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Something hung in the air, when they reached the base of the Panopticon. If he had asked Martin, Jon suspected he would have called it anticipation, or inevitability. Had he had the faculties to look back and name it himself, Jon might later have termed it the vindicated possessiveness of something other than themselves.
Neither of them could quite resist the urge to look back, when they drew upon the entrance to the great tower overlooking all creation. Whether it was nervousness, the lasting imprint of the Watcher on their beings, or the fated steps in some great dance, neither could have said. It was as they looked back out on the ruined world, on the threshold of what they hoped would be their triumph, that Jon felt the hands fall heavy on his shoulders.
Long-fingered and well-manicured; familiar; a squeeze of paternal affection that had flustered him as a young researcher, settled the anxious insufficiencies of the newly-promoted employee, pressed frustrated dread into the ill-informed Archivist, now endowed with the weighty sense of ownership they had never been allowed to express before. A voice as soft as their palms, too close to his ear. “It’s so good to see you arrived safely at last. Was the journey very difficult?”
Jon had always suspected that when the time came the Watcher’s gaze would slip from his grasp, unwilling to turn on another of its servants, on the one who had orchestrated its apotheosis, but in that moment he could barely conceive of trying. He saw Martin jump, whirl to face them.
“Jonah.” His face was hard, eyes fixed on the man who had tormented them and fit them to purpose. Jon missed his smile; he would have liked the last time he saw Martin to have been smiling. He couldn’t have said what told him this would be the last time, but the knowledge sat heavy in his heart even as his scattered mind tried to concoct an escape.
“Martin, go.” He couldn’t move beneath Jonah’s hands, but he could feel himself slipping away, like blood in rushing water, dispersed until it might as well have never been there at all. Martin’s eyes snapped to him.
“Jon…” He wanted to ask Jon to annihilate Jonah as he had so many others, Jon could not help but Know, but something in his face spoke to how far outside his grasp such an action was, drew Martin to a halt. His eyes flicked instead to Jonah’s. “Let go of him.”
The right hand tightened on his shoulder, the left curling to rest against his throat instead. “I don’t think he minds. Do you, Archive?”
Jon could picture the slippery smile, the cool regard in the eyes, but he could not move to see them for himself. It was as though his body had been transformed to concrete, inflexible and immovable and his sludgy, diffuse thoughts. “Go… Martin,” the words were meant to be forceful, decisive, but came out strangled and cracked. He needed them not to betray the dread coiling up his spine, he needed Martin to leave before it was too late.
His love’s eyes- his name, what was his name, he couldn’t forget his heart, his anchor- were bright with realization, now, not understanding what was happening but knowing it was bad. “Jon!”
He flailed a hand out as though to push him away. It was weak, aborted; it took nearly everything out of him despite that. The gesture was mirrored, nearly but not quite managing to land a competing grasp on his arm, held back by trepidation. Jon summoned every ounce of compulsion or control and forced it into a single word. “Go!” The effort took all strength from his limbs, and he collapsed forward to his knees, stomach roiling. He retched and the only thing to spill out was wads of tangled magnetic tape. It caught on his teeth and felt slick and cool at the back of his throat. His head spun, all the knowledge of the world he’d destroyed pounding at the door, like when he waited too long before speaking a new Statement as they traveled through the wasteland only a thousand times worse.
Only half-consenting to his own movements, Martin- Martin, don’t forget, Martin- turned, teary, confused eyes staying fixed to Jon until they had to focus on the path ahead of him instead, and he ran.
Long fingers stroked through Jon’s hair. “I’ve been waiting for you, Archive. Do you even know how much potential you have yet to reach?”
He could not answer, could not move. Inky teardrops trickled down the Archive’s face as it crawled on its knees behind its master, led by the grip on its hair, into the Panopticon.
-
At the top of the tower at the top of the world, Jonah Magnus arranged his Archive in front of the massive windows looking out over everything. The Archive’s skin shifted and bubbled, rattling into its true form now that it sat at the height of their power.
No sliver of skin remained visible, entirely taken up by eyes, crowding into each other, overlapping, being squeezed out of their spaces until they drifted off the Archive’s skin like soap bubbles to float around the kneeling form, alighting in new configurations and shifting in size and color with every moment. Human eyes next to cross-pupil goat’s eyes and the milky eyes of a half-blind thing that lived and died in the depths of a cave; compound eyes pressed into glassy doll’s eyes crammed alongside gleaming camera lenses; an infinite variety, all eternally Watching. Its mouth hung open, a thousand voices narrating overlapping tales of horror, none of them its own. Fingers running through the hair that hung long down its back would find spider silk and cassette tape in equal quantity with human hair.
Jonah cut the Archive’s clothes away with gentle hands, unveiling a thousand thousand hungry stares. What fragments of Jonathan Sims had not been bled away by the final assault of a world of transcendent terror, locked away inside the Archive, could not protest. Jonah ran a hand down its back, smiling. “Perfect.”
Just as he’d experienced the fear of every Statement giver during his long development, the millions of writhing, choking, prodding, chasing, devouring fears filtered through the Archive wrapped themselves around the remains of Jonathan Sims. Locked within himself, he could not separate the terrors of the world from his own, reliving the scenes flooding the Archive intermingled with his own Markings, aware of nothing outside his tortured, incoherent mind but his naked vulnerability, the immobility of disobedient limbs, the form that was no longer made up of his own flesh.
The onslaught obliterated the memory of hands reaching out to cling through packed dirt, of being Seen through crushing fog, of strings snapping as a book fell from tiny hands. They were all shoved aside, banished to nonexistence or crammed into the tiny pocket of love and care and anchored humanity Jon had managed to lock away, a scant sliver isolated from the rest of the Archive, just enough to focus its power into wrapping its beloved in an idyllic bubble, as protected from the horrors ruling the world as any being on earth.
Had he been conscious enough to articulate the feeling, Jon would have wished to retreat into that compacted portion of himself, but he could not escape the sights that unspooled over each other, filtered through the Archive to feed the Eye. He was too absorbed in the constant volley to feel anything but the all-consuming fear of every being on earth.
Martin would leave that bubble eventually, Jonah knew, march on the Panopticon again with whatever scattered allies he could piece together, but he had no hope of reclaiming either the world or the Archive. Both had been too thoroughly changed, remolded in the image Jonah had designed for them.
He sat proud on his throne, all-powerful and undying, and watched the remains of Jonathan Sims spin within itself in turbulent, whirling, agonized fear, filing each experience to the Archive only to be consumed by the next, an eternal, infinite monument to Jonah’s efforts and the Eye.