Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 10 (Conclusion): "Centennial"

Sia might never have seen Night again, but that doesn’t mean Oliver didn’t.

     A hundred years later, someone else was calling themselves Oliver Row, but as had long been tradition, they liked to think the life of a previous one was more or less their own, too, and so their lingering memories (every one of them kept a journal of some kind), and so the current Oliver was interested to know as the Oliver at the time what had become of Night, whether she had, as Sia had supposed, departed Earth, before the war, before everything changed, again.

     Of course she hadn’t.

     Oliver never even considered it a possibility.  He waited patiently, as it happens, for Night to visit him, as he knew she would, in her fear, her trepidation, her anxiety, same as anyone, human or Danab, or another other alien race, wherever their origin, the impossible challenge of processing such things easily, as Sia seemed to have, but had really been a mask, as so many choose to wear, which Oliver, then, had allowed her to keep, but had kept tabs on her, when the Danab came, when the war came, as he watched her devote herself to preparing elaborate meals, which, he noted, had become quite the obsession around the world, in households that had never so much as cracked an egg, before.  Nervous tension, the creator.  Eventually. 

   Oliver wasn’t so lucky, and neither was Night.  He worried about her most of all, not because he feared her people would decide to execute her, but that she would harm herself, out of shame, embarrassment, any of the lies she’d be willing to tell herself, this ultimate sense of betrayal, of whole planets, that she had so willingly plunged herself into.

     All because of a little curiosity.

     Same as anyone.  That’s what he told her, when she finally did come to see him.

     “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

     “It certainly seems otherwise at the moment,” she said.

     “Forget the moment,” he said.  “You already did.  Your whole course of action defied all that.  Defied it because you knew it was going to happen.  You did think you were going to stop it.  You’re some kind of princess, aren’t you?  I bet you never told Sia that.”

     “I didn’t want to scare her,” she said.

     “Funny way of showing it,” he said.

     “You wouldn’t understand,” she said.

     “Listen, we’re all in the same boat,” he said.  “We’re all blood.”

     “That’s not what I meant,” she said.

     “I know,” he said.

     “She needed to see at a level she could understand,” she said.  “She had a much different life than either of us.”

     “I appreciate your saying so,” he said.

     “I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true,” she said.

     “There’s that alarming forthrightness,” he said.”

     “Probably something to do with my upbringing,” she said.

     “Yeah,” he said.  “Probably.”

     “I don’t know my way forward, Oliver,” she said.  “I’m frightened.  I don’t have a role to play anymore.”

     “Narrative horror,” he said.  “I read a book about that, once.  The author was more concerned about the past, but it applies to the future, too, I guess.  That’s the problem.  That’s, really, always the problem.  Right now, there’s fighting going on all over the world.  Sia’s not a part of it.  I’m not a part of it.  You’re not.  You think you should be.  You think you should be.  You think you owe a debt or something.  You think you caused it.  You didn’t.  This was going to happen.  You have no blood on your hands.  Maybe it’s the Danab in you, but there’s humanity, too.  I know what the humanity says.  Maybe the Danab does, too.  I don’t know.  You have to trust me on this.  You’re not to blame.  That’s just how we are.  We were like this long before those aliens took your ancestors into space.  That’s why they were, because they were fighting anyway.  A lot of trouble has been put into thinking about why this is.  Some people think our most cherished beliefs about it.  I don’t agree.  I think it’s just nature.  We can’t control it.  We can only determine what we do in response.  How we view it.  How we learn from it.  It’s not about when the fighting ends, Night, because that always happens, just as inevitably as it starting up again.  I never agreed with the notion that someday it’ll just wipe us all out.  Nature is too indifferent.  It has no role for us to play.  We just need to forgive ourselves.  That’s what you’ve got to do.  You can’t stop this from happening, you never could, but you can help people understand.  You can start with yourself.  Like the rest of your people, it was simple curiosity.  That’s it.  And that’s fine!”

     “You make it sound so innocent,” she said.

     “Innocence is always the first victim,” he said, “but it’s never taken away.  It can’t be.  It can’t be a casualty.  We just need to fight to reclaim it.  Sounds impossible.  But it’s the only inevitable thing about it.  That’s nature, too.”

