THE SOCIAL ORIGIN OF MULTICELLULARITY

Aggregative Prehistory and the Clonal Transition in the Animal Lineage

Keywords: multicellularity, aggregation, major transitions, clonal bottleneck, epigenetic differentiation, Choanoeca flexa, Capsaspora owczarzaki,scaffold hypothesis, Holozoa, animal origins

Abstract

Animal multicellularity has a social prehistory. The standard account of the major transition treats aggregative and clonal pathways as competing alternatives, crediting clonal development as the exclusive route to animal complexity. We argue this dichotomy is empirically inadequate for the animal lineage. Molecular evidence from unicellular holozoans — the closest living relatives of animals — shows that the developmental toolkit of metazoans was assembled in an aggregative social behavioral context before the clonal transition occurred, and that the regulatory transition at the metazoan origin was not the invention of new toolkit genes but the addition of enhancer-based, position-specific gene expression control onto socially assembled raw material. We call this the Social Scaffold Hypothesis, and distinguish two analytically separate contributions: aggregative behavior assembled the toolkit; the clonal bottleneck resolved the conflict problem that prevented the toolkit from scaling. Epigenetic specialization within clonal bodies instantiates the same organizational principle — identity constituted by relational position — using chromatin machinery that predates multicellularity. Oncogenesis demonstrates that the conflict problem the bottleneck deferred resurfaces as somatic mutation regenerates genetic heterogeneity, and that organisms evolve convergent solutions to a problem the clonal transition only postponed. The paper draws implications for major transitions theory, biological individuality, and the relationship between the two pathways, which this account reconstructs as temporal succession rather than competing alternatives.

1. Introduction

The origin of complex multicellular life from unicellular ancestors is one of the best-studied major transitions in evolutionary history. Two broad mechanisms have been proposed. In clonal development, daughter cells fail to separate after division, forming genetically identical collectives. In aggregative development, independently living cells come together voluntarily, forming collectives of genetically heterogeneous individuals. The dominant view holds that complex multicellularity has arisen exclusively through the clonal route. Aggregative collectives, on this account, have remained facultative, transient, and organizationally simple across half a billion years of evolution, and the standard inference is that genetic heterogeneity sets a hard ceiling on social complexity (Grosberg and Strathmann, 2007; Rokas, 2008). Brunet and King (2017) provide the most detailed current articulation of this framework for the animal lineage, proposing that animal multicellularity arose through modification of pre-existing ECM synthesis and cytokinesis regulation in clonal ancestors, with choanoflagellate rosette colonies as the appropriate model for the early animal condition.

This paper challenges that inference, though not the comparative pattern on which it rests. The pattern is real: no aggregative lineage has achieved animal-grade complexity. But the question of what aggregation was doing in the pre-animal lineage, and what molecular legacy it left behind, has not been adequately addressed in major transitions theory. Recent evidence from unicellular holozoans, the group of organisms most closely related to animals, complicates the picture in ways that matter for how the transition is understood.

Molecular profiling of Capsaspora owczarzaki shows that its aggregative life stage activates gene families whose animal orthologs govern tissue architecture, adhesion, and cell-cell signaling (Sebé-Pedrós et al., 2013). The regulatory genome of Capsaspora encodes these genes under a simpler, promoter-proximal architecture lacking the enhancer elements that permit positionally specific expression in animals (Sebé-Pedrós et al., 2016). Work on Choanoeca flexa documents multicellular sheet formation through aggregative, clonal, or combined mechanisms, with aggregation preceding clonal expansion under ecological stress conditions, and with kin discrimination between genetically distinct strains (Ros-Rocher et al., 2026). A fourth holozoan lineage, Chromosphaera perkinsii, independently forms spatially organized multicellular colonies through cleavage divisions, including symmetry breaking and co-existing distinct cell types (Olivetta et al., 2024), strengthening the inference that social and developmental behaviors were broadly distributed in the unicellular ancestor of animals.

We propose the Social Scaffold Hypothesis to integrate these findings. Its claim is that aggregative social organization in the pre-metazoan ancestor was the evolutionary context in which the molecular toolkit of animal development was assembled, and that the regulatory transition at the metazoan origin was not the invention of new toolkit genes but the addition of a new regulatory architecture onto socially assembled raw material. Crucially, the hypothesis separates two functions that the standard account conflates: aggregative behavior assembled the toolkit, while the clonal bottleneck resolved the conflict problem that prevented the toolkit from scaling. These are analytically distinct contributions from sequential stages of the same lineage, and recognizing their distinctness reframes the relationship between the two pathways from competition to succession. The clonal bottleneck did not create the toolkit. It removed the one constraint preventing the toolkit from being exploited at greater complexity.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the two pathways and the aggregative complexity ceiling. Section 3 develops the molecular evidence for the scaffold relationship. Section 4 examines epigenetic specialization in clonal bodies as an internal instance of social dynamics. Section 5 addresses oncogenesis as the re-emergence of the conflict problem within clonal organisms. Section 6 draws implications for major transitions theory and biological individuality. Section 7 addresses objections.

2. Two Pathways and a Persistent Ceiling

2.1 The Standard Dichotomy

Grosberg and Strathmann's (2007) influential review argued that the single-cell bottleneck was the key innovation enabling complex multicellularity. By resetting genetic composition at every generation, the bottleneck maximizes within-group relatedness, aligns cellular and organismal fitness, and suppresses the within-collective conflict that would otherwise favor selfish lineages over collective function. The comparative support for this argument is strong. All five eukaryotic lineages that independently achieved complex multicellularity, including animals, land plants, fungi, red algae, and brown algae, use clonal development as their primary organizational mode.

The aggregative lineages follow a different trajectory. Dictyostelium discoideum and its relatives in the Amoebozoa have practiced aggregative multicellularity for at least 600 million years. Under starvation stress, thousands of independent amoebae aggregate, differentiate into stalk cells that die without reproducing and spore cells that disperse, producing a coordinated fruiting body from genetically heterogeneous individuals. Myxobacteria show functionally analogous organization. Neither lineage, across half a billion years, has approached animal-grade complexity.

2.2 The Conflict Ceiling

The standard explanation for the aggregative ceiling is the cheater problem. Because aggregating cells are genetically non-identical, any lineage that preferentially occupies reproductive roles has higher fitness than cooperating neighbors. This produces persistent evolutionary pressure toward defection that clonal collectives do not face. Dictyostelium has evolved kin discrimination to manage this pressure. Two transmembrane proteins, TgrB1 and TgrC1, function as a molecular recognition system enabling cells to identify kin and preferentially aggregate with them (Hirose et al., 2011). Kin recognition constrains cheating but does not eliminate it. Cheater strains that circumvent recognition are routinely found in natural populations, and the arms race between recognition and circumvention is ongoing.

The management ceiling that results is structural, not contingent. The more complex the collective organization, the more internal conflict it can generate, and the more resources must be allocated to conflict management rather than collective function. Boomsma (2009) drew an instructive parallel: the single ancestral mating event in the Hymenoptera maximized within-colony relatedness to r = 0.75 between full sisters in haplodiploid species, approaching but not achieving the full fitness alignment of clonal development through a single-cell bottleneck. The comparison clarifies what the bottleneck uniquely accomplishes. Monogamy reduces heterogeneity at the founding event but cannot eliminate it; the bottleneck eliminates it entirely by passing all genetic information through a single cell. It should be noted that the relationship between high relatedness and eusociality in the Hymenoptera has been contested following Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson (2010), and the paper's use of this parallel is for the structural point about bottlenecks rather than as an endorsement of any position in that debate. What the aggregative lineages lack is not social organization but the structural reset of a clonal bottleneck, and no degree of elaboration of social conflict management substitutes for it. This is precisely what makes the scaffold hypothesis interesting: if the molecular toolkit was assembled in the aggregative context, the bottleneck's contribution was not to provide raw material but to remove the one constraint preventing that material from scaling.

The most sustained early argument that bounded individuality had to be evolutionarily won against persistent cellular conflict was made by Buss (1987), who showed that major features of animal developmental architecture — germ-cell sequestration, determinate cleavage, the early restriction of somatic cell fate — are best understood as adaptations evolved to suppress within-organism cell-lineage selection. On Buss’s account, the metazoan individual is not a starting condition but an evolutionary product, continuously re-manufactured by developmental systems whose function is as much conflict suppression as construction. The scaffold hypothesis extends this logic one stage earlier: if the bottleneck and its attendant developmental architecture were required to suppress conflict that had already been assembled, the pre-bottleneck lineage must have been one in which that conflict-generating molecular toolkit was elaborated. Buss identifies when the solution evolved; the scaffold hypothesis asks what the problem was built from.

2.3 The Puzzle the Standard Account Leaves Open

The standard account generates a clear prediction: complex multicellularity should arise from lineages with minimal social aggregative behavior, since genetic heterogeneity sets a ceiling on collective complexity. The more sophisticated a lineage's aggregative social organization, the more resources are consumed in conflict management and the less are available for collective functional elaboration. On this account, the pre-animal ancestor should have been primarily clonal in its multicellular tendencies, and aggregative behavior should either be absent from the holozoan clade or represent an independent, derived development within specific lineages after the animal transition.

The holozoan evidence does not fit this prediction. Aggregative behavior using the same molecular language as animal development is documented in at least five unicellular holozoan lineages, all of which are phylogenetically positioned as outgroups to animals and therefore represent ancestral conditions rather than derived ones. Capsaspora owczarzaki activates tyrosine kinase, integrin, and Hippo pathway genes during voluntary social aggregation. Choanoeca flexa forms multicellular sheets through aggregative processes with kin discrimination comparable to Dictyostelium's recognition systems. A third independent instance comes from Ministeria vibrans, a marine free-living filasterean that Li, Dharamshi et al. (2025, preprint) report forms stable homogeneous aggregates and deploys a broad set of animal multicellularity genes — cell adhesion, signaling, and transcriptional regulators — during the process, supporting the inference that the last unicellular ancestor of animals had the capacity to aggregate using the key genes of animal development. Two further lineages extend the distribution: Pigoraptor vietnamica and Pigoraptor chileana, novel predatory filastereans described by Hehenberger et al. (2017), form multicellular clusters as part of complex life histories and encode nearly complete integrin adhesomes including the IPP complex, scaffolding proteins, and receptor tyrosine kinases. Tikhonenkov et al. (2020) showed that Pigoraptor aggregations are driven by active chemical attraction and serve cooperative foraging on large eukaryotic prey — identifying predation pressure as a possible ecological driver of the behaviors in which the toolkit was assembled, one that complements intraspecific coordination as a selective context. The ecological selective pressures operating on the pre-metazoan ancestor were therefore multiple and convergent: cooperative foraging on large prey rewarded collective action; size-dependent predator evasion favored aggregation over solitary living; and environmental stress responses — including starvation and osmotic challenge — reliably induced the transition from dispersed to collective states. Each of these pressures would have selected for the molecular machinery of cell-cell adhesion, coordination, and collective responsiveness independently, and the holozoan toolkit accumulated at their intersection. What the scaffold hypothesis adds to this ecological picture is a molecular consequence: the genes elaborated for these collective functions are the same genes animal development would later co-opt, and their functional integration within the aggregative context — not merely their presence — is what made them useful raw material for the regulatory transition. The phylogenetic spread of five lineages within the holozoan clade — three filastereans, a choanoflagellate, and members of the newly characterized Pluriformea — is more consistent with an ancestral social condition than with independent derivation in each lineage. Deep-time corroboration comes from the Torridonian fossil Bicellum brasieri (approximately one billion years old), which displays two distinct cell types in spherical aggregates consistent with holozoan affinity and cell sorting topologically similar to cadherin-mediated adhesion (Strother et al., 2021), placing cell-type differentiation in the holozoan lineage more than 400 million years before animals. This is not a complication at the margins of the standard account — it is in direct tension with its core prediction about what the pre-animal ancestor should look like. The question the evidence forces is not how the aggregative behavior of holozoan relatives is compatible with the clonal transition but why the lineage destined for the clonal transition was, at the point of that transition, saturated with aggregative social behavior and the molecular tools it had assembled.

The scaffold hypothesis answers that question by separating two functions that the standard account conflates. Aggregative social behavior assembled the molecular toolkit. The clonal bottleneck resolved the conflict problem that prevented the toolkit from scaling. These are analytically distinct contributions, and recognizing their distinctness reframes the relationship between the two pathways: not competition between alternatives, but sequential stages of a single lineage, each doing different work toward the eventual outcome. What Section 3 must then show is whether the molecular evidence from unicellular holozoans actually supports the assembly claim — and whether the depth and integration of the toolkit overlap is sufficient to distinguish retention from convergent recruitment.

3. The Social Scaffold: Molecular Evidence

3.1 Capsaspora owczarzaki and the Pre-Assembled Toolkit

Capsaspora owczarzaki is a unicellular holozoan that lives as a symbiont in the haemolymph of the freshwater snail Biomphalaria glabrata. Its life cycle includes a unicellular filopodial stage, an aggregative stage in which cells form a colony with extracellular matrix, and a dormant cyst stage. Sebé-Pedrós et al. (2013) performed comparative transcriptomics across these life stages and found that the transition to aggregation is associated with significant upregulation of tyrosine kinase signaling components, integrin-mediated cell adhesion machinery, and elements of the Hippo pathway, the same gene families that coordinate tissue growth, cell adhesion, and multicellular patterning in animals. The authors note explicitly that the first multicellular animals could have recycled the genes controlling aggregation in their unicellular ancestors, a formulation that anticipates the scaffold hypothesis.

The scaffold hypothesis rests on a specific version of this claim, and the distinction matters. The argument is not simply that these gene families happen to be expressed during aggregation and happen to be useful in development — a coincidence that could reflect convergent recruitment of the most available molecular tools. The argument is that these genes were selected and functionally elaborated in the social aggregative context, and that the metazoan transition co-opted them with a new regulatory architecture rather than inventing equivalent tools from different raw material. The evidence that supports this stronger reading is the depth of the toolkit overlap. The shared gene families are not isolated adhesion molecules but functionally integrated signaling systems, including complete pathway architectures, whose animal versions retain the same interaction logic as their holozoan counterparts. Independent recruitment of entire integrated pathways for analogous functions is considerably less parsimonious than retention and regulatory repurposing of the same network.

That parsimony argument has been substantially strengthened by recent functional genetics. Phillips et al. (2022) developed CRISPR genome editing techniques for Capsaspora and used them to characterize the function of coYki, the Capsaspora ortholog of the Hippo pathway effector YAP/TAZ/Yorkie, a central regulator of tissue growth and a clinical oncogene in animals. The result was decisive: coYki loss-of-function mutants showed severe defects in the three-dimensional morphology and cytoskeletal organization of Capsaspora aggregates, with normal proliferation rates throughout. In animals, YAP/TAZ drives growth. In Capsaspora, it shapes multicellular aggregates and has no proliferative role. The ancestral function was aggregative morphology; the growth-regulatory role was acquired later, in the animal lineage. Phillips and Pan (2024) extended this analysis to the upstream Hippo kinase cascade: loss of the Hippo and Warts kinases produced identical cytoskeletal and aggregate-packing phenotypes and no proliferative effects, confirming that cytoskeletal regulation of aggregative architecture was the ancestral function of the entire pathway. This is functional evidence — not expression evidence — of a complete developmental signaling pathway being specifically elaborated for aggregative social function before the metazoan transition. It is the strongest available evidence that the toolkit genes were not merely present and available for convergent recruitment but were actively shaped by selection for aggregative behavior, and that their animal function represents derived co-option of an ancestrally social molecular system.

What would further confirm the stronger causal claim is evidence that Capsaspora's toolkit genes carry regulatory signatures of positive selection specifically in the aggregative context — not merely that they are expressed during aggregation, but that they were shaped by selection for aggregative function rather than retained under relaxed constraint. The Phillips findings provide strong functional support for this interpretation in the case of the Hippo pathway specifically, but the full toolkit encompasses integrin-ECM and tyrosine kinase networks whose ancestral functions in Capsaspora are not yet characterized at comparable genetic resolution. The hypothesis makes a distinct and testable prediction that extends beyond what current data adjudicate: a systematic demonstration that the interaction network topology of these pathways in Capsaspora mirrors the ancestral form of their animal counterparts, rather than a simpler or independently assembled configuration, would further distinguish retention from convergent recruitment. This gap should be understood as a research program the hypothesis generates, not as evidence against it — but it must be stated clearly.

