion - any emotion - but all she felt was…empty. She thought back to uni, when she’d started studying Genocide. In that introductory class - the one that had grabbed her attention so profoundly - the first thing the lecturer had the class do was divide into groups, think about a very large number of theoretical bodies - millions - and calculate how many football stadia it would take to contain them. Rapidly, logistical considerations had overtaken the human aspect: students raised questions of stadium size, asked whether bodies could be taken apart or stacked for increased efficiency, things like that. And, as it turned out, this was the point of the exercise: demonstrating that human brains have difficulty working with atrocity at scale. Single, horrible, isolated events…murder, rape, abuse; these resonated on the level of empathy and shock. Thousands…hundreds of thousands…a collective million such events seemed to only resonate in the realm of either statistics or ideology, and it took specific focus and humanising examples of individual events within the broader context to drag them back down to the realm of interpersonal relatability.

This was, in Alice’s mind, the logic behind the denazification of Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Gacaca courts in Rwanda after 1994: forcing perpetrators and collaborators out of the realm of statistics and ideology and back into the realm of empathy and shock, where it was possible to confront the human impact of their actions…or lack thereof. The exercise had stuck with Alice. She’d started to see examples in the day to day. Travelling to Germany and visiting the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, she had overheard an American couple complaining that only tens of thousands had died there, qualifying it as ‘not one of the real ones’. Listening to the news, she would hear sterile tabulations of the steadily increasing numbers of dead civilians in Palestine. Discussing a comparative paper with a colleague and realising they had both - utterly without meaning to - internalised a hierarchy of which events were at the top of their lists to discuss based almost entirely on scale. Things like that. Alice thought about that quote often attributed to Josef Stalin: ‘A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic’. In her estimation, the human brain just wasn’t built to comprehend the numerical ramifications of the worst outcomes of human nature.

But there were also addendums. These disturbed her more. She could reconcile the idea that human brains had a capacity problem; that was something that could be mitigated and worked around. The addendums, though, were mainly centred on ethnicity, which was where the issue of comprehending atrocities at scale moved definitively into the realm of ideology. Even in her field, there was a certain reverence for the Holocaust, specifically: a not-particularly-well-validated tendency to centre it in any discussion of Genocide and crimes against humanity. In her mind - and she rarely shared or even hinted at this perspective - she routinely wondered if it wasn’t some kind of morbid variant of white self-involvement; that even in the realm of atrocities, Westerners tended to centre their own actions as the most significant.

And she couldn’t help but contrast that reverence with the lack of it when neither the victims nor the perpetrators were white. She remembered talking to a relative about the Rwandan Genocide: how they had shrugged and classified it as ‘tribalism’, as if to reduce the significance; the possibility of something similar occurring somewhere ‘more civilised’ (clarification: ‘less black’). She thought about the Genocides-in-progress in the present that were being largely ignored in the West: like the Rohingya in Myanmar; the so-called ‘slow Genocide’ in the Democratic Republic of Congo…the Uyghurs in China. She considered the - very justified - focus on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and couldn’t help but wonder how much of the popular and political support for Israeli atrocities was predicated in Palestinian brownness, and how much the overall visibility of that conflict - both pro-and-anti-Zionist - had to do with Israel being a Western ally which had a significant population of recent Western expatriates. She suspected she knew the answers to these questions. At scale…the perceived and relative significance of human suffering always seemed to speak to Othering. Us versus Them. Ideology. Not that it mattered, now. The world was dying. Finally Alice managed to have an emotion.

Relief. Fuck.

“‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’.” Alice’s head jerked involuntarily in the direction of the voice, the skin on her arms immediately prickling with shock and concern. She recognised the voice, but the figure it had emanated from stood a few metres back in the shadows of the corner of the room. She couldn’t make her out.

“Kade?” She asked…hearing an undertone of hopefulness permeating her own voice.

“No, sorry. I’m one of the other ones.”

“Oh.”

“I’m Seven.” Alice paused, briefly frozen. Because of course she’d known that before Seven confirmed it. Who else? Why not? And it occurred to her that she should be reacting to her. Lashing out; pushing back…but all she could manage to feel was the inevitability of it. As if it had been pre-scripted and all that was left to do was say her lines…play her role. In resignation, she shrugged.

“I sort of figured. I’m Alice.”

“You’re all alone here.” A statement, not a question.