     “Okay,” she said.
     “During the course of all this I acquired a nasty habit,” he said.  “Coffee.”

     “Anastassia introduced it to me,” she said.

     “The trick is, there’s always different ways to make it,” he said, “and you’ve got to find the one that makes sense to you.”

     “We don’t have coffee on Danab,” she said.

     “You already sound more civilized,” he said.

     “We have worse,” she said.

     “I’m sure you just haven’t figured that out, either,” he said.  “Don’t mean to be rude.”

     “I’m beginning to suspect that’s just nature, too,” she said.

     “Probably,” he said.  “Something like that.”

     They continued their little chat, and Night explained to Oliver what they did drink on Danab, something they’d developed long ago, on the spaceships of the aliens who took her people from Earth.  He suspected it sounded something like motor oil.  She laughed at that.

     She lived longer than he did.  That Oliver died decades after the peace was declared, after Earth was welcomed into a galactic alliance, full of wary members who had no idea what to make of these humans, who so quickly adapted to and then took over an existing space corps, despite even more begrudging acceptance into it.  Other Olivers followed, Olivia, sometimes Olive, Ollie, Ol, as it had always been, until a full century had passed.  Sometimes the current occupant merely retired.  It was another Oliver, from this vantage point.  Night had died, finally, not so long before.  Long life, along with all the other advantages, as he still chose to view them, as many jealous humans did.  Oliver’s wasn’t that choice, but rather admiration. 

     It had taken a great deal of courage.  Sometimes curiosity can produce wonders.  But it takes warriors, soldiers traveling along ancient seas, to brave such treacherous waters.  Sometimes we have the privilege to make the decision ourselves.  Of the three of them. It was Oliver’s opinion that it was Night who most closely matched that description.

     He tipped his cup at all three.  It takes all kinds.

Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 9: "The Winds of Death"

When they met again, at the same coffee shop, Sia and Oliver each sat down with cups they intended to drink.  Sia noticed that Oliver didn’t add anything into his this time.  He seemed nervous, agitated, kept sipping at his cup.  He’d removed the lid.  She watched him with anticipation.  She held hers in her hands, and brought it up to her lips for steady swallows.  She didn’t much notice the temperature.  There was a single packet of sugar mixed in, a little creamer, which changed the color to a dark tan.

     “The whole point of all this is that there’s going to be a war,” he said finally.  “A war.  A full-on, all-out war.  A true world war.  It’s going to be all of us, all on the same team.  I’m not sure we have a chance.”

     “I actually don’t think that’s true,” she said.  “Why would she have even bothered.  Night.  Her name is Night.  In case you didn’t already know that.”

     “In fact I didn’t,” Oliver said.  “Feeling a little inadequate these days, thank you very much.  I was workshopping Danab Lady.  Or maybe Mad Lady.”

     “Night,” she said.  “She’s actually a very nice lady, when you stop worrying about all the horrible implications.”

     “I’m sure she is,” he said.

     “We had a little chat,” she said.

     “A lot of that going around, lately,” he said.

     “I’ve found them helpful,” she said.  “I mean, I don’t think we have to worry about it.  About the war.  I mean, there’s going to be a war, and it’s going to be worldwide, global, devastating, as wars go…but I don’t think it’s an extinction event.  I don’t think it’s about annihilation.   I don’t think it’s avoidable, no matter how you look at it, but that’s just how these things go.  That’s how humanity says hello.”

     “That’s awfully cynical,” he said.  “And also, since when were you the level head in all this.  I’m the one who was supposed to know what was going on.”

     “That’s awfully condescending,” she said.  “Since you asked…I guess I knew what this was all going to lead to, somewhere along the line.  At some point.  I kind of had to figure a secret as big as the one I’d stumbled onto was never going to be simple, not with that scrubbed from the historical record.  There had to be a reason, and…there was.  There absolutely was!  C’mon, you had to guess, too, at some point?  You know more than I did, for longer, and you’re going to tell me you honestly thought it was going to turn out any different?  That you thought it was really going to be like all those silly movies?  I mean, I’d love to see the movie, if I didn’t have to experience it, but I guess there’ll be a movie, eventually, anyway, humanity’s brush with its destiny!  From its past!  I’m sure it’s going to be horrible, but…Endurable.  They’re not going to just come wipe us out.  Weaponry has to exist on a scale that makes sense, if we’re essentially the same people.  And we are.  They can’t invent anything we wouldn’t be able to understand, or confront.  We already know this, Oliver.  Ollie.  Can I call you Ollie?”