The genome-level picture from Suga et al. (2013) supports the same interpretation. Capsaspora encodes a near-complete complement of animal multicellularity genes, organized in regulatory networks activated during the aggregative life stage. What the organism lacks is not the toolkit genes but the regulatory architecture that deploys them with the spatial precision animal development requires. Sebé-Pedrós et al. (2016) characterized this regulatory architecture directly. The Capsaspora genome encodes its developmental toolkit under small, promoter-proximal regulatory elements that respond to global environmental signals such as starvation and chemical inducers. The enhancers found in animals, which are distal regulatory elements capable of driving gene expression in specific cell types at specific developmental stages, are absent. The genome of Capsaspora is a toolkit without a positional operating system.

The regulatory gap between Capsaspora and animals is therefore larger than a simple gene count comparison suggests, but it is also more informative. It is not a gap in molecular raw material. It is a gap in the architecture that reads positional information and translates it into differential gene expression. This account locates the metazoan transition in the acquisition of that architecture, not in the prior assembly of the tools it reads.

3.2 Choanoeca flexa and the Living Intermediate

Choanoflagellates are the closest known unicellular relatives of animals. Among them, Choanoeca flexa is the most directly relevant. Brunet et al. (2019) showed that C. flexa forms multicellular cup-shaped sheets whose cells undergo coordinated inversion from concave to convex in response to darkness, driven by actomyosin contractility. The actomyosin machinery responsible is conserved with the morphogenetic machinery animals use for epithelial folding and tissue remodeling. This finding demonstrates that mechanical, tissue-level morphogenetic tools were present and functional in the choanoflagellate ancestor, extending the toolkit pre-assembly argument from cell adhesion and signaling genes to the physical machinery of morphogenesis.

More directly relevant to the argument here, Ros-Rocher et al. (2026) report that C. flexa multicellular sheets form through purely clonal processes, purely aggregative processes, or a combination of both depending on environmental conditions, specifically salinity levels in coastal splash pools that undergo repeated evaporation and rehydration cycles. Under rehydration, cells aggregate first and begin dividing second. The social assembly occurs under ecological stress; the clonal expansion consolidates the structure afterward. This sequence is what the scaffold hypothesis predicts in a lineage that has not yet committed fully to either mode. Sheets capture bacterial prey at twice the per-cell rate of dissociated single flagellates, providing a concrete selective rationale for why multicellularity is maintained in this organism.

The same study documents kin discrimination in C. flexa: cells from genetically distinct strains preferentially associate with their own strain when mixed. This places C. flexa in the same functional space as Dictyostelium's TgrB1/TgrC1 recognition system, and the co-occurrence of kin discrimination with retained clonal capacity identifies it as an organism navigating exactly this transition — one in which social conflict management and clonal structural solutions evolved in the same lineage simultaneously, neither yet displacing the other.

A fourth holozoan lineage provides a different kind of evidence. Chromosphaera perkinsii is an ichthyosporean, a group phylogenetically distinct from choanoflagellates and separated from them by substantial evolutionary distance within the holozoan clade. Olivetta et al. (2024) showed that Chromosphaera undergoes symmetry breaking and develops through cleavage divisions to form spatially organized colonies with distinct co-existing cell types. Chromosphaera is not aggregative — its relevance is not as another instance of the social pathway. Its relevance is as evidence against the convergence objection to the scaffold hypothesis. If the developmental toolkit genes shared between Capsaspora's aggregative stage and animal development were convergently recruited rather than homologously retained, one would not expect to find independent clonal multicellularity with genuine cell-type differentiation arising in a phylogenetically distant holozoan lineage using the same toolkit. The recurrence of differentiated multicellularity across the holozoan clade, from Capsaspora to Choanoeca to Chromosphaera, is more parsimoniously explained by an ancestral holozoan endowment of the toolkit than by repeated convergent recruitment. The Chromosphaera finding strengthens the toolkit distribution argument without adding another instance of the aggregative pathway.

3.3 The Regulatory Transition: A New Operating System on Old Hardware

The mechanistic question this account must answer is what specifically changed at the metazoan transition, given that the toolkit genes were already present and functional. Sebé-Pedrós et al. (2016) provide the most direct answer available. The transition from Capsaspora-type regulation to animal-type regulation involved the expansion of distal regulatory elements, enhancers, that can drive gene expression in a cell-type-specific and position-dependent manner. These elements read the combinatorial transcription factor environment of each cell, itself a product of the cell's position in the developing body, and translate it into a specific gene expression program. The same toolkit gene can be expressed in one spatial domain and silenced in an adjacent one, enabling the generation of distinct cell types from a uniform genomic substrate.

Complementary evidence comes from chromatin evolution. Grau-Bové et al. (2022) surveyed chromatin writer, eraser, and remodeler enzyme repertoires across eukaryotic diversity and found that the core machinery for placing and removing histone modifications is ancient, conserved across all eukaryotic lineages surveyed, and does not expand significantly at the multicellular transitions. What does expand markedly in lineages achieving complex multicellularity, including animals, streptophyte plants, and brown algae, is the repertoire of chromatin reader proteins: the domains that interpret histone modification states and translate them into transcriptional decisions. The cell's capacity to write contextual information onto its chromatin is phylogenetically old. What complex multicellularity added was an expanded vocabulary for reading that information and acting on it in cell-type-specific ways.

The picture that emerges from these two bodies of work is consistent. The pre-animal ancestor possessed the molecular toolkit, the chromatin writing machinery, and a basic capacity for contextual responsiveness. The metazoan transition added the regulatory architecture, enhancers on the DNA side and expanded reader domains on the chromatin interpretation side, that transformed a globally responsive system into a positionally specific one. Single-cell transcriptomic comparisons across early-branching animals confirm that this regulatory expansion scales with cell-type diversity: ctenophores, which have the most diverse cell types among the animals surveyed, show the strongest enrichment for distal regulatory elements relative to simpler animals whose regulation remains closer to the promoter-proximal mode of Capsaspora (Sebé-Pedrós et al., 2018) — a correlation consistent with the hypothesis that enhancer complexity enables cell-type diversity, though the causal direction is not definitively established by that data alone. Social responsiveness, the capacity to change gene expression in response to signals from neighboring cells, became developmental responsiveness, the capacity to acquire a stable, heritable cell-type identity from positional context within a growing collective. Coyle and King (2025) provide a comprehensive recent survey of regulatory transitions at the animal stem, confirming that developmental pathways in animals were built on core mechanisms inherited from protistan ancestors — a conclusion directly supportive of the scaffold hypothesis framing. They note, however, that whether distal regulatory elements truly emerged only in animals remains uncertain given incomplete sampling across unicellular holozoan diversity, a caution worth retaining: the current evidence from Capsaspora (Sebé-Pedrós et al., 2016), S. rosetta chromatin accessibility (Gahan et al., 2025), and three-dimensional genome architecture across multiple holozoan species (Kim et al., 2025) consistently finds no distal elements or chromatin loops, but the sample is not exhaustive.

Recent work at the level of three-dimensional genome architecture adds a second layer to the regulatory transition argument. It is not simply that Capsaspora lacks animal-type enhancers. It also lacks the physical genome folding mechanism that makes enhancer function possible: Kim et al. (2025) found that chromatin looping — the spatial contact between distal regulatory elements and their target promoters — is absent in unicellular holozoan relatives of animals and emerged specifically at the animal stem. The regulatory transition was therefore two steps, not one. The unicellular ancestor had the toolkit genes under simple promoter-proximal regulation and lacked both the distal regulatory elements and the genome architecture that would allow those elements to operate. Animal development required the assembly of both. This sharpens the account of what changed at the metazoan transition and what did not: the molecular tools were present; the regulatory reading apparatus was the innovation.

4. Epigenetic Specialization and the Internal Social Dynamic

4.1 Identity Without Genetic Difference

The preceding sections address how the developmental toolkit was assembled historically, at the phylogenetic scale, through aggregative social behavior in the pre-animal ancestor. A separate question operates at the organismal scale: once a complex clonal body exists, how does it generate hundreds of distinct, stable cell types from a single genome? This section argues that the mechanism, epigenetic differentiation, instantiates a structural logic similar to the one identified in the historical scaffold argument. The claim is not that epigenetic specialization is historically continuous with ancestral social dynamics — that is a stronger claim than the evidence supports — but that it operates by the same organizational principle: identity constituted by relational position rather than intrinsic properties. The molecular basis for treating this as more than structural analogy is that the chromatin machinery executing positional cell-fate determination is the same machinery that predates multicellularity and was already operating in social aggregative contexts in the unicellular ancestor — a shared molecular substrate, not merely a shared metaphor. The specific mechanism in each case differs enough to require that the connection be stated carefully, and the full treatment of the objection is deferred to Section 7.4.

The empirical foundation for this argument was laid in 1891, when Hans Driesch separated the first two blastomeres of a sea urchin embryo and found that each isolated cell developed into a complete, smaller larva rather than the predicted half-organism. The result directly falsified the prevailing mosaic model, in which each cell was presumed to carry only the developmental instructions for its own eventual fate. Driesch’s conclusion — that “the fate of a cell is a function of its position in the whole” — remains the foundational statement of the positional identity principle in developmental biology (Driesch, 1892). He called the embryo a “harmonious equipotential system”: every component has the full potential of the whole, and actual fate is determined not by intrinsic cellular properties but by location in the collective. Driesch eventually retreated into vitalism because he could not identify the mechanism by which position was read and fate specified. That mechanism is now understood: the chromatin machinery described below translates the signaling history accumulated from neighboring cells into stable, heritable gene expression states. What Driesch perceived as a mysterious positional force is the epigenetic state of the cell — its chromatin landscape shaped by the molecular signals it has received from its location in a growing body.

Every somatic cell in a mammalian body carries a complete copy of the genome. A hepatocyte encodes everything needed to be a neuron; a smooth muscle cell encodes everything needed to be an erythrocyte. Specialization is not achieved by distributing different genetic information to different cells. It is achieved by differentially silencing and activating the same information according to each cell's developmental history and position within tissue architecture. Histone modification, DNA methylation, chromatin remodeling, and non-coding RNA regulation together establish stable, mitotically heritable epigenetic states that determine which portions of the genome are accessible for transcription in a given cell.

These epigenetic states are written by signals from neighboring cells, by morphogen gradients encoding positional information, and by the signaling history the cell has accumulated through development. A cell's fate is a function of where it is and what its neighbors have told it. There is no intrinsic, context-independent property of the cell that determines whether it becomes a neuron or a glia. Cell identity is constituted relationally, by position in a social topology.

4.2 Ancient Machinery, New Function

The chromatin machinery underlying this positional constitution of identity is not an animal innovation. As Grau-Bové et al. (2022) document, the core writer-eraser-remodeler apparatus for histone modification is universal across eukaryotes, present and functional in unicellular lineages where it serves functions including stress response, cell cycle regulation, and transposable element suppression. Wang et al. (2021) showed that Dictyostelium, during transitions between its unicellular and aggregative multicellular states, undergoes significant changes in H3K4 methylation and H3K27 acetylation patterns at loci specifically active during the multicellular phase. Dictyostelium is an amoebozoan, phylogenetically distant from the holozoan lineage, and this evidence does not establish that the holozoan ancestor specifically used chromatin modification for social state-tracking. Holozoan-specific chromatin data is now available, however. Gahan et al. (2025) profiled chromatin modification states across the life cycle of Salpingoeca rosetta, the best-characterized unicellular choanoflagellate, and found that H3K27me3, deposited by Polycomb Repressive Complex 2, marks cell-type-specific genes in different life cycle states in a manner directly analogous to its silencing function in animal cell types. The same histone mark that in animals suppresses genes inappropriate for a given cell identity is already present and life-cycle-coupled in the closest unicellular relative of animals. Two qualifications constrain the scope of this finding. First, the chromatin accessibility profile of S. rosetta remains exclusively promoter-proximal, with no distal regulatory elements detected — independently corroborating, at the epigenetic level, the regulatory gap described in Section 3.3. Second, Capsaspora has secondarily lost both H3K9 and H3K27 methylation machinery, so the Gahan et al. (2025) data reflects the ancestral holozoan condition rather than the specific chromatin mechanism of Capsaspora itself, which likely operates through alternative modifications. The Dictyostelium evidence establishes that the general capacity for epigenetic responsiveness to collective transitions predates complex multicellularity — consistent with, though not proof of, an ancestral holozoan version of the same capacity — and the S. rosetta data now provides a holozoan-specific instance of that capacity operating at the level of histone modification.

On that qualified basis, the connection to the historical scaffold argument holds: the metazoan regulatory transition likely built on chromatin machinery that was already functionally coupled to collective behavioral states, whether or not the precise mechanism is recoverable from the Dictyostelium comparison. The expanded reader repertoire that Grau-Bové et al. (2022) identify as the animal-specific innovation made this contextual responsiveness positionally precise — the same chemical modifications driving different outcomes in cells occupying different positions. This reader expansion is the epigenetic correlate of the regulatory transition described in Section 3.3: just as the metazoan genome acquired distal regulatory elements and chromatin looping to translate positional transcription factor environments into cell-type-specific gene expression, it acquired the expanded chromatin reader vocabulary to translate histone modification states into stable, position-specific cell identities. The two transitions are two sides of the same innovation. The writers and erasers — the machinery for placing and removing histone marks — were already present in unicellular ancestors and were already coupled to collective behavioral states. What the animal stem added was not the capacity to write contextual information onto chromatin but the expanded vocabulary for reading and acting on that information in a position-dependent way. The operating system metaphor of Section 3.3 applies here directly: the pre-animal ancestor had the hardware and the data, but the animal-specific reader expansion was the software that could interpret them with positional precision. The internal social dynamic of the clonal body is built from ancient machinery redirected, not invented from scratch.

4.3 Specialization as Social Position

The practical consequence is that in a complex multicellular organism, cell fate is equivalent to social position. Two cells with identical genomes become different things because they occupy different locations in a network of signaling relationships. Disrupt the network by changing which cells are adjacent, altering a morphogen gradient, or blocking a juxtacrine signal, and cell fates change accordingly. The organism is not a collection of pre-specified cell types assembled in space. It is a relational topology of signaling relationships that generates cell types as emergent properties of position.

This is the central mechanism of developmental biology, not a peripheral observation about it. The major conceptual frameworks of the field, including Spemann's organizer concept, French flag positional information models, and lateral inhibition patterning, all describe how positional relational context generates distinct identities from a uniform genomic substrate. In this sense, the multicellular animal body is organized socially from within, by the same fundamental logic that organized the aggregative ancestor from without. The scaffold was replaced structurally but its organizational principle persisted.

The theoretical framework for this picture was sketched in advance of its molecular details by Waddington (1957), who proposed that differentiating cells move through a topographic landscape of branching developmental valleys — “chreodes” — whose stability is maintained against perturbation by the underlying regulatory network. A cell committed to a given fate occupies a deep basin in this landscape, and normal development is canalized: the same cell type emerges repeatedly despite variation in input signals. Kauffman (1993) formalized this intuition computationally, showing that gene regulatory networks of sufficient complexity spontaneously generate a small number of stable attractor states corresponding to distinct cell types, and that the number of attractors scales with genome size in a way that matches observed cell-type numbers across organisms. On this formalization, cell-type identity is an attractor in regulatory network dynamics, not the product of any single molecular component. The epigenetic machinery described in Section 4.2 — the chromatin writers, erasers, and readers, and the expanded reader repertoire that is the animal-specific innovation — is the mechanism that establishes and maintains these attractors: that deepens the developmental valleys and keeps the rolling marble from escaping. The stable, mitotically heritable cell identities that result are what Driesch called position-determined fates and Waddington called chreodes; they are what the molecular evidence shows to be chromatin states constituted by positional signal history. Section 5 will show what happens when the attractor fails.

5. Oncogenesis and the Return of Conflict

If the clonal bottleneck permanently resolved the conflict problem by establishing genetic identity among all collective members, social conflict dynamics should not recur within clonal bodies. Somatic mutation falsifies this expectation. Dividing cells accumulate mutations over an organism's lifetime, generating genetic divergence between daughter lineages. Cells whose mutation history includes loss of tumor suppressor function or activation of proto-oncogenes gain a proliferative advantage over their neighbors. In the structural terms of aggregative multicellularity, these are cheaters: cells that defect from the cooperative constraints of the collective to pursue a locally selfish replicative strategy, at the expense of collective function.

The organism's response to this re-emerging conflict is organized identically to the conflict management systems of aggregative collectives, implemented in different molecular substrate. TP53, a damage-response integrator that triggers apoptosis or senescence in cells experiencing DNA damage, oncogenic stress, or hypoxia, functions as a general gatekeeper against aberrant proliferative states; RB1 restricts cell cycle entry and suppresses progression past the G1 checkpoint, preventing cells from entering replication inappropriately. The functional parallel is to worker policing in eusocial insect colonies, where non-reproductive workers that attempt to lay eggs are attacked and their eggs destroyed by other workers.

