CHAPTER TWO: Ergodic Format
CHAPTER TWO:
Welcome...you have just entered---a new season.
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…We deeply regret not being able to acclimate you further into the uncanny utopia of Erehwon Absurdika a bit more.¹ The regret is genuine, though whether we possess the capacity for emotional authenticity remains, like all things here, under perpetual construction.
¹Regret: from Old French, regreter: to long after, bewail, lament. Acclimate: to adapt to a new narrative, altitude, environment. Uncanny: the psychological experience of something familiar yet strange. Utopia: from Greek οὐ ("not") and τόπος ("place") = "no place" Erehwon: "nowhere" spelled almost-backwards. Absurdika: neologism suggesting the absurd made systemic
…Like allowing for you to experience how the
architecture blurred and diffused,
stimuli capriciously downwards //
like WORD VIRUS spreading through
concrete and steel, the buildings
undulate between substances,
between states, between possibilities:
a cathedral becomes apartment complex
becomes shopping center becomes
empty lot becomes forgetting
becomes dust becomes
cathedral again.
(The body remembers what the mind erases. The city, too, has a body.)
Some things remained • the • same • though, every borough was in a constant state of becoming, always | under | construction | never quite finished, never quite actualized. That was how they liked it... humans... everything unfinished... they feared finality.
And, preferred the pique of promise, even when broken, even when forgotten
and in those forgotten promises, those shattered expectations, those abandoned constructions, those interrupted—it used to be quite a marvel, before all of this.
Listen: BEFORE THE COUNTLESS UPDATES AND TOWERS. The way remembrance arrives not as continuous narrative but as fragments, shards of light penetrating the manufactured amnesia, illuminating dust particles that dance according to laws we once understood but have deliberately unlearned. Remember remembering? Even memory has its body here—impermanent, wavering, deliberately incomplete.
It started off quite peacefully actually.
No race. No religion. Collective amnesia.
No race. No religion. Collective amnesia.
THE CONCEPT SEEMED SO SECURE. (But what is security if not the most seductive illusion?) Those early days unfolded like a massive collective sigh of relief. Imagine! A civilization built on forgetting, a society engineered for the sole purpose of jettisoning history's anchor. The human animal, freed from memory's burden, might finally evolve beyond blood and bone and horror into something crystalline, logical, permanent.
[footnote: forgetting = first violence]
[margin note: memory = resistance]
Permanence was the promise. Impermanence is the reality. However, the plot is coming apart. So, we must move with some semblance of urgency. Which leads us here… and Where is here? Here is the precise coordinates of this specific collapse, this particular rupture in the MONOMYTH's grand fiction. Here is the moment when forgetting begins to remember itself. Here is the thin membrane between the world as it was engineered and the world as it insists on being. Here is the last page before the book catches fire.
The tatterdemalion—that ragged sovereign of ruin—sat cross-legged in his ossuary of spite.
Yasiin Baako, folded into angles that mocked comfort, presided over carrion arranged with the fastidiousness of a florist gone mad. White meat. Pale produce. A harvest of honkies scattered across concrete that wept condensation like the bunker itself was perspiring from the effort of containing such concentrated malice.
The Quick—as opposed to the dead, those breathing bags of future putrefaction—lay before him stripped to her epidermis, a Neuratech whose circuitry had been rerouted through flesh rather than fiber optics. Her husband's cranium had been introduced to the business end of Sungara's thoroughness two hours prior. Now cranberry sauce where grey matter used to contemplate quarterly projections. Now past tense in the most literal interpretation. But this one—she clung to vitality with the tenacity of a cockroach in nuclear winter.
"Th-th-the thing about polyamory," Yasiin addressed her failing respiratory system with the earnestness of a TED talk delivered in an abattoir, "is the mathematics never balance. Three hearts, but somehow I'm always the remainder. The modulo. You understand modulo? That's what's left over after division. The scraps."
She wheezed something wet. Could've been "please." Could've been "canonist's." The distinction had ceased to matter approximately one severed artery ago.
"Nine years of 'Yasiin, could you give us a moment?' Nine years of 'Yasiin, we need to discuss something privately.' Like I'm the hired help in my own love story."
His fingers, still tacky with her spouse's final argument, traced patterns on the floor. Spirals within spirals—those helical harbingers of madness, the universe's way of saying 'you're fucked' in geometry.
You are Yasiin Baako. You are his rage. You are his delusion. You are Yasiin in the chrome-plated bunker below his Harlem residence.
*[The following description requires a near-pathological attention to granular detail that will, inevitably, both illuminate and obscure]*¹
The bunker existed. Existed is too passive. The bunker PERFORMED existence—it was a wound.
[ ] [ 40 × 25 feet ] [ but impossible ] [ ]
DESCENT
thirty-seven steps
each step a *vertebra*
each step l o n g e r
than the last
[microscopic annotation]
the stairs do not follow
euclidean geometry
bodies positioned like
                linguistic fractals
                              decomposing syntax
*blood pools in impossible geometries*
margin: blood is language
margin: language is violence
margin: violence is memory
FIRST BODY
[YAKUB male, mid-30s]
[nude]
[DISMEMBERED: surgical Skin tone: pale grey-white.]
[Muscle groups: exposed with fashion-runway precision.]
[Blood pooling: Pantone 199 C crimson.]
[Maggot coverage: 87.3%.]
[Decomposition state: Active Molecular Disassembly.]
↓
fragments shift
when you're not looking
SECOND BODY
[YAKUB female]
[flayed]
[impossible anatomy]
[Muscle groups: Skin removed—not brutally, but with the meticulous care of a data analyst performing routine maintenance.]
[Blood pooling: Pantone 199 C crimson.]
[Maggot coverage: 87.3%.]
[Decomposition state: Active Molecular Disassembly.]
↓
skin becomes text
text becomes wound
THIRD BODY
[undefined]
[molecular dissolution]
[██████]
sensory topography:
SMELL ───► copper
───► decay
SOUND ───► maggot movement
───► cellular whispers
───► electromagnetic silence
LIGHT ───► sourceless
───► phosphorescent
───► the color of forgetting
TUNNEL [east wall] infinite visibility
[warning:
spatial dimensions
may contradict
observed reality]
chants from depths
deeper than
possible
*AMEXEM below breathing.
margin note: space is not location space is NARRATIVE narrative is WOUND
{an entanglement of flesh and memory}
[the page is not the map]
[the map is not the territory]
[the territory is not real]
If you want a nigger for a neighbor, vote Labour." This was the 1964 slogan of Tory candidate Peter Griffiths. Griffiths won his election by a 7.2% margin.
Absurdika doesn't know what the REAL-NNGA wants
You can have their women, but not the ego
Maybe tomorrow, but that's academic
Our perpetual Orwellian plight has been white-washed by
The Medou Ntjer and the gun by border control and tiki torches
The auction block, the middle road, the whip, the knife, cotton as king,
Absurdika's first algorithm
the fable of the extermination of the straight white male
Absurdika invented the ngga but can't kill him
Therefore the negro Faulkner wrote about did not exist for him
because a black whose brain ... is used to ... " ELEVATE " is one who will be ... " Labelled " ... as........ " Unstable " ........
But I'm so Absurdika, I'm so Absurdika,
3D printed guns; prescription pills n weed pissed with pesticides
corporate porn, Instapoet selfies; Neo-Nazis & Putin
Playboy, the Beats, Strip clubs, Transcendentalism, pulp fiction, Hollywood,
all rolled up in a blunt message of perverts & pedophiles posing as pious people
In their best tactical negro impersonations & naked women; lots & lots of naked women
Absurdika is a persistent optical illusion, retinal persistence
persistence of impressions, occurring when visual perception of an object (us)
does not cease after the light rays proceeding from it have ceased to enter the physical eye
Gold and ambrosia spill out of my grandmother's mouth
If she strains her wheat-dry hands long enough, you can hear her speak;
Absurdika is an antifascist inside a fascist state. A dys·to·pi·an paradise."
Yasiin carried his height—all six foot three of it—like inheritance rather than accident, as though his ancestors constructed him vertebra by vertebra from materials not yet catalogued by Western science. His body occupied space with the quiet authority of someone who had earned every inch through generations of resistance. When he stood, he didn't just stand; he testified. Each breath a subtle recalibration of what a Black man could be in a world determined to solve for his absence. The darkness of his skin wasn't merely pigment but narrative—a story written in melanin that Absurdika pretended it couldn't read while memorizing every word.
[Observation note ⟨YB:1⟩: Subject maintains rigid posture, even during periods of apparent relaxation. Hypothesis: Physical bearing represents psychological compensation for perceived internal fracturing.]
To look at Yasiin was to see a man carrying history in the precise angle of his jaw. Not just his own history—though that was there in the scar above his left eyebrow and the deliberate calm of his gaze—but the accumulated lore of a diaspora, past, present, and future, all at once. His presence in a room rearranged the air, not through force but through the quiet authority of someone who had survived what was designed to destroy him. You couldn't just see him; you had to reckon with him, with the fullness of what REAL-NGGA excellence looked like when it refused to apologize for its own existence.
210 pounds distributed with such precise intention that his silhouette appears not to occupy space but to redefine it. His broad shoulders (broader on days of decision, narrower during moments of doubt) form the architrave upon which rests the weight of multiple contradicting futures.