     “Actually, I’ve been workshopping,” he said.

     “Night came here like she’d road a bus, took a cab,” she said.  “I don’t know, drove a car.  If she had been, I don’t know, part of a vanguard, she really wouldn’t have just orchestrated our bumping into each other like that.  Think about it.  I know I have.  Very little else.  Actually, that’s a lie.  I’ve been distracting myself a lot.  You have no idea.  You’d think I would be able to think about anything else.  But I had to.  I think that’s really how all of this works.  Some of us are able to cut through the chatter.  I guess somehow I’m one of them.  I know you are, Ollie!  C’mon!  You can’t tell me otherwise!  I don’t know you at all.  Really!  But I know you better than anyone.  I know the type.  I know you, Ollie!  I know you understand this.  It’s going to be war.  And then it’ll be something else.  We’re just going to have to learn to deal with it.  That’s going to be a whole thing.  It’ll get complicated.  That’s how these things work.  That’s how it always works.  It’ll be okay.”

     “It’s really supposed to be me,” he said, “explaining all this.”

     “Don’t be crass,” she said.

     “Suppose we’ll have to invite her over for dinner.  Also, each other.”

     “I don’t think she’s here anymore,” she said.  “I think she went back home.  Or somewhere.  I don’t know.  I don’t really know her.  I mean, I know her.  But she went out of her way to clarify how little I could possibly understand her life.  But that’s life.  Biggest story in history, and that’s what it boils down to.  I guess it figures.”

     “It just needed someone capable of seeing it that way,” he said.

     “I have no idea how it ended up being me,” she said.

     “I think if you thought about it enough you would,” he said.  “Coffee’s awful.  I don’t mean coffee in general.  I’m drinking plenty these days.  I mean the coffee here.  Just awful.”

     “You know what?” she said.  “I think I agree.  It’s just awful.”

     “Let’s not come here again,” he said. 

     “Agreed,” she said.  “Easily.  See?  Something ordinary.  Simple.  That’s how these things really are.  Just ordinary life, regardless of the circumstances.”

     “You still curious about Duende?” he asked.

     “I think I learned enough,” she said.  “For now.”

     “I know what you mean,” he said.

     “I’m not finishing this cup,” she decided.

     “A wise decision,” he said.

     They slipped back into the night, together, and then went off in different directions.

     In the ensuing years, Sia never saw Oliver, much less Night, again.  It’s not worth summarizing her experiences, here.  That would be another story, and really, Sia wasn’t a part of the fighting, and her life wasn’t significantly impacted by it.  Not anymore than it had already been, before it had ever begun.

     So the rest is mere epilogue, as, too, this, as is everything, mere prologue.

Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 8: "The Winds of Fortune"

Sia had been feeling pretty small, which had made it increasingly difficult to think outside of her home, and really, much more than outside of her bed.  There was a knock at the door, late at night, one day, and she had really wanted to believe it was someone at the wrong door, because that was how she really wanted to view everything she’d been trying to do, that idiot search through her ancestry, that had led to all of this, and she wasn’t going to answer, and then she found her body moving anyway, opening the door, and there was, of course, the lady, who had exploded everything, whose existence, even if Sia chose not to believe anything else, presented the last piece of the puzzle, either of Sia’s loss of sanity, as something that had occurred years earlier or that night, or nothing much short of an intimation of the apocalypse…

     No pressure!

     “I’m going to simplify things a little,” the woman said, walking past Sia.  “My name, or so I’m going to call myself, is Night, and I really wish all I had to do was sing a song, nothing more simple or pleasant than that, but all this has been…something of a trap, and it’s caught all of us, all three of us, and it’s only going to get worse from there.”