The same structural logic operates at the level of immune surveillance and cell-contact signaling. The immune system surveils for cells displaying abnormal surface markers, identifying and destroying incipient tumor cells, as kin recognition in Dictyostelium excludes genetically foreign cells from the aggregate. Contact inhibition prevents cells from proliferating when surrounded by normal neighbors, as pheromonal suppression prevents reproductive development in worker insects. These are distinct mechanistic implementations of the same solution type: detection of deviation from cooperative constraint, followed by suppression or elimination of the deviating unit.

The parallel is not homology — tumor suppressor networks and insect worker policing share no common ancestral mechanism — nor is it mere analogy, which would make the comparison merely descriptive. It is structural convergence: when any collective of replicating units faces the same formal selection problem — maintaining cooperative integration against individually advantageous defection — a predictable solution space exists, and independent lineages find it. The claim is causal, not rhetorical: the same fitness logic produces similar regulatory architectures across unrelated lineages because the selective pressure is formally identical, not because the mechanisms share history. The consequence for the present argument is significant. The clonal bottleneck does not permanently solve the conflict problem. It defers it by eliminating the initial genetic heterogeneity that makes defection individually advantageous. Complexity at scale regenerates that heterogeneity through somatic mutation, and the conflict dynamics of the aggregative ancestor re-emerge within the body that had structurally escaped them. The organism then evolves, over evolutionary time, convergent solutions to a problem the bottleneck only postponed. Molecular evidence supports this characterization directly. Trigos et al. (2017) analyzed transcriptomes from 3,473 tumor samples across seven solid cancer types and found that tumors universally show systematic upregulation of genes shared with unicellular organisms alongside downregulation of genes that emerged specifically in metazoans. The transcriptomic age index of cancer cells shifts toward the unicellular ancestral condition. This is not a structural parallel between cancer and aggregative dynamics but direct evidence that oncogenesis involves the reactivation of unicellular gene expression programs as multicellular regulation fails. The atavism is molecular: the same gene networks that unicellular holozoan ancestors expressed during their free-living state are preferentially upregulated in cells that have lost the conflict-management architecture of the clonal body.

The phenomenon Trigos et al. document is atavism in the classical sense — not Haeckelian recapitulation, by which development adds new terminal stages that replay evolutionary history, but the de-repression of an ancestral regulatory program when the derived controls overlying it are removed (Gould, 1977). This reading connects the scaffold hypothesis to a distinct theoretical tradition in cancer biology. Davies and Lineweaver (2011) proposed that cancer tumors represent a reversion to ancestral unicellular or early multicellular gene expression programs, which they termed the “atavistic model” of cancer, and predicted that systematic transcriptomic comparisons would reveal phylogenetically ancient gene signatures preferentially active in tumors. Trigos et al. (2017) provide precisely that confirmation. The scaffold hypothesis supplies what the atavistic model requires but does not provide: a mechanistic historical account of what those ancestral programs were doing before the metazoan transition, and why they remain molecularly accessible in cells that have shed their multicellular regulatory controls. The atavism is not metaphorical but stratigraphic — a literal expression of evolutionary history layered into the genome, with the ancestral program persisting beneath the derived one. Gould distinguished recapitulation (adding ancestral stages to the end of development) from paedomorphosis (retaining ancestral juvenile features in derived adults); the Trigos finding is the regulatory analog of neither, but of a third possibility: the reactivation of an evolutionary precursor’s gene expression program when the multicellular regulatory architecture that suppressed it is dismantled by mutation. The tumor cell is not recapitulating by adding unicellular stages to its developmental trajectory. It is reverting — as the derived regulatory landscape is degraded — to an ancestral attractor state in gene regulatory network dynamics, the basin from which multicellularity lifted the lineage and to which cells return when the mechanisms sustaining the derived state fail. This framing clarifies why the Trigos finding is not merely an analogy between cancer and aggregative dynamics but a structural consequence of the scaffold relationship: the ancestral unicellular program was not erased by the metazoan transition but overwritten, and it resurfaces when the overwriting wears thin. The palimpsest metaphor of Section 6.3 is here made molecular.

This recurrence also illuminates the evolutionary arms race between oncogenes and tumor suppressor networks. Standard accounts frame this as a conflict between levels of selection, with cell-level selection favoring proliferation against organism-level selection favoring restraint. This framing adds a temporal dimension. This conflict is the re-emergence, within the body, of the same cheater-policing dynamics that governed the aggregative ancestor. The body contains, as a permanent structural tension, the same organizational challenge the clonal bottleneck was adopted to resolve.

6. Discussion

6.1 Revising the Major Transitions Framework

Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995) treated the clonal and aggregative routes to multicellularity as alternatives, crediting the clonal route with the successful transition; the specific mechanism enabling that success, the single-cell bottleneck, was most fully articulated by Grosberg and Strathmann (2007). This account does not dispute the outcome but offers a different account of how the successful route was reached. If the molecular toolkit of animal development was assembled during social aggregation in the pre-metazoan ancestor, the two routes are not independent alternatives that competed. They are stages in a temporal sequence, and understanding animal development requires understanding its aggregative prehistory.

The practical implication is that the most informative comparison for understanding animal origins is not animal versus non-animal but aggregative versus developmental expression of the same toolkit genes in unicellular holozoans. The field has begun moving in this direction, particularly following the Capsaspora and C. flexa studies, but the theoretical framing of what that comparison is looking for matters. If this account is correct, what the comparison should reveal is not independent recruitment of conserved genes but homologous expression of the same regulatory network in the ancestral social context and the derived developmental context.

A further implication follows from Queller’s (1997) distinction between fraternal and egalitarian major transitions. Fraternal transitions occur between genetically similar units — clonal kin whose shared identity aligns fitness and suppresses conflict; egalitarian transitions occur between unlike units whose cooperation pays through functional complementarity rather than kinship. Animal multicellularity is the paradigm case of a fraternal transition: the clonal bottleneck maximizes within-group relatedness, and developmental architecture suppresses the cell-lineage selection that would otherwise undermine it. The aggregative scaffolding stage described here fits neither category cleanly. The unicellular holozoan relatives of animals aggregate with conspecifics — the interaction is fraternal in kind — but with genetically heterogeneous partners, so the fitness alignment of true fraternal transitions is absent and the conflict ceiling persists. Major transitions theory currently lacks a well-developed category for this intermediate: cooperative social behavior among genetically non-identical conspecifics, deploying shared molecular tools in service of collective function, but without the structural reset that would make that function scale indefinitely. The scaffold hypothesis names what this intermediate contributed: not a completed major transition, but the assembly of the molecular toolkit that the completed transition would later deploy. The clonal bottleneck did not create a new toolkit; it fraternalized an existing one.

6.2 The Derived Status of Biological Individuality

A persistent assumption in evolutionary biology treats sociality as an anomaly requiring explanation against a background of competitive, asocial individuals. The Hamilton-Trivers tradition frames cooperation as a problem: given that natural selection favors individual fitness, how does cooperative behavior arise and persist? The scaffold hypothesis inverts the question for the animal lineage. Social aggregation is ancestral. The molecular toolkit for cooperation, adhesion, and collective coordination was assembled before clonal development, in organisms practicing voluntary social aggregation as a primary ecological strategy. The bounded, clonal individual is the derived state, produced by a specific structural solution to a specific conflict problem. What requires explanation is not the emergence of social behavior from asocial individuals but the emergence of stable individuality from a prior social substrate.

This inversion has antecedents that predate the molecular evidence by more than a century. Virchow (1858), whose cellular pathology established the cell as the fundamental unit of both life and disease, described the healthy organism as a “cellular democracy” — a republic of cells in which each member retains equal viability, and in which disease arises not as a curse on the whole but as a disruption of the cooperative civic order among cellular participants. Virchow’s political framing was explicitly inverted from the reigning atomism: the body is not an independent individual containing subordinate parts, but a collective whose coherence is achieved by the ongoing civic behavior of its components. The present account vindicates this framing mechanistically. The bounded animal individual is not the starting condition from which social behavior must be explained but the end product of a molecular history in which the social organization came first and the clonal individual was constructed on top of it. Buss (1987) made the same point from the developmental direction: the architecture of animal development — germ-cell sequestration, cleavage restrictions, the early silencing of alternative cell fates — is an evolved system for managing cellular conflict, not a neutral scaffold for constructing tissues. The individual animal body is, on both accounts, less an atom that entered into social relations than a society that achieved the appearance of individuality through structural conflict management. The molecular evidence from holozoan unicellular relatives of animals now provides the specific history of how that achievement was staged.

This inversion does not dissolve the questions the Hamilton-Trivers tradition asks. Kin selection, reciprocity, and multi-level selection remain valid frameworks for analyzing cooperation among pre-formed individuals. The inversion applies specifically to the question of origins: for the animal lineage, the tools of collective organization are phylogenetically prior to the bounded individual, and major transitions theory should account for that priority.

6.3 Biological Individuality and the Temporal Dimension

Godfrey-Smith (2009) proposed that individuality is a graded property defined by the degree to which a collective suppresses within-collective competition and becomes the primary unit of selection. Queller and Strassmann (2009) operationalized this with a cooperation-conflict two-dimensional framework in which organisms are defined by high cooperation and low conflict among components. Both frameworks are synchronic: they assess the current distribution of cooperation and conflict to determine the current degree of individuality.

This account adds a diachronic dimension to both frameworks. The individuality of a complex animal is not simply the current outcome of conflict suppression by the clonal bottleneck. It is the outcome of a layered sequence: social toolkit assembly in the aggregative ancestor, regulatory transition at the metazoan origin, bottleneck-enforced conflict suppression at the founding event, and secondary re-emergence of conflict through somatic mutation with corresponding evolution of policing systems. The individual animal is a palimpsest — a document written over repeatedly, where earlier inscriptions are not erased but persist beneath the surface and occasionally show through. Oncogenesis makes the conflict dynamics of the aggregative ancestor visible within the body. Developmental positional signaling makes the social constitution of identity visible within the growing embryo. The aggregative behavior of C. flexa makes the earliest inscription visible in a living relative. Individuality, on this account, is not a stable achieved state but an ongoing, historically layered process of conflict management.

7. Objections

7.1 Convergence Rather than Homology

The most direct objection is that aggregative behavior in Capsaspora and choanoflagellates is independently derived and does not reflect an ancestral holozoan condition. On this view, the overlap between aggregative toolkit deployment in these organisms and animal developmental genes reflects convergent recruitment of the most available molecular tools for cell-cell interaction, not the retention of a socially-assembled toolkit by the animal lineage.

Convergence cannot be definitively ruled out with currently available data. Several features of the evidence make it a less parsimonious account, however. The toolkit overlap extends across functionally integrated signaling systems, including the Hippo pathway, integrin-ECM interactions, and tyrosine kinase networks, rather than a few isolated cell-adhesion genes. Convergent recruitment of entire integrated pathways is considerably less probable than homologous retention. Critically, the Phillips et al. (2022, 2024) functional studies demonstrate that the Hippo pathway in Capsaspora is not merely present and expressed during aggregation but is genuinely required for normal aggregative morphology — the ancestral function was aggregative, and the growth-regulatory animal function was derived. This is the kind of evidence that distinguishes retention from convergent recruitment: a pathway shaped by selection for aggregative function is a pathway that was elaborated in that context, not independently recruited into it. The phylogenetic distribution of aggregative behavior deploying animal toolkit genes, now documented in at least five independent holozoan lineages — Capsaspora owczarzaki (Sebé-Pedrós et al., 2013), Choanoeca flexa (Ros-Rocher et al., 2026), Ministeria vibrans (Li et al., 2025, preprint), and two Pigoraptor species encoding near-complete integrin adhesomes (Hehenberger et al., 2017) — is more consistent with an ancestral social condition than with repeated convergent recruitment. Additionally, independent clonal multicellularity with cell-type differentiation in Chromosphaera (Olivetta et al., 2024), a lineage that is not aggregative, is more parsimoniously explained by ancestral toolkit distribution than by independent convergent recruitment of entire integrated signaling pathways in multiple holozoan lineages. Preliminary preprint evidence of kin discrimination in C. flexa, now confirmed in the published Ros-Rocher et al. (2026) study, adds a fourth feature more consistent with ancestral social dynamics than with independent convergent recruitment.

7.2 The Ceiling Still Requires Its Own Explanation

A second objection holds that even if this account correctly describes the molecular origins of the animal toolkit, the aggregative complexity ceiling requires a separate explanation. The fact that social aggregation provided the raw material for animal development does not explain why aggregative lineages themselves never achieved animal-grade complexity. The two facts could be independent.

This account does not replace the conflict explanation for the aggregative ceiling, and the two are compatible. Aggregative behavior assembled the toolkit; the conflict inherent in genetically heterogeneous collectives prevented that toolkit from scaling without the structural fix of the clonal bottleneck. This framing makes the ceiling more interpretively significant, not less. The ceiling is why the social route was superseded. The clonal bottleneck was not an invention that made new things possible from scratch but a structural solution to a specific problem, and the scaffold is what made that solution consequential. Without the pre-assembled toolkit, removing the conflict ceiling would have generated a more complex but still limited organism. The two facts are causally connected rather than independent. One complication deserves careful acknowledgment. Capsaspora lives as a symbiont in the haemolymph of Biomphalaria glabrata, and Ros-Rocher et al. (2023) showed that its aggregation is induced by host-derived lipid cues — lipoproteins and free phosphatidylcholine — rather than by intraspecific social signals. The transition is regulated and reversible, demonstrating that the aggregative program is a genuine biological response to specific triggers rather than passive cell stickiness, which is consistent with the toolkit genes having been shaped by selection for aggregative function. However, the host-derived trigger means that the relevant selective pressure on some gene families may have involved host-symbiont dynamics rather than intraspecific social coordination. This complication does not undermine the scaffold argument, since the hypothesis requires only that the aggregative state was the functional context in which toolkit genes were elaborated — a claim supported by the transcriptomic profile of that state regardless of what initiates it — but it prevents confident attribution of all toolkit elaboration specifically to intraspecific collective organization. Ministeria vibrans, a free-living filasterean without a symbiotic host, provides a cleaner case: Li et al. (2025) document aggregation and toolkit gene deployment in an organism with no known host-derived induction, strengthening the inference that aggregative toolkit assembly is not an artifact of the Capsaspora symbiosis.

7.3 Scope: Is This Specific to Animals?

Animal multicellularity is one of five independent clonal transitions. Do plants, fungi, red algae, and brown algae show evidence of an aggregative social precursor? The hypothesis, as currently evidenced, is specific to the animal lineage and should not be presented as a general revision of major transitions theory without qualification.

We accept this limitation. The evidence for a scaffold relationship is currently specific to the holozoan lineage and its unicellular relatives. Whether other clonal transitions involved similar social precursors is an open empirical question. The claim advanced here is that the standard dichotomy between aggregative and clonal pathways is empirically false for the animal lineage, and that this revision warrants updating the theoretical framework for at least this case. Given that the animal lineage accounts for the majority of complex multicellular organization on Earth, the revision is not narrow in its implications even if it remains lineage-specific in its current evidence.

7.4 The Epigenetic Parallel as Metaphor

A fourth objection targets Section 4 directly. The claim that epigenetic cell-type determination constitutes an 'internal social dynamic' conflates causal mechanism with metaphor. Cells are not voluntary agents; they do not choose to aggregate, negotiate roles, or defect. Positional context in a developing body is a physical-chemical fact, not a social relationship. On this view, framing epigenetic specialization as 'social' imports language from one domain into another without explanatory gain, and the paper's unity claim — that the same organizational logic operates at the historical and organismal scales — is a rhetorical move rather than a scientific one.

This objection has real force and Section 4 should be read in light of it. The paper does not claim that cells are social in the sense that organisms are social — the Section 4 opening explicitly states that the epigenetic argument is a structural analogy, not a claim of historical continuity. The substantive claim is narrower: first, that cell identity in a clonal body is constituted entirely by relational position rather than by intrinsic genomic properties, which is a precise empirical statement about the mechanism of differentiation; and second, that the chromatin machinery executing this positional constitution is shared with the machinery that tracked social context in aggregative ancestors, which is a molecular homology claim, not a metaphor. Whether these two facts warrant the phrase 'internal social dynamic' is a question of terminology. The underlying claims are separable from the terminology and stand independently. Readers who find the framing too liberal are free to read Section 4 as making two distinct points — one about developmental mechanism, one about molecular ancestry — that are unified by shared substrate rather than by any claim about agency or intentionality in cells.

