Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 4: "Life in Pink"

So I did what I always do, and amused myself with the follies of others, in how Oliver Row was actually searching for Sia herself all along.

     You see, what Oliver was never going to outright volunteer was that he and his little club had been searching for the descendants of Duende, among whom happened to be Sia since the disappearances occurred a millennium ago and those left behind struggled to pick up the pieces and move on, living out meager existences in utter obscurity until one day a girl started looking things up on the internet.

     Such are the vagaries of fate.  Today it seems easy to be lost in the shuffle.  Since Earth’s population exploded and covered seemingly all available landmasses, there developed a lot of panic about what it all meant, a lot of fear that established avenues of relevance would change, would shift, and the balance of expectations along with it, although certainly no one was eager to admit it.  Life began to seem cheap in a whole new way, the ease of communication frightening, easy to take for granted, easy to lose in the rush to express mindless opinions, nothing and no one truly found except those already saying what someone else happened to have already thought.

     So it took a great deal to stand out, and mostly because there were those who were bothering to look, such as Oliver Row, such as House Argos behind him, because they knew what they were looking for, and what they wanted to find.

     In this instance, anything that helped prove the existence of the Danab, anything that proved that one day, an alien race stole a bunch of humans into space.  Humanity spends all its time worrying about alien invasions, singular abductions, clandestine or catastrophic encounters, whether visitors will be friendly or apocalyptic, when the history suggests a great deal of…apathy.  Why bother?  The Danab would bother, when they got around to it, because they themselves had been human.

     They were the descendants of Sia’s ancestors.

     But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Oliver’s group knew all or most of this, they just didn’t know who Sia was, that she existed.  They couldn’t possibly hope for someone not only relevant to their search, but capable of understanding it.  That’s the key right there.  Find the wrong person and the whole thing’s worthless, like finding the wrong materials for a project.  What’re you gonna work with?  You can’t catch water in a sieve; it’ll just slip away again, and all you’ll have is the memory. 

     Family trees can be surprisingly tricky.  Dig back far enough, they say, and everyone’s related to everyone, and so it begins to seem a little pointless.  Dig forward long enough and you have too many results.  The search is arduous, almost impossible, and so it can seem endless.  Some people are capable of enduring such things, and that’s basically House Argos in a nutshell, the little human organization that could.

     They began at the beginning, at the generation of which Duende was a part, and those who were left behind when the Tikanni took their breeding stock away, the family left behind, and what became of them, hard as it was to find such minor details in the record, hard as it ever is to find, even in the present day, anything worth anything amidst all the pointless noise.  Family of legends, though, tends to remember the legend, and while the legend can be distorting, if the legend is big enough, but easy enough to ignore by the outside world, well then you’ve got something, and no one outside this family was looking, was even aware that there was something to find, except House Argos, and the family was at a distinct advantage, and passed along to each generation the family legend, and it began to transform into myth, into stories, the way these things always work, until it was only stories being rediscovered every few generations, the way Sia herself discovered it, in the way she was the last to still believe there was something to it besides mere stories, the way she believed there was something worth discovering, the way House Argos searched so desperately for the same thing, knowing it was more than mere stories, because it had the missing pieces of the puzzle…

     Oh, it would be fascinating, and something on an order of a great deal more intricacy than this story is prepared to chronicle, all the steps along the way, the stories within stories, the way all history really unfolds, the way history forgets along the way, which if we’re very lucky some dusty museum exhibit will keep alive, the way all history becomes dark ages, whether we’re willing to admit it or not, common knowledge not so common as we like to think, despite whole childhoods being dedicated to pretending otherwise…

    I find it amusing.  I admit it.  Of course, I had all the pieces before Sia, before Oliver Row, and so I had the benefit of watching them struggle to catch up, and such a vantage point has its distorting effect, I know, how every much like a god, which is why such things are so hard to fathom by those who will never occupy such spaces, which is to say, virtually everyone.  I pretend no pretense, here, no arrogance.  I appreciate the vagaries of the universe. 

