Charlie X at twenty-seven might have lived a lifetime already, had migrated to the Company building. Heading up a lab, experimenting with form and function, blurring the lines of art and product. Feeling so very powerful as an orchestrator and organizer and manipulator of life.

How, much later, as the practical concerns of the Company, in most Cities, fell away—the idea of someone, somewhere, who bought the product—and yet the Company in the context of the City still existed, as if some fundamental truth larger than either the Company or the City had been revealed … without clarity like the ghost white or bone white shining through the world.

The constraint of the practical fell away and the idea of “experiment” became instead the idea of “art form,” and as little morality attached to “product,” Moss and Chen had both discovered in their separate ways that “art” had even less.

It wasn’t Charlie X’s fault, in a way, even though it was all his fault. Charlie X just thought in the old way. Plants couldn’t feel pain, animals were objects to be manipulated as products or resources. Because he didn’t see the systems the way Moss came to see the systems. Because he thought soft tech should serve the same master as hard tech before it.

But there would come a terrible and obliterating day when beauty was the only thing that mattered, and it mattered little if the pure part of beauty was blood. And on that day, the globes embedded in the walls hurt to look upon because the price paid for the wonders displayed within was too high. It had become a death cult, under a veneer of what was inevitable and necessary, and anything else was illogical.

That was Charlie X at fifty, just before the end on most timelines. The end meaning the point at which the City began to encroach on the Company rather than the other way around. Or when the Company cast out Charlie X. When the fox began to appear. Or reappear.

Charlie X at fifty had lived too long within the Company, and even the prison of his youth no longer existed except as a husk and a series of ghosts. Suffered and deserved to suffer confusion of realities, pieces of him caught between, seduced and shot through with other times, other versions.

Charlie X by then did nothing but experiment. Charlie X who by then had long since reimagined Moss out of the resurrected and the residue. Who had found ways to subsume the human without taking away a human consciousness, and done all of this to Moss.