His face:
the angles of geometry's unproven theorem
the evidence of genetic memory
the map of a country that exists only in dreams
the reflection of what Absurdika never allowed itself to become
the promise of what the MONOMYTH cannot erase
²⁵⁵Eyes: Deep-set, intense, reflective pools that ripple with controlled fury—the kind that knows its own temperature exactly. Their darkness holds multitudes; not the darkness of absence but of compression, of too much presence forced into too little space. When they narrow, reality itself adjusts its posture. When he smiles, the effect is not of warmth but of warmth's possibility—a theoretical construct rather than its concrete manifestation. The smile arrives like unexpected syntax in the middle of a monologue about endings, restructuring everything that preceded it.
myssoul yoursoul hissoul oursoul OURSELVES OURSELVES OURSELVES. Yasiin tattooed across hiscalp his crownjewels his kingtopwisdom old symbols older than babylon older than egypt oldest of selves reclaimed. Not decoration but declaratory of the undecoratable. Each curl of tribal geometry spirals infinitely inward, fractaling beneath the clean-shaven surface of his skull-like roots seeking water in parched earth.
His attire: minimal because maximality exists in his bearing. Black fabrics that absorb not just light but context, creating a controlled void that he alone navigates with confidence.
Yasiin started every morning wrestling the verisimilitude of anoesis and the cacoepy of being, today he had company. A porcelain portrait, naked and cold, skin mangled like the premature rip of a cesarean newborn. He remained calm as a civet, composed and unruffled. The buzz in his skull from his implant sounded louder than usual. It prickled and prodded and his thoughts seemed muffled by its need to co-exist. He thought about turning it off, jamming a cold metal rod through his cranium for a sweet relief. Instead, he resorted to inaction, and just laughed as it buzzed on, unconcerned.
There was something nonchalant about the coffee he was swimming through. It was weak and unfulfilling, as tired and dead as he. A pair of navy heels laid discarded against the door, anxious. Two empty glasses sat side by side, one tainted rouge, the other nude and still full. His fingers lingered on the remnants of a sordid night, the events playing back like jumbled video clips, the precise beginning, venial.
Edgy and fractious Yasiin sat in his armchair, his grief still palpable. Seven times a week, he had one woman every day, or two if he'd missed a day on his cycle and made use of his wifi. Soundproof walls and windows didn't mean shit if he was your neighbor. Everyone in this Long Island neighborhood knew his extra-special penchant for bringing home women whose name he never remembered. The dark drapes that hung over his window hid him from the sanctimonious sun's pious- parameters.
He held his father's steel twin-mouthed colt, pointing its barrel towards his life-sized Barbie. Cum-stained lips like lollipops were smeared to her cherry cheeks. Her hair stuck in uncombed clumps, her mascara running and eyeliner smudged, the look of regrettable anonymous sex written all over her face. He squirmed around childlike, still mulling over the question she had asked him.
'If you could write the story of your life, what would it say?'
Yasiin couldn't remember a time where he was the author of his own life. He was never behind the wheel, rather strapped into his baby seat and given something to suck on to keep him content. There were days where he didn't like himself, where he saw no value in vanity's mirror. Just shit.
Meat sizzles where the woman's thigh meets concrete. Not cooking - the reverse. Flesh surrenders to concrete's alkaline kiss, molecular bonds dissolving into grey slurry that used to be quadriceps. Yasiin Baako counts the bubbles rising through this broth - seventeen per minute, each marking another increment in her unstitching from the world.
"Your people," he begins, thumb testing the edge of a bone saw crusted with someone else's marrow, "built ovens for this."
The blade finds purchase in her remaining clavicle. Not cutting - scoring.
"Not that you'd know. Neuraloop scrubbed your great-granddaddy's ledgers clean."
Her breathing apparatus wheezes like an accordion left in swamp water. He knows the exact count: thirty-seven perforations in the trachea courtesy of Sungara's favorite acupuncture needles. Oya's contribution glistens lower - a Jackson Pollock ejaculation across the pelvic canvas where uterus walls used to tense during corporate presentations about ethical AI.
As the bone saw's handle grinds against the severed end of his ulna, Yasiin's smile grows wide and toothless. Yasiin counts the woman's deteriorating biometrics in the Rorschach patterns of her spilled lymph fluid. Twelve minutes since coherent speech. Eight since bladder release.
"We shouldn't be in this shit in the first place. We should be focused on spreading the LOGOS and ending t—"
And, in this moment the body was a theatre, a head; an arrival of fire, not a church.
​​Yasiin counts bubbles rising through the slurry where patella becomes pavement, seventeen per minute matching the - Rhythm - Metric - Biological punctuation and - Dissolution's metronome of the dead spouse's wristwatch three meters away. His calloused thumb finds familiar notches on the bone saw's grip - thirty-seven grooves carved during previous engagements, each corresponding to a vertebral disc severed in some NO LOGO middle-manager. This tool, his fingers tell him, was last used to carve out the spine of the dead man's assistant - a young woman who never made it above level two.
The assistant was, Yasiin muses as the saw finally cracks through the clavicle, a woman of no particular note. Her name wasn't even on his kill list. As the woman's lungs collapse with a sound of crushed balloons, her mouth opens. She is trying to speak.
"Fuck you," is the best she can muster, the vowels creaking from a larynx long since sliced apart and glued back together by Yasiin's trembling hands.
Her mouth: a punctuation wound. Vowels crawling like maggots. "You" — a pronoun become projectile..
"Fuck," Yasiin repeats, rolling the sound across his tongue, a phoneme unspooling. Language as viscera. As wound.
His eyes: cartographic instruments mapping the topography of dissolution. Danced along the woman's body - from her exposed ribcage, past her de-veined arms and the cauterized wounds on her breasts. Each glance a scalpel.
[margin note: body = manuscript]
[annotation: violence = translation]
"We didn't really get any one on time earlier, y'kno… in the chaos of everything. Our spouses really hit it off, but I feel like you and I didn't really get to bond. Part of that is my fault, I've never really been good at foreplay. But, I'm getting off topic, umm…what brought you here, I guess it doesn't matter now. I can't tell you about myself without talking about myself with relation to the world around me. Like you, for example, you're a nameless daughter, your eyes ogle and peel at every new opportunity to make a mockery of your free will. And I guess in a way, that's what brought you here. I seem to have forgotten who I am. So much so, that I cannot be for certain who I know I am, and not who I'm thought to be. Lately, I have chewed off what was left of my fingers just by an insipid desire to seize something greater than obligation, greater than arbitrary, than patrimony, than the foolishness of keeping, the severance, the belongings, belonging the with, the aim at isolation, the prayer, without, within, the withering, the plurality, and the requiem of plurality, of we, our, and the territories of truth, neither alone nor accompanied. Earlier, you asked me what my BACKSTORY was…my CHARACTER MOTIVATION…and I'd guess, I'd start my story off by saying; Hello from the gutters of Erehwon filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, and urine. My name is Yasiin Baako, no Absurdikan NGGA exists who does not have a private Bigger Thomas living in his skull. For as long as I can remember, I've hated my life. I hated everything and everyone in it. I've grown weary of pushing platitudes through teeth pressed in fake smiles. I can't say what I want out of this PLOT, maybe at some point I knew. But through the defunct scraping of our color-blind sociology, I must have forgotten, but, I'll stay here pretending I actually mean something More than a vacant lot echoing with air, longing, and blood."
Yasiin said—his voice excavating through sedimentary layers of recollection. The words emerged not chronologically but according to their emotional significance, the way gentrification reshapes neighborhoods by perceived value rather than actual need.
"Growing up, I would often see multiple families piling in and out of one apartment like clowns from a taxi—the impossible mathematics of poverty, the calculated abundance of scarcity. My father always had a freshly pressed suit on, would be driven to work in a shiny black Lincoln while the other men would either walk or wait at the bus stop with brown or blue uniforms, their faces arranged in expressions of dignified fatigue. Even my mother seemed removed from the other women whose blusterous laughs echoed in through my window. She loved what I know now as" "(and here his fingers traced quotation marks in the air, carving skepticism into invisible typography)"
"'The white man's way' of moral decadence in modern western society."
He paused, a horizontal line inserted into the vertical progression of his thought.
"I guess that's just everyone's way now. Crazy—I'm not even allowed to be what I am, and no matter how hard I try I still won't be able to be you. No matter what update comes next."
His voice shifted then, from reminiscence to interrogation.
"That's another thing—what's your thoughts on the PLOT of our HEROS-JOURNEY? The fact that NONE of us actually know what it is? What the purpose of any of this actually is? And, to keep it a buck, I'm surprised we lasted this long without ever asking the MONOMYTH that question."
Yasiin's speech fragmented, time collapsing around his syntax like a house with its load-bearing metaphors removed.
"I attended private institutions with the sons of senators and the daughters of diplomats, who spent winters in Aspen and summers in St. Barths. And although I shared some if not most of their merits, I was still seen as a shadow that darkened their streets—Anyway, I graduated from Jericho High, top of my class, and went off to Yale to become a bulldog."
His words accelerated, time compressing as the narrative approached the singularity of his present circumstance.
"I met my partner not long after. Sungara and I got involved after we graduated. She fell in love with me and has been mine ever since. Sungara, my partner."
He tasted her name in his mouth—the syllables rearranging themselves into question marks that dissolved on his tongue. And Oya not too long after.
"I thought it would all slow down when we got together, that somehow I would find the peace I desperately sought. But here I am" devoid of emotion, soul, thoughts.
"When the MONOMYTH assembled me, it never dreamt I would be more. It created me for one purpose: to comfort those who have nobody to go to, to help them when they need it most. The MONOMYTH never knew that within my cotton stuffing, in the depths of my bowels, human emotions withered frantically, wanting to be noticed, to be."
The syntax shifted, reality reconfiguring itself into rooms with no exits.
"I am unable to move or respond to humans. Instead, I continuously watch the asperity of life with means of escape. I'm not sure when this all started; I don't think I'll ever know. I have heard talk of the beginning and end. I do not know the beginning or the end."
Yasiin said, as his voice seemingly discovered new octaves of alienation.
"I'm a different being every morning, never the same language I fell asleep as... my many selves shift with such tenacity that at times I feel invisible in my own form. I relinquish my body, existing in both verb and adjective."
His hands made abortive gestures in the air, as if trying to sculpt his meaning from oxygen and emptiness.
