Rebel and traitor both.

xiv.

the sickness found
in the midst of beauty

What had Chen done for the Company? Before he betrayed the Company? Before he stole Charlie X’s journal and sent it and the salamander through the wall of globes to another place?

Chen-conscripted disposed of dying biotech at the holding ponds. Chen-volunteer checked the Company’s products for signs of illness, so that the sick could be sent to the holding ponds. Or given over to Charlie X.

Conscripted or volunteer, Chen told himself that he worked hard for an absent family, a wife, two children, and a grandmother that Grayson’s Chen had come to think of as far-distant stars, as remote as anything in the night sky. Perhaps corrupted by the idea that they didn’t really exist, had never really existed. But also because Chen-now knew it didn’t matter: He would never see them again; they lay so many realities behind and whatever copies lived here belonged to the Chen they had imprisoned. The one that periodically used it for freedom.

Chen-that-was lived in his Balcony Cliffs apartment and came to the Company to work weeklong shifts, sleeping in a cubicle bed among the others. All day long, Chen mostly saw the biotech. Shoveled it into the holding ponds, to be preyed upon—floating, struggling, drowning—by the creatures that already lived there, that had refused to die as predicted or desired. Good, the Company said. They can serve a purpose. And so they did.

The people Chen worked with faded and shrank into a landscape of slow-moving shadows in his mind. The globes they worked with a form of contamination, like radiation and mercury poisoning, but different because biological and temporal.

Chen wore special clothing to protect him from the wall of globes when he worked there. Localized fields leading to other places once the “product” was complete. Areas of temporal contamination near the Company building. Most of the time, it just made people sick. Sometimes it corrupted the body in a way that the body became unstable, could not decide whether to live here or there, then or now.

There was only Charlie X’s voice, coming through from the secret room on the other side of the wall of globes, the side Chen wasn’t allowed to see. The place where Charlie X kept his journal. Except, if you looked at the reflections in the globes … you could see the distorted face of Charlie X. See the journal, on the corner of the desk. How often Charlie X referred to it. How he depended on it. Perhaps, too, the green tracery that was evidence of Moss, but how was Chen to have read that? There, so close to Moss, never knowing Moss. Not then. (Or as Chen clarified, “A Chen knew about a Moss.” Somewhere/when. “Just not me.”)