     For you see, I know where all this ends, and I am horrified, and what I want more than anything is to prevent it, but there’s no preventing it, and I know this better than anyone, no matter what I try to accomplish or who I tell or…

     The worst thing about gods is also the best thing, that you must witness entropy knowing it is the only thing more powerful, more inevitable, than you are.  I’m told most are obsessed with how all things began or how they will end.  I guess I’m a pessimist.  I can imagine nothing worse.

Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 3: "In & Out"

This one’s a summary of various conversations Oliver Row and Sia ended up having on various social media platforms, which as a signature element of the era must at some point be normalized, and so the summary of what happened to reach the exchanges would look ordinary enough to contemporary readers:

     Girl goes online looking for answers, and finds them, or thinks she does, chasing down rumor, lies, conjecture, whatever seems convincing, and eventually finds someone (Oliver) she thinks is worth talking with about all of it, since they seem to know things…

     “Wait, wait, wait,” she wrote (forget what she calls herself, what he calls himself), “try starting from the beginning again.  Pretend I don’t know anything.”

     “You really don’t,” he wrote.  “No offense.”

     “None taken,” she wrote.  “Probably.”

     “If you’re going to trust me on any of this, it’s just easier to assume you don’t,” he wrote, “because you really can’t.  You have no idea.  Unfortunately I know a whole lot.”

     “That’s what they all say,” she wrote.

     “And yet you choose to trust me,” he wrote.

     “Or so I want you to believe,” she wrote.

     “You can’t kid a kidder,” he wrote.  “I practically wrote the book on it.”

     “So you keep telling me,” she wrote.  “Quit stalling or I’m just going to assume you’re yet another dead end.”

     “I wish,” he wrote.  “House Argos, the thing you learned about that led you to me, the term you kept seeing pop up, the conspiracy of all conspiracies.”

     “I don’t even care about the rest of them,” she wrote.

     “You shouldn’t,” he wrote.  “They’re all nonsense, just ways ordinary lives try and pretend they’re extraordinary.  There’s nothing quite like secret knowledge to spice up ignorance.”

     “You’re still stalling,” she wrote.

     “Character limits,” he wrote.

     “That can mean multiple things,” she wrote.

     “You’re probably right,” he wrote.

     “Just promise me this isn’t a sex thing,” she wrote. 

     “Never asked for a picture, never going to send one,” he wrote.  “I don’t have any of the good ones anyway.  I’m as Earthbound as the next guy.  That’s kind of the whole point.”

     “So you keep saying,” she wrote.

     “I wish it weren’t true!” he wrote.  “Nobody here has spaceships capable of anything truly amazing.  We’re just trying to get to Mars, right?  Dreaming of colonies in the neighborhood.  These guys, they’re off in deep space.”

     “House Argos?” she wrote.

     “The aliens,” he wrote.  “The actual aliens.  I’m told they’re offended if they learn we call them that, though.  But if I told you any, you’d think it was just gibberish.  No way to verify.  You’re not the first to come poking.  We don’t invite strangers.”

     “Yet here we are,” she wrote.  “I guess I’m just too charming.”

     “Sometimes persistence really is key,” he wrote. 

     “You’ve called it pestering on more than one occasion,” she wrote.  “Your honesty is sometimes more direct than other times.”

      “We get all kinds of crazy,” he wrote, “as you might imagine.  House Argos is older than anything else I’ve ever heard about, much less been a part of.  If I told you my history, we’d be here all day.  House Argos, though, you might say, is the original telephone, the first line of communication across vast differences.  I’m told the technology they used in the beginning was so radical it was indistinguishable from magic, as they tend to say about revolutionary science.  Lost to history, of course, some of those lost civilizations that leave nothing for anthropologists to comb, nothing for museums to display.  Sometimes we underestimate just how long human history is.”

     “Or we have old people blabbering,” she wrote, “and that makes us forget.  And fall asleep.”

     “It’s old, suffice to say,” he wrote.  “It’s been searching the stars for longer than most of humanity knew what stars were, when the bulk of our curiosity was trying to navigate by them, both literally and metaphorically.  When we thought the stars were magic.”

     “Hey, I’m into that kind of stuff, too,” she wrote.