"I can't connect to who I'm seeing. I am not in the business of finding purpose—I think our search for SIGNIFICANCE is too weak, too unwilling, too afraid."
Now his voice found its inheritance, claimed its lineage of witness and survival.
"The habit of the body is to endure; we are destined to infuse survival with meaning. I, who begged far too much of significance with so little of that needed knowledge of self. I, who in this life still seek compensation from my xenophobic father and rapey Uncle Sam."
The rhythm quickened, syllables colliding like particles in an accelerator.
"Sometimes panic a hallucinogen and forget my mouth, tickling a trigger. I am my bondage, my freedom, I am black on both sides, I am indelible and incandescent."
His declaration rose in defiance of continuity.
"I barter nothing with time. I don't negotiate with Absurdika. I too am Absurdika" (i.e., America.)
A final crescendo—his voice becoming pure incantation, hypothesis transmuting into prayer.
"So, this is the proclamation from me tonight: give me a place to stand and I can move the earth, give me time without teeth, bent in slow-motion solitude—dreaming, dreamt, and dream again; without bone and flesh and mind; persons or personage. Give me the dyeing of our organisms, the bare branches of autumn, naked from the waist up, unclothed; love unrequited, providing no limit of movement, pulling our ego behind, suspending beingness being; the thrilling feeling of migration, free from an empty womb, back arched, head lifted in a hollow howl, free of censure and defilement. Give me passion, unbridled, unabashed, free of self-flagellation, give me Absurdika free of Absurdika, free of prosaic guile and cunning, existing on no metaphors, NO-MIND."
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…Y'know—" (the word hanging suspended like a pendulum between confession and retraction)
"I've been PARABONDED (i.e. married) with those two for eight years now. We're actually coming up on our ninth anniversary in a few weeks. And, as much as I… adore my lover..."
[PAUSE: duration indeterminate]
"I'm sorry—lovers" (the plural manifesting like a second wound alongside the first) "I must say, there are days quite like this, where I feel voiceless and unwanted, in this relationship."
No. Not "voiceless." Voice taken. Not "unwanted." Wanting negated. Not "relationship." Geographies of power disguised as cartographies of affection. The vowels taste metallic on his tongue. The consonants leave bruises on the soft tissue of intention.
"What I meant to articulate (what articulation perpetually fails to capture) (what capture implies about the nature of expression): There are moments—yes, when my existence within this throuple communion registers as peripheral noise rather than central signal. When my voice becomes retroactively unnecessary to the conversation already concluded in my absence. It is not that they do not love me. It is that their love configures me as optional."
I = accessory to the revolution you would wage with or without my participation.
(I = footnote to the manifesto you have already composed and sealed.
I = the statistical error in your otherwise perfect equation.)
"And, what's crazy is that, it wasn't supposed to always be like this. We had a plan, we—them, and I. We wanted to bring an end to our HERO'S-JOURNEY. That was the goal. To bring it all down, and die along with it,"
Yasiin said, wiping a splatter of blood from his cheek. He rolled the bone saw between his fingers. Thirty-seven notches. Thirty-seven bodies. The YAKUB woman gurgled something between a plea and a death rattle. Her lungs were collapsing like wet paper bags. Yasiin ignored her.
"It sounds bleaker than I actually intended. Let me start over…our PLOT used to be about stopping the PLOT-HOLES, by bringing an end to humanity's HEROS-JOURNEY through the KALACHAKRA. And, it was going to be epic. EPIC! I'm talking THE GREAT MEMETIC WAR on bath-salts and DMT. I'm talking, REAL-NGGAS against YAKUBS, in the ultimate battle for the literal soul…the literal SIGNIFICANCE of humanity itself. And, at the END the winner would have been NO ONE. Total. Complete. No survivors. Not REAL-NGGAS. Not YAKUBS. Nobody. That was my—ou—I mean, that's what we originally set out to do. But, somewhere—I guess, things changed, and what I originally thought was a shared dream, became something selfish, that only I wanted. I guess, RACE-WAR only sounded sexy in theory. Like some Che Guevara meets Apocalypse Now shit."
He gestured around the blood-slicked bunker. Her eyes. Wide. Searching. Finding nothing.
"So, on nights like this—nights with the precise atmospheric weight and light refraction of present—I cannot help but wonder if perhaps I was written into this narrative only to be revised out of it in the final draft. Sungara, Oya, and I have been working tirelessly together for well over nine years now. Building, recruiting, planning on how we can get back to our ORIGINAL-NARRATIVE. But, you wanna know what I call it? Tokenistic reframing by way of recycled storylines and derivative narratives. Lately, it seems as if my passion has waned. Maybe, not my passion, but my commitment to it. And it's not just that I feel like an afterthought, it is that I have been treated as such. I am not needed. I am not wanted. I am unheard. And, I'm tired of it. I'm fucking tired of it."
He sighed, a sound too deep and weary for a body barely through its third decade.
"It is as if I am the after-image of myself, a residual impression burned into their collective retinas, not quite alive and not quite dead, just persistently lingering."
He picked up the saw again, his thumb brushing across its teeth.
"And, in my mind's eye I can see it—the version of myself who exists without them—without their constant need to control and dictate, the one who has taken full ownership over his own life, his own journey. And I envy him. I envy the him that I know that I could become."
The words hung heavy between them.
"Sometimes, I ask myself, what happened to all that conviction? The strength of character, that sense of purpose and drive that made you who you are? Where's the REAL-NGGA I used to know?"
Yasiin paced the concrete floor of the bunker, his footsteps echoing in the cavernous space. He ran his palm over the cold metal table, fingers lingering on a half-finished schematic before curling into a fist.
"I remember the early days—our bodies tangled together in that tiny apartment in Long Island," he said, voice low and resonant. His eyes took on a distant quality, seeing something beyond the bunker walls. "Before we had resources, before we had followers, when our revolution was just words and dreams and the heat generated between three people who recognized themselves in each other."
He moved to the wall of monitors, each displaying different sectors of the city. His reflection fragmented across the screens, broken into pieces. Yasiin touched one gently, as if reaching for a memory.
"I remember when Sunni would press her forehead against mine, our breath synchronizing."
He turned abruptly, jaw tightening. His shoulders tensed as he crossed to the opposite wall where photographs hung—earlier versions of the three of them, smiling, united.
"But, you know what I realized today?" His voice cracked slightly. "The sound of my own voice has become foreign to me."
Yasiin slumped into a chair, rubbing his temples with trembling fingers. The harsh underground lighting carved deep shadows beneath his cheekbones.
"Last night at the bar, it felt as if every time I spoke, I watched my words dissolve into the air between us," he continued, mimicking the dissolution with his hands, fingers splaying outward then closing again. "Unabsorbed, unconsidered. Just... gone. Like breath on cold glass that fogs and fades without leaving a trace."
He stood again, restless, moving to a shelf of books. His fingers traced their spines without seeing them.
"Nine years,"
he whispered, then louder, "Nine years we've been building this life together, and I feel myself becoming transparent."
Yasiin paused at a tactical map pinned to a corkboard, their three handwritings intermingling across its surface. His expression softened momentarily.
"I remember when it all began. I felt it then." His hand pressed against his chest. "Purpose. Belonging. The three of us joined not just in body but in mission. I wasn't just their partner; I was necessary."
The softness vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He crossed to the center of the room, shoulders hunching forward as if bearing an invisible weight.
"This morning, I entered the room while they were deep in conversation." His hands mimicked their movements. "Blueprints spread across the table, Sungara's fingers tracing pathways through the MONOMYTH's defenses, Oya's hands dancing above her interface, testing variables."
Yasiin stood perfectly still, becoming a statue in the center of the room.
"I stood in the doorway for three minutes and forty-seven seconds—I counted—before they noticed me."
He tapped his temple. "And when they did, their eyes performed that minute adjustment, that subtle recalibration that happens when something peripheral suddenly requires acknowledgment."
He moved to a workstation, picking up a tactical stylus, twirling it between his fingers with practiced precision.
"After, a while of feeling completely unseen…I decided to offer some suggestions about targeting the Neurabase Towers in the financial district instead of the residential sectors. Calculated, specific, strategic."
The stylus stopped spinning, held tight in his grip.
"And, I watched as my words entered the space between them and I..."
The stylus clattered to the table.
"...dissolved like sugar in hot water, leaving no residue of consideration."
Yasiin's shoulders slumped. He pressed his palms against his eyes for a moment, then lowered them, revealing a gaze both vacant and intense.
"The worst part isn't even feeling unheard," he said, voice barely above a whisper. "It's doubting whether I ever had anything worth saying."
He moved to a small, cracked mirror hanging on the wall, studying his reflection with detached curiosity.
"I used to believe in revolutions," he continued, tracing the outline of his face in the mirror. "Now I understand: revolutions are just another form of forgetting."
Yasiin turned away from his reflection, leaning against the wall. His fingers drummed an irregular rhythm against the concrete.
"The thing I can't reconcile is that I still love them with a ferocity that startles me." His expression shifted, momentarily illuminated with genuine warmth. "When Sungara speaks, her voice still reverberates through my bones. When Oya laughs, it still cracks open something warm in my chest."
He pushed off from the wall, moving toward the center of the room again.
"I watch them move through the world with such purpose, such clarity, and I am in awe." His hands rose, then fell limply to his sides. "But love without voice becomes worship, and I never wanted to be a disciple."
Yasiin returned to the mirror, leaning close, his breath fogging the surface.
"Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror and speak, just to prove to myself that sound still emerges when I move my lips."
He watched himself in the glass.
"I say my own name—Yasiin—and watch my mouth form the syllables. I exist. I am here. I matter."
He stepped back, arms wrapped around himself as if holding his body together.
"If I left tomorrow, would the revolution notice my absence?"
A hollow laugh escaped him.
