Trojan Sky

You learn the rules as soon as you’re old enough to speak. Don’t talk to jabberjays. You recite them as soon as you wake up every morning. Keep your eyes away from screensnakes. Your mother chooses a dozen to quiz you on each day before you’re allowed lunch. Glitchers aren’t human any more; if you see one, run. Before you sleep, you run through the whole list again, finishing every time with the single most important prohibition. Above all, never look at the night sky.

You’re a precocious child. You excel at your lessons, and memorize the rules faster than any of the other children in your village. Chief is impressed enough that, when you’re eight, he decides to let you see a glitcher that he’s captured. Your mother leads you to just outside the village wall, where they’ve staked the glitcher as a lure for wild animals. Since glitchers are too slow and uncoordinated to chase down prey, their peculiar magnetism is the only reason they’re able to survive in the wastes.

Each of the glitcher’s limbs is tied to the ground. Its clothes are rags by now. As the group gathers around it, it starts to moan through its gag, a painful undulating noise. “Look at it,” Chief says. As if roused to a frenzy by his voice, the glitcher throws its body from side to side, shaking against its restraints. “This is what you’ll end up as, if you’re careless.”

Suddenly one of the glitcher’s arms breaks free. It waves in the air, fingers forming frantic spasmodic patterns. You stare at it for a second, before your mother yanks you around and buries your face in her side. When she lets you look again, two men have wrestled the arm back into place. Chief looks at you somberly. “If you’d kept watching for a few more seconds, you would have been hypnotized. And if you’d stayed hypnotized for a minute, even odds that you would have glitched yourself. That’s how easy it is to be careless. Do better, or you won’t make it to adulthood.”

You have nightmares for the next few days, your mind full of the glitcher’s slack face and its writhing fingers. You lull yourself back to sleep by reciting the rules. You’re determined that you won’t mess up again. And so you make it all the way to thirteen before everything goes wrong.

It’s morning on an ordinary day. You left your room to wash, and when you walk back in there’s a screensnake curled up in the corner. You look away immediately, but there’s a second one crawling towards you from the side, and your eyes lock onto it. You freeze for a moment, not knowing where else to look—and that’s long enough for the patterns on its skin to catch your gaze. They flicker, blooming in radiant colors. There’s something hypnotic about them, and for a few seconds you can’t look away.

Then an axe comes down, and you hear voices shouting, and a piercing scream. You blink, and shake your head muzzily, and when you look up again Chief is throwing a blanket over the screensnake corpse.

“Fuck,” Chief says. “God fucking damn it.”

“What happened?” you ask. There’s a gasp from the doorway; you turn to see your mother. “He’s okay! He’s okay he’s okay he’s okay—” She starts towards you, but Chief moves faster, stepping in front of her and pushing her back.

“Think! It got him just as he walked in. How long ago was that—five minutes? Ten? That’s a lethal exposure.” His head never turns away from you as he says it, though his eyes are focused over your shoulder. He’s still holding his axe in his hand.

“But he can still talk! No glitcher can talk!”

“Nobody’s ever survived five straight minutes of screensnake trance either.”

“I feel fine,” you break in. “It wasn’t that long, was it? Or maybe I’m immune.”

Your mother lets out a sob. “See? He’s still thinking straight! He must be immune somehow, he must. Here, show Chief—”

“Quiet!” Chief barks. He backs out of the room, pushing your mother behind him. “Don’t go anywhere, child. And don’t say a word. I need to think.”

They leave you alone for hours. Outside, you can hear your mother arguing with the guards Chief has posted at your door. But they barely reply, and she gets nowhere. Eventually, you hear Chief’s voice outside again. “Say yes if you can hear me; don’t say anything else.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard rumors that occasionally people arise who have some kind of immunity. But that’s all they are—rumors. And I will not risk my village on those. You can’t stay here.”

You hear your mother’s voice raised in a moan outside, but Chief’s voice cuts through it.

“One thing the rumors say is that there’s a whole village led by someone who can resist glitching. They say it’s two week’s travel north. I’ll give you enough supplies to get there. Maybe they’ll take you in, maybe they won’t. But either way, you leave today.”

His voice softens. “You were a good kid. I hope the rumors are right, and I hope you make it to safety. But whatever happens, you can’t come back.”

