Archive of Our Own

Your name is Adler Hofmann.

You are a soul within an organic composition.

You are experiencing the death of the one you love.

Even so, Laplace as a whole did not descend into chaos. The organization continued to function, budgets were executed, and matters requiring approval kept arising. The first thing the acting head of Laplace put into operation was a batch and automated approval system—in other words, selecting and temporarily appointing a handful of staff and handing over to them final decision-making authority on all drafts. The acting head no longer concerned himself with a future in which, in the near term, Laplace might come to an absurd end in its history due to what was close to his own dereliction, or in which he himself would be unable to retain even a position resembling that of acting head. The only thing of significance to him was a single belief: that the former head of the cryptography team still existed in the world, merely fallen into a temporary dormancy. Every researcher and non-researcher denied that belief.

Nor did they think that the team lead was a being who could truly “die” merely because a body made of nothing more than glass, metal, and wires had been badly damaged and broken. It was a familiar sight at Laplace that, after scraping together with magnets what remained of the team leader—shattered beyond recognition, burst apart, some portions melted and pooled on glass in a state that could only be described as liquid—pouring it into a beaker, adding an oily solvent to assist the movement of the ferrofluid, and dropping a spare compact module of a simple voice-synthesis circuit against the beaker wall, only for the team lead to immediately begin bellowing orders through that tiny output device. As everyone at Laplace knew, the team lead never lay quietly still. If not in front of one person, then in front of another, the team leader was always computing, or raging, or discharging current, or skewering conversations with sarcasm, asserting, directing, acting. He just did not lie there peacefully silent and calm, as if asleep. The team lead did not sleep.

If anything, recently the amount of time spent lingering near a particular researcher had increased to an unusual degree. To others it appeared almost like a form of rest. The team lead had stopped tormenting many other researchers and seemed determined to focus his relentless harassment solely on Adler Hofmann inside a locked room. Few staff worried about poor Researcher Adler’s well-being, and even fewer cared what the two did behind that locked door. For Laplace, what mattered more—positively or negatively—was that thanks to this “rest,” the team lead’s 168-hour workweek had been reduced, if only by a little.

It was not much of a secret within Laplace that the team lead sometimes used that glass body in creative ways for physical contact and bodily union with humans. The name usually attached to actions in which a human shares such intimate exchanges—down to fluids, membranes, and waterproofed internal surfaces beneath the outer shell—with another humanoid organism followed them as well. They did not deny it. Adler sometimes shuddered. Even after the team lead stripped off every cherished layer of his own fiber-based outerwear and wrapped himself with a human under nothing more than a coarse blanket, hugging the team lead like a portable heater while he wasted power simply to raise the temperature of the glass exterior to something close to an organism’s core warmth, Adler would sometimes tremble like a leaf.

If Researcher Adler had made a mistake, it was only that he had grown far too accustomed to those hours that so closely resembled rest—hours spent pressed together, screaming, engaging in unproductive conversations, trading insults, embracing, attacking one another personally, entering into physical relations, or doing all of those things at once.

On one peaceful—that is, chaotic—Laplace morning, the team lead was found lying neatly on Adler Hofmann’s private-room bed, the prosthetic body’s hands folded. The first discoverer and reporter of the incident was, naturally, Researcher Adler himself. For roughly twenty-three hours since he had last been seen by other researchers, there had been no movement of the body, no flow of the fluid drifting inside it, no emission of light or heat of any intensity from the electronic acceleration that normally occurred. Researcher Adler, subjected to horrific overwork, sleep deprivation, and other harsh conditions, crawled into bed and slept beside the glass body for an unusually long and deeply fulfilling eight hours. Upon waking to a refreshed morning, Adler suddenly became aware of a certain kind of silence, panicked, tried to shake the body “awake,” tapping on the glass tank, almost immediately opened, pressed, and probed those smooth sections of the body—areas that only someone like Adler could touch while the ferrofluid itself governed its operation—until he became convinced something was wrong. Throughout all of this, the body showed no response at all, as though simply asleep. Adler later claimed that, just as he was reaching a conclusion and about to burst out of the room, he heard the team lead’s light laughter behind him. He claimed that the voice output device then spoke to him—called his name, Adler—and left him with a single, clear sentence, I love you. He testified that he snapped back, telling him to shut his damn mouth, and ran straight to the mechanical engineering team.