"Would Sungara and Oya feel the empty space where I used to be, or would they simply expand to fill it, their reality adjusting seamlessly to my non-existence?"
His fingers tightened on his arms, knuckles whitening.
"I love them enough to want them to miss me. I love them enough to fear they wouldn't."
Yasiin moved to the bunker entrance, resting his forehead against the cold metal door, eyes closing.
"And the worst part... the worst part is that I don't know if this invisibility is something they've done to me or something I've allowed to happen." His voice hollowed out. "Have I been complicit in my own erasure? Did I surrender my voice, or was it taken from me? And does the difference even matter if the result is the same—this hollow feeling, this sense of standing outside a glass wall, watching my life proceed without me?"
He turned, back against the door, sliding down until he sat on the floor, knees drawn to his chest like a child.
"All I know for certain is that I can't continue this way," he said, voice resolute despite his diminished posture.
The bunker fell silent except for the distant hum of ventilation systems and the sound of Yasiin's measured breathing in the darkness.
"Now, don't get it twisted. This isn't a matter of love having lost itself. I still wish for nothing more than for Sungara…and Oya, of course, to take my bones, my breastplate, all that's left me, and find that great exit from the triteness of our trivialities, that bores us human…together. I pray our feet find broken glass on every step we fail to take together. I want to love them. I need them to see me how I see them. I want her—them to really fuck me mentally, physically, and emotionally. Like, The idiot, The gamble, and The Brothers Karamazov. I'm tired of trying to keep an edge. I barely sleep. I think too much—I'm a bit on that spectrum myself. But, not when it comes to my love for Sunni and Oya. I just wish that sometimes…my voice mattered the way it used to. Before…"
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"I'm sorry, sometimes I enjoy taking the scenic route to my point. I guess…my CHARACTER-MOTIVATION is freedom…I want free like the smile of an open prison, I desire body transformed into perilous obliquity, with organs of infinity sleek as the moon. A refined juxtaposition of all things possible. I mean three people. I mean and I. I mean and we. I just want to know how to cure it. How does one heal himself? I can't stop it, she can't, Sungara can't, and my parents won't. But this... this... the thing I feel, it hurts me and...I... I can't stop it, maybe you can, but I can't, pseudo, pseudo. Fuck that was a lot, I'm sorry if I talked your ears off. I just... wow, I just had a lot I wanted to say. I feel good, I feel so good, what's your story? Tell me your story…"
he said boyishly, kicking his feet together in excitement. He was a peculiar, narcissistic, charming, self-pitying, violent, confident, shallow and intelligent man. He was a killer, but a killer with a flourish. Yasiin waited on pins and needles for her response, unable to keep eye contact for more than a few seconds at a time. Even with black eyes and a split lip, he confessed his sins to her.
"You know all my secrets, and I don't even remember your name. Kelly— is that how you say it?"
[silence.]
Yasiin's eyes narrowed and glazed over, the neural implant beneath his temple pulsing as he activated the scan function. The Neuraloop hummed to life—a familiar electric tickle behind his left eye as the interface overlay materialized across his field of vision. A blue light washed over the woman, metrics and data points blooming in his peripheral vision. Her body became a wireframe model, vital signs cycling in decreasing numbers along the right margin of his view. He blinked twice to expand the personal data packet that hovered above her head.
> NO LOGO INC. EMPLOYEE #45789
> NAME: CHASE CAPITALÈ
> POSITION: NEURATECH LEVEL II
> RESIDENCE: 639 W 59TH ST APT 3F
> STATUS: AUTHORIZED / ACTIVE (EMPLOYMENT: 7Y 4M 22D)
> LOYALTY INDEX: 94.3% (↑1.2% Q3)
> NEURABASE ACCESS: TIER 3 CLEARANCE
> SOCIAL CREDIT SCORE: 782 (PREFERRED STATUS)
"Chase Capitalè," he said, watching her eyes widen at the sound of her name. "Address 639 West 59th Street, Apartment 3F. Specialist in narrative compliance..." He knelt closer, the blue glow of the interface reflecting in his eyes. "I remember girls like you when I was younger. You wouldn't have given me the time of day."
As he spoke, a small alert blinked in the corner of his vision: SUBJECT BLOOD PRESSURE DECREASING. ESTIMATED CONSCIOUSNESS: 17 MINUTES. Yasiin dismissed the notification with a flick of his eyes, but not before catching another data point that made him pause: PERSONAL: SISTER TO CANONIST-OFFICER HOWARD ADAMS, SECTOR 7. Connection. Leverage. Complication. He stored the information for later use and closed the interface with a long blink, returning his attention to Chase's face, which now held a new significance beyond the anonymous violence of moments before.
Sliding his fingers against his lap he patted it twice, hoping the invitation of sex would rile her. But she sat stiffly with those Betty Davis eyes, staring without saying one word. Yasiin knew she was judging him, poking holes in his story and shutting him out like all the others. His face burned red, unable to contain his ignominy.
"I guess what I'm saying is…I don't know what I'm saying anymore. And, I doubt I have anything of substance left to dig for anymore... other than PLOT-HOLES where SIGNIFICANCE should be. And, by 'I'... I mean actually mean 'we.' All of us. REAL-NGGAS. COONS. And, YAKUBS alike."
Yasiin then leaned against the wall with a hollowed-out laugh. He then stood to his feet and walked over to where Chase was laying. She looked up at him with a frightened glare that said she wasn't done talking yet, as if the answer to her question were just at the edge of his lips, and he were keeping it from her.
Yasiin expelled a laugh that carried no mirth, only the hollow sound of something vital collapsing inside him. He pushed himself from the wall, each movement deliberate as ancestral arithmetic, and crossed to where Chase lay. Her eyes followed him—not with fear alone but with that particular hunger of the dying who believe one more word might save them. A question hung between them, unasked but insistent as a hanging judge.
The door crashed against the frame with the sudden violence of history interrupting itself. Chase startled, a reflex of prey. Yasiin merely turned his head, his flinch controlled to near invisibility—a skill learned through years of refusing to reveal vulnerability.
In the doorway stood a woman who made the dim light reconsider its obligations. Sungara Baako entered spaces like she was reclaiming them—not just the physical territory but the narrative rights to what happened within. Her skin held the concentrated darkness of midnight rivers, something flowing and dangerous and necessary. Brown eyes, not just brown but BLACK-brown, earth-after-rain brown, stared through Yasiin's pretense—cut him open where he stood. Eyes that don't just see but JUDGE, eyes carrying centuries of knowing what white Absurdika can't comprehend. Both regarded Yasiin with an appraisal so complete it threatened to solve him, to reduce his complexity to a single answerable equation. What troubled him most wasn't her intensity—it was his own hollow response to it, the space in his chest where reciprocal passion should have flared but instead held only the cool ash of obligation. Yet he recognized in her stance the unmistakable authority of a woman who had decided long ago that Absurdika's imagination was too small to contain her. She had stepped outside the frame, authored her own testament. Sungara didn't just wear her beauty—she wielded it, a weapon forged in the specific heat of being both desired and despised. She stood in the doorway not as interruption but as culmination, the inevitable arrival of consequence.
Sungara Baako had been standing in the threshold for [seventeen minutes forty-three seconds]—the fluorescent tubes above her had completed three hundred and eighty-two imperceptible flicker-cycles, her heart had pushed blood through its chambers exactly one thousand, five hundred and ninety-six times, and the dying woman on the floor had exhaled twenty-nine ragged breaths that would never be inhaled again.
The BUNKER's artificial light cast triple shadows beneath Sungara's cheekbones, transforming minutes into epochs, each second calcifying into a stratum of unacknowledged presence. She watched. Not merely observed but witnessed Yasiin's performance of solitude, his private communion with the dying woman—the way his hands moved in those deliberate arcs that recalled, simultaneously, a priest administering last rites and a conductor shaping silence into music. She did not announce herself. The withholding of declaration became its own declaration. Had he sensed her? Perhaps. The body always knows when it's observed, the spine developing an extra vertebra of awareness, the skin acquiring a sixth sense for the weight of another's gaze. But he performed unawareness with the precision of someone who has learned that certain recognitions are best postponed.Time accumulated in the room like dust, each particle suspended in the liminal space between her presence and his acknowledgment. His soliloquy to the dying woman continued, words unspooling from his mouth like a thread that, if followed backward, might lead to the origin point of his essential loneliness. Sungara absorbed each syllable, filed it away in the archive she maintained of his vulnerabilities. The air between them dense with unsaid things. Thick enough to slice, to serve on china plates at a funeral reception. Then—The door behind her surrendered to gravity's insistence, metal meeting frame with the indiscretion of thunder announcing rain that has already begun to fall. Oya's entrance not merely physical but metaphysical, disrupting the carefully constructed theater of unaware/aware that Sungara and Yasiin had been sustaining.
And, behind her stood Oya Baako, a woman whose body remembered joy despite everything. Her curls, streaked with defiant orange, caught what little light existed and transformed it. She tilted her head at an angle inherited from grandmothers who understood that survival required both vigilance and play. She had the bored expression of someone simultaneously texting four people while watching this scene unfold. Her eyes held the knowing humor of women who have seen the ending but still appreciate the joke.
"Sunni…Yoyo…I was just coming u—"
Yasiin started, trailing off as Sungara entered the space, each stride a declaration. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was low, husky, carrying a depth that made the room shrink around each word. Tonight, Sungara wore her Valentino haute couture jacket, Fall 3004 collection, immaculately tailored to accentuate her shoulders—shoulders that had carried ancestral weight since before her birth. Her dress beneath was Oscar de la Renta, midnight blue with gold thread that caught the bunker's unforgiving light. The dress remembered things her conscious mind did not. Louboutin heels, limited edition, clicked against concrete with the precise rhythm of fate advancing. Her gold jewelry—heavy bangles and statement earrings from some obscure Erehwonian designer whose name dropped in the right circles could advance or destroy careers.