     “I’ll bet,” he wrote.  “It doesn’t matter.  The point is, House Argos is humanity’s oldest and best bet to learn the truth of what’s out there.”

     “And you know all this because you’re a member,” she wrote.

     “Precisely,” he wrote.

     “And you were interested in me because of all the genealogy research I’d been doing,” she wrote.  “You were spying on me, my search history, before I ever found you.”

     “Our interests are extensive,” he wrote.  “They have to be.  Our knowledge of history is extensive, a bit more than the average.  When someone goes around digging for certain terms…”

     “Such as Duende,” she wrote.

     “Of course you knew,” he wrote.  “That’s why we were so interested.  I’d like to accept personal responsibility, but you started as an assignment.”

     “I’m flattered,” she wrote.

     “You should be,” he wrote.

     “But someone told you to,” she wrote.

     “I would’ve been happy to drop it if you hadn’t proved to be so insightful,” he wrote.

     “Still trying to get in my pants,” she wrote.

     “Listen,” he wrote.  “It proves nothing to admit I know what you look like, and everything to suggest you and I will likely never meet.”

     “Other than using the internet’s basic anonymity to chicken out,” she wrote.

     “You and I both know you don’t mean that,” he wrote.  “But I appreciate that you keep trying.”

     “If I hadn’t passed your little test, you mean to say, you would’ve just ghosted me,” she wrote.

     “Easiest thing to do in this day and age,” he wrote.

     “But you decided otherwise,” she wrote, “because I happened to know a certain name, which you still haven’t explained, and because you found me so darn charming.”

     “In a manner of speaking,” he wrote.  “Listen, I don’t mean for you to take any of this lightly.”

     “Is that some kind of threat?” she wrote.

     “Not from me,” he wrote.  “Not from House Argos.”

     “I’ll just take the word of a stranger who keeps assuring me we’ll never meet,” she wrote.

     “Don’t be glib,” he wrote.  “There are limits even for us.  We’re traders in information.”

     “But not sharers,” she wrote.

     “Again, there would be no way for you to verify anyway,” he wrote.

     “Convenient,” she wrote.

     “You’re the one who went digging,” he wrote.  “Sometimes you’re bound to find something.”

     “You,” she wrote, “and this House Argos nonsense.”

     “I wish,” he wrote.  “If what we suspect happens, everyone will know.”

     “Ooh,” she wrote.  “Ominous.  And vague.”

     “Invasion,” he wrote.  “Probably within the next decade or so.  Believe me, you won’t be able to miss it.  You’ll wish you had.  All of us will.  If it doesn’t sound too condescending, I’m trying desperately to preserve your innocence, here.”

     “Well, that was a failure,” she wrote.

     “I’m truly sorry,” he wrote.

Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 2: "Fools Rush In"

 Sometimes the observer is themselves observed, and such was the case with Oliver Row.

     Ah, yes, the one and only Oliver Row.

     In the grand scheme of things, not much of a legendary figure.  There were certainly circles where he was, even when he was a she.  A multitude of lives.  All shared along a similar quest, a destiny yet unwritten, vague, ambiguous, but somehow always lurking about.

     Oliver Row belonged to that tradition history on the planet Earth ascribes to such fictional luminaries as Van Helsing, who in the pages of a book helped take down a vampire, and in that lineage Oliver had been in pursuit of legends all his lives.  He, too, had once helped take down a vampire, and encountered many other monsters besides, some of them mere humans, although in my humble estimation…Is there really such a distinction?  Is it really necessary?  Humans are such a mess.  Though I suppose, it’s a trait shared on many worlds by many so-called intelligent lifeforms…To be fair.

     Oliver Row, as the traditions would have it, was a shared sobriquet, and many individuals had given up their given name to work under it, and in this particular story, the Oliver Row in question had done so quite happily, driven to distraction on this occasion in the pursuit of the mysterious “Agent,” whom Oliver had discovered in association with something called the House of Stars, which if he hadn’t taken quite so long in finding, would have led to me, one and the same “Agent,” in much shorter fashion. 