No one believed the latter part of his claim. The power supply built into the team lead’s body had been fully discharged for far longer than Adler asserted. Voice output would have been impossible.

The fluid that no longer carried any kind of magnetism could now never called as a ferrofluid, that was just a matter of fact. That was the conclusion of several departments, including mechanical engineering. The fluid once called the team lead flowed into droppers and was transferred into various containers. They applied the strongest magnetic force they possessed. Ran current through it. Subjected it to physical shock. Heated and cooled it. Changed atmospheric conditions, pressure, and the composition of the solvent in the tank. They took samples, analyzed them under various conditions, formed hypotheses, and experimented. For treatment applied to an awakened—or at least to the remains of one—it felt primitively and barbarically crude. The fluid was concluded to be close to an insulator. It carried no magnetism and could not be magnetized by any effort. In no solvent did it form shapes or cohere. As dozens of hours passed and nearly everything analyzable had been analyzed, the researchers’ caution and hesitation toward the fluid they had once called the team lead, gradually vanished. Adler noticed that the fluid samples—once called the team leader—were being treated like unremarkable teaching materials of little value. He lifted the glass tank, gathered the remaining fluid into his arms, returned to his private room, and locked the door.

Adler cursed. He cursed the damned unresponsive team lead. Then he cursed himself for having slept so comfortably. He cursed the last words he had left, cursed the fact that he could not prove those last words even existed. He cursed himself for failing to notice and act sooner, whatever the truth was. He cursed the impossibility of turning back time. And at some point, with a momentum he could no longer stop, he began to cry.

With hands shaking so badly they barely obeyed him—due to sleep deprivation, lack of nutrition, extreme stress, and other abuses no human body could endure—he twisted open the lid sealing the tank’s opening, the part that had once connected to the body’s neck. He plunged his bare hand inside. After all the futile attempts, the voice synthesis device had already been destroyed by strong magnetism. More than half of the solvent had already been poured out. Gritting his teeth, Adler stirred the black fluid settled at the bottom beneath the solvent. He remembered precisely the feel, viscosity, temperature, texture—everything—from the day the ferrofluid had first wrapped around his skin.

His nails and fingers cut through the cold, slick solvent. Beneath it, the fluid was likewise cold and offered no resistance at all, feeling almost exactly like stirring shallow water beneath oil, as it slipped between his fingers. Adler cupped both hands beneath the solvent, trying to scoop the fluid up. Only the pale golden solvent remained uselessly in his palms; the fluid would not gather. Impulsively, Adler poured out nearly all the remaining solvent and tried to submerge both hands in what was left, but the amount was so small it barely wet his fingertips. The clear black fluid, like ink—like nothing more than pitch black rainwater—ran along his fingertips, dripping softly, sliding down the glass wall of the tank and sinking back to the bottom.

Adler thought, in a daze, that perhaps a few drops of the tears he hadn’t realized, constantly flowing and obscuring his vision, had fallen into the tank and mixed in—that the team lead would not stay still because of it.

Then, slowly, he realized there was no longer any need to worry about such things, about saltwater mixing into the fluid, or anything like that.

Adler walked, holding the fluid in a small tank. With all mechanical devices removed, the vessel had become much closer to its original form as an aquarium, and given that the remaining fluid amounted to no more than a few milliliters, the black fluid sloshed along the bottom of a glass sphere far smaller than the original, moving in time with Adler’s steps. Some researchers suggested installing a small transparent stand inside the tank so that the fluid could imitate the way the team lead had once floated there, but Adler rejected every proposal. Adler still—still—wanted to wait for the day the fluid might suddenly, without warning, rise again and form a round shape. Even if that day never came in all the days he had left to breathe, he wanted to wait. The thought occurred to him that he had to stay alive in order to wait; that, just to simply wait, he should tend whatever days remained to him, however few, and remain in the world one day longer, for as long as his life would allow.

Of course, Adler Hofmann knows that all of this is meaningless.

Adler Hofmann longs for the one he loves.

Adler dreams.

You complete Adler’s dream.

At its end, you find Adler motionless.

Of course, this is not the first time you have seen a dead human. You have seen humans who died of old age, of illness, of trauma, humans who died with no visible injury at all. You have seen humans beneath rain that falls upward. And now you are looking down at a human who has died for no reason at all, in a place safe even from those endless rain.