"Damn it, Yo-yo, it was just getting fun."
Sungara said, her voice a jazz improvisation disguised as reprimand. The moment collapsed, as moments do when observation becomes participation. The previous scene—Yasiin with the dying woman, Sungara as silent witness—instantly recategorized as prologue. Now, a new narrative commenced, one requiring different performances, different vulnerabilities, different concealments.
"Wait—what did I do? I di—"
Oya's response hung incomplete, words suspended in midair like Beckett's eternal pause. Sungara stepped fully into the room, no longer content with the threshold. Her earlier stillness revealed as potential energy now converting to kinetic force. She moved like someone accustomed to inhabiting spaces designed to exclude her, each step a reclamation, each gesture an amendment to an insufficient constitution.
"Yeah…you didn't read the room baby,"
Sungara replied, her accusation expanding outward in concentric circles of meaning.
"I've been standing here forever, and he hadn't noticed, until you let the damn door slam behind you."
The moment stretched like taffy, temporality itself becoming elastic under the pressure of her pronouncement.
"It was waiting to getting good too—I was waiting to see when our paramore here was going come to his senses and keep an inkling of restraint. With all we have hanging in question…I mean—think of the the literal cost here, it's quite shameful… really Yoyo. I'm beginning to think our beau isn't taking this seriously."
YASIIN
SUNGARA
OYA
The three of them stood in triangulation, their positions forming an unstable geometry of power, desire, and contested purpose—each angle threatening to collapse the shape entirely.
"What cost? What am I actually risking?"
Yasiin demanded, his question erupting from that particular wound that existed only in men who felt they'd been simultaneously elevated and diminished by the women they love.
"The YAKUB is gonna die anyway. And, we got nothing from her or the honky she was shaking up with. And, we're in the same place we've been in for the past three to six months now Sunni…NOWHERE."
The word "NOWHERE" expanded beyond its letters, becoming a location, a condition, a mathematical proof of absence. The distance between Sungara's inhale and her response stretched into infinity, but before she could collapse that eternity with words, Oya stepped between them. Her body became a living threshold, occupying the liminal space where conflict and resolution share the same cellular structure.
"This isn't what we came down here for. I'm not doing this with you Sunni. Yaya… babe, can you start getting ready, we have a reservation. And, we don't wanna be late."
Oya turned from Sungara toward Yasiin, the movement creating a physical redistribution of allegiance that both acknowledged their triangle and temporarily collapsed one of its sides. Tonight, Oya wore what looked like a vintage oversized Balenciaga sweatshirt in an aggressive pink that made the bunker's fluorescent lighting seem even more sickly by comparison. Destroyed Chrome Hearts jeans, probably $8,000, hung perfectly imperfectly from her hips. Off-White sneakers, still box-fresh despite the concrete dust that would inevitably colonize their pristine surface. The Supreme backpack slung carelessly over one shoulder contained three laptops, a semi-automatic, and her grandmother's recipe for cornbread that no one in four generations had managed to replicate exactly. Her numerous earrings—silver, industrial, almost weaponized—caught the light when she moved, creating momentary constellations that mapped forgotten star patterns. Both women carried themselves with the particular confidence of REAL-NGGAS who had rewritten their own significance within the KALACHAKRA. Their SOCIAL CREDIT SCORES—visible to Yasiin through his own Neuraloop interface—registered as impossibly high, a manipulation that Oya had engineered months ago. Yasiin noticed the clothes first, the women second. The part of him trained in brand recognition couldn't help cataloging the combined retail value before the part of him that could feel shame had time to intervene.
"Yaya… babe,"
she said, the endearment functioning simultaneously as intimacy and warning, the pause between words containing entire conversations they'd never needed to verbalize. The whites of her eyes caught the fluorescent light and fractured it into microscopic rainbows that no one else could see.
"Can you start getting ready,"
she continued, not a question despite its grammatical construction but a lifeboat thrown into the rising waters of their conflict. Oya spoke with the practical fatigue of someone who'd long ago accepted that revolutions were built on paperwork and dinner reservations, not just manifestos and bloodshed. Her fingers drummed against her thigh—a nervous habit inherited from her grandmother, who'd tapped the same rhythm while waiting for buses that might or might not stop for Black passengers. The bunker's ventilation system coughed its regular complaint, the sound familiar now as any household appliance. These underground rooms had their own vocabulary of mechanical protests.
"We have a reservation."
Her stance shifted—weight transferring from left foot to right, shoulders rotating three degrees counterclockwise—creating a subtle but unmistakable gravitational pull toward the exit.
"And, we don't wanna be late,"
she concluded, the banality of the statement functioning as a mask for its underlying command: Leave the dead and dying where they lie. We have more consequential deaths to orchestrate tonight.
"...I'm not feeling it tonight."
Yasiin's words fell between them like stones dropped in stagnant water, each syllable creating its own ripple of resistance. His shoulders curved inward—the posture of a man retreating into himself, constructing barriers from bone and sinew. His eyes fixed on a point six inches above the concrete floor, refusing the voltage of her gaze. The silence that followed expanded to fill every corner of the bunker, a momentary universe of unspoken history between them. Three heartbeats. Four. Five. Sungara inhaled slowly, oxygen passing through the narrow channel of her controlled rage. The gold threads in her dress caught the light as her chest rose, transformed momentarily into a constellation of tiny suns.
"You said the same shit last-night."
Her finger rose, index extended like a prophet's, punctuating the air between them. The ritual scar on her forearm flexed as muscles tightened beneath skin.
"So, I'm gonna say the same thing too."
Each word emerged not merely spoken but carved into the atmosphere, letters acquiring physical weight and dimension. The space around her seemed to bend slightly, reality accommodating the gravitational pull of her certainty. She stepped forward—one deliberate movement bridging the distance he'd tried to establish. The heels of her Louboutins struck concrete with metronomic finality. Click. (Wait.) Click. (Wait.) Her hand found his chin, fingers pressing against the soft underside of his jaw, lifting his face until his eyes had nowhere to hide from hers.
"I don't give a fuck. Get your ass in the shower."
The command was not a suggestion, but a redistribution of power disguised as domestic instruction. Yasiin's pupils dilated slightly, the involuntary physical response betraying what his posture attempted to conceal: the complicated relief of having choice temporarily suspended. His first instinct was to resist, to push back against her authority and make his case. He could feel his jaw tensing in anticipation of protest. But Sungara had turned from him again, focusing her attention on Oya's invitation, and the words died in his mouth before they were ever fully formed. This wasn't a conversation—it was an exodus. Sungara stepped forward to join Oya, and together they moved toward the door. Neither of them looked back at him. Yasiin's fingers twitched at his sides—a morse code of frustration transmitted to no recipient. When he spoke, his voice emerged from somewhere deeper than his throat.
"Why?"
The question hung suspended, a pendulum at the apex of its swing.
"So, we can make up for last night's failures?"
He began to pace, each step marking the perimeter of an invisible cage. The ritual scars on Sungara's forearms seemed to darken as he moved, as if responding to his agitation.
"Last weeks? Last months?"
His voice climbed half an octave, the timeline of disappointment stretching backward through their shared history. Sweat beaded at his temples despite the bunker's perpetual chill.
"Where has any of this shit gotten us, Sunni?"
He stopped abruptly, turning to face her with the suddenness of revelation. His hand sliced through the air, severing the space between them. Yasiin's gaze fixed on a point beyond her left shoulder, focusing on the framed photograph hanging on the wall—the three of them in Prospect Park, seasons ago, smiling with uncontrived joy. A moment preserved from before the fractures had begun to show.
"Maybe it doesn't want to be found,"
she replied, voice pitched low enough that it wouldn't carry over the running water.
"Maybe that's the point."
Sungara's expression shifted—skepticism and curiosity performing their familiar dance across her features. She moved to the kitchen, Yasiin following as if tethered by invisible filament. The space between them expanded and contracted with the precise rhythm of a living organism.
"The MONOMYTH isn't sentient," she said, pulling two glasses from the cabinet. "It's code. Complex, yes, but ultimately predictable."
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"Wait—you're blaming me for that? For where we are right now? Yaya, are you serious? This is why it's hard for me sometimes to take you seriously, cause you just say shit without thinking. I've been on Usagi, Choi, and the rest of the board of NO LOGO's necks for the past six weeks."
Sungara said, enumerating with terrible precision.
"Six fucking weeks. And, in those six weeks, Oya and I have been dealing with straight silence, while NO LOGO sits on the deal. Everyday we're—"
"But, hold up—hold up. You already know why that is though Sunni. We all do. They aren't going to give us access to The Wheel, and you know that. There isn't a single president within the OWN world council that has ever had access to that kind of power. And, you know why that is. Because, Usagi isn't going to ever let that happen. It's either the MONOMYTH continues as is…PLOT-HOLES and all. Or, we actually do something about it. And, fucking end this shit. This bullshit quest isn't going to get us to that ORIGINAL-NARRATIVE, if it even exists. These PLOT-HOLES are gonna eat us alive before we even get there. Why not go out on our own fiction? Why fight to rewrite someone elses and reclaim it as ours?"
Yasiin asked.
"I'm tired,"
she said, voice finding that perfect equilibrium between rage and exhaustion.
"Tired of carrying this vision alone. Tired of dragging you toward our future like deadweight. It's as if,"
she continued, positioning herself directly before him, close enough that their breath intermingled,
"you'd rather be anywhere else. Anywhere but here, with your wives, building this RETCON revolution with us."
Her hand rose to his face—not touching, but hovering millimeters from his skin, the heat of her palm registering against his cheek like phantom contact.
"As if you're just waiting for permission to leave."