“They went out for something. I thought I’d better stay. I don’t know, I needed some…space from my selves. Just for a little bit.”

“Sorry for interrupting that.”

“Don’t be. I remembered as soon as they left…I don’t like being alone much.”

“I’m the same, unsurprisingly. But you get used to it eventually.” Seven said quietly, moving out from the shadow. Alice, even despite the context, found herself feeling relieved to see her own face smiling sadly back at her. “Pretty crazy what’s happening out there, right?”

“‘Crazy’.” Alice sniffed. “That’s definitely one word for it.”

“What word would you use?”

“‘Inevitable’ maybe? I spent so long trying to convince myself otherwise, but…” she nodded towards the window. “This kind of thing is always there, deep down. People have been doing this to one another since the dawn of time.”

“That’s certainly been my experience.” Seven nodded. “It’s okay, though.”

“No.” Alice shook her head, folding her arms over her chest. “It’s not. We could be better. We should be better.”

“There isn’t a ‘we’. They’re just…shadows. Iterations. They don’t know better; can’t do better. They’re just mirroring and repeating an inbuilt tendency. The process is accelerating, now, but this was always where it was going to end.” Alice and Seven shared a look. Alice thought she could see sadness in Seven’s eyes. Regret, possibly. But behind that was something else. Resolve?

“No one sees it coming.” Alice murmured quietly. “History rhymes. You can feel it in the air, and yet…” Seven nodded.

“I’ve always felt it. We all have, I think. The Alters who diverged later, anyhow, after the…” she trailed off.

“Bad few years.” Alice finished.

“Well, the worst few years. I’m not sure if there were ever really any good ones. Y’know…there’s something about trauma that can make you very…aware of things being on the edge of going somewhere bad, no?”

“Hyper-vigilance.”

“Right, exactly. Hyper-vigilance. Sometimes you feel like Cassandra of Troy. You know the bad things are coming but - "

“ - But if you tell people, they just think you’re crazy.” Alice felt her mind drifting back to the Covid pandemic. She remembered a friend laughing at her for the assertion that there were going to be mass graves before it was over. Sure enough…

“Mmm. Can I ask you a question, Alice?”

“Of course.”

“Where do you think this kind of thing starts? What do you think the root of it is, this tendency towards hatred and violence?” Seven nodded towards the window.

“Well…you have discontent.” Alice crossed her arms over her chest, wrapping herself up in a kind of a hug. Self-soothing. “People wishing things were better. And then you have other people - opportunistic people - who give them someone to blame for things not being better. In simple terms, I feel, that’s the foundation of it. Weaponised blame. The rest of it grows from there.”

“I think that’s a good way of framing it if you want to feel like these sorts of things can be prevented. All you need to do is hold the opportunists accountable, dismantle the propaganda and educate people.”

“You say it like that’s easy. You say it like it’s…possible.”

“Well, it’s more comforting than my theory.”

“What’s your theory?”

“That it doesn’t matter. That there’s no way to prevent it. That the impulse towards seeing difference as dangerous, as other-than…it’s fundamental to our evolution, like a parasite we all carry, nestled deep in each of our brains, and that all of this may as well just…end, to put a stop to this endless cycle of enacting horror, forgetting horror, then repeating horror. It’s the Uncanny Valley writ large, and it’s too deep and too dark for any of us to really ever manage to entirely clamber out of.” Seven fell silent. Alice’s jaw clenched and set, her lips twisting into a tight scowl. It wasn’t an opinion she hadn’t heard before. It was one that she associated less with logic and more with…self-justification. To assert that human nature was innate; unconquerable; beyond human control, ignored…everything. Human history was nothing if not a series of examples of people sublimating their so-called ‘natural state’. It wasn’t and could never be an excuse. “Do you think it’d change anything if they knew?”

“Knew what?”

“How they look, when you zoom out from it a little. How small and petty and self-defeating it all seems from a distance.”

“Seven…why are you here?” Alice asked.

“Here in this world, or here in this room?”

“I expect both have the same answer, no?”

“More or less. I’m here because of Helios.”

“Helios? What about them?”

“They’re on your world.”

“I know, they reached out to me.” Alice’s brow furrowed.

“Yeah. I’m aware. It’s a shame, really. I liked you so much more than the others.”

“I don’t underst - “ Alice began, then lost her words. She found herself unable to speak. Unable to move. Unable to