8. Conclusion

The standard account of animal origins tells a story of structure defeating society. The clonal bottleneck suppresses the conflict that aggregative collectives cannot resolve, and developmental complexity follows from the resulting genetic uniformity. This account is accurate about outcomes but incomplete about sequence.

The molecular evidence from the closest unicellular relatives of animals places aggregative social organization before clonal development in the holozoan lineage, not as a competing strategy that was abandoned but as the context in which the developmental toolkit was assembled. Capsaspora activates animal developmental gene networks during voluntary social aggregation, and functional genetic studies of the Hippo pathway in Capsaspora show that the ancestral function of this signaling system was regulation of aggregate morphology, not proliferation — the growth-regulatory role was derived in the animal lineage (Phillips et al., 2022, 2024). Choanoeca flexa forms multicellular sheets through both aggregative and clonal modes, aggregating first under ecological stress and expanding clonally afterward (Ros-Rocher et al., 2026). The regulatory transition at the metazoan origin was the addition of enhancer-based, position-specific gene expression control, and of expanded chromatin reader repertoires, onto molecular raw material that aggregative ancestors had already assembled and deployed.

Within clonal bodies, the same ancestral chromatin machinery that — if the Dictyostelium evidence reflects a broader holozoan capacity — tracked social context in aggregative ancestors now constitutes cell identity from positional context: a shared molecular substrate underlying two instances of the same organizational principle, identity determined by relational position rather than intrinsic properties. This is not a claim of historical continuity between social and developmental dynamics, but of shared molecular ancestry and structural convergence on the same logic. The individual animal is in this sense the palimpsest described in Section 6.3: the conflict problem the bottleneck deferred re-emerges as somatic mutation regenerates genetic heterogeneity, and the organism responds with the convergent solutions the aggregative ancestor would have recognized.

Social organization was not what the animal lineage overcame on the way to complexity. It was the ground from which animal complexity grew, the scaffold that was overwritten but not erased, and the dynamic that resurfaces within the resulting organism whenever the structural solution to the conflict problem begins to fail. The animal lineage did not escape its social prehistory. It built a body around it.

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FISCHER (PART 2)

Field Report

Subject: Classification

FISCHER ― A large, sturdy and loud fella who wears flip-flops and pajamas. Driven by laziness, snacks, and horniness. Accidentally mistaken for a post-structuralist genius. Upcoming expert in the history of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. What more can I say about him. His gravity overpowers any situation and everyone's characterization ends up revolving around their history and relation to him.

SUSSIE ― Nursery school student and Fisher's girlfriend. They talk a lot, likes to show her tits a little bit more than she is able to acknowledge and grew up in the same hometown as him. Has pink pajamas and a cat named Oliver. Calls Fischer "Marcus" when really serious. Seems to be the only one that has anything resembling a leash on him.

MYSTERIOUS GIRL ― Also known as Lidia sometimes. Fischer has a massive crush on her that he himself inadvertently created by the use of hyperstition. She is shy, cute, normal and always busy. Ate Fischer's peanuts that one time. Stuck in self-inflicted guilt loops. I would say more about her but she has to go to an academic class right now.

JEREMY ― Smart guy that follows Fischer's steps. Has extensive technical knowledge of everything the plot requires him to. Does the majority of the work. Lacks character. Surprisingly unremarkable. Interprets Fischer's words or fills in for him when needed. Walks too slowly.

FATE ― Probably not her real name. Blue-haired hacker pixie maniac girl that Fischer is totally oblivious about. Probably has other stuff going on. Being part of the retarded academic avengers is her version of "having friends". Will fight if prompted.

ROBERT ― Handsome violinist. Nihilist that eats apples whole. Experimented with going barefoot for a while. Has commitment but lacks focus, if that makes any sense. Joined the group because he's dead inside but is working to fix it.

BAREFOOT GUY ― Has a surprising amount of characterization for someone whose only defining trait is not wearing any shoes. Real name is a mystery. Does not particularly care about wearing or not wearing shoes.

CLOWNIE ― Takes himself too seriously and that's why he swerves (that's a real verb look it up) between acting out as a clown and writing pretentiously about nothing. He feels left out.

JESSICA ― Cafeteria waitress Fischer recruited. Loves trashy reality TV shows and doing her nails. Always knows when two people are going to have sex. And that's about it, really.

DOCTOR PROFESSOR MILLER ― Architect of the whole project. Head of a history department even though he is allegedly a physicist. References lots of things and people and places. Is convinced there's something missing in knowledge and thinks Fischer is a genius that can figure it out.

ANDREW SCHNEIDER ― Miller's German evil counterpart. Everyone's got one. He parallels a similar program, with regular smart and proficient students instead of strange oddballs that do nothing all day. Always fails. The origin of their antagonism is yet to be revealed but it was obviously not planned at all from the start.

"J" ― A patient in the university asylum. Conspiracy theorist. Believes the world is a simulation run by memes. Is like, super smart. Not clear what she is doing here, but seems quite comfortable between the walls. Likes apple juice (without pulp).

MIKE WAZOWSKI ― Unknown man behind an avatar. User of prediction markets that changed the game when he started directly interfering with the participants of Love Archipelago.

LUCA ― Who? I think it had something to do with waifus.

CARLOS ― Gardener who Fischer recruited.

OLD LADY ― Old lady who Fischer recruited.

FRANCIS ― Another professor. Is old. Remembers things. More of a wildcard than you would expect.

GILBERTA ― Lady with a hat. Probably not a professor. Has many grandchildren.

BERTA ― Flunked Fischer. Thinks Miller is full of shit. She's probably right.

SLINGER ― Calls Fischer "Adrian" for some reason. Just a nuisance, really. He's a tryhard. We hate him.

JAY ― Plays acoustic guitar shirtless. Fischer wants to maul him with his bare hands.

FISCHER’S GRANDPA ― The source of all Fischer’s wisdom.

MOTH MAN ― Crazy dude that can't stop mentioning that silk moths can't fly.

TEDDY ― A teddy bear holding a heart. Fischer does not trust him.

FISCHER AI ― A state of the art LLM trained on reality TV and Fischer's works and words.

THE HOPLITE GUYS ― They talk only about hoplite battles. On their way to make it a national sport.

MILITARY GUY ― A man that Fischer once stumbled upon but has forgotten about already.

KOLMOGOROV ― Probably just a plot device, but who knows. From Santa Fe.

ANANSI ― African looking weird guy with painted nails.

OLIVER THE CAT ― A full-time cat named Oliver.

CHAPTER 31 ― SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION

Humans are animals of habit, and Fischer was the animalest of them all. After the initial shock, in a couple of weeks he had completely adopted his new old life of going to classes, sleeping in them, near-flunking everything, procrastinating homework and the whole student experience package. Honestly, it wasn't that bad. Sure, he had to do things. And go to places. But it was alright. Because of a combination of the legendary talk and being part of the weird group at the cafeteria doing random nonsense he had gained some notoriety, and so people now seemed to know him, but if he even realized that, he managed to look rude enough so nobody would really bother him too much. And yes, something was somewhat missing, but he was always losing things so he was used to that feeling, and perhaps that is what he thought he was going through.

But his old companions were having a harder time.

Most of them were excellent students, and some of them didn't even stop going to class in the first place. It was something else, this "something missing" that was as elusive as important to them. They scattered that day, and attempts at reunion, even informal ones, were met with general disinterest; as each one of them was going through what Jessica precisely defined as "their own shit".

―Hey!

―Hey.

A random dude with a badly adjusted suit and a horrible hairstyle consisting mostly of, what seemed to be an oily substance approached him in the hallway. Fischer was just walking like a tortoise, carrying a huge number of books in his backpack in an attempt that doing so would somewhat better transmit their contents to his head without having to actually read them.

―Do... I know you?

―Marcus please, we have been talking daily for months.

―Don't call me that.

―Alright. So?

―I have no idea who you are.

―I'm Daniel.

―You don't look like a Daniel. And I don't know anyone with that name.

He sighed.

―I'm barefoot guy.

Fischer looked at him straight in the eyes. And then at his feet. He was wearing moccasins.

Then he looked at him in the eyes again. He could see a kind of resemblance, but not much.

―No you're not.

―Yes, I am.

―You're not barefoot. Like, at all.

―Yes, I know! Right? I was thinking, maybe this is the moment to sort of reinvent myself. Be more assertive, relational, charismatic. Wear socks and dress nice. Don't you think?

He looked at him. And then at his feet.

―No. God no. Please. Don't do that to yourself. Oh my God. Fuck off, I don't know any Daniel.

And he left. So that was disturbing. Then he met Jeremy. That went well. He desired to be talking to barefoot guy once again. He was a husk of a man. Dead in the eyes, looking busy, with a girl on his arm, dressing in a pink polo, smiling and on the way to play something he called "padel". Fischer had to excuse himself to run away from the scene to prevent anyone seeing him crying. Which was unfortunate, because then he met Robert. They walked past each other, saying nothing but maintaining eye contact the whole time. Fischer could never get a read on that guy. Too honest. To heal himself from all that intense social life, he went to the cafeteria in search of some milkshake. Which was unfortunate, because Jessica was back working there. There was no TV now, because she herself had taken it away: a bad move, because she spent all day here, and not in her home where the stolen cable was. They exchanged a few words, but not too many. He hadn't been keeping up with his series and she had no relevant gossip to share. The cafeteria reform was underway, and there was a lot of noise going on, so he decided to leave sooner than later, taking a strange detour to ensure he wouldn't meet anyone else that was known to him ever again.

A couple of encounters later, that pent-up aggression we were talking about earlier came back to him. He was tired, of pretending to care, of people telling him to do things, of being reminded constantly about what he was beginning to understand was his own failure. He was turning from red to purple and you could see the veins of his neck preparing to explode like that time where he had a tantrum in front of a couple of dozen people. He curled into a ball and started walking faster and faster, going nowhere with utmost haste.

It was then when he stumbled upon mysterious girl.

And I mean literally. I mean the guy almost tackled her. A few people approached to ensure they were alright. Well, that she was alright. And she was, a bit upheaved about the encounter but fine. It knocked her out of whatever she was doing, wherever she was going, and however she previously felt like that day. Fischer had that effect on women. Just that usually, not in the good sense.

―Oh it's you! I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I wasn't looking where I was going and...

SHE was apologizing. Unbelievable. Some people's apologetic self-defense mechanisms eat them whole.

It's not shyness, it's not insecurity. It's just who they are. And that was the dark truth behind the mysterious girl: she was a fairly normal person. That missed out on a couple of experiences for personal character development. And as a result, would spend her whole life looking for an elusive and non-existent deeper true self. Or something like that.

―I see you're back to classes.

―I am. How do you know?

―Well because of the backpack, and your mood, and the way you walk...

―Oh...

―And because we go to the same one on thursday morning, you silly boy.

She was enjoying herself. That was unusual.

―But you're usually sleeping.

And then, something highly unusual and unexpected happened. Have you ever heard about spontaneous combustion? It's a medical condition by which someone via no apparent source or explanation just bursts into flames. Very controversial topic, pretty much agreed by everyone to be a myth, combination of superstition and medieval medical nonsense. But still, some cases are still debated and there are several theories about possible mechanisms that could theoretically trigger such a thing. For example, as it mainly happens to alcoholic people so there's that: alcohol burns, so alcoholic people sometimes burn too. Flawless argument. Also there's a lot of crap in the literature about phosphate or subcutaneous fat acting as wax from a candle and more plausible things. But I think the general "logic" behind the supposed phenomenon is that, given that there are uncountable chemical and quanticophysical and whatnot reactions taking place in our bodies in intricate chain processes and reactions all the time, it's not so wild to think that from time to time the whole thing goes haywire and just consumes itself. Even if by pure chance. It would be hubris to assume we understand everything about our own biology and the universe. Some stuff just happens, and there's no clear explanation why.

So, no. They didn't burst into flames. But they did start making out. Like, a lot.

Yes I don't know! I don't know what happened, I missed a second and it was happening. I know I'm the one writing the story but stuff sometimes happens and that's it. Have you not been listening to the spontaneous combustion thing? Anyway. People started to turn around to watch. They almost knocked down a table and everything, as they were moving erratically around the available space. It wasn't until someone shouted something about them going to a hotel that they snapped a little bit out of it and decided that Fischer had a room five minutes from the campus and they were going to fuck each other a lot so better do it somewhere else. So they didn't say anything, just agreed to the plan in silence and started walking, almost running, as if in a trance. In about twenty seconds in plot time they reached the door and started a messy and elaborate dance that consisted of juggling between opening it, snogging violently, and removing random parts of their or the other's clothing. They must have been making a lot of noise, because, once again, people emerged from inside the other rooms to see what on earth was going on. Luckily they somewhat succeeded, and a very red mysterious girl with half a bra put on, and a very red fischer boy missing his shirt, a shoe and a sock but not from the same foot entered the apartment.

CHAPTER 32 ― SINNERS

Fate was staring at them from across the room. With big headphones on that she was now slowly removing, sitting on the floor holding a controller, playing the oldstation that fischer took from the cafeteria not so long ago. They froze in place. She started mumbling.

―Oh, you know I'm sorry didn't want to only wanted to, some videogames! Hello Lidia, so long see you don't mind I just the window door closed you know what I'm just gonna go but first let me take my I was making spaghetti you know what you eat them I'm not hungry, HAHA! What am I should just go you guys have fun. Call me! Not like that but I mean, we're not hooking up we're just friends it's not like you guys were going to can I shut up? I'll shut up.

Mysterious Lidia Girl (we will call her Lidia, for short) and Fischer looked at each other.

They were absolutely unsure about what to do or what to say. Something spontaneously combusting suddenly ran out of whatever it was using to combust or perhaps the delayed wave of realization about what just happened reached their minds before they could actually have something to feel guilty about. Reality is such a buzzkill. While it was happening it was fine, but now, even if kicking the unexpected visitor out and continuing whatever was going on was a very realistic and feasible possibility, it would feel like premeditated arson feels to pleaders of accidental manslaughter. I think the blue haired girl realized what I just said and the once in a lifetime event she effectively interrupted, because of the combined force of conflicting circumstances and emotions, she started crying.

―Fate! What's going on?

―I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I just wanted to... I've been so...

Picking up the mood, without daring to speak or think, Fischer started to pick up the scattered pieces of clothing around the premises and tending to a burning pot of pasta while Lidia put her bra where it fully belonged and tended to their mutual friend. He didn't say much, limited himself to listen and be present while busy doing other things and not looking directly at anyone at any time. They had dinner, played some videogames, comforted fate about feeling lonely and like she had no friends now that their circus ended and perhaps she never did because nobody reached out to her since then and maybe she was just an accessory part of something like a house plant, listened to some music, said goodbye to lidia when she came up with a plausible excuse, and when that happened they both sighed at the same time. Everything very civilized.

―What the fuck are you doing here?!

―I already told you! I sneaked here to play videogames! How the fuck should I know you were going to come here in class hours with a fucking girl to fucking fuck her? You could've said something!

―I could have said something about something I didn't have any way to know would happen so someone who is not supposed to be in my house at all like ever knows?

―Alright that sounds a bit off.

―It's unbelievable! Why are you here to play videogames at all?!

―I gave you the console.

―You said you were not going to use it.

―I changed my mind.

―No you didn't. Why did you really come here?

―I didn't want to play alone, alright?

―Unbelievable. You fucking donkey.

―Hey! You fucking pig! Didn't you have a girlfriend?

―What's that gotta do with anything? If you're lonely just fucking call a friend or something!

―I have no friends!

―I am your friend you stupid libtard retard stupid blue pink...

He lost steam midway through the sentence. Don't get alarmed, it's just how they talk to each other.

―Oh.

Fischer was exhausted. Fate really was somewhat at the end of her rope.

―I'm sorry.

―It's fine.

For a lack of a better thing to say or to do, they continued playing videogames.

―So... Lidia. Uhh?

―Shut up.

―I didn't know that was a thing.

―It's not a thing.

―It seems to me it is a thing. How did that happen?

―I dunno.

―Come on. Tell me.

―No, really. I don't know.

Spontaneous combustion.

―So I really did mess it up, didn't I.

―Yeah, I mean, you kind of did.

―Don't worry, she will come back.

Fischer pondered for a few seconds.

―I am not so sure about that.

They wouldn't meet again for the foreseeable future.