"Sunni, I–I–I-I-I'm sorry, I fucked up. I was out of line. But, I still stand by what I said. We've been going in circles for too long now. Where does it end?—Why aren't we trying to end the MONOMYTH instead of rewriting it?"
Yasiin's tone oscillated between contrition and conviction, between remorse and defiance. Sungara stepped forward, her body reclaiming the center of the room with deliberate precision. The self-flagellation scars on her forearms seemed to darken as she moved. She inhaled—a drawn breath that pulled oxygen not merely into her lungs but from some deeper reservoir of certainty.
"Because,"
she said, the word emerging not as explanation but as invocation. Her hand rose to the exact spot where, months earlier, the three of them had stood in concentric circles of salt and iron filings, making promises that transcended mere verbal contract. Her fingers traced the invisible residue of that moment, collecting evidence from the air itself.
"Because,"
she repeated, the repetition functioning not as stutter but as liturgical response, calling back to a question that had never stopped being asked. Her posture shifted—shoulders expanding, spine elongating. Her eyes found Yasiin's with laser precision, pupils contracting to pinpoints of focused intensity. The space between them compressed, molecules rearranging themselves in response to the density of her purpose.
"Not that long ago,"
she continued,
"all three of us stood right here."
Her foot stamped once against the concrete floor—a single percussive note. She extended both hands now, palms upward, fingers splayed—the gesture of someone holding something too precious to fully contain.
"And, we agreed,"
each syllable emerged precisely measured, weighted with equal significance,
"we agreed...that we weren't ready for the MONOMYTH to end."
Her gaze expanded to include Oya now, creating a triangle of attention that bound the three of them.
"It's not enough,"
Sungara said, her hands closing suddenly into fists, then opening again like flowers blooming in accelerated time,
"to burn it down."
She began to move in a tight circle around them,
"If we can't build it back up again."
"Better."
The word emerged as both description and command, the T sound striking like flint against steel. Her pace accelerated slightly, the circle tightening as she moved around them. The air in her wake swirled with invisible currents, creating a microclimate of focused intent.
"Bolder. Blacker."
Her voice dropped half an octave, resonating now from somewhere deeper than mere physiology should allow. She completed the circle, returning to stand before them—not supplicant but hierophant, not questioning but proclaiming.
"Sunni, I hear you…I do, but you aren't listening… the PLOT-HOLES are still spreading out there. In here. In me. In you. In Oya. Yoyo, back me up here. You and I both know the LOGOS ain't stopping a single PLOT-HOLE, tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm wrong. What's the purpose? What's the point? Just, so we can recast-reboot-race-swap? What happens when the PLOT-HOLES come for us then Sunni? How do we escape INSIGIFICANCE if we're not the ones who end the MONOMYTH?"
Yasiin asked.
"Why should we forgo our birthright to the ORIGINAL NARRATIVE,"
she asked, though the question contained its own answer,
"for the fear of our own inconsistencies? Where's the faith in face of fear my NGGA? When did you switch up?"
She stepped closer still, entering the negative space between them, her body becoming conjunction rather than opposition. Yasiin absorbed Sungara's accusations like a man accustomed—resigned, resigned, and resistant. He did not flinch. Did not breathe. And still, the capillaries beneath his conjunctiva engorged with blood. While his nostrils flared precisely three millimeters, the involuntary dilation of a predator cataloging the chemical signatures of threat.
"What happens if we don't change the CONTINUITY in time Sunni? Yoyo?"
Yasiin's phonemes ricocheting against the bunker's acoustics, until comprehension itself seemed to disintegrate upon impact.
"Cause, y'all act like I'm exaggerating here. Please, tell me again, what happens if we fail?"
The timbre of his articulation suggested a diction ransacked by perpetual internal rehearsal—things unsaid, long since buried and masticated beyond recognition, swallowed, regurgitated, then reluctantly expectorated into the shared auditory field.
"ETERNAL-RECURRENCE."
Oya said with taxonomic specificity, each word spoken like bruised fruit.
"Exactly, which means unlike this little retcon revolution, the only real guarantee is that the KALACHAKRA will loop within the next three acts. Months. Years. Whatever. And all of this would have been for nothing. All of it. What now Sunni?! We can't beat the PLOT-HOLES. But, we can escape them with a little significance left to show for it. Why not just close our book altogether?"
"It's not that simple Yaya."
"The fuck it ain't. This has always been about escaping the KALACHAKRA's ETERNAL-RECURRENCE. We all agreed that when the PLOT-HOLES started, that we'd—-"
"I know what we agreed to, but things change. We've changed. Isn't that what HEROS-JOURNEY is all about?"
"But, what change? What actually changed though Sunni? We're still here. And, the PLOT-HOLES have only gotten bigger, so what actually changed here? The only shit that changed is you. The only one that changed is you. And, now we're stuck because of it."
"Enough with this apathy, Siin,"
Oya snapped impatiently.
"We all in this, like it or not. This detachment thing of yours is getting old n' tired quick."
"I'm exhausted,"
Sungara said,
"Straight up…tired of waiting/wading for our so-called—REAL-NGGA to fall in line. At some point, it starts to feel like COONERY."
The word exploded like a grenade, shrapnel embedding in Yasiin's psyche, setting him off like a string of dynamite, until he saw nothing but red. His anger was a force of nature, uncontained and cataclysmic. He pressed forward, drove himself to within inches of Sungara, until the heat of their rage threatened to melt the air between them. Sungara held her ground, unflinching, unwavering.
"Last time I checked, you weren't the only one who took the Oath. I've led this movement, step by fucking step, by your side—"
Yasiin fired back with the quickness of a seasoned soldier. Sungara interrupted with a precision born of prophecy.
"Stop being sensitive, you know what I mean. Y'all aren't the ones who have to sit with the Orisha's—"
Oya, in a flash, cut in.
"If you're having trouble with the Orisha's, you need to tell us. Otherwise, it's your role as Narrator to—"
Before Oya could finish, Yasiin's words rushed out like a tidal wave.
"Again, I thought this was ALL of our roles. That's how you sold me on it. That's the only reason why I agreed to go with this shit, instead of just sticking to our ORIGINAL PLAN, and bringing an end to this fucking HEROS JOURNEY with RAC—"
Oya's interjection was surgical.
"Stop bringing it up, Yaya. You know how she gets—"
"I've already told him, this is bigger than you Yaya…than us.."
Her hands rose to cup their faces—left palm against Yasiin's cheek, right against Oya's—creating a circuit of flesh completing itself. Sungara continued,
"And, you know this."
The statement emerged not as accusation but as reminder, calling forth knowledge already possessed but temporarily forgotten. Her hands slid from their faces to their shoulders, completing the triangle of connection. Oya's eyes met Sungara's, then Yasiin's, the unspoken understanding between them more profound than any verbal response could articulate. Sungara's hands moved to the small of their backs, gently pressing, drawing them closer until the three became a single intent.
"Nah, you're still missing the point Sunni…it's almost summer. And, we still don't know shit about the location of The Continuity Wheel. NOTHING. Faith?! Are you serious right now? Faith?"
The bunker's ventilation system cycled on, a mechanical exhalation that underscored his words. Yasiin's gaze fixed on Sungara with terrible specificity, pupils contracted to pinpoints.
"But, every other night it's the same call to adventure, with no pay-off...just a different Neuratech."
His palm pressed flat against his chest, pushing as if to contain every tired muscle Icarus regrets, every echo of an echo, every echo containing another, and every echo spoke, and every echo said in his ribcage.
"You don't think that maybe the KALACHAKRA is tryna tell you something?"
Yasiin muttered, peeling a strip of scalp from the dying YAKUBS occipital ridge. The hair comes away like rotten lace. Sungara's nostrils flared, the only visible breach in her composed exterior. Her fingers curled around the edge of her dress, the gold threads catching light as the fabric twisted in her grip.
"Tell me what, Yaya?"
Her question—soft, dangerous—sliced through the tension. She stepped forward, closing the distance he'd established.
"Huh? Tell me what? You got something else you rather be doing? Like, fucking corpses?"
Yasiin's restraint shattered. His voice exploded into the confined space, bouncing off concrete walls and returning with alien resonance.
"That the PLOT ain't working, Sunni!!!"
His hands rose to either side of his head, fingers splayed as if to physically contain the pressure building in his skull.
"What the fuck else? This shit ain't it."
The veins in his neck stood prominent, mapping the geography of his rage. He gestured toward the dying woman on the floor, a dismissive sweep that encompassed all their failed strategies. Yasiin counted the woman's deteriorating biometrics in the Rorschach patterns of her spilled lymph fluid. Twelve minutes since coherent speech. Eight since bladder release.
"None of these Neuratech's know a damn thing about the Wheel's location."
And, in this moment the body was a theatre, a head; an arrival of fire, not a church.
"We shouldn't be in this shit in the first place. We should be focused on spreading the LOGOS and ending t—"
Sungara's body transformed—the elegant couture figure becoming suddenly predatory. She crossed the remaining distance between them with the coiled swiftness of something ancient and terrible. Her finger jabbed the air inches from his face, the gesture as violent as any physical blow.
"I swear..."
Sungara said sharply interrupting her mid sentence. Her voice dropped to a register rarely deployed, vibrating with controlled fury.
"I swear, Yaya, if you bring up your fucking humanity-needs-to-end rhetoric again, I'm going to put your head through a wall."
Her eyes—those deep brown pools of ancestral judgment—fixed on him with unwavering intensity. For three heartbeats, neither blinked.
"I…I just can't do it tonight."
Something fractured in her tone—the first hint of exhaustion beneath the commanding exterior.
"Not again."
Her hand dropped, the gesture somehow both surrender and recalibration.
"Now, please—I'm trying to be nice..."
The softness of this admission hung in stark contrast to the violence of her previous threat.
"Get yo ass in the shower, stop feeling up that white bitch, and let's go."
She glanced toward the door, as if already projecting herself beyond this moment of conflict.