You look down into Adler Hofmann’s slightly open eyes, where dilated pupils have nearly swallowed the familiar golden irises.

You do not panic, clutch at his heart, or deny an obvious truth.

You can accurately determine human vital signs even without physical contact.

You know precisely that it is too late.

You know precisely that, whether late or early, a day like this was bound to come eventually.

The only thing you do not know is why this moment came to him so quickly.

You experience a mild cognitive confusion.

You are a single consciousness moving a glass-bodied form whose two hands rest upon the remaining body of a dead human.

Your name is not Adler Hofmann.

You vehemently deny that fact alone.

You are a repulsive and attractive force that keeps a certain amount of metallic matter in a fluid state and flowing, yet in truth roams across everything through which electrons can move.

You are an arcanist who knows that life is ultimately driven by an exceedingly faint flicker of electrical flow and who can imitate that current endlessly.

You are a will that mimics bioelectricity, making involuntary muscles tremble into action.

You intervene in every cell of the cerebral cortex that has ceased operation, stopped receiving and transmitting information, and stopped demanding oxygen and blood flow; you are the electrical signal that busily runs across every capillary and one hundred billion branches of neurons and synapses as they lose form and turn into meaningless clumps of protein.

As a wave intervening in every particle that composes the organic body of the one you love, the time of your thought expands endlessly, slower than any flow that can exist in the macroscopic world.

And you know that all of this is meaningless.

You know that no matter how quickly you had begun all these, you could not revive the one you love.

You know that no matter how excessively you exert yourself, tormenting yourself as an electrical signal flowing through every nerve of a human body, you cannot know what the one you love was thinking at the end.

And yet you try.

You count and grasp every branch of countless nerve cells, begin to control and handle everything down to the tips of every terminal.

For a moment, the heart of the one you love beats according to the electrical signals you command.

Some of the loved one’s organs begin again to perform actions they had repeated for twenty-eight years and several months before briefly stopping.

You struggle to inflate the alveoli of the one you love, to draw in oxygen, to supply blood flow.

With all your strength, you command every cell of the one you love to live, to act, to perform, urging them relentlessly.

You create imaginings from the brain waves you emit through the nerves of the one you love.

You try to become Adler Hofmann.

In endlessly extended time, you imagine again and again using the cells of the one you love.

You imagine Adler being alive in a world without the one he loves.

You hypothesize, experiment upon, explore, and interpret the time of a human left behind in a world without the one they love.

You race across razor-thin intervals of milliseconds.

You weave dreams between the nerves of the one you love.

You imagine a world where Adler lives instead of you.

You think, apologetically to Adler, that it did not go well.

You keep trying.

And you perceive a world without the one you love.

You send meaningless signals again and again, drawing tears from the tear ducts so the underside of the one you love's open eyelids will not dry, until at last they overflow and spill out.

You cry through the eyes of the one you love.

You adjust the optic nerve cells of the one you love and, through the pupils and the thin, translucent layer of tears, perceive your own form there.

You do not become Adler Hofmann.

You know this.

You perceive your own glass body, which had remained almost motionless within the one you love’s field of vision, slowly bowing its head, amid all fhe fatigue and pain like the entire perception being torn away at the limits of computation.

You are not Adler Hofmann.

You know that you will never meet the one you love again.

You know that no matter how much you wish it, you cannot convey even a final signal of love to Adler Hofmann.

You can no longer make Adler Hofmann sad, or laugh, or suffer, or grow angry, or desire, or feel irritated, or cry, or sigh, or occasionally feel miserable, or, more rarely, smile—and harbor emotions you cannot know while trying to hide them from you and, at the same time, trying to express them—so that you and Adler might both be absurdly joyful, want to be alive, be happy in each moment, fleeting yet unmistakably so.

You cannot turn back time.

You think of the one you love.

Slowly—painfully slowly, yet at the same time cruelly fast—with such delicate care, you sever, one by one, the flickering, flowing, trembling meaningless signals that course through one hundred billion neurons and all their junctions, a flow in which nothing is not a part of you.

Within the stilling body of Adler Hofmann, you truly think that you love him.

With each severed signal, you think of the one you love.

You think of Adler Hofmann.

You are the one long, slow flow that caresses everything that love is.

You experience the death of the one you love.

Your name is Ulrich.