Eventually they fell asleep controller in hand, and she left the morning after. They made this a sort of regular unplanned thing. The appearing and playing videogames, not the cockblocking part. So that was a fine recurring gag. But Fischer was miserable the day after. Not only because of the usual reason he was miserable going to class and doing homework and everything else, but because he was thinking about the day before full time. Sussie, Lidia, Miller, Jeremy, Barefoot Guy. The worst was the teddy bear holding a heart in his room watching him with piercing accusing eyes. Then, he couldn't sleep. Wasn't even hungry. Threw the bear through the window. And went back to recover it. Several times. A guy smoking on the balcony next to him watched the spectacle with detached amusement. Until Fischer noticed and threw Teddy to him too. And then a rock he found. Minutes later, he knocked at the door, apologized and tried to retrieve it. But the poor black-eyed fella was having none of it, and Fischer went back to bed to not sleep one more time only to discover all that exercise actually succeeded, if not at making any tangible thinking, at least at making him sleepy. Which gave him an idea, just a second before actually falling asleep.

CHAPTER 33 ― MR. BEANS

―So this is the plan.

Said Fischer, while putting a huge assemble of paper on the table, knocking several fully served drinks. Jeremy was watching and listening to him dumbfounded, his girlfriend next to him, really scared of the impromptu visit. Being physically tired made Fischer not think, get sleepy and forget girls. So the plan was to make sports. All of them. More than one at the same time, if possible.

―Man, I'm happy you want to get fit. But I don't really know where this comes from or how it involves me exactly.

―Shut up and listen. Here are all the possible activities on campus. There has to be a combination of those that gets me busy all the time. Also you play tennis and I need tips. Do people have their own racket or...

―Padel.

―What?

―I don't play tennis I play padel. And yes you need your own one.

―Dammit. What about the combination? Do you think it's possible?

―I mean, more than possible than impossible in the possible-impossible spectrum.

―Great! Where can I start?

―But Fischer, the problem is not that. The problem is that you will literally die if you do everything here.

―I don't care about that right now. What I care about now is getting busy.

―If you want to get your mind off things you can always study, or read, or...

―Doesn't work. I need to move. What do I do, where do I go?

―Well... there's interpretative dancing in half an hour at the theatre...

―Half an hour?! No, no, no. That's too much time. What else, what else.

―Nothing, really... Unless you want to jog there but that would be ridicul―

But Fischer was already sprinting full speed out of the cafeteria and through the forest.

After some very surprisingly productive interpretative dance, improv mime comedy, street basketball, spontaneous running, kung fu crossfit and intensive yoga classes Fischer woke up the next day unable to remember anything he thought or said the last day, as planned, and also completely unable to move. He sprouted a mixture of loud grunts from his bed, but that was about it. It took him half the morning to get up, and the other half to cross the room and open the fridge. He obliterated a two liter bottle of frozen water, messing it up with his hands to the point of no return. Then looked at what else was in there. Stood there a second, maybe a minute, staring at the void.

―No milk.

So he left, still in whatever he was wearing when he fell asleep, leaving the door to his room wide open behind him.

By some miracle he made it to the store. Went directly into the huge fridges where yogurts and stuff are, opened it, took a giant jug of milk and started chugging from it then and there. A minute later he was sitting on the floor of the store, with the jug still in his hand next to him and his eyes lost in the distance. Moment by moment, he began to regain consciousness. Real consciousness. With executive function and all the theory of mind perks. Everything started to come back to him. Just this time, he couldn't move. It was just him and his personal physical and mental agony, as god intended. While he was lost in what Kierkegaard once described as "his own shit" the customers regarded him as some part of the furniture, a kind of permanent exposition of performance art. Those classes he took yesterday forcefully for free must have finally paid off. For a lack of a better thing to do, he watched people pass. Have you ever come to the realization that every single person you pass by everyday is a full person, capable of the same deeds and emotions and mental complexities you yourself live and experience every second on this earth? Well, Fischer hasn't.

And that's it, that's the reflection. No, this did not change now. He didn't take this moment to indulge in a bit of expanding outwards self-reflection about others. He chugged more milk and thought about these different brands of imbeciles dancing groceries in front of him. The idiot in a suit, the idiot with the baby, the idiot with the mommy, the clerk with a degree, the manager on a power-trip telling him to get off the store, the redneck with the tattoo, the old lady struggling to reach... Well, he did have a soft spot for old ladies. Yes, their greedy widow management of dead husband assets made rent impossible to pay, but they reminded him of his granny. And she was no imbecile. She went to Woodstock.

So he mustered all the strength he had left, got up, and helped the old lady reach the luxury brand of beans (more than twenty cents more than the regular ones).

―Aren't you a nice young man? Thank you so much. I usually don't go to do the groceries myself, but my aide had a doctor's appointment and I tried to reach some of my grandsons but neither of them was available! Can you believe it? I mean I don't blame them, young people, always busy. Be a dear and help me get all these would you, the heavy ones go at the bottom.

―This... Ehem. I was gonna sorta, leave?

―What? Do you expect me to carry these all by myself?

Fischer's patience and good-hearted nature were coming to an end. Certain people make you instantly feel and act as their servant. It's a rare and powerful skill. Need lots of lucky points of stamina in your character chart to unlock it. But although he was hurting as hell, he obliged. As I said, soft spot. Also, he was not in the mood for arguing with old ladies. So he followed her around, putting things in bags or carts or whatever you want to imagine. This was his life now. She sure looked like his grandma, but he felt a whole lot more like being with Sussie than with anyone else. But he shook off that thought hastily.

"That's girl-think. Do not think about girls. Forbidden. No thinking."

...

"That's better."

About ten minutes later and lots of doubting about tomato soup brands, they came around the breakfast section.

―What do we need now? Can we leave already?

―Not yet. We have to get cookies.

―What for?

The lady turned to him as if he had gone crazy.

―To accompany the tea! Obviously!

―Yeah, right.

―You can choose them. I don't like them anyway.

Apparently they were gonna have tea. That was news. The good-bad spectrum didn't quite capture the hyperdimensional subtleties of the quality of such news. So they were just news. Like when the president got his dick sucked by a secretary, or when the new one kidnapped the president of puerto rico or venezuela or something like that.

Fischer picked the Monster Cookies one. Huge crispy explosive ones with chocolate atomic chips. And the old lady nonchalantly rejected them back and put some nonsensical small ones with an aftertaste of orange. Then Fischer put that back and got a jar of peanut butter and jelly on the cart. And the lady put it back, and the bit went on for a while. It was quite a thing. Pretty funny, if told appropriately. Fischer left the scene holding huge bags of dorito chips with both his arms. An interpretation is that he won the argument. Another one is that the old lady succeeded in what some would call a deliberate attempt at bribery. Here in this story, however, we are more flexible. And do not take lightly such highly provocative accusations.

―So, that's everything. Where's the car?

―What car?

―What do you mean what car? Where are we going? How did you come here?

―I took a bus. It's free for seniors.

He had to concentrate to not lose his shit. They went to the bus stop, and waited there patiently.

Eventually, his efforts were rewarded with a damned bus.

Making a lot of efforts, he got everything inside and sat next to the window. There, he got lost looking at the scenery through the window. The sparse houses of the small town next to campus rapidly faded, and revealed the empty passage of a place that desperately wants to be countryside but can't shake off the electrical posts and paved highways. Telephone lines connecting every single desperate man to any available wandering priest. Perhaps we're tangling the world with them in such a way that we expect to be held by it with our feet in the air when we got no ground to stand on, but just free enough to not become strangled or cut by their plastic cold force. I remember this place. This seat, this moment, this window. Every moment in a traveler's life is but an intermission between the last journey and the next, only truly oneself when moving and looking through a window with nothing more than his own thoughts. The only difference being that, in my memories, there used to be mountains.

―Where the fuck are we?

―Almost there.

She ignored the profanity. They would hit her with a stick in the joined tips of her fingers, when she was a little girl. Which doesn't sound very bad, but stings a lot more than you would expect. Just hearing it, even all this time after, kind of hurt.

―So, seriously. I will have to go back later, where are we? How much time have we been here?

―Don't complain. See, that's our stop.

But there was no stop at all. As far as Fischer remembered, bus drivers didn't stop just anywhere, much less in particular people's houses. And didn't usually take detours to do so. And didn't enter suburban developments. And only they were coming out. And the lady said goodbye to the driver by name. And they were in front of the biggest fucking mansion this humble fella had ever seen. And they were entering through the front door.

CHAPTER 34 ― GILBERTA

The old lady shouted as she was crossing the hall.

―Melissa! Tea!

―Right away!

Fischer was dumbfounded. He attached himself to the two giant bags of dorito chips as if they were australian antigravitation belts. The mansion was even bigger on the inside. Their entrances had entrances. He could not for the life of him determine the name or function of any of the rooms they were crossing by. That's when you know someone is well-off, when they say stuff like "this is the planetarium room" or "here is where we have the ping-pong table". That and the luxury beans. Fischer's family was not poor by any means, his father was a veteran and his mother did mother stuff. But they stored their ping-pong table in the garage, doubling as a regular table in things like birthdays. Like normal people.

They reached a quite modest and small room, a miniature wooden cabin inside (literally inside) a bigger stance. With its own internal external garden. It had chairs inside, and a fireplace, and a cabinet, and books, and a table. Fischer, who had been carrying the grocery bags the whole time, decided that the best place in the whole house to leave them was on the floor. Just a couple of feet between the chairs and the antler structure where you're supposed to put your coat. And then threw himself into a chair, that bravely endured the accidental attempt at destruction.

Old lady looked at the groceries and at Fischer. Mildly annoyed but still smiling at him. Like when he openly cursed. Her persuasion tactics had worked well so far, but she could sense a strange resistance coming from that boy. Like a deep unconscious reluctance to being fully civilized, which she feared a lot more than attempts at open rebellion. But before she started to have flashbacks about her time in subsaharan africa, Fischer knocked on the wood on the floor and chair quite loudly.

―Is this oak?

He was starting to recover.

It wasn't oak. At all. Fischer didn't know shit about wood. Nor cared. He just had always wanted to do that.

A maid, presumably that melissa lady, entered the room calmly at full speed and placed a porcelain tray with porcelain cups that porcelainly contained tea, and left the room. They both sat in front of each other and sipped from it. Then a dance began. Sensing he would put the cup directly on the table, she got him a coaster, only to find he had put it firmly on his own knee. She offered him sugar just to find he had a small pack of his own that he had discovered in his trousers. Then he asked her if she had seen the game last night, and when she expected to surprise him because she had indeed watched the game, he answered that he didn't. What on earth did he expect to talk about? About them both not having seen something in particular?

She couldn't for the life of her get a read on him.

Then Fischer opened one of the two bags of chips with both his hands causing a massive explosion. The scattered doritos contrasted with the luxurious silence. Uncomfortable and unsure about what to do, he started eating some that were left in the now destroyed bag. And started scavenging for scraps directly from the floor. The old lady sighed.

―Melissa...

Melissa showed up. But before the old lady could say anything to her, Fischer talked first.

―Can I go to the bathroom?

More sighing.

―Down the hall.

And left them there with the mess. Remember when Fischer said he had a plan, the day before, and the plan didn't totally backfire on him spectacularly? Well, he had a plan again. He was going to get the hell out of that place and never look back. Weaponized avoidance strategies. Once he turned a corner, he started almost running. Aimlessly. Then he remembered painfully he was stiff as hell as his body reminded him with what felt like a thousand microscopic crystal cuts. So back to walking it was. A couple of minutes later, he realized he was totally lost. Fortunately, it was a sunny day, and mustering all his thinking powers, he started following the natural light until he reached the outside of the mansion. Not the same outside he entered before, but it was a start. The passion for weird statues expanded to the outside, where they were combining with some very curious plant work and weird configurations of flowers and a couple of very mean flamingos. If you're ever in the situation, remember this: flamingos don't like to be grabbed by the neck. I say it, knowing it sounds obvious, because when he was little I know of a guy that did exactly that and that's why now he even looks at pigeons with suspicion. Eventually he reached the front door. Didn't even break that many things on his journey there. There was a camera, pointing at him. He ignored it.

―Well, what now?

They were indeed far away from any place Fischer knew of or knew how to get to. He reached for his phone, in intention to look up an address or call someone or even better ask the still working FischerGPT what to do. But he realized the phone was exactly where he left it: by the side of the milk jug in the supermarket. And there wasn't a bus stop to look up anything nor to wait for any bus. He buried his head between his shoulders like a tortoise and headed back where he had come from.

The old lady was still waiting when he found the small room again. Only had to ask for directions twice.

―Found the bathroom, dear?

―I did. Very beautiful, toilet and everything.

She smiled. They said nothing and made small sounds with their teaspoons from time to time.

―You know, you're a quite particular guy. Strong, bold. I really appreciate you taking the time and effort to help me with my groceries, and even come here to my invitation for a tea you very clearly don't care very much about. Indulging me with, let's say, conversation.

Fischer was going to retort, but saved everyone the effort.

―My grandsons don't even have the decency to pretend. And the ones that do, don't have the decency to fight back from time to time. It's a fine line to walk, that of common decency. Let me ask you a question. Do you study at the university? Do you have a lot of time?

―Well... I do. Both. I've been trying to study more and also have less time, lately. But not at the same time.

―Have less time?

―Yeah, well there's this girl and...

And Fischer proceeded to explain what amounts to everything we have covered in these pages. If so in a less than optimal, very summarized, non-linear way. Why Fischer felt suddenly compelled to do that, only he knows. But we can assume he just kind of surrendered. He couldn't talk to Sussie, he couldn't talk to his grandfather, he couldn't talk to Jeremy, he couldn't move, he felt miserable and had never been to church. The old lady absorbed every word completely fascinated by both the subject matter and Fischer himself.

―And that's about everything that ever happened to me, more or less.

―That's a lot. You clearly have a talent for telling stories. I never knew this sort of things happened here. I did my studies at a nun school. A bit of a different vibe. Not that much. But different.

They went in synchrony to sip from their teas, but they were mightily cold. The old lady got up and opened the nearby cabinet, that ended up being a secret refrigerator. Hidden appliances are another clear sign of status, one that impressed Fischer more than the hundred terracotta warriors he had found in a basement when he was lost and looking for a way outside. From it, she took out a couple of beers.

―I hope you don't mind something a little stronger. The doctor had forbidden it to me, but he passed away last year the poor soul, so now I'm free to do whatever I want. Cheers.

Fischer didn't mind. Didn't mind much about anything, really, right now.

―You know what, Marcus. I think we can do each other a favour. Well, I think you will help me more than I will help you, but it would still be a positive arrangement for both of us. You see, I have this nephew. He studies at the university, just like you. And he's a good student, just like you. But something very interesting about him is that he runs the student newspaper! Although I'm not sure they still print it nowadays, everyone all day with their phones, it's like we're all going mad.

And she looked at him. As if she had asked a question that demanded an answer.

Just when Fischer was about to react, she continued her argument as if nothing happened.

―So, it occurred to me. They need some help. And no big help, just a little bit. It's not about things to write about, they have lots of people that can do that. It's more that, my grandson. He's a bit strange. Like you! But he is without that natural, charm. He has a little bit of trouble making friends. And I think he would benefit greatly from having you there. You mentioned you were searching for things to distract yourself a little bit from your studies and from thinking about all these girls... It could be a beautiful match. What do you think?

It was a carefully constructed argument. Balanced praise and persuasion. Evidently hiding deeper intentions behind a veil of plausibility. A favor hiding a favor, an opportunity hiding something unknown. There's this saying in spanish, that badly translates to "the devil knows more by being old than by being the devil" that could apply here. A masterwork.

―Sorry, what? I was zoning out. Not really listening.

She deflated instantly and visibly. And then really looked at him, with piercing eyes. She was trying to decide if he was serious or not and if to repeat herself or what to even do. His were inscrutable eyes. Even if totally earnestly transparent. There was something wrong with this guy, and it wasn't a mere case of bad manners nor neanderthalensis DNA. But she could not really figure out what, exactly. Her attempts at casual manipulation (which she regarded as just "just how things are done") were being masterfully deflected in a ghastly manner that resembled cold-war diplomacy and arguing with a sleepy bear. After balancing possibilities she decided to take a more direct route: china and subtleties are wasted on a man covered in cheese dust. So in other words, the Yalta strategy.

―Be the next Monday at the cafeteria by noon. You'll meet my grandson.

―What do I get in exchange?

―Nothing.

―Sounds good to me.

Like I said, he didn't really care. It turns out, to avoid doing something, you have to still care a little about it. That being said, following up actually doing the thing is something completely different. Given the time, you can always not show up. No explanation, no nothing. No need. Don't care. Remember?

―Melissa! We're done here!

She left, started typing on her phone top speed and lit a long old lady variety style long cigarette.

She had enough Fischer for an entire year.

Melissa appeared, escorted Fischer out of the building, told him to wait for the bus and left him there.

In fact, everyone had had enough of Fischer for an entire year. Soon, even more people would.