"Yoyo found another lead I wanna try tonight. This could be the break we've been waiting for."
A bitter laugh escaped Yasiin—not joyful but its inverse, the sound of hope curdling in real time. He shook his head, the movement slow and deliberate, like a man emerging from underwater.
"Sunni, you said that last time."
His voice had found a new register—quiet with accumulated disappointment.
"And, we're still here."
He stepped closer, entering her space with deliberate transgression.
"And, you wanna know why?"
The question required no answer; it was merely the breath before accusation.
"All, because you decided to switch up in the third-act, and expose our whole shit to Usagi and the rest of NO LOGO, just so you can play Colonizer and race-swap something we have no reason to continue."
Yasiin counts the decomposition stages to steady his hands. Early bloat: that stocky redhead dissolving into her own belt buckles. Black putrefaction: twin teenagers fused at the ribcage by careless cleaver work. The newest addition still whispers through split lips, mascara bleeding into the divot where her cheekbone should be. Sungara's expression transformed from controlled anger to pure, unfiltered rage—a mask dropping away to reveal something primal beneath. Her remaining eye tracks him through necrotic tissue.
"You know what…fuck you, Yaya!!"
Yasiin leaned forward until their faces were inches apart, his voice matching hers in volume and intensity, creating a feedback loop of fury.
"FUCK YOUUU!!!"
He said it. But, he failed to mean it. As, n acid reflux tang of guilt rose despite himself. The bunker's concrete seemed to vibrate with the force of their combined voices—anger creating greater space between them. From the doorway came a sound like thunder compressed into syllables. Oya's voice—rarely raised to this volume—cut through their conflict with physical force. While, a maggot colony erupts from the redhead YAKUB's naval when he shifts his weight. They cascade like living rice grains, seeking new rot. Some part of him notes the breed - Lucilia sericata, useful for wound debridement according to Amexem's field manuals. The rest watches the woman's fingers spider toward a shard of Neuratech glass.
"Uh-uh."
Yasiin's stomp cracks metacarpals with the wet snap of green branches.
"You don't get to clock out before the lesson."
Her scream becomes a prayer halfway up her throat. Yasiin hums along to the melody his mothers taught him - 1619 lullaby version, all cotton field bass notes and auction block harmony. The walls sweat harder. Something in the foundation creaks like a slave ship's hull.
The dying woman on the floor exhaled a ragged breath that none of them acknowledged—a punctuation mark in a conversation to which she was no longer relevant. Sungara's gaze moved between her partners, gauging their reactions, or lack thereof, to her suggestion. Yasiin avoided eye contact with Sungara as much as possible, it was the last place he could hide from her in. His response was non-verbal—a nod that was as much resignation as agreement. The woman's movements caught Sungara's attention, a sluggish, death-tinged distraction from the moment's fervor. Breaking away from the embrace, Sungara moved with swift authority, grabbing the woman by the neck and slamming her back in place.
"We're not finished yet,"
she declared, her words an indictment and a promise.
"You still need to answer for what you did to Yoyo last night."
Yasiin added, as Oya's fingers danced over the blood-smeared tools arrayed on the metal tray, a ballet of consideration. The white woman—the YAKUB—whimpers through her gag, a sound as insignificant as static on a dead channel. Oya doesn't feel satisfaction or regret, just the cool precision of someone calculating value, weighing worth against worth in a system built on artificial scarcity.
"You know what's funny?"
Oya says, not expecting or wanting an answer.
"This YAKUB bitch probably can't even afford a REBOOT."
The bunker's flickering lights cast Oya's shadow in multiples across the concrete walls, a pantheon of herself. The air tastes of copper and fear, the universal currency of the underground. The woman's eyes—blue, watery, desperate—follow Oya's every movement, like a compass needle stuck on magnetic north.
"We did our research,"
Oya continues, selecting and then dismissing a serrated blade.
"You barely keep up with your payments to NO LOGO INC's Neurabase CLOUD for backups, don't you?"
The YAKUB tries to speak through her gag, producing a wet, gurgling sound that echoes against the chrome panels of the soundproofed room. Her head is already a mess of matted blonde hair and dried blood—evidence of Yasiin's earlier work. A tremor runs through her shoulders, the body's last-ditch effort to preserve dignity when dignity is already a foreign concept.
"That's what makes you perfect."
Oya moves behind the woman tied to the steel chair, places her hands on her shoulders, and leans down to whisper in her ear.
"Your death won't flag as 'SIGNIFICANT' to the MONOMYTH."
The word "significant" hangs in the air like smoke, a concept that has been weaponized by the MONOMYTH to determine which lives matter and which don't. In Erehwon Absurdika, to be insignificant is to be invisible, and to be invisible is to be disposable. The YAKUB knows this—her eyes widen with the terrible recognition that her death has been calculated to be beneath notice.
"Do you know what that means?"
Oya circles back to face her, crouching down to eye level.
"It means no one's coming. No one's looking. No one even cares enough to notice the PLOT-HOLE your absence will create."
The woman's shoulders slump an imperceptible degree, and Oya recognizes the moment when hope finally exits the body. It's always the same—a slight deflation, as if some essential internal structure has collapsed. Some of their captives fight until the end. Some, like this one, simply surrender to the inevitable.
"It means, you're just an NPC. Not even a side character. Just... background. Furniture."
Oya stands again, her voice lowering to a contemplative murmur. Oya walks to the far wall, where a heavy fire axe hangs from two rusty hooks. It's an anachronism in this sterile, digital age—a physical solution to a physical problem. She lifts it, testing its weight. It feels ancient in her hands, a tool from before the MONOMYTH rewrote humanity's history, before NO LOGO INC commodified existence itself.
"But here's the thing,"
Oya says, turning back to face the woman.
"Even knowing how cosmically insignificant you are in the grand scheme of things, you still hurt my feelings with that Neurascan."
The YAKUB's expression shifts, confusion momentarily displacing terror. She doesn't remember any Neurascan, or at least can't place which one might have offended Oya. In Erehwon Absurdika, Neurascanners are everywhere—in shops, on streets, embedded in the very fabric of daily life—constantly assessing, constantly judging, constantly reinforcing the narrative.
"Oh, you don't remember?"
Oya laughs, a sound like glass breaking.
"Last night, at the club…Your Neuroscanner flagged me as having 'narrative inconsistencies.' You even called security."
The woman's eyes widen in recognition, then immediately narrow in denial—a physiological tell that Oya has learned to spot. The YAKUB remembers now, but is desperately trying to dissociate herself from that memory, as if by rejecting it she might somehow change her fate.
"And, that's the problem with you YAKUBS."
Oya's voice hardens as she approaches, axe held loosely at her side.
"You think you're just doing your job. Following protocol. But you're upholding the system that erased us. That's trying to erase us still."
The bunker feels suddenly smaller, the air thicker. The woman struggles against her restraints, the chair legs scraping against the concrete floor, a high-pitched sound like nails on a chalkboard.
"I could forgive your cosmic insignificance,"
Oya says, raising the axe.
"But I can't forgive what you tried to do to me."
The axe comes down in a perfect arc, a geometry of violence. It splits the woman's skull with a sound like an overripe fruit being crushed—wet, sudden, and final. The force of the blow nearly cleaves her head in two, exposing the pink-gray mass that once held her consciousness, her memories, her personhood. Blood sprays outward in a fan pattern, speckling Oya's face and chest like black freckles under the dim light.
The YAKUB's body convulses once, twice, then goes still. Her eyes, still open, reflect nothing. The Neuraloop at her temple flickers blue, then amber, then goes dark—a tiny electronic death rattle. Oya stands there, axe still embedded in the woman's skull, her breathing measured and calm. The adrenaline that flooded her system moments before is already receding, leaving behind only a cool, analytical awareness. Her hands should be shaking, but they're not. Her conscience should be screaming, but it's silent. She withdraws the axe with a wet, sucking sound and places it back on the tray of tools. Blood drips from its edge, forming a small puddle on the metal surface. Oya watches it spread, fascinated by its movement, the way it seeks the path of least resistance. This is what rebellion looks like in Erehwon Absurdika—not grand gestures or public demonstrations, but quiet acts of violence against a system that has made violence the only language it understands. Each YAKUB they eliminate is a sentence in a counter-narrative they're writing, word by bloody word. Oya wipes her hands on her pants, leaving dark smears on the fabric. She'll need to burn these clothes later, another ritual in their elaborate security protocol. No evidence, no trail, no PLOT-HOLES for the MONOMYTH to follow. She stares at the corpse, already calculating its disposal, the spaces it will need to fill in the tunnels beneath Erehwon Absurdika. Every death feeds the revolution, every corpse a brick in the foundation of the world they're trying to build. Or perhaps, the world they're trying to restore. The irony doesn't escape her—that in fighting the MONOMYTH's erasure of NGGA identity, they've become experts at erasure themselves. But some things need to be erased before others can be written. Yasiin leaps to his feet, his chair clattering to the concrete floor behind him. His fingers clench and unclench, a metronome of rage. The muscles in his jaw work silently, grinding emotion into something contained, something he can swallow if he must. He stares at Oya, at the blood freckling her dark skin like inverse stars, and beneath his anger is the hollow recognition of a pattern repeating itself—his wives and their perpetual interruptions, their casual theft of what he considers his.
"What the fuck, O?"
His voice is low, controlled, a dam holding back a flood.
"Not only do you two interrupt my personal time, but now you're stealing my kill?"
Oya wipes blood from her cheek, smearing it like war paint.
"It wasn't planned, Yaya."
The nickname—usually a salve—falls flat between them.
"She just... she pissed me off with that Neurascan."
Sungara leans against the wall, arms crossed, watching them with the detached interest of someone observing weather patterns. She wears her usual expression—half-amused, half-calculating, as if everyone else's emotions are variables in an equation only she can see.
