Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks

At the console, the technician remembered a few Latin words from school: Deux ex machina. He couldn’t remember what they meant, but he heard his teacher saying them. He felt sweat on his temples, and hoped his supervisor would excuse it.

At a different console, a different technician remembered a few words of a poem from a literature class she’d taken in a previous life: ‘Не треба рятувати світ, спробуй урятувати хоча б когось’. Those words had been said in secret, the teacher fired shortly after their recitation. The technician could feel sweat on her temples. She thought her superior wouldn’t notice.

In a classroom in a remote village, where there was a temporary hole in the roof, children gathered to look at the night sky. Little lines crisscrossed it: green and red and blue. The children sat perfectly still to study those lines. There were so many of them. The teacher said: Hlala ngxi. Yiba nomonde. Uza kubona.

On one of the lines, a red line, a man stood. He looked down at the world far below him. Instantly, he recognized it. The man had just come out of a profound sleep, a coma where he had seen nothing but could hear nearly everything there was to hear. The blackness had felt like a void on his skin, but the sounds suggested that void was the furthest thing from where he was.

It was eternity, those voices. And the man, standing now upon his red line, marveled at the planet below him: the source of those sounds. Without seeing the people watching him, he heard snippets of the conversations they were having with themselves.

Hlala ngxi. Yiba nomonde. Uza kubona. Sit still. Be patient. You will see.

Не треба рятувати світ, спробуй урятувати хоча б когось’ ‘You don’t have to save the world, try to at least save someone’ (Serhiy Zhadan).

Deus ex machina. God in the machine.

And the man marveled at this, but also the things the whales were saying to one another. He heard how they could feel the red and green and blue lines up here with him. They told how those lines charged the tops of their spouts of water; how the water fell back on their whale bodies with a unique charge. And the whales were laughing at this new field. They sensed how it caused so many humans to panic, and they asked: Why panic? Why not try and shoot a higher spout to better feel this new field?

So, the man rode his red line for a time, then jumped to a green line. He studied the lens of light encasing the planet, lenses like the ones shaping his own eyes. He wondered whether he would burn up if he jumped off his red line and embraced the lens. Somewhere, deep in his past, he had seen tin cans return to Earth, growing get red hot as they fell.

The man remembered how people had called him Franco then. And once people called him by that name, it was what he called himself. He repeated that name now and laughed as he did.

Franco (laugh). Franco (laugh). Franco (laugh). Franco (laugh).

The name and the sound of laughter looped around each other. Franco made for himself -and the world- his very first Mobius strip.

Far below, two fleets of missiles gained height and acquired an arc. The sweat on the temples of technicians at opposing consoles on opposite ends of the Earth were matched by the first questions of the night sky students sitting in awed silence.

Those questions became tracers in the dark.

The missiles crisscrossed paths, missing the chance to kiss one another.

All of this brought more sweat, more fragments of literature to mind. Shards of prayers emerged as mutinous memories from cerebral cells now in open rebellion. Technicians, low level functionaries with no power to command armies, recalled how missiles were far more primitive than the sentiments, experiences, and intelligences behind verses, passages, and prayers.

The rebellion grew in amplitude and lyricism. Eyes attached to singing cortexes pulsed against codes and colored streaks vandalizing hologrammatic screens. Those technicians, under the sway of their intelligences, almost missed the new orders their supervisors shouted. Those technicians, they couldn’t feel the buttons their fingers pressed. And what made their visions swim: was it numbers or verses? Was it duty or poetry?

Or was it this odd voice laughing in their ears?

The voice was all they heard. The mouths of their superiors flapped in silence. The voice laughed. It laughed and repeated a name. A name that didn’t belong in any poem they recalled; wasn’t from a phrase some teacher once committed to their memory.

Who the hell was Franco?

Franco, who finally chose a blue line. It was his last line. As red and green ones came closer, he reached down and grabbed them with either hand. Franco held them and fused them into the shape of a cane, like a candy cane at Christmas. Then he reached down again and pulled up the blue line on which he was standing.

As he fell, Franco he looped the blue in with the red and green and used his giant cane to collect the two schools of missiles who had just cold shouldered one another. He hooked one school first and then the other. The missiles bucked a little at his touch, but then settled down. He folded them up and placed them in his pocket and laughed.

Franco laughed with the whales, who now laughed louder than ever.