While he was waiting, holding the remaining dorito bag, he thought to himself:

―What a nice lady. A bit weird, but nice.

CHAPTER 35 ― ALPHONSE

Fischer decided it was already summer.

Yes, they were in early march. Yes, it was cold as hell. I will explain. To him, there were only two seasons: summer and winter, cold and hot, yin and yang. And because he was absolutely done with winter he decided to take initiative and declare it over himself. An unusual occurrence, for sure, but not unprecedented. The sun seemed to agree with his assessment, shining during the morning hours during the whole month, but it was a lightshow more than anything else, as mortals like fischer and freddie mercury are not (no matter how much they sing about it) mister fahrenheit. People turned to watch him pass through the campus wearing hawaiian shirts and swimsuit pants. In Fischer's house the change of clothes was a definitive and irrevocable rite of passage from season to season that demanded commitment no matter the needs of actual weather outside else the skies fall upon us. So you can understand then the surprise in Alphonse's face when an almost seven footer crossed the cafeteria as if tornado season was a beach episode, slurping a giant smoothie, looking around as if looking for someone.

―Is this the guy? Please don't let this be the guy.

After the old lady incident, the week had been good to Fischer. Really calm, really normal. He had gone to class with remarkable constancy, slept a lot (both in and out of it), made some of his homework, watched some TV, played some videogames with his new blue haired friend, not thought a whole lot about girls and he even found time to cut his own hair. All of it. He also received an anonymous gift basket, really big, full of delicious and exotic fruits. It had no note, but included a small bag of Doritos. If the old lady thought he would take the hint it was from her and the gesture helped her convince Fischer to attend the meeting she had orchestrated with her grandson, she totally and completely missed the mark.

But it wasn't needed. A bald Fischer (that made him look both like a silly and terrifying overgrown baby) full of antioxidants and electrolytes decided to attend anyway, as he was in a good mood, it was on his way, and had absolutely nothing to lose. He saw this Alphonse guy, waved at him, and upon confirmation sat really relaxed on the chair opposite of him.

―Are you the guy?

―I am a guy. Who are you?

―I'm Fischer. Who are you?

―I'm Alphonse. Who are you?

―I just told you. I'm Fischer.

―I do not give a shit about your name Fischer. Who are you?

―I'm Fischer!

―I know who you are! I know how you're called!

―If you already know who I am why do you ask me who I am?

―Because I want to know who you really are!

―Do I know you?

―Why would you, know me?

―I don't know you look kind of familiar for some reason.

―Don't change the subject! Who are you?!

―Who are you?!

They were standing. This alph guy seemed quite irate. Fischer was just roleplaying. He was, indeed, a bit weird. You could not pinpoint any particular characteristic that made him weird (although I will try to) he just had an uneasy nervous vibe around him that he could not for the life of him shake off. He was, as Fischer would later describe him "uneven". He had long hair for being a dude, but a little too thin, and with like, gaps. His teeth were not bad but not good. His clothes had nothing wrong with them but didn't quite fit. And you could smell a slight neuroticism and perverted quality to how he walked, despite walking like, normally. I mean, how people walk. I don't know. You know how there are some dudes that you don't quite know what it is but girls see them and instantly go like "ugh" and you quite understand what they are ughing about? That was Alphonse. Great dude, don't get me wrong. Friend to his friends. One thing has nothing to do with the other. Really talented, spirited and committed journalist firmly going nowhere in his endless search for the truth perhaps to avoid the hidden more important question of why doesn't he ever get laid.

―Let me tell you a story. Everybody likes stories. Last week, I was minding my own business, and I got a call, on my personal number. Who could that be? A friend, family maybe? But no, it was a woman. An old woman. A woman I had never talked to before. But she knew me. My name, the name of my parents, where I studied, where I was, everything. She assured me she was distant family, an aunt grandmother or something like that, from the side of my mother. But kept calling me "grandson", to simplify. Can you believe it?

―Sounds reasonable to me.

―It does, huh? Well not only that. She revealed she was also some sort of a benefactor. Both for the family, and for this little independent journalistic venture we have here. "But that's not possible," I said. Because it's supposed to be financed by voluntary work and anonymous donations, a key part of maintaining the "independent" part of our independence. She told me to call a couple of numbers here at the university, and so I did exactly that. She was very patient. I called Miller first, who is whom I wanted to call anyway. But he didn't answer. They told me he was out of the country. Then I called the secretary office. And then, obviously, I called my mother.

―Miller is out of the country?

―Do you know Professor Miller? Why do you know professor Miller?

―Long story.

―I got all day.

―He's a history professor doctor. I major history.

―That wasn't a very long explanation.

―Well, I guess you had to be there.

Alphonse looked at Fischer with suspicion. As he was telling his "story" about wanting to know who Fischer was, he had been moving back and forth. At times relaxed, at times accusatory, at times with arms crossed, at times almost grabbing our hero's shirt by the part of the neck. Which is very lucky he didn't, as Fischer doesn't tolerate personal space transgressions, especially by people shorter and skinnier than him.

He continued. He was now leaning forward, as if telling secrets. Fischer had to lean too to even hear.

―They confirmed the story. But how my mother talked about it. I don't know. You know?

Fischer nodded.

―Then I went back to the old lady. And she started to make open ended suggestions. Very subtle, very in character. Didn't work. Then she started to make demands. And threatened to cut our funding and being expelled from university grounds if we were to continue our activities. And you know what those demands were?

Fischer nodded sideways.

―That I was to come here, meet a guy and make him editor. And be his friend.

Fischer nodded.

―Does it ring any bells?

Fischer nodded sideways.

―That's you. Obviously. So when I ask "who are you". I don't expect to hear your name repeated back to me over and over. What I expect is an explanation of why and how a freshman has the connections, power and influence to get himself into this position and who and why has an agenda regarding that. Do you understand me now, you fucking idiot?

And Fischer, who doesn't tolerate being called an idiot, especially by people shorter and skinnier than him, slapped him with his open hand across the table. He didn't do it out of malice or anything, it happened as a sort of reflex or psychological self-preservation mechanism. It was an honest, non-violent, quite violent, slap. He did feel sort of bad after the fact, but didn't regret it. To a point, it was an act of nature. You poke a bear, you get bearded, and no jury would convict the bear. But surprising it was. Half the people there turned to see what on earth happened. And Alphonse, who had never been slapped in his life, found himself in a lot of confusion unable to process what just happened. Frozen in place attached to his seat with open eyes.

But took it like a champ. No hostility from him. Just a mild concussion. He knew he crossed a line.

A couple of minutes later Fischer was consoling and half hugging the guy on a nearby bench.

―I'm sorry Ali, but you can't call me an idiot like that.

―I know, I know. Whatever. I just. Whatever.

―Look, I know nothing about this whole thing you told me. I met an old lady at a supermarket and I have been caught up in this, I don't know what to tell you. It's not a secret conspiracy. I guess. Well, apart from the usual giant alien secret conspiracy that's making reforms in the cafeteria.

Alphonse was still trying to recover, and didn't lift his sight from the grass where he was spitting saliva half expecting to see blood on it, but did answer to that in a very neutral voice.

―What do you know about that?

―Not much. That it exists, I guess.

Ten minutes and a smoothie later (that Fischer insisted on) he was feeling much better, and after having been exorcised by him, Al decided that Fischer was not part of the secret giant alien conspiracy (but still didn't trust him at all) enough to proceed with their interaction. The loony brothers walked a little, but not too much, and reached a door not far from the cafeteria that looked like a maintenance closet. Fischer had passed that door hundreds of times, but never thought too much of it. It wasn't even in his top one hundred doors list.

Inside, however, there were no brooms and trash cans, but lots of tables and papers and stands and walls covered by newspaper articles and a bunch of other stuff. The place looked like it was indeed some sort of medium-big old janitor closet, but it had been repurposed as a guerrilla style underground newspaper that wasn't very clear who they were hiding from and why. An old analogical printer covered in dust was being used as a new home for a capsule coffee maker, which Alphonse used to make himself something to combat his lingering dizziness and power sugared aftertaste of the pistachio-oreo smoothie Fischer had proudly invented himself. And they weren't alone. A short haired poker face guy and a slightly older girl with bad hair were on their respective "desks", clearly working on something with fluctuating degrees of light-heartedness and concentration. They glimpsed at the door when they entered, but didn't pay much attention until Alphonse introduced them. And even then, returned to their tasks, not without listening to the entire conversation passively.

―Fischer, meet the team. Guys, this is Fischer.

―Hello.

―Hi.

―Fischer, this is the guys. Rachel "It's Not Aliens" Summer and Richard "Nothing Ever Happens" Barn.

―Why is Richard Nothing Ever Happens Barn called like that?

The man himself spoke.

―Because nothing ever happens.

―That's why.

―Cool.

They sat in a couple of chairs more "around" Alphonse's "desk" than in a formal one in front and the other behind it. Maybe because that was more the vibe of the place, maybe because Alphonse didn't want to risk a too clean angle of attack by Fischer's open hands.

―You see, I'm more than happy to have people involved in our project. God knows we need extra eyes, that's not the problem. The problem is that I don't like to be told what to do, and I don't like interference from the outside that could compromise our mission. Revealing the uncomfortable truth. Journalistic ethic. Total objectivity. I run a very tight ship here.

Summer was fighting an urge to openly laugh at that statement.

They both turned to watch her, but she made a gesture without stopping looking at her laptop that meant "I said nothing don't mind me". Alphonse for sure took his "job" seriously. He had been in college a lot more time than your average student, as he was so busy interviewing people, drafting things and coordinating a group of people to produce a consistent editorial publication that he was constantly flunking his introduction to journalism exams. The dude was roleplaying himself.

―What we're gonna do for now is I'll just send you to do some field work. I can't have you here doing office stuff because, as you can see, we are quite crowded. This is the job: go out there and interview some people about academic stuff. Very easy. Here's a list. Let's see how it goes. Just get your feet wet. I don't want to pressure you, I don't expect results, I just want to see how you move out there, what you ask about, how people react to your presence. I need a reason to justify to myself that this whole thing is worth it in some way.

Fischer was very concentrated. In silence. And looking at Alphonse directly. Making him very uncomfortable. Then he had a light-bulb moment.

―Wait I know who you are!

―Huh?

―You're that weird guy that was caught masturbating in the girls' locker room!

The room exploded. Summer and Richard started to laugh uncontrollably. Alphonse got up in total disbelief, panicking with his hands on top of his head and walking around.

―Oh my god, that's not what happened!

He turned to his colleagues.

―It's not what happened! I was working on an article! My God, is that what people tell about me out there?

Fischer shrugged. He found it really funny. And happy to actually have recalled something somebody had told him about someone else and linked it a time after to the actual person, a feat of memory and gossip he's often not capable of. Alphonse was still having an existential crisis.

―Why does this kind of shit always happen to me? It's not fair! Everybody is always willing to believe the most unhinged shit about me then when I say something no one believes me!

―Don't mix things Al, people believing sexual scandals about you has nothing to do with any batshit conspiracy you're on about at the time.

―What sexual scandal? There's no sexual scandal!

More laughter.

―Anyway. It's not fair. Why me? Of all people why me?

―I dunno. It's your whole vibe, I guess.

Alphonse pierced Fischer with his eyes. He was still amused. Was it his jersey? His hair? Cologne? He tried to wrap up this whole Fischer thing to be alone with his musings and google how to be less creepy on some obscure internet forum for weirdos like him.

―So, that's about it. I will send you the whole formatting guidelines, lists of possible questions. Do you know how to use InDesign-Pro? How is your spelling and punctuation in writing? Are you familiar with transcription software or you plan to do it on your own? Can you...?

Fischer found himself lost after the first question. He thought for a second, and found an alternative solution.

―Don't worry about all that stuff. I know just the guy.

―What do you mean? What guy?

It was a beautiful early afternoon at the beginning of spring. Two couples were happily playing tennis in the outside courts of the country club, talking and laughing and not taking it (if anything at all) very seriously. Near them, there were other courts, and tables where people ordered overpriced cappuccinos and margaritas at hours where alcohol is generally frowned upon. The place had vistas to the golf course, its homogeneity and pleasantness to the american dream eye punctuated by the curated and hyperreal wildness of its background. It was from there that a silhouette started to advance towards them. Slowly but relentlessly. They took a while to notice its presence, but it was clear as day. It traversed through every present obstacle, both natural and man-made, and continued in a straight line.

―What is that?

―Oh, no.

It was a man. A huge man. They stopped playing altogether, but froze in place instead of fleeing. Perhaps ignoring the exact nature of the immediate danger they were in.

The figure passed the barrier between the golf course and the club area brute forcing the wooden fence. Without saying a word, he entered their court, and before anyone could ask who he was or what he wanted from them, the man, the myth, the legend grabbed Jeremy by the back of his neck and without saying a word dragged him across the court and towards the exit. His girlfriend began to scream, to no avail. I would like to do him a favor and say that he took his kidnapping gallantly, but that wasn't the case. He fought, yelled for help, scratched, kicked and cried the same way he entered this world; as people do when they are forced (perhaps a little too early) to abandon the peaceful and subdued happiness of their bird cage for the rough edges of the real world by ―how these things often happen― the hand of a reckless barbarian.

CHAPTER 36 ― THE ROMAN EMPIRE

It's about controlling the past to control the future, it's about fiction masquerading as fact. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory like fire is radiant and immutable, while history serves only those who seek to control it; those who would douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men, for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written with the blood of those who might remember, and of those who seek the truth.

The interview was going well. Or at least as well as a two hour interview with a hundred year old roman historian can go. Jeremy had prepared for it thoroughly, reading about the work of the professor, consulting a variety of sources, speeding through a couple of books about interviews and who knows what else. Fischer had been trying a new character to main in mario kart, had discovered a new kind of spiced pumpkin milkshake, resumed talking frequently with sussie, and watched a lot of TV.

I know what you're thinking, yes. They both overprepared for their own particular standards. And for their own reasons. Jeremy had wanted nothing to do with all this, but seeing as he really had no choice on the matter, he actually wanted to do it right. Fischer wanted more fruit baskets.

Apparently, Alphonse and his small student newspaper had made a deal earlier in the year, that in exchange for some basic utilities, they would make a series of interviews with senior professors and affiliated people with the university. Which were basically the kind of people nobody in their right mind would want to talk to for a couple of hours much less read about. Jeremy chose this professor in particular because he was a historian, and he figured out that in that way Fischer would be more comfortable, and knowledgeable, as the topic would be somewhat closer to him than let's say, computer engineering. But obviously, that only made the whole scene resemble a history class more in which Fischer would be dozing off; and as Jeremy was asking perfectly reasonable and accurate questions, Fischer was fighting for his life trying not to fall totally asleep. Towards the end, he won that fight. He had found a couple of apples and a banana stashed in his backpack from god knows when, and was recuperating happily listening to the man talk.

Of course, when I say the interview was going well what I mean was that it was the blandest possible thing in the world. I don't blame Fischer. This was some top notch tour de france, mixed athletic olympic games, rerun of a classical baseball game sleep inducing stuff. Jeremy was starting to feel its effects also.

―And so... Uhm. What, like, impact do you think these new discoveries will have in...

Yawn.

―Our current understanding of the topic?

―Very, extremely one might dare to say, moderate. As I already said in my annotated version of the decline and fall of the roman empire by edward gibbon a retrospective, it's not very clear whether the current understanding of the events (as you called it) is indeed based on factual consideration of available evidence or a recontextualization of what we already knew or we were supposed to know as truth by the faulty sources in written tradition that have survived but are "from the time". And so, operate not as a source of actual what we historians call "sovereign description", which is no less than derived from a particular set of circumstances of our same historic tradition, not shared by the so-called "historians" of the time. Sorry what was the question? Oh, yes. So as I was saying...

Jeremy gave up.

―Well that clarifies everything. We don't want to take any more of your time, thank you very much and... Fischer, do you have anything to add before we wrap it up? Anything at all.

The question was a last-call desperation play from Jeremy, but also had a bite of venom. He still felt hurt by his abduction, and while he had agreed to do this, he was still discontent with Fischer's passivity during the whole thing. And also projecting his frustration at what he was beginning to see as a defeat. Fischer was playing games on his phone.

―Oh. No, not really.

Said, without lifting his eyes from the screen.

―But, I mean. I don't believe in it.

They looked at him, puzzled.

―What do you not believe in? Do you think something the professor said is false?

Fischer finally took his eyes away from the screen for this one.

―No, nothing like that.

Jeremy made a sigh of relief. One of his worst fears had been for Fischer to say or do something that would offend a respected professor. These last months, he had learned a lot about Fischer and about free thinking, and subverting established knowledge, and questioning faulty logic. But he still respected authority. A vestigial custom from times where people older than him holding textbooks decided the grades upon which he would base his value of himself as a living being that he hadn't fully got rid of and probably never will.