---

The deep wastes are quiet, and lonely. You’ve only ventured into them once or twice before. Now they’re all that you can see in every direction as you walk, following an old wives’ tale that’s your only remaining hope. Somehow, you’re less scared than you would have expected. You never really thought you’d be glitched, but it’s still a fact of life: you lose friends every year. And you are immune, you must be—you’ve felt totally normal since the screensnake attack.

You still don’t want to take risks, though. Each night, as the stars come out, you cover your eyes firmly, and keep them covered until dawn. On the third day you see a glitcher shambling towards you from afar, but you give it a wide berth, and quickly leave it behind. You set traps every night, but all you catch are two ratlings. Still, they help stretch out your dwindling supplies a little longer, giving you a little more room for error.

After ten days of walking, you start looking for signs of the village Chief had spoken of. There are often still roads leading to them—sometimes covered in sand, but visible if you’re careful. You scout in a zigzag pattern, trying to cover as much ground as possible. But you see nothing. In the back of your mind you start to wonder if Chief had just made up the story wholesale, to get you to leave quietly. You curse yourself for a fool, but keep searching.

Two days later, you stumble across a suspiciously straight line of sand dunes. You start digging at their base, and after a few minutes you spot the telltale dark gray pattern of a buried road. You follow it north-east, searching for any sign of human presence. The next day you start spotting traps. They’re mostly empty, but even when they’ve caught a thylac or jabberjay, you leave them undisturbed. A few hours later you see who’s been laying them: at first faint figures in the distance, slowly resolving to two men as you walk closer. They’re focused on their task; only when you’re a hundred meters away does one look up and see you.

They shout in alarm, and scramble for their weapons. You rush to reassure them, but they’re wary—you need to yell back and forth for a few minutes to convince them that you’re not a glitcher or a mirage. Eventually they agree to take you back to their village, though they first bind your arms behind your back.

After an hour of walking, you reach their village walls. The hunters confer with the guards behind the gate. Finally two guards grab you and pull you through the main street, to an imposing building larger than any in your village. They lead you to a room near the entrance, where an old man sits at a desk, writing.

“Shaman,” one of the guards says, bowing his head. “We found him wandering in the wastes. He said that he seeks refuge, and that he has information he needs to tell you personally.”

Shaman turns his head towards you. He stares at you for a long moment, then gestures for you to speak.

“Greetings, Shaman,” you say deferentially. “I traveled here because I heard that you are immune to being glitched. I discovered recently that I am too. If you allow me to stay, I will contribute to your village in any way that I can.”

Shaman’s eyes are cold. “Are you sure that this story is the one you want to stick with?” You nod. He turns to the guards. “Test him,” he says.

The guards pull you towards through a corridor, into a large, dimly-lit room. In it are more glitchers than you’ve ever seen in your life—each tied down to a table, twitching intermittently. The guards tie you to one of the empty tables in the same way, and gag you. They each grab a pair of bulky earmuffs, and carefully place them over their ears. Then they walk around to each of the glitchers and remove their gags, one by one. As they do, the room gradually fills with their moans.

All night you listen to the babbling of the glitchers, noises that sound too alien to be produced by human mouths. As you sleep, you dream that you’re a glitcher too, prowling across the wastes under a sky that you’re still too afraid to look at. In the morning the guards come back, with Shaman behind them. He motions, and they undo your gag. “Well?” he says.

“I’m unharmed. But you can test me further if you like,” you say.

Shaman’s eyes widen. “You were telling the truth, then.” He pauses, and smiles. “I’d almost given up hope. This makes you the very first to succeed.”

They treat you very differently after that. You’re given food, and a room, and several days to rest. You spend the time exploring the village, which is much larger than your own, and much more raucous. The people in the streets seem less scared than those you grew up with. You wonder if that’s Shaman’s influence, though you’re too wary of offending them to ask.

A few mornings later, Shaman summons you to his office again. At his gesture, you sit in front of him. He waits for a few minutes before speaking.

“Tell me, child. Have you ever wondered why the world is like this?”

You frown. “The stories say that things used to be better. The land used to be fertile everywhere, not just where we cultivate it. Animals used to be safe. Even the stars used to be a beautiful sight. And then… I guess there was some kind of terrible accident, though I’ve never heard any explanation of what it was.”