     First he was going to have to find Sia, but that, too, was going to have to wait, as was any real understanding of what any of his lives meant.

     Along the way to destiny, life tends to be mundane.  Actually, even destiny is mundane as it’s happening; it only matters in hindsight, usually in terms of regret and only sometimes in glory.  Sorry to be so melodramatic about it.  I’ve been following the careers of Oliver Row for too long not to be a little nauseated by all of it, the way Oliver himself wonders at this very moment what’s keeping our dear Sia.

    Since neither of them will know of my existence very soon, allow me to introduce myself: The woman Oliver knows only as the “Agent” is in fact named Night, or so I’ve equally chosen to be known.  You’ll find out more as they do, and that will do for now, thank you.

     For now, revel in the mediocrities of Oliver Row!

     Oliver, whose namesake died a hundred years ago, and whose detailed accounts of all activities fills a series of notebooks that really only Oliver Row ever cares about, protected in briefcases, satchels, whatever is currently at hand to protect them from the elements and doubles visually for anyone at hand as probably the implements of the trade, the doodads and gadgets used against monsters, weapons.  Ha.  If only.  Just a bunch of words, nonsense, whatever makes such a life worth living.  Same as anyone else.  Very much like Sia, really.  Oliver Row: nothing much more than another hapless would-be published author.  Memoir waiting to be accepted.  Movie rights available!

     When the original and only legal Oliver Row passed away slumped in an alley, there had been a homeless youth made aware from the sensationalized accounts accepted as fiction by the world at large who happened to come across the body and collected works.  This is how the legend really started, in just such humble circumstances.  The youth spent years trying to make sense of it, and tracking down new challenges, until he realized Oliver had belonged to an organization known as House Argos, the history of which the original and neophyte was in total ignorance, Argos being the dog who was the lone individual capable of recognizing Odysseus when he returned in secret to Ithica.  Suffice to say, but House Argos is an ancient society dedicated mostly to keeping alive the dim flame of learning.  It is, in Earth parlance, a bunch of nerds, nothing more.

     Such is the background of Oliver Row as he exists today.  To claim the title, all one has to do is become aware of the existence of the tradition, and merely be deemed adequate by the current one to replace them.  A fluke of circumstances, really.  The files had been digitized over the years, even published in limited editions never circulated due to popular disinterest, under a variety of colorful titles, increasingly easy in modern times but with scarcely different results. 

     The current Oliver Row inherited the title from a woman, who relinquished the title.  In fact, in recent years the role has changed hands with alarming frequency.  Interpret that with any amount of cynicism you deem appropriate.  This Oliver was once known as Marty, but that was a lifetime ago, or so the months can sometimes suggest. 

     He came across the existence of the “Agent” by chance, on the internet, where all modern life on Earth plays out, and the House of Stars, although he had no idea, as no one could on such a planet at such a developmental level, no matter how alarmingly important such knowledge happens to be, as so much fodder for mindless conspiracy theories.  Oliver Row, by any name or face, though, never lets good knowledge go to waste, and immediately suspected it was worth following up. 

     Which is to say, he became obsessed.

     It just so happened that a young woman named Sia had developed the same mania, and her name, or her aliases, though nothing so petty caused much difficulty for Oliver Row, quickly caught his attention, too, and that was how they began their tumble down the rabbithole…

Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 1: "Finest Kind"

It’s hard to remember her, in the greater context of her life, as the girl who was so utterly lost in the world, flailing about to try and find her place in it.  That’s really how all such lives are, in my experience anyway.  But that was Sia as the events of this particular story begin.

     Sia was at that time a young adult, which in those times had become something of an albatross, neither prepared to take on the big challenges expected to get ahead nor capable of asserting herself in a world dominated by her elders.  She’d moved away from home and begun the series of petty employments that was to keep her in her tenuous independent existence, and yet she would never have described herself as happily settled, nor content in the life, which was why she began exploring the parts of her past she was most curious about, her ancestry, and what she supposed she would discover about herself along the way.