Fischer looked at the screen once again before adding.

―I just don't believe in the roman empire.

Splash. His friend's jaw dropped to the floor in total and complete and utter disbelief.

―You don't... "believe" in the roman empire?

―No, I don't. Think about it. If they really existed, how come there are no romans anymore? It's just a meme.

Jeremy had had enough of Fischer's antics, and forgetting about the professor and everything else, he went ballistic on him, gesturing and everything with his hands in a manner that was very like him.

―What even is there not to believe in? What the hell do you mean? There are ruins everywhere, hundreds of years of literature, dozens of languages that come from latin. We are even speaking one right now! You aren't serious. You're just doing it on purpose. All this disinterest and all. You're sent on this earth to torment me, I just wanted to play some tennis and have a girlfriend a normal life but no! And you know why? Do you know why?

―Uhm... no.

―Because "you don't believe in the roman empire"! Like if it was santa claus!

―Excuse me guys, if I could...

The professor tried to intervene.

―Shut the fuck up!

―Yeah, shut up!

―You don't tell him to shut up! I do!

―Yeah? Who put you in charge?

He tried once more.

―Guys I really think that...

They finally conceded, both in unison.

―What?!

―Well, I really thought it was a good perspective. In fact, that's what I've been trying to say all evening. I'm just glad someone was actually listening.

―What.

They both stopped fighting and froze in place.

―In fact that's actually always been my thesis. Think about it. The council of Nicea. No, even earlier. Before Caracalla. What we've been led to think of as a "roman empire" based on nation-state or imperialistic notions coming from recent centuries, it's a post-hoc rationalization. Yes, you could trade from britain to syria and that requires a modicum, a network of institutions and people and national apparatus to work. But from which point such things, maintained in name over a geopolitical game of power, can be considered an actual entity? It's the mycelium conundrum.

―So... you don't believe in the roman empire?

―Well, I wouldn't say it with those words but... In fact, I cannot say it with those words. All my life, all my research. If I mention it, I'm ostracized. I become a pariah. I would not be able to find work anywhere serious and end up in one of those awful alternative history documentaries.

―Well sorry that I put it that way but... what do you care?

―Pardon me?

―Aren't you, like, a hundred years old?

The old but not that old professor stroked his beard and thought about it. As if the fact that he was very, very old had never occurred to him.

―Well, now that you say it that way. I think you're right. Let's start over.

―Start over what?

―The interview, of course. You're not in a rush, are you?

And so they spent a couple more hours hearing the life work of a madman. They both left there quite astounded by everything he said, everything that happened, and the way everything happened. They didn't talk about it. Just went home and got ready for the next round. And next day, next interview, the formula repeated, more or less. They had at first a normal conversation with normal questions, then Fischer said something outrageous about the topic, and the professor, this time a dignified very tall lady, got very quiet. Just this time, instead of agreeing with Fischer, she started talking with a different voice. Like as if she was saying something very delicate. More than an argument, it was a series of short sentences that were spoken with some (I guess) order behind them and with a lot of caution, as if explaining it to something made of very thin glass.

―You have to understand. The death of the author. Beckett. Scholarly work is creation. It's always been. The mistake was dressing with scientific robes. Dissection is... theater. Karamazov wouldn't have brothers without us. The whole empire of literature's work hinges on a broken promise made to a dead man. It's like aztec cursed gold.

And that went on, for a while.

Next stop, Jeremy didn't even bother with the regular interview. He asked a couple of questions and then turned to his friend as if saying "do your thing" and the balding fat guy they were interviewing did have a more predictable reaction to Fischer than the others, taking what he was saying as open provocation. Jeremy had to restrain them. But just as he was doing that, he also began to talk frankly and openly about his subject.

―Of course it's wrong! Everything is wrong! How do you think I feel studying and teaching a dead field? But we have to go on, and pretend this is going somewhere, as if something relevant has happened in theoretical physics since Einstein! Of course strings is dumb. Of course wave probability functions don't collapse! Of course it's selling the Brooklyn bridge! Do you think you can come here and mock me? HA! You wouldn't even know, you wouldn't even begin to know, you wouldn't even distinguish the tip of the iceberg in the renormalization equations even if they were hanging their dick in front of you. The audacity! Of some random undergraduate who has seen one too many cosmos chapters from that awful sitcom character (not the old twink, he was fine) to come here and talk to me as if you knew anything about it. I will tell you about it. Oh, I'll tell you everything. Sit down. Sit down!

They sat down.

―Let me get the brandy.

For the next and last one, they didn't even need to say anything. They planned to reverse roles just for fun, but as Fischer went blank on the regular questions and resorted to just looking at the interviewee deadpan in the face (an unusually young asian lady very professional looking with an accent) she started crying and spilling the beans immediately.

―Woah! Woah! What's wrong?

―The students. They are so stupid. I can't. I can't. I can't teach anymore, why do I have to teach these stupid children? Look at you, just staring at me. All this effort for nothing. China is going to eat us with potatoes. I don't want to go back to Shenzhen. They have a dish, that is made with rooster testicles! Filthy, disgusting people. About that, have you even been to Nigeria? Let me tell you about these nig...

Fischer whispered to Jeremy while they watched the spectacle.

―Hey, so. What was she professor of?

―Diplomatic relations.

―Damn.

CHAPTER 37 ― TOPO GIGIO

They were back at the guerrilla headquarters of the student newspaper or whatever you want to call that place. Alphonse was reading carefully in diagonal the transcripts of the interviews, passing pages with fury and amazement. Eventually, he threw them on the table and looked at them.

―That's amazing. How did you guys manage that?

Jeremy took the initiative.

―Well, at first they were normal interviews, and then Fischer made some of his usual nonsensical stuff and these people started (presumably) talking without filters. I don't know. Classic new age Fischer accidental isekai stuff.

Alphonse reclined his chair and nodded in agreement. But Fischer wasn't in agreement.

―What do you mean accidental? It was on purpose.

―Yeah, sure. A deliberate strategy.

―I mean it. Look...

Fischer had spent all his life pretending to be human and trying to survive in a social human world. On the road, he had learned and developed some tricks to go along the way, as the one in which he just stared at people until they are intimidated or convinced he is retarded or both that he used in one of the first chapters.

―People usually don't want to give you information if you ask for it. What you do is give them inaccurately provocative misinformation and they will rush to correct you because they want to prove you wrong and feel themselves superior. Like on the internet. That or you make yourself stupid enough so they want to teach you, or mad enough so they lash out with the truth. So during the interviews I asked FischerGPT what he thought about the subject and read it out loud. Works every time.

Alphonse and Jeremy were looking at him, not sure of what they had just heard him say. As if this was a truly magnificent and rare event, him showing a sprout of (if stupid) unexpected competence. Like an aurora borealis. They had both read a lot about social dynamics and engineering heuristics (Jeremy because he liked to accumulate knowledge as a means of self-protection, Alphonse because he wanted to learn how to pick up girls) but they had never heard of that. But I guess the results spoke for themselves.

―Where on earth did you learn to do that?

―I dunno. From TV?

They fell back into their chairs, unsure how to react.

You know, people like to have people in these mental "pockets". Where they are labeled and catalogued by types and all kinds of nonsense. The reason we do this is because we are unable to process the internal mental mechanisms of hundreds of people, and it's much more comfortable, and useful to the task of trying to foresee how someone may behave or what a person will do in a given situation. The sea of possible real answers to those questions, taking into account that everyone is a cohort of conflicting personalities and diverging moving goals, is so immense; that actually trying to comprehend it would be not only incredibly tiring but also almost painful on a psychological level. That's why people actively resist changing their opinion or classification of someone, choosing what to see, what to hear, what to interpret about someone else's actions. And that's why right now, Fischer's mere presence was hurting their minds.

―And don't forget the secret ingredient.

―What is that?

―I make them feel at home. I'm a people person, after all. The old Fischer charm.

Alright, now he was just kidding.

Eventually, they decided to abandon the topic, as what they just heard was too hard to process.

―Anyway. I guess one thing is clear.

―What is that?

Jeremy was having his own internal existential crisis with the whole affair, as not only Fischer's competence changed his view of him but also of himself. He was beginning to feel bad about his little outburst the other day about his friend. He had, as much as he feared it, still so much to learn from him.

―Every single person in this university is crazy.

―That's true. Absolutely bananas.

―Well, that's to be expected.

Alphonse seemed quite relaxed with that assessment.

―What do you mean?

―Well, this place is its own madhouse.

That was Miller's phrase.

―What a university essentially is, or at least this one, is a bunch of crazy people left to themselves to do whatever they want with their minds. Everything around it functions not to induce those crazy ideas but to contain, bind and restrain them into the realm of actual possibility. It's psychological scaffolding. Papers, classes, teachers, bureaucracies, cafeterias, lectures, congresses. It's a masquerade. Topo Gigio.

And those were Miller's ideas. Almost word by word.

―Unrestrained madness is the natural and predictable outcome of the environment. Did you guys see that group of students that had a club in the cafeteria until very recently? Did you see what they did and they published?

―Oh, yeah. That was us.

―That was you?!

―Yep.

―Wait a second...

Alphonse looked at Fischer as if he was seeing him for the first time. At last, he got the answer to his first and most important question about him. The "who are you".

―You're the guy in a NASA shirt that had a meltdown last semester in front of the whole college?

―That was me.

―Oh my god, that explains so many things. How could I have forgotten?

―New haircut.

But he didn't hear that last one.

―It all makes sense now! You're Miller's boys!

And then, as the rush of finally solving the puzzle vanished, he realized the implications that had. A frightened Alphonse receded from his table and stood up, examining them as this new great danger. Like one would do with a crocodile if one was a crocodile hunter that just realized he had been sitting on top of one for the whole evening. But they weren't reacting, and so he sat down again, and along the way decided they were not a threat. Why he would think so in the first place, only he knew.

―So you already know everything about it, no? You were "in" on it.

―What the hell is even "it"?

Fischer and Jeremy looked at each other, like couples do. They had no idea what he was talking about.

―C'mon. I wrote about it last November. You must have read it. Everybody has read it.

Alphonse had the strange impression his newspaper was wildly more popular and read than it really was, for some reason. He didn't even know they stopped printing it because students were using it to vandalize the halls and were asked not to, a secret that "it's not aliens" Summer kept well hidden. He started searching for a copy on his desk, but easily gave up.

―It's all there. The precedents, the story. Everything about the experiment. This goes deep, it's an international conspiracy. Decades old. You sure know what I'm talking about. Class of seventy four? The Minsk agreement?

They looked at each other again.

―I really have no idea what you're talking about.

―Yeah, we were just a bunch of students making stuff up. They gave us like, a scholarship or something. But it went nowhere and eventually the funding was cut. In fact, it was Fischer's idea, and Miller got in on it.

―Oh god, you guys really know nothing about it. You were in on it and knew nothing.

―In on what?

―Let me explain. This is gonna be good.

He made tea for everyone.

―So. Let's start at the beginning. It was before WWII.

Fischer sunk in his seat. One more history lesson. His eyes started to automatically give in.

―And so that takes us back to present day!

Fischer woke up by the sudden enthusiasm of the sentence.

―They tried to do the same, just this time with a group of undergraduates. And giving them freedom, instead of with the communists. All with the hope that they didn't turn totally crazy or depressed like their predecessors. And it failed. Really, the academic world is a cesspool of these "advanced studies" type of failed experiments. It's all over the country. I guess it's worth it, considering what is at play.

Jeremy, who had been listening the whole time, wasn't fully convinced by it.

It all sounded both totally fantastical and a bit too convenient. And was on the same opinion as Summer that what really happened was far more inane and inconsequential than what Alphonse was suggesting was this massive international conspiracy (that, to be fair, did not as of the moment contain any reference to aliens).

―And that's why I say that this place is its own mental asylum.

Fischer had woken up enough to be able to intervene, if half asleep still.

―Well, apart from the actual asylum.

They both looked at him suddenly.

―What do you mean?

―I mean, the actual asylum inside that huge social studies building.

―You mean it's real? Are you saying the place actually exists?

What place? Really, Fischer was operating at about a 20% of context here.

―Of course it exists.

―Who told you that? Did Miller tell you that? You know we can't trust him.

―Nobody told me. I've been there. It's where J lives.

Alphonse fell into a profound silence, containing all of the available air.

―Who are you?

CHAPTER 38 ― MK-ULTRA

Fischer surpassed all the usual obstacles in the long hallway. The receptionist, the guards, the silk moth guy, a very long haired woman asking him for cigarettes, a food card (empty, much to his dismay) and reached J's room. He opened it directly, without knocking, only to find his friend wasn't there.

It was a very simple room, really. Diaphanous, with lots of light coming in. There was a simple bed, a simple window, a simple table, a simple shelf and a simple fridge. It was a bit sad, really. A huge empty space in the middle. No posters. No chairs. A couple of books. An almost empty trash can, with a couple of band-aids and empty small medicine containers at the bottom. Fischer, who was almost done profanating her intimacy by looking at her underwear drawers and shaking her books, found the lack of videogames and TV very alarming. Well, there was a purple dildo on top of the shelf in plain sight, so that was something.

―Fischer!

J appeared suddenly by the door, accompanied by what we will assume was some white coat doctor, but could be a janitor. He got caught by surprise in the middle of his investigation, and in a panic he broke the small bag of candies he was presumably interrogating and they all fell in a variety of directions on the floor. She turned to the doctor.

―It's fine, I know him.

And he left. She turned to him again.

―What are you doing here?!

But she wasn't mad. Just very pleasantly very surprised. Her eyes illuminated with radiance.

―Oh, you know. Just visiting.

He was a terrible liar. But J, that could read him like an open book, didn't even care.

―I thought you wouldn't come back! I waited for you!

―Yeah, I know. I'm sorry.

―Don't mind that. Give me a big hug.

And she jumped to him stepping on lots of candy on the way, and losing her slippers.

―How are you? Where have you been? Tell me everything. You're still in that cafeteria thing?

―Oh, no. That ended like ten chapters ago.

―Oh, so you got tired of being Miller's guinea pig, didn't you? You're not the first one.

Fischer gulped. What did she know? Why did she always know more than she was supposed to? He had to get to the bottom of this, and had a feeling that he couldn't do it keeping up this charade.

―I... I have to be frank.

―Hello, Frank.

―No, shut up. I'm not just visiting.

―I figured. What's going on?

―Nothing, nothing. I mean I like to visit. I was planning to. Eventually. But...

―C'mon Fischer get to it. What is going on, what are you doing here?

―I'm investigating.

J's expression changed visibly. Her whole body posture receded into her reglementary basketball cylindrical projection, the area of personal space that is considered to determine wherever a player is allowed to take certain actions, and whose invasion by another player can be (in certain circumstances) called a foul. Now she felt invaded. Or so it seemed.

―You were... investigating, me?

―No, I was-

But then she got really serious-playful and hooked a finger under the strap of her top and slid it down her shoulder. Then burst out laughing. Fischer was sweating bullets. His eyes like oranges looked at her and then at the dildo on the shelf. Promiscuous small woman scared the shit out of him. Sussie used to scare him a lot too, but that was a different story.

―I'm kidding, I'm kidding. You know you're not my type. And don't feel threatened about that.

Pointing at the dildo with vagueness.

―It's a prescription one. Low amplitude. Doesn't even reach two hundred hertz. Did you know vibrators were originally invented as a treatment for female hysteria? I guess they worked, because Doctor Vibrator's invention got really famous. Before that, he had to do the procedure himself, which he explains in his memoirs was very, very tiring. For everyone involved.

Fischer's brain was hurting. Girls openly talking about sexual things confused him a lot. After that one, he almost fainted. Like a victorian lady being told somewhat unfortunate news. So they sat on the simple bed, for a lack of a better place to sit. And J offered him some apple juice, like the last time they were together in that very same place. In defense of Fischer, he hadn't visited as he promised he would, but stopped buying apple juice as he considered drinking it now nothing less than a sacred ritual they had together.

―I had more stashed, but it expired. I was waiting for a special occasion.

She said, with a bit of sadness.

―So. Investigating. Fun. What are you investigating about?

―Well, this place. And Miller. Let me explain first.

And Fischer did one of his usual recaps of past events that we won't repeat here. Just imagine it very disorganized, with lots of unintended undercutting humor, full of cursing, pop references, and barely comprehensible to the average human. Nothing to do with how I usually explain events. When he finished, she was cutely clapping and wanting more.

―The interview bits were great! What did you even say to the head of philosophy for him to call the cops on you?