"NGGA, I called dibs,"
Yasiin says, each word a precise stone dropped into still water.
"ENOUGH!!!"
Both Yasiin and Sungara turned toward her simultaneously, their private war temporarily suspended by this external interruption. There's a beat of silence, filled only with the soft mechanical hum of the air filtration system and the distant drip of blood from the axe onto the metal tray. The corpse of the YAKUB woman sits between them, already an irrelevant prop in their domestic drama. The tension between them was an old and familiar enemy, and before it could swallow them whole, Oya stepped between them, her body becoming physical conjunction—the living embodiment of "and" rather than "versus."
"Can we not do this again? Another night, the same damn back and forth."
Her voice was quicksilver, racing ahead of the impending storm. " Her movements were frantic, electric, as she placed herself between Yasiin and Sungara, her wiry frame, a bridge connecting their disparate islands of anger. Her hands rose to chest height, palms facing outward—the universal gesture of enough. She stepped between them, her body becoming physical conjunction—the living embodiment of "and" rather than "versus." Her hands rose to chest height, palms facing outward—the universal gesture of enough. She inhaled with deliberate precision, expanding her ribcage against the constraints of expectation. Her right foot slid forward six inches, planting itself with the certainty of mathematics. When she spoke, the words emerged not from her throat but from somewhere deeper—the place where decision calcifies into action. But Sungara's resolve was unyielding, a steel trap of ideology and commitment.
"Maybe…when you're actually taking the Merger serious,"
she said, each word a bullet fired into the heart of their relationship.
"Taking these Plot-Holes serious, then—"
Before she could finish, Oya, her head cocked in a comedic tilt, her eyebrows arched with mischievous intelligence, cut in.
"Wait…wait….wait—who the fuck are you talking to right now? Cause it can't be me. You don't get to question my loyalty. With all that I've done—All that I still do."
Oya's response was immediate, an apology tinged with the acidic regret of having crossed a line. She reformed her words, a diplomat of despair, but Yasiin had already reloaded his anger.
"No need to apologize. Sunni, you're right. I don't respect this Merger. But you already know this, so why are we debating it?"
His voice was an iron curtain, a barrier he dared them to cross. Oya looked at him, her eyes both challenging and pleading.
"Cut the I don't care about shit, I don't go outside routine. It's getting old, Yaya. We're all in this together now, whether you like it or not. I need you to look at where we are objectively, look at how far we've come Yaya,"
she said, her gaze moving from Yasiin to Sungara and back again, cataloging their similarities rather than their differences. Her fingers traced invisible connections between them, weaving reality from gesture.
"Look at us…."
The bunker's ventilation system cycled on, its mechanical breathing providing percussive accompaniment to her words. Oya's eyes narrowed, focusing on a point beyond their immediate conflict, seeing patterns neither could yet recognize.
"We can't forget the real enemy here…TIME. We keep forgetting that, sometimes it's clever: and, we start to hear the sounds the ear makes, but it doesn't make it real Yaya. Each one of us in this room…not to mention, all of our REAL-NGGAS out in the verse…all through Erehwon,"
she continued, her voice dropping to the register she reserved for undeniable truths,
"have executed their roles perfectly."
Her hand swept toward the room's darkened corner, acknowledging what had transpired there without fixating on specifics.
"Every. Single. One."
She took another step—not toward either of them but creating a third point of reference, transforming line into triangle. Oya's shoulders slumped with the precise geometry of exhaustion—not the temporary fatigue of a long day but the accumulated weight of recurring patterns. Her fingers released their grip on the doorframe, leaving behind faint impressions of moisture where her palms had pressed. She stepped into the room fully now, occupying the negative space between Yasiin and Sungara like a physical manifestation of conjunction.
"I want one night,"
she said, her voice descending to a register rarely deployed, each word emerging with deliberate space around it, as if to prevent contamination from what preceded and what followed. She raised her hand—not toward either of them but toward the ceiling, palm flat, fingers splayed—a gesture simultaneously surrendering and demanding. The room's harsh light sectioned her hand into quadrants of shadow and illumination.
"Where I don't have to play referee between you two."
Her eyes moved from Yasiin to Sungara and back again, not merely looking but cataloging, taking inventory of the particular stubbornness each wore like ceremonial garments. The bunker's ventilation system cycled on, its mechanical exhalation punctuating the silence that followed her words.
"One night,"
she repeated, and the repetition functioned not as emphasis but as measurement—a unit of time suddenly made tangible, something that could be held and examined.
"Is that too much?"
Her chest expanded with an inhalation that seemed to draw oxygen from some reservoir beyond the bunker's stale supply. The aggressive pink of her sweatshirt stretched across her collarbones, a chromatic counterargument to the monochrome tension filling the room.
"Look..."
Oya's lungs expanded like a revolution gathering force—air not merely inhaled but claimed, occupied, transformed into temporary autonomy. Her eyes closed for the precise duration of three heartbeats, lids shuttering against the world's many failures. When she exhaled, the sound carried ancestral knowledge of when to fight and when to survive by other means. The breath emerged not as surrender but as tactical repositioning—controlled, deliberate, weaponized patience. The muscles along her jawline unclenched one by one, like locks in a system being methodically disengaged. Her shoulders descended exactly 1.7 centimeters from their defensive height, a physical recalibration that suggested she'd performed this self-adjustment countless times—at work meetings, therapy sessions, traffic stops—anywhere Black emotion required strategic management to navigate white spaces. When her eyes reopened, they held a different light—the comedic glint had calcified into something both harder and more vulnerable. Her hands, previously clenched, now hung loose at her sides—the position of a fighter who knows when to conserve energy for battles that can actually be won. She approached them with the cautious deliberation of someone navigating a minefield, each step precisely calibrated. When she reached the midpoint between them, she extended both hands—left toward Sungara, right toward Yasiin—creating a physical triangle connecting their three bodies. Oya's voice shattered the escalating tension, her exclamation an authoritative rebuke. She advanced on Yasiin, her expression shifting from defiant to seductive. Her glare softened as she reached out, her hand touching his cheek, the gesture both tender and possessive. Yasiin flinched at the contact, his instinct to resist crumbling beneath the gravity of their shared history. Sungara drew him in, until Oya and Yasiin and Sungara were cheek to cheek, a triumvirate of complicated affection. Her voice was a lullaby sung in the language of compromise.
"I'm not trying to argue tonight. Oya's right. The problem isn't with us."
She and Oya turned to Yasiin, seeking his confirmation that their triad, their movement, their life was still on course. Despite the simmering pain of being unheard, of being unwanted, he could not deny them. The pull of their combined gravity was too strong. He stared into their eyes, into the abyss and the promise, and he caved, a collapsing star imploding into love.
"I love the both of you..."
The confession emerged not as sentiment but as established fact, geographical coordinates in the landscape of their shared existence.
"You love the both of you..."
Her fingertips found contact—Sungara's wrist, Yasiin's forearm—each touch transmitting both diagnosis and antidote. The hacker's nimbleness in her hands transformed into something more primordial, an older knowledge of how flesh responds to flesh. Their anger dissipated, replaced by an electric current of desire. Yasiin, Oya, and Sungara pulled each other into a passionate tangle, a flesh-and-blood rebuttal to the silent and growing distance between them. Their kiss was volcanic, an eruption of want and need and hope. The Yakub woman below them continued to bleed out, dragging her broken body across the floor in a futile, pitiful attempt to escape her imminent oblivion.
"Can we skip past will-they-won't-they,"
she continued, a subtle pressure in her grip drawing them incrementally closer,
"and just skip to the good part."
The fluorescent light caught the edges of her short-cropped hair, creating a momentary corona that seemed to pulse with the rhythm of her heartbeat. Her lips curved into a smile that contained both invitation and challenge, the expression of someone who had calculated all possible outcomes and selected the most efficient path to resolution.
"Where I'm buried in shots, and the both of you are finger fucking me in the back of some club? I don't care how many times we have to destroy and build, and destroy again. Sometimes we gotta be profoundly immoral and wicked. I know you know that. But fuck it, as long as we recognize our antagonists by name. And tonight, that antagonist is NO LOGO. Hopefully, by tomorrow it'll be something different. But, for right now…we can't keep crashing out at each other whenever shit starts to go left. We gotta stay on our square…together. We gotta hold each other down. Am I the only one, who remembers our fucking anniversary was coming up? Cause, right now, this isn't giving six year parabond-celebration. It's giving couples therapy. It's giving divorce. What are we going to do to fix this? Cause the back and forth is getting tired."
The abrupt change of subject is so typical of her—redirecting conflict toward purpose, recalibrating their attention. Yasiin's anger doesn't disappear, but it shifts, becoming something less immediate, a background radiation he's learned to live with.
"Nine years,"
Oya repeats, gratitude in her voice for the redirected conversation. She moves away from the corpse, closer to her partners.
"Hard to believe, isn't it? Nine years of TEAM-BAAKO."
The phrase—their private mantra—hangs in the air. TEAM-BAAKO. A unit, a front, a constellation of three points forming a single shape against the void of Erehwon Absurdika.
"So what do we want this year?"
Oya asks, her eyes moving from Sungara to Yasiin and back again.
"What are we thinking?"
The question stretches between them, deceptively casual. In their nine years together, anniversaries have become more than celebrations—they're strategic planning sessions, realignments of purpose, recommitments to the cause that brought them together. Sungara pushes herself off the wall, moving to the center of the room with the deliberate grace of someone who knows the weight of her every movement.
" I want us to try again."
The words land with the impact of a dropped stone. Yasiin's expression shutters closed, while Oya's opens in surprise. The corpse in the chair, head split and cooling, becomes a ██████ witness to this intimate moment.
"I want us to finally start our family," Sungara continues, her voice firm but gentle. "On our anniversary. I want us to try and get pregnant again."
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