     “I can offer you water,” Sia said.  “From the tap.  I have a variety of novelty mugs to offer you as well.  I don’t use them.  I don’t know if you have mugs where you come from.  They’re cups.  We use them to drink hot beverages.  I don’t like hot beverages.  I don’t know why I have them.  It’s the custom.  It’s expected.  I guess I figured if I ever had a visitor, I’d need them.  I’m babbling.”

     “That’s okay,” Night said.  “I guess I needed to talk to someone who would understand.”

     “Lady, you came to the wrong house,” Sia said.

     “You don’t understand,” Night said.  “You’re exactly who I need to talk to.  You’re the only person in this universe who could possibly understand.  A long time ago, when I was a little girl, I was told a bedtime story.”

     “Oh,” Sia said.  “If you don’t want a hot beverage, in a mug, I can at least offer you a seat.  You can see for yourself the options.  They’re sparse.  I’m sorry.  You’re my first guest.”

     “Nothing I don’t recognize,” Night said.  “The bedtime story consisted of a family tradition that had been passed down by every generation, and it was about a man named Duende, who had fallen into possession of a book, which itself had been lost, the Book of Danab.  I suppose it was a kind of testament, as close to a religion my people could formulate for themselves.  They’d seen too much of the universe, even at that very early point, to worry too much about such things.  They otherwise maintained the old traditions, from here, from Earth.  We’re really not as different as you might think.”

     “I think if you and I approached the same guy for a date, the guy would find it pretty easy to distinguish,” Sia said. 

     “Don’t be so petty,” Night said.  “Or so small.”

     “Easy for you to say,” Sia said.  “Actually, that’s kind of insulting.  Proves my point, too.”

     “You’re being provincial,” Night said.

     “Hey, you’re the one who came here,” Sia said.  “Only planet I’ve ever known.”

     “Not your fault,” Night said.  “Actually, I think that’s really the problem, here, why I had to come.  I worry about the future, Anastassia.”

     “We all do,” Sia said.

     “I think you’ve already talked about this with Oliver Row,” Night said.

     “You eavesdrop on top of everything else,” Sia said.  “Not cool.”

     “It was at least logical to assume you had,” Night said.  “You can’t just ignore everything you’ve learned.  I couldn’t.”

      “I could certainly try!” Sia said.  “In fact, that’s exactly what I was trying to do tonight, besides sleeping! when you knocked at my chamber door.”

     “I don’t understand the reference,” Night said.

     “I lend you a copy,” Sia said.  “Actually, you know what?  We could make all this a lot easier if you gave me a book.  Bridge the gap.  Know what I mean?”

     “That’s not why I’m here,” Night said.

     “You worry too much,” Sia said.

     “You have no idea what’s coming,” Night said.

     “That’s the point,” Sia said.  “That’s what I began to realize.  I’m kind of comfortable in my ignorance.  It’s actually better that way.”

     “You won’t have the luxury for such foolishness,” Night said.

     “Nothing I can do about it,” Sia said.

     “That’s…actually pretty accurate,” Night said.  “I came because…I had to see.  I had to see what was going to be lost.”

     “That sounds horrible,” Sia said.

     “Nothing so provincial,” Night said.  “I mean, what humanity is now.  Not what I can see on the surface, not the mere facts.  What it is.”

     “I guess that makes sense,” Sia said.

     “To put a human face on it,” Night said.

     “Likewise,” Sia said.  “I guess.”

     “I feel truly sorry for you,” Night said.  “I apologize.  You can’t possibly know.  I can’t show you.  I wish I could.  I can describe details, I can show you images.  You wanted answers.  I have them.  I wish I didn’t.  Not because I’m ashamed, but because the world is going to interpret all of it very differently.  I think you will, too.”

     “I think I crossed that threshold years ago,” Sia said.  “I have a face, too.  I see you.  That’s enough.”

     “It won’t be for everyone,” Night said.

     “That’s the way the world works,” Sia said.  “Your existence doesn’t change that.”

     “I wish I had met you earlier,” Night said.

     “Why?” Sia said.  “You said it yourself.  It wouldn’t change anything.”

     “It would’ve changed me,” Night said.

     “Ah,” Sia said.

     “I feared so much,” Night said.  “Looking at this, from the other side, I…never expected to find someone like you.”