     Being chronically short of funds, her recourse was free search engines and all the pitfalls therein, the utter vagaries of the results, the inability to refine them so that she might know instantly whether she was absolutely correct in the findings or had been led gloriously astray.  She plugged in the names she knew, the grandparents on both sides, and found her great-grandparents and further beyond that, and she guided herself along these waters with a name she’d heard her mother use, Duende, hoping that she might come across it, although she had no idea how except through dumb luck, and in tracing the origins of the name itself, hoped to bridge the gap between what she might find and the desperation of her yearning.

     Now, Sia was on the whole a resourceful person, and wasn’t overly shy in the pursuit, so when she wanted to consult a relative, her uncle, she did, and that was how she confirmed her mother’s tale, that there was a Duende, that somewhere in the crossroads of her French and Scandinavian pasts she might discover the name for herself.  She cross-referenced Viking raids, settlements, and what she had learned in the genealogies, and that was where she discovered the gap.  Right where she expected to find Duende.  Whoever they were.

     Which is to say, Sia found herself stymied.

     Which is to say, Sia grew frustrated.

     It’s all well and good to have a goal and a general understanding of one’s frustration with the cosmos, quite another to find that there’s not going to be much more satisfaction in this pursuit than in the rest of one’s life, and that was about the sum total of Sia’s existence at this early stage.  This happens to be a story where there are much wider discoveries waiting around the corner, but at the start it looks very much like anything else in the humdrum world, and Sia herself mind-numbingly ordinary, if even that, and very much aware of it, but also that she could imagine greater things than that, and the curse of knowing it.

     To top it all off, she was also quite isolated.  No one much to talk to about all this, except maybe her mother, but, and Sia very much adored her mother, this was never going to be a conversation that they could share.  She yearned more than anything for someone with whom such things were possible.

     Instead, in the meantime, she stared at a screen and hoped it might spontaneously give her the answers she sought.  No such search engine was powerful enough to deliver such magic.  She appreciated the age in which she lived, in which she could search the vast sum of human knowledge as captured by the internet, or could stroll to a bookshelf and discover anything not found therein, and how humiliatingly limited it still was, and how all of that was somehow prone to mismanagement, mostly by the everyday custodians known as mankind.  Basically, to be concise, all that knowledge reduced to petty insults expressed with a poor grasp of the language (any of them).

     She developed poor posture, not really because of all this, or the metaphorical burden of her existence, but through sheer existential angst, and possibly also from all the reading, both on her phone and in books.  She found herself worrying, when she thought about it, what kind of image she presented.  Her hair was straggly, not so much styled as caught in desperate snatches.  She was always brushing it out of her eyes, a slightly gold color that had been mistakenly described as brown throughout her life, or possibly they’d brightened.  Anyway, she was always trying to relax.  She took frequent naps, mostly to rest her eyes.  She wore thick glasses when she didn’t have her contacts in, which was whenever she didn’t need her contacts.  She tried not to avoid the contacts too much.  She worried constantly about her eyes, and basically everything else.  That’s mainly why she spent so much time investigating her ancestry, and why she needed to find something important there.

     It’s funny that we really don’t know what lies ahead.  It’s got to be strange living a nonlinear life, when you know everything all at once.  I guess I’ll have to look into it.  Always kind of busy, though.

     Sia plowed ahead with what she tried valiantly to not consider a disappointing life.  She tended to use the library when she was online.  She didn’t yet have unlimited internet on her phone, so she used, and trusted in, the library’s wifi, and also the ability to browse the books, the newspapers, the magazines, everything that had made as tidy an order of her life as she’d ever managed.

     The problem was that she couldn’t spend her life reading.  The rest of it still had to happen, and the rest was invariably disappointing, and Sia was absolutely aware she was chasing what was probably some fictional version of a past that didn’t have anymore practical applications than adding to her own knowledge, which she had so far utterly fail to convince the world at large as having any real meaning.

     Still, there had to be something there.  “Duende.”  It had always sounded important.  She just had no idea how, except for vague family legend, something in the remote and incredibly dim past.  If history didn’t record it, there wasn’t much meaning to it.  Right?

     She sat back, stretched her neck, pretended it was irrevocably wrecked already, closed her eyes, and imagined.

     Which was how she did her best work.