Shaman laughs. It’s an ugly sound. “An accident? An accident that breaks the sky in ways that go on to break humans? An accident that turns animals themselves into weapons against us? No, this was no accident. It was a deliberate, targeted attack.”

“But… for that to be deliberate… it requires unimaginable power. What sort of beings have that?”

Shaman nods. “That’s the right question. Or rather, half of the right question. The other half is: with so much power bent on our destruction, why do they not simply crush us like ants?”

“Oh.” You think for a moment. “They want to… drag it out? They want to torment us?”

“Possibly, but I don’t think that they care about us even enough to enjoy hurting us. No, my guess is that they work under constraints that are invisible and maybe even inconceivable to us. I think that there was some kind of bargain. Humans used to have power, real power. We negotiated with them in aeons past, setting up compacts that would protect us from direct attacks.

“But they’ve been getting around the rules, step by step. They figured out how to overwrite our minds with only a few minutes of visual stimuli, to reform us into vessels for their purposes. Not easily, and not precisely. But they don’t need to be precise. If they can glitch enough of us, time will take care of the rest.”

The sheer scale of what he’s saying overwhelms you. “So we’re doomed.” You feel a lurch in your stomach as you say it.

He shakes his head. “No. We can adapt too. We have adapted—with all our safeguards, all our rules. And we can learn from the techniques they use. I’ve been studying glitchers for a decade, but it’s been slow work. I need someone else who’s immune to help me run more experiments.”

He stands and leads you towards the room full of glitchers. As you enter, he grabs a book from the desk by the doorway.

“The first question is: can we make any sense of their language? Is it even a language at all? They occasionally commune with each other, and sometimes their actions are suspiciously coordinated, which makes me think the answer is yes.”

He flips open the book, showing you pages upon pages of scribbled notes and tallies. “When I listen to them, there are some repeating syllables, and some structure. Your first task is to replicate my observations, and see if you can make any sense of them yourself. It won’t be easy, but from there we might be able to find patterns that give us hints about how to make more people immune, or maybe even find a cure for those who have already been infected. Will you work on this for me?”

You feel dwarfed by the magnitude of his ambitions. It’s like you’ve been living in a cave for your whole life, and now you’ve suddenly emerged into the blinding light of the sun. You worry that your voice will break if you try to speak. But you nod, and he seems satisfied.

---

You spend weeks working with Shaman, then months. His mission consumes you. He saved you from a drawn-out death in the desert. But more than that—he’s given you a way to fight back against the sheer senselessness of the world, to strike a blow against whoever caused all of this to happen.

Most days you sit in the corner, taking notes, as Shaman runs through experiments. Many are attempts to uncover any lurking remnant of humanity within the glitchers. He makes them try to pull clothes over their twitching limbs, or vocalize human language again with their writhing tongues. If they don’t succeed, he hurts them. They’ve lost almost all of their minds, but they still understand pain.

When Shaman is busy, you go to the lab alone, and try to replicate his old experiments. When you’re tired of that, you sit and watch the glitchers’ indecipherable hand gestures, and practice mimicking them. Sometimes they seem to respond to you, but you’re not sure how much of it you’re imagining. The ones that Shaman has had for longer do seem cleverer, though. So you focus on them, slowly training them to follow your commands.

You meet others from Shaman’s village, but they seem wary of you. You don’t blame them. They’re terrified of glitchers, of course, and you spend so much of your time with them that you’ve even started to smell like them. But you don’t care for their company either. They have no idea how important your work is; nor can they discuss it intelligently even when you try to explain it.

So you spend most of your days with only Shaman and the glitchers for company. Sometimes you despair of ever making progress. But other days it feels like you’re communing with them, that you’re right on the cusp of understanding them. You go through those days in a fugue, only half-aware of what you’re doing. Your notes on those days are eerily insightful, though. And it often seems like Shaman is in the same fugue state—he works like a man possessed.

One night, you dream again of the glitchers, and when you wake up you find yourself in their room, listening to them. You flinch, and realize that you must have sleepwalked there. The glitchers’ heads are all turned towards you. God, that’s dangerous. You start to tie yourself to your bed at night, to prevent any accidents.