     “Sometimes there are small miracles,” Sia said.  “I guess those are the only ones that really exist.  Why they’re so hard to see.”

     “I think I’ll take one of those…hot beverages,” Night said.  “In a mug.  I would like to…see your collection.”

     They sat in silence, after a while, drinking.

Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 7: "Room"

Oliver found himself sitting in that office at his desk, which was cluttered with notebooks, not just his computer, since he happened to come from a time when one still very much made sense to him, and the other was used mostly for research. 

     What bothered him, at the moment, wasn’t so much shattering the worldview of some girl, but the other woman, the Danab, who had breached the protocols his office had begun to assume must exist, in a society his office could only imagine, filled with hunches and assumptions, which the presence of this woman, now, on Earth, and the manner in which even he had discovered it, now pierced like a flaming arrow…

     He didn’t even have a name for her.  Some of the agency’s conclusions seemed to have been confirmed.  Physically, she outclassed anything he’d ever seen, whether in person or out in the strange avenues of culture, real and fictional.  Well, maybe not fictional.  She seemed to embody the current interpretations of Amazons.  In ancient Greek times, Amazons were women driven to the edges of society, making all manner of decisions that would’ve made it problematic at best to reintegrate.  No, in the current parlance, this woman was a god.  A truly perfect physical specimen, taller, more muscled, in no way bulky but lean, useful, and obviously gifted with an intellect to match…Perfect.  Or someone’s idea of perfect, anyway. 

     A thousand years in the past, aliens had visited Earth and took what they thought to be the best of mankind then available, and then artificially selected, bred, a master race.  On Earth it would’ve been called, a century ago, eugenics, and it was a notion that had led to a world war.

     …The only problem with all that being that when it came right down to it, physical and mental attributes only account for so much.  Humans, as presumably any species, are riddled with neuroses.  Whoever those aliens had been, they’d had their motivations, probably trying to compete with some other alien race, and they were probably never even on the same track.  That’s really how these things tend to go.

     Which was why Oliver didn’t worry too much about this woman’s advantages, her attributes…He needed to know her, which was the only way he could understand why she’d come to Earth, what she hoped to accomplish, and…

     It struck him.  She must’ve been looking for Duende, too, must have looked at the same facts, from the opposite end, as Sia.  Simple as that.  They really had converged at the same point for the same reasons.  It gave him a little comfort to think so.

     She must’ve been some kind of rogue agent, the same kind of figure as Sia, but in the context of her society.  Oliver knew something about that himself, being one in a long line of Oliver Rows.  What he couldn’t bring himself to explain to Sia, what would be impossible to explain to anyone, was why the line existed in the first place, how it set him apart, had made, essentially, his whole association with House Argos meaningless, had exposed House Argos itself as meaningless, once he’d understood it himself…Tracing the history of the name (which would be an entirely different story) had been an entirely different mission, once he'd decided to look into it, putting faces to the lineage, that’d been the first step.  He saw at once how the whole business had driven his predecessors to distraction, how they’d been so busy justifying their existence, they’d never stopped to wonder why they did.  At the very beginning of the line had been a different name, which of course had been Duende.

     This was how he himself had become obsessed with Duende, what had led him to meeting Sia, meeting this mysterious Danab.  Duende had been among those abducted by the aliens, a Danish raider, a Viking, involved in a war with the French, who’d been a leader, who must have been important enough that these Danab kept visiting Earth, obsessively, as if to justify their existence, to see the fruits of what had happened here, in the line, so that they might better understand themselves, and…never found what they were looking for.  Eventually they seem to have given up.

     In time, since the origins of Oliver Row, like Sia, began with Duende, so that they were distantly related, as he had to assume the mystery woman was, too, a true family affair, someone in the line had put the pieces together, uniquely motivated, recruited by this point into House Argos, an otherwise meaningless organization given its true purpose in ensuring steady resources for the Olivers, and discovered why these alien visits had never amounted to anything, but in time, as with all patience, finally running out thanks to the ambitions of some upstart, the details of which Oliver couldn’t possibly know.  But some facts of history, by any reckoning, will repeat themselves no matter how much preparation takes part.  Chaos takes no heed of order.

