-9-

All corporations are an extension of someone's ego at their source. Whether it is the mad rambling of an incompetent CEO, or the wise leadership of another, by any extent of time, lost in the manifold labyrinths of social chaos, or grown beyond what tribal cohesion a manager can muster, the organisation eventually collapses to the blind corners within the human ego. Rules, regulations, empty rhetoric and a grand illusion of an enemy, they only do so much as to keep the leadership collaborating, the workers going their usual routine of spending their lives for another. Symbols, mythical origins and magical culture, carefully crafted to prolong these systems, they do their earnest in this era. All seems another machine-perfected iteration of secret societies, as was on good old abandoned father Earth.

Varhas, Anax, Zanuvia, Lacata and every other Claimant is not spared of knowing the state of the universe as is. Corporations, upcoming failure, the self decaying nature of mankind, the culture derived from such failure and its shape, all is well known to them. To such concepts, they illuminate when light is required and conceal whenever darkness is longed for.

The old woman enters, she takes a calm look around the basalt cave and the many miniature ziggurats where the other three Delvers remain, half-there in their various poses, bending the space inbetween the silicon binding seals, the highways of light and the central processing megaforums.

Varhas opens his eyes. The black stone is but a breath away from his face. His forehead unsticks slowly from the rock and he pushes with both palms to steady himself. Sitting thus, ontop of his two folded legs, the knees complain, while he turns to speak to the old woman.

"I have met with Orichalcum. First I met with, upper management and then the CEO with his two Claimant-Narrativists." She stops. Her gray clothes are dry and the basket on her hands is plentiful with mussels, deep green seaweed and the unsorted, twisted shape of all things aquatic. "Are they pleased?" The man gets up and moves through the cave. He breathes, ready to speak. All the while, salty, peaceful breeze enters through the maw of the cave. "Very much so. Jorj is absolved of debt. They have decided to untether us completely. Us, apologies. I meant as in, me and Jorj. You know how, one man sees spectacle. Too much ego that makes a CEO say, that it is only me and Jorj that are the reason we won, when it is a team effort. I plead your case but..."

Varhas nears Zanuvia. Her old fingers inspect the hard black shells with that usual crudeness, born out of decades of habit.

"Don't apologize. I thought it was going to be like this before I decided we should team up. You got untethered from debt. What did Hab and Hippolus get?"

"Ten million credits each."

"That is barely enough for me to reach my husband's age."

"Again..."

"Don't. This I expected too."

"Now you are just being harsh. I did not think you despaired so when you were urging your husband to throw himself against that red butcher."

"We do everything to win in this world. Squeeze ourselves through tight places for a chance to be praised by fat, moronic nobodies whose ownership extends across celestial bodies. Let it be Varhas, let it be."

As the cold wind enters anew, dried and serene after a great tantrum, Varhas catches within his thinking, the other old woman.

Yesterday, he saw them both again, one young Contestant and half a withered woman in gray and purple, enter a small sailing boat and leave the calm harbour amidst the native stones.

Anyone's price to the world of mankind, it appears to Varhas, as a personal test, a custom-tailored sacrifice that is the most bitter and sweet. They have spent a lifetime together already but they will each be separated by the usual end. Perhaps, he imagines, what they sacrificed, is knowing which one of them will die first. Perhaps, their sacrifice is for one capable being to see his loved one decay in-front of his very eyes. Questioning every sunrise, if the common youth they shared was a lie.

In their imagined bitterness, Varhas remembers the contrast of the meeting he just had. How much, these experiences, some film-maker, or writer or another, could pass off and sell them to unfeeling, wealth-muted kings.

"Varhas. Varhas!"

"Sorry I was lost in, you know."

"What is next now?"

"Team. We will build a team, I have a few names. Anax and your daughter are screening some contestants now. I just hoped Mallat would reconsider before leaving. We three managed the borderline impossible."

"She is afraid. That is all."

"We all are, some mundane or serious way or another."

Zanuvia slides the knife between the slit of a sea mollusc. The hard shell opens up and the soft innards of inordinate and slimy texture, slide to a flat stone.

"Sure we do Varhas, but none of us is as tired of rolling the dice as her. Leave her be. We could just as easily lose the next fight and then forget all about retiring with ten million in the bank. Spiral down a slope of debt again, match after match trying to break even."

"You stood at exactly the same choice. What makes you want to continue?"

Her smile pushes further than her elasticity. The wrinkles fold over eachother and her eyes shine with the reflection of the open pale sky ahead. The many trinkets underneath the gray fabric are of narwhals, driftwood and crystallized depictions of a half-fish boy and many other such women. One such trinket escapes from the many folds at her chest. The lewd mermaid of yellowed-out bone hangs from a thin brown rope and it sways softly along to the playful yet stiff heave of the old woman's body.

"The rush. The rush keeps us going. Who would not want to spend eighty more years with that hunk?"

-

Voliphoe is on the long distance calling device, stepping up and down the wooden shack, while Jorj is enjoying the idleness away. The swaying wooden cabin goes back and forth. Wood creaks in the softness of the water planet and along go their bones to its tense sound.

Intimate, fantastical a creaking of joint and bone, so thinks Jorj about his body. A newfound experience. A creeping scare, idle and special that he enjoys for the first time in decades.

He turns to the woman, motioning for her to come near. She glances at him, but the phone is louder, making her turn her face away while softly pressing her fingers on the fleshy part of her temples.

Her problems have been so for a while. But Jorj thinks neither solution nor the next step. His mind wanders in the peace, going from softest worry to idle enjoyment of a setting sun over a flat waterline.

Something he has forgotten in this back and forth. That very lapse, takes him from industrial music, it seems to him, memories old to some question he has yet to ask of Varhas.