But you don’t want to take a break. With your help, Shaman is making more progress than he has in years. The two of you have noticed a kind of correspondence between their words and their gestures, and Shaman thinks it might hold the key to translating the glitcher language. You still don’t know what any of it means, but after a few weeks of practice you can listen to the glitchers’ mumbles and effortlessly trace out the corresponding patterns with your fingers. Shaman watches you intently. “Could you learn to speak like them too?” he asks you one day. “I think so,” you tell him. He nods with grim satisfaction, and you redouble your efforts.

Sometimes you think about your home village—whether your mother still grieves you, whether Chief regrets his decision, whether your friends are still following the same routines and playing the same games as they used to. Sometimes you wonder what your life would have been like if you’d stayed. But you don’t regret any of what happened—your work now is too important. So you sleep, you wake, and you sleep again, the days all blurring together—

You snap awake. You’re standing in the lab. Shaman is holding your shoulders and shaking you. His face fills your vision, twisted into a rictus of terror. “Listen. Listen! I thought I was immune too at first. But there’s no such thing. It’s a trap! You and I are just a new type of glitcher—subtle enough to blend in, smart enough to research how to create more of our kind. All our work, all our experiments, we’re doing exactly what they want. Destroy it all and kill me! Please, kill me now!”

You stumble backwards in shock, hitting the desk behind you with a thump. He flinches at the sound. For a moment a look of blank incomprehension appears on his face.

Then his eyes snap back into focus, and his voice mellows. “Forgive me. I’m an old man, and my mind sometimes wanders. What were we talking about?”

You stare at him. “What do you mean? You just told me that all our work is helping the enemy! You asked me to kill you!”

He smiles slightly. “It sounds like you’ve been having a bad dream. Go back to sleep. We can talk about this in the morning.”

The smile is what convinces you. Your hand goes to your dagger. As you lunge towards him, he moves backwards, almost in slow motion. You kill him quickly, mercifully. As soon as he stops moving, you stride over to his desk and write out a note. You keep it as brief as possible, to prevent any further contamination. “Immunity is a lie. He and I were just more subtle glitchers, and our research would have created more of them. Kill the captive glitchers NOW.”

You think about killing the glitchers yourself, but you’re worried that they’ll make enough of a fuss to rouse others. And you don’t trust yourself in their presence any more. You don’t know how close you are to being trapped inside your own body, like Shaman was. So you gather all the papers from Shaman’s desk in a bundle under your shirt, and walk quickly out of the building. Nobody sees you as you navigate to the edge of the village and scale the wall to the outside world.

For an hour you walk deeper and deeper into the desert, eyes fixed on your feet. Eventually the adrenaline wears off, and you find yourself shaking from the cold. This will have to do. You drop to your knees on the sand, and use your hands to dig a small hole in front of you. You pull the papers from under your shirt and pile them in. Your whole body is trembling still, so it takes you several tries to set them alight. Once you do, though, they burn merrily.

The dancing of the flames is peaceful, almost hypnotic. By the time it dies down, what happened in the village almost feels like a bad dream. You look around at the sand stretching out towards the horizon. It’s all so peaceful, so serene. Did he really say those things to you? Was it all some fevered imagining? You don’t know what to believe. But it doesn’t matter any more—you’ve burned your bridges. And if you can’t solve the problem of the glitchers, as you’d so fervently hoped, the only thing left is to make sure you don’t exacerbate it.

Your dagger is by your side as always. As you unsheath it, you notice that it’s still sticky with Shaman’s blood. Somehow that feels appropriate. You close your eyes, take a deep breath, then drive it into your chest. For a second you stay there, frozen—then, involuntarily, you slump onto your side like a broken doll. You feel your blood start to pool under your body. With the feeling of helplessness comes a feeling of release. Wonderingly, you realize that at last the rules no longer apply to you. You can do anything you want.

With a last spasmodic effort, you twist yourself onto your back. The night sky fills your sight for the first time, and you let out an involuntary sigh. It’s grander than anything you’ve ever seen. The stars, multicolored, whirl in patterns, dancing across the sky as you watch. Hypnotized, your focus zooms in and in, chasing the universe as it spins towards the center of your vision. Your last faint thought—oh. It’s so beautiful. Then your mind falls into the spiral, and you are lost.