     There really wasn’t anything he could do, now, having reached the culmination of all the work he, his line, and the agency had been a part of over the centuries.  It had all amounted to so much futility, as had to have been obvious, and just as obviously suppressed, all that time.

     He shuffled through some loose sheets, meaningless paperwork.  He switched on the computer and found the social media site he’d spent so much time talking with Sia, before any of them had become aware of what it all meant.

     She didn’t respond to his messages.  He wondered if she’d been scared away, if she was considering any one of a thousand rash and equally meaningless gestures.  The world doesn’t listen to nobodies, or agencies it doesn’t know exists. 

     Absently, he wondered if the Danab, if the woman, had ever been a part of the network, if these people had any idea such things existed, if they could possibly have cared.  Meaningless.  He suddenly felt that the only word in existence that mattered, the meant anything, was meaningless.  He had a strong sense of faith, but sometimes it felt more abstract than most people would be comfortable understanding.  He’d never suffered a loss of faith.  He figured, now, that it probably felt something like this.

Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 6: "Primary Colors"

Oliver and Sia met for coffee, a few weeks later.  Sia wasn’t much for drinking coffee, had never really understood the appeal of it, had never particularly needed it, having a generous store of energy within herself and never, say, having had to work overnight shifts, but sometimes one agrees to things that involve other things in a fairly nominal fashion, and while both of them ordered coffees and drank their coffees, the coffee is to be understood as pretext, which is how they both viewed it, too.  Sia watched as Oliver stirred in a generous amount of flavored creamer, hazelnut, and several packets of sugar, or whatever it was that was inside them, and snapped the cap back on, take a sip, make a face that seemed to suggest pleasure, but then, for the next few minutes, he left the cup untouched, and not a single word was shared between them.  She got the sense that Oliver was comfortable in such silences.

     “The first thing you’ve got to understand,” he eventually began, his right hand invariably drifting toward the cup, as it had been in the preceding silence, as he continued, “is that House Argos didn’t begin, so far as I know, with the vital information that became its very reason for existence.”

     “That sounds like a contradiction,” she said.

     “It probably is,” he said.  “Though I’ve found that very few things worth preserving remain consistent with their origins in their current state.”

     “That sounds philosophical,” she said.
     “That’s probably about right,” he said.  “This is the kind of job that gives you plenty of time to think.”

     “That’s all of them,” she said.  “I don’t trust anyone who isn’t constantly thinking.”

     “You’re probably right about that,” he said.

     “You can generally tell the difference,” she said.

     “I hate them, too,” he said.  “Although it’s probably not their fault.”

     “It’s safer to assume,” she said.

     “We had other mysteries,” he said.  “We.  They.  It gets a little complicated, as I’ve suggested.  This is a planet, as I imagine they all are, filled with mysteries of its own, and some of them led to dramatically dead ends, the kind of nonsense conspiracy that’s popular among the riffraff you no doubt waded through in your own efforts.”

     “Oh, definitely,” she said.

     “There’s always the one seemingly innocuous clue, though,” he said.  “In your case it was a single name, the pursuit of which led you to everything else.  Or me, at any rate.”

     “Duende,” she said. 

     “Yes,” he said.  “That’s generally how it works.  You find the one true thing, and it leads to everything else.  For House Argos, it was learning about the other houses.  How we got our naming scheme.”

     “Are you just going to come out and tell me things?” she asked.

     “That’s the idea,” he said.  The other houses.  The ones that belonged to them.  The Danab.  The descendants of that ancestor of yours.  The branch that led out into space.  There are still things we don’t know.  But they’ve visited often enough, they left breadcrumbs.  Our friend, the other day, is hardly the first.  I suspect she might think so.  There’s a generous amount of time to account for, hardly the kind for anyone to have kept a track of, not at her level.  Too desperate.  She knows something that scared her enough to do something rash.  She was alone that night for a reason, Sia.  And she should be.  We’ve been following those breadcrumbs for centuries.  Nothing humanity was ever ready to confront.  We can’t even agree on basic facts of known history.  We allow our interpretations to be colored by petty squabbles we inherited from people who were actually affected by them, but arrive in the present with no more relevance than something happening right now in someone’s kitchen halfway around the world, a simple decision about what to eat.  The kitchen they’re in right now, up there?  They’re discussing truly consequential matters.  All I have is fear, but it’s legitimate fear, Sia.  You found me.  I found you.  She found us.  That’s too much happening.  This isn’t just some coincidence, not anymore, not at this rate.  We passed the event horizon, and we didn’t even know it.  Not even us.  House Argos.  Humanity.  Even them.  The Danab.”

     “You’re kind of scaring me,” she said.

     “There’s really no point,” he said.  “What’s going to happen is going to happen.  That’s what a lot of us have been trying to accept.  House Argos.  There comes a time, an event horizon of its own, when a little knowledge turns into a dangerous thing, and then simply passes…back into knowledge again.  That’s the hardest thing in the world.  It transforms from information to action and back into information.  That’s the way of things.  That’s what the whole sum of the modern age has been struggling to comprehend.  It’s going to seem incredibly meaningless, soon.  That’s what we fear.”

     “But then it’ll just be another piece of trivia,” she said.

     “That’s the idea,” he said.  “Some turning points, though, are so big, they warp everything around them, utterly transforming the world, and in our struggles to accept that they’ve happened, we risk losing more than we should’ve gained.  This is going to be the biggest event in human history.  This is truly going to be…the war to end all wars.  The biggest fear, the biggest fiction we’ve been telling ourselves for more than a century.  A war between worlds.  We kept telling ourselves, any civilization sufficiently advanced to travel easily through the stars, would necessarily have been sufficiently advanced…to make such a notion meaningless.  For us.  For humanity.  Get what I’m saying?”

     “But you’re saying they’re us,” she said.

     “Exactly,” he said.  “That makes it a thousand times worse,” he said.  “In every way possible.”

     “I opened a real can of worms,” she said.

     “That’s generally why we’ve tried to keep a lid on it,” he said.  “People are too good at panicking as it is.  You don’t want them to know that the thing they’re actually going to experience, sometime into the future, is worse than anything they’re already imagining.  We play through those scenarios, at the office.  It ain’t pretty.”

     “Yeah, she said, “I guess.”

     “So that’s everything you need to know, except all the little details,” he said.

     “It was just the little details I wanted,” she said.

     “Sometimes a little knowledge is a terrible thing,” he said.

     “That seems like an oversimplification,” she said.

     “Probably,” he said.

     He drank his coffee at this point, seeming to relish it.  She found hers to be cold, which made it easier to drink.  The thing she’s always least understood was why anyone would relish it hot.

Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 5: "In the Garden of Good & Evil"

They all met, one evening, strolling downtown, the sidewalks bustling, everyone chatting around them, and how it was that a conversation formed between them might itself be considered a story, because that’s the real mystery, the magic of how life works in its simplest ways, no matter how we might try to interpret it otherwise, how the world Sia was growing up in seemed to function at its core, without being explained, helpfully, by Sia and Oliver agreeing to meet up that night, because saying so would be a lie, and worse than what might be said about it otherwise.

     The truth of it was Sia, attempting to have something of a normal life, ventured out that day in search of something to do, and during the course of her ambling happened to spot the pin Oliver was wearing, featuring the logo she’d begun to accept as the only face of House Argos she was ever going to see.  She wasn’t going to do anything, say anything, when Oliver turned around and looked directly at her, as if he’d somehow sensed her presence, but the truth was it was only coincidence, and the force of her imagination that pressed the events onward, and the worst words expressed between them were an awkward apology, and somewhere down the street someone scoffed, and of course that was Night, and it was Sia becoming angry and confrontational that led to everything else.

     “Sorry,” Sia said.

     “No problem,” Oliver said.

     “Please!” Night said.

     “Excuse me?” Sia said.

     “Please,” Night said again.  “You don’t need me to explain.  You can’t be that dense.”

     “You’re being rude,” Oliver said.

     “I think you just need to move on, lady,” Sia said.

     “I think you need to wake up,” Night said.

     “That’s just uncalled for,” Oliver said.
     “Take a look at the pin again,” Night said.

     “How do you even know I was looking in the first place?” Sia asked.

     “I was watching, okay?” Night said.

     “That’s creepy,” Sia said.

     “I agree,” Oliver said.

     “You’re both going to need to be walked through this,” Night said.

     “Lady, you have no idea,” Oliver said.

     “Trying to play it discreet isn’t going to work here,” Night said.

     “You certainly made sure of that,” Oliver said.

     “That’s the logo,” Sia said.

     “Exactly,” Night said.

     “The logo of House Argos,” Sia said, “which is now a thing I’ve said out loud.”

     “It gets less awkward,” Oliver said.  “Actually, we don’t tend to use it ourselves, come to think of it.  No one tends to use the name of the place they work for, really.  It’s just too obvious.  You do tend to read it a lot, though.”

     “I’m trying to make this easier,” Night said.

     “You could’ve done a better job,” Sia said.

     “While maintaining your own anonymity,” Oliver said.

     “That’s the idea,” Night said.

     “Still very, very creepy,” Sia said.

     “Says the girl who just happened to bump into the guy she’s been chatting with on the internet,” Night said.

     “You kind of spoiled the curve a little,” Sia said.  “Whoever you are.”

     “I have some ideas,” Oliver said.

     “I bet you do,” Night said.

     “In my line of work,” Oliver said, “it’s usually expecting to see things that aren’t human.  But then you aren’t and you are, aren’t you?”

     “That’s the general idea,” Night said.

     “I have no idea what any of that means,” Sia said.

     “Care to field this, Field Agent?” Night said.

     “A long time ago, her ancestors were human,” Oliver said.  “Generally speaking, they aren’t anymore.  And they are.”

     “Which is the most racist way possible to put it,” Night said.

     “You’re speaking English very well, by the way,” Oliver said.

     “I try to blend in,” Night said.  “It’s not a very formal language, the way it’s used these days.”

     “You’re not human,” Sia said.

     “I am,” Night said.  “And I’m not.”

     “She’s the answer to everything you’ve ever wanted to know.”

     “I’m also the one who set all this up,” Night said.

     “You couldn’t possibly have coerced me into taking a walk today,” Sia said.

     “True,” Night said, “probably.  But I certainly had plenty of opportunity to influence your friend here.”

     “Oliver Row,” Oliver said.

     “Sia,” Sia said.  “Anastassia.  Hard name to pronounce, so I shortened it.”

     “I know,” Oliver said.

     “Of course you do,” Sia said.

     “It’s Greek,” Night said, “as I understand it.  They would’ve been nice to know, in their prime.  But that was well before my time.”

     “You wanted answers, Sia,” Oliver said.  “This lady’s capable of providing much more of them than I could.”

     “Right here on the sidewalk,” Sia said. 

     “No better place or time,” Oliver said.

     “I could think of a few,” Sia said.

     “Nobody’s listening,” Night said.  “Nobody cares.  They’ve got their own little lives to worry about.  The world could be ending.”

     “That’s an awfully specific hypothetical,” Oliver said.

     “An example,” Night said.

     “So you’d certainly like me to think,” Oliver said.  “The problem is, it’s been my business since well before my lifetime to worry about exactly that.”

     “You were looking for answers, Sia,” Night said.  “As your friend here suggested, I’m here to give them.”

     “Doubtful,” Oliver said.  “You’re not here on any official capacity.  You’d never have come alone if you had.  She would’ve seen it on the news long before she saw you on a sidewalk.”

     “That’s the wild imagination you humans have been so good at cultivating,” Night said.

     “Driving ourselves to distraction, I sometimes think,” Sia said.

     “All my stories involve the past,” Night said.

     “Must be boring,” Oliver said.

     “You’ve lived fanciful lives,” Night said.  “You’re hardly the best judge.”

     “This is going nowhere fast,” Sia said.

     “The only reason it hasn’t gotten a lot more complicated has nothing to do with me,” Night said.  “Your friend’s agency is just waiting to swarm.  That’s the real reason this is playing out so casually.”

     “She has me there,” Oliver said.

     He was the first to step away from the small group.  Sia was so busy worrying about her sudden sense of security slipping away, she didn’t even notice when, or how, Night made her exit.

     She expected to hear from both again.