―That what they were doing was fine but they should be focusing on more practical things.

―Well, that's not so bad.

―Like attempting to communicate with the spirit world.

―Oh. That did the trick. Noriega would have lost his mind with that one too.

―Who?

―The old head of philosophy. That's what I graduated in. But it's not important now.

She did a very useful recap.

―So. What you're investigating and want to figure out, is how much of what Alphonse told you about this secret alien advanced studies conspiracy is true. In essence if this place itself is the discard bin of those kind of projects, and if you unknowingly had been abducted into one of them with the goal of conquering the world or something in a program that used to be about winning the cold war?

―Yes. That's about it.

―That's just silly. But I mean, some of it is kinda true. I would say thirty percent? I don't know. It's hard for me to tell exactly. You're still missing so much! The convention... So close and yet so far!

―Well then just tell me!

―Where would all the fun be if I just told you everything? Also, I don't even know "everything" myself. And they could be listening. You don't want them figuring out how much you already know.

―Who? Who are "them"?

She looked at both sides, actually seeming like she feared someone had sneaked into the room and was listening.

―The art department.

―That's insane. You're insane.

J reacted to that word a similar way to how Fischer reacted to being called "dumb".

―You're insane! I remind you, you're talking with someone in a nuthouse. Would you even believe me if I told you what I think is going on here and the world and everything? Because you shouldn't.

Which was surprisingly a quite solid argument.

But Fischer was tired of all of this. The fact is, his energy for half-truths and conceptual richness had run out. He wanted nothing but to be told what things were and that was it. It wasn't even that he was now on some crusade for the truth, it was more that he was dazed and confused by not knowing what was going on and wanted that feeling to go away (without actually putting in the effort to actually doing or thinking too much, obviously). He was already having trouble accepting the fact that instead of pretentious people pretending to know about things they don't, the university was a cesspool of insane wackos pretending to be respectable workers of knowledge. Mixed with a lot of pretentious people pretending to know about things they don't. He wanted answers and he wanted them now. And then, to take a nap.

―Just tell me. What is this place. Why are you even here? Did Miller do something to you?

―Oh, so you "are" investigating me. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. No, I have nothing to do with Miller. At least personally. This place is exactly what it looks like, a nursing home for people that can't live in the outside world. I am here because I can't live in the outside world. Too co-co.

―Alright but, this place is secret. Isn't it? You told me yourself last time.

―Well... it's more secretish than secret. They just don't advertise it very much. To most people it's an extension of the normal residency. And to be honest, I don't remember much of what we talked about last time. I was suuuper high. Like, unbelievably.

Fischer was tempted to ask the obvious follow-up question of "why can't you live in the outside world, they have better cookies" but in what was for him a tremendous act of social intuition "and TV" he sensed he wouldn't get much more than that. He resorted to shutting up, and slurping his apple juice. She did the same, until she was called by name at the door; and went there to take some medicine. Showed her tongue to the doctor, and went back to bed. Now that he looked at her better, she seemed tired, and in effect she curled herself into a ball in a corner of the sheets, with a leg over Fischer's lap, looking at the ceiling.

―But you know, those interviews were great. You should do more of that.

―You think?

―Yeah, just talk to people.

―To whom?

―I dunno. Anyone that looks worth the try.

That was as much of a hint as she would give him. She curled even more, and closed her eyes.

―Tell me more stories about you. I really like to hear you talk. You have a very soothing nasal voice.

And Fischer started talking. At first they resembled stories told to someone else, but they quickly devolved into unstructured rants mixed with personal anecdotes about his hometown, some of them true, some of them actually the plot of a variety of television episodes that he misremembered as his own. Half an hour later, or when he realized she had fallen asleep five minutes in, Fischer got up and left the building. Not without opening all the random cabinets he found and stealing a bunch of documents. And shaking violently a couple of plants.

CHAPTER 39 ― DOPPELGANGER

Fischer went back to the headquarters. Only to find everyone in a small circle around a phone.

―Hello?

―Shhhh! Fast, come here.

―What are you guys watching? Is that video of a panda eating carrots? Because I've already seen it.

―No. What? Come here.

―Well, wouldn't hurt to watch it again.

He approached and found an angle to see the screen amidst the gang. It was a recording made with a phone inside an unknown cafeteria that showcased a guy wearing a NASA shirt and flip-flops screaming at the top of his lungs and...

―Wait a minute. That's me.

But it wasn't him. Barely. The guy had a constitution similar to him, was wearing clothes similar to his, had a hairstyle similar to his, mannerisms similar to his. But he was a little bit older, a little bit shorter and had a slightly more devious stare. All being seen and said, it was a really uncanny sight to behold.

They turned up the volume.

―And you know what? They don't! Because you're idiots! "Oh, look at me I have ideas". I have ideas too. What about books but nobody understands them. What about math, but with letters in it. What about chess, but with time travel and more dimensions. What about music but it fucking sucks. You all make me sick.

They all turned to Fischer. He was indignated. And paralyzed. Indignazed.

―Those are your words!

Jeremy pulled his own phone out of nowhere, and went to search for the video someone made about his original outburst so many months ago, in an obscure channel nobody remembered who it belonged to posted on the net with about twenty visualizations. He synchronized both of them so they would start at roughly the same time. It matched almost perfectly. The guy was now taking off his shirt and circling it around his head, just as Fischer did.

―That's your thing!

But instead of the raw natural force Fischer did it with, struggling and panting and fighting with it, his evil twin (we don't know if he's german yet) had a strange sort of rehearsed theatricality to it. It was, for better or worse, cleaner.

They stopped looking at it, to just stare at each other in confused and nervous laughter.

―What is going on?

―I have no earthly idea.

―Is this AI?

―Doesn't look like it.

―Where is this?

―Here it says University of Michigan.

―What, but how...?

―"Why" I think is the better question.

Fischer kept looking. It was like seeing himself in one of those strange filter apps mirror video artificial things. The video continued after what he himself remembered he actually said, but had a striking difference. In real life, everyone was left stunned by his meltdown. In the video, people were at first surprised, but then clapping. And cheering. And whistling. He was watching a more successful version of himself.

―Pause right there!

He screamed, suddenly.

―What, where?

―Just a second ago. Pause. There.

They approached to see closer. Fischer was pointing at someone in the crowd, near the guy.

―That's...

―That's Clownie. I'm sure of it, that's him. Right there.

―Are you sure?

―One hundred percent. Wouldn't miss his stupid face in a million years.

―But how? Why?

―I don't know, I don't care. Give me a minute, I'm going to kill him, and then I'll come back to finish this conversation.

It looked like he was really going to, because he stood up and started leaving.

―But Fischer, he's not here. He transferred. Shortly after the conference fiasco.

Fischer paused, not knowing what to do next.

―I guess, now we know where.

He was still watching the screen, the rant evolving as he remembered it, and Clownie now smirking and waving at the camera. Sort of taunting him. Michigan wasn't that far, was it? Isn't that where they have lakes?

―Where did you even find this, uhmm... Well this is awkward but I don't really remember your name.

―I'm the "nothing ever happens" guy.

―Oh right. So...

―Well, I searched for some video of the incident Alphonse mentioned in the cafeteria. I thought I had seen it somewhere recently. And I found this. Not that I had to search very much. It's everywhere. Posted yesterday and already past thirty million views.

Trending in every single platform youngsters are about on these days.

―Dude, they're gonna mistake him for you.

―You got to admit. It is pretty funny.

―Funny? Clownie is getting rich at my expense.

―Don't you have his phone number? From the cafeteria project application?

Fischer tried to pull out his phone at lightning speed, which somehow resulted in it flying about ten labubus into the air before crashing at a nearby table. Luckily, they say phones resemble their owners, or this particular manufacturer accidentally made a stupidly sturdy batch out of their usual planned obsolescenced overpriced paperweights, because it still worked perfectly fine. He fought with the menus for half a minute until Summer rescued his nervous ass pressing a single button that made the necessary call. Fischer listened, containing his breath, and a second later yote the phone back to the stone age via smashing it against a wall. Which made everyone duck as if suddenly under cannonfire and left a phone sized hole in the aforementioned wall. Then he said very calmly.

―It says the number no longer exists.

―Maybe we can leave a comment or send a DM or...

―It's useless. There's thousands of comments. And you can't send direct messages to random people.

And they sat around, still in amazement and confusion, talking about what they could do, what it meant, why he did it, what was going on, and exhausting every possible angle the conversation might go on. Then, and only then, they sat in silence. And remembered what they were doing before.

―Oh! By the way! How did the visit to the secret asylum go?

―Yeah, any secrets?

―Not really.

―As expected.

They turned to "nothing ever happens" guy and looked at him with condescension.

―What?

But Fischer got up, and recovered the files he had stolen from the place. Along with a small cactus.

―J said we were quite a bit wrong, but didn't want to tell me what was going on exactly.

Alphonse was visibly disappointed, but very curious about the files.

―Where did you get these?

―What do you mean where did I get them. From the asylum.

―Yes, but how did you acquire them, exactly?

―Oh, I didn't "acquire" them. Whatever that means. I just stole them.

Jeremy and the old gang were pretty used by now to Fischer's low level of petty criminality. But the young aspiring journalists were not. Like, at all. They hadn't even heard of that crazy class for documentalistic filmmaking the club attended, that consisted almost entirely of learning how to pick locks and forge government documents (that's a real thing, look it up).

―That's illegal! These are official and personal documents of actual people!

―You have to take them back immediately.

―Yes. It's not only a felony, but also against every single ethical journalistic code we swear by.

They looked at each other and started a complicit laugh. Then, after the normal requirement of time and intensity for a normal improvised social laugh passed, Fischer kept laughing. More and more. Jeremy had stopped entirely, and was now limited to seeing his friend fighting for air. They had even time to comment on the situation while that was still happening.

―Guys, I think we broke Fischer.

―No. That video broke him.

―Quick, record this so they can make more.

―No, but seriously. Stealing is a no-no.

Fischer recovered, and tried to sound serious while sweating and his face fully red.

―Alright, don't worry. I'll take them back. I'm keeping the cactus tho.

―No.

―Alright, alright.

A silence lingered. Alphonse was looking at the files on top of his desk with the corner of his eyes as if they were the new Panama papers. His cronies were doing the same. Even given the situation and being Fischer the one that got them, they mattered more to them than to the cafeteria guys, who only had a passing interest towards unveiling the alleged secret international conspiracy going on in the social studies building and were doing this only for their own entertainment and baskets of fruit. But having secret official documents on his desk not only had awakened Alphonse's old morbid curiosity but was his lifelong dream. No matter what they were about. Same with Summer. And Richard, despite claiming that "nothing ever happens", desperately wanted to be proved wrong.

―But, I guess we "could" take a look at them before that. It's not about those particular people, after all.

―Yeah, just to get a clearer picture of what's going on, just so we know... who to return them to. Right?

―Yes.

She spoke for everyone.

After all, the flesh is weak. Not like the strength and certainty of steel.

CHAPTER 40 ― PIZZAGATE

They got pizza.

CHAPTER 41 ― CROWD CONTROL

The situation escalated towards "pulling an all nighter if necessary" vibes. They made room for all the pizza boxes and what started as a casual lookup of some files evolved into a general scattering of hundreds of pages. They spontaneously separated into groups, looking at and for different things, that they communicated immediately, talking and cross shouting across the room.

―These are all medical files.

―It's like... they are keeping a registry of everyone there.

―Of course they are. It's a nursery.

―I got the psychiatric notes on a guy that assures to be his own grandfather.

―Here's the budget for the laundry. Extremely detailed. My props to whoever cooked it.

―Anything suspicious?

―Well, they sure spend a lot on blankets.

Richard sat on the floor, exhausted.

―There's nothing here. It's just what you would expect to see at a normal nursery.

―What do you know about how a normal filing nursery system works?

―I don't. But I know this is nothing.

―Do normal psychiatric wings or nurseries or whatever these are run astral charts on patients?

They turned towards Jeremy, who confused, pulled a carpet full of weird diagrams. Summer took a look.

―Those are not astral charts.

―Then what are they?

―They look like some sort of... abstract personality profiling?

―Well, it's unusual. But nothing out of this world for them to do those.

―Let me look if other files also have them.

But as he pulled up a file and opened it, he froze in place.

―What is it?

―That's... me. It's a file on me.

―What are you talking about? In the asylum files? Are you sure it's you?

―Of course it's me. It has a photograph and everything.

―Lemme see!

―Your hands are dirty with pizza.

Fischer washed them nonchalantly with his own shirt. And made some "gimme gimme" signs in international mime language. But Jeremy pulled the file closer to his chest. He was letting nobody look at that. He started reading, scaring anyone that might (and did) feel tempted to sneak a look over his shoulder. Eventually, he spoke again to the expectant crowd.

―This is some sort of registry. Perhaps this is part of the general university filing system, and got lost?

―Who knows.

―I mean, everything is quite standard. I also get some of this personality profiling stuff. But don't understand most of it. Clustering analysis, convergence factors, adjusted memetic strength... What this looks like is part of a file on a big sample group. A big study.

―Why do you say that?

―It says right here: control group.

What the fuck.

―Are you suggesting they are using the whole campus as some sort of guinea pig for social studies?

―Something like that.

―Well, it doesn't sound so far off. That's what those social studies guys do, don't they.

―I have no earthly idea.

Summer took the initiative and took another file. It was Clownie's.

―No.

―Does it have an address?

Jeremy pulled another, it was Daniel's.

Fischer looked at him with a face that could only be interpreted as "who?".

―The barefoot guy.

―Ah.

―Another guy from the cafeteria.

He clarified to the others.

―Guys. I think we're being monitored.

A tension could be felt through the air. Could it be that they actually discovered something, something that wasn't supposed to exist, something that couldn't be dismissed as a product of their imaginations? They all reacted to that possibility in quite different ways.

Jeremy was calm and deductive, but his hands had a slight tremor. Summer was expectant and afraid, searching for a way to plausibly deflate this whole affair. Richard was fighting to remain incredulous, especially on the outside. Fischer belched. Alphonse was strangely uneasy, not like when he usually was when he thought he had uncovered some hidden conspiracy, like when he was convinced there was something behind the change in providers of the vending machines. Just silent.

―BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

They collectively jumped out of their socks. The whole room was vibrating. Except Fischer, that fixated on the wall, slowly got up, approached it, and detached the incrusted still working perfectly fine phone from it, and answered the call. The group was still in shock. Summer had instinctively grabbed Alphonse's arm, who was even more in shock by that than by the situation. They couldn't hear what was being said from the phone, so we only get Fischer's fragments of the conversation, that very seriously, almost somberly, was making short replies to whatever they were telling him.

―Yes. It's me.

―We're in the campus still.

―We got pizza.

―Yes.

―Aha.

―I'm on my way.

And hung up.

The group got very quiet, expecting an explanation. But Fischer was just grabbing his things (forgot the cactus) and preparing to leave nonchalantly. They looked at him, asking what the hell happened and where he was going. Fischer turned, as he was already opening the door and said.

―I'm gonna smash fate with Donkey Kong.

And left.

Jeremy had to explain to them the necessary context to the otherwise very, very cryptic words. They would spend the rest of the evening trying to unveil it, but to Fischer, the conspiracy would have to wait. He met her halfway towards his apartment, and on the way explained the whole affair. Fate wasn't very worried, but offered to help. After all, she was the magical CSI hacker of the group, and cracking some random nondescript codebase to get more information about the whole thing shouldn't be more than a quick montage away. Soon, they reached the hall just outside Fischer's apartment, where Fischer himself saw something that made him stop suddenly in his tracks. This time, it was him who seemed overtaken by fear.

―Fischer? Are you alright?

In the shadowy darkness of his window frame, someone he knew very well had been waiting for him.

CHAPTER 42 ― OLIVER THE CAT

Oliver woke up. The last day had been a tumultuous one. Sussie (his current caretaker) had kidnapped him from his domains and put him inside a car. Hours later they emerged into a different dimension, full of students and weird new stuff. She had been quite excited. They got into an apartment that smelled familiar. Upon rigorous inspection and investigation he concluded it belonged to the big guy (or how others called him, Fischer). What a small world we live in.

And then they waited.

Minutes became hours, and day became night. Sussie was getting impatient and nervous. Then a little sad. He allowed her to pet him, out of pity. Then he decided to take a walk and scout the premises, and moments later he found him, accompanied by a human girl with blue hair. Sussie must have disliked the color very much, because when Fischer told the girl to run from the place, and she opened the door just to see a glimpse of her head in the distance, she began screaming profanities at her. The lungs on this girl. She packed a fury. Woke up half the people in the other apartments. Oliver thought to himself.

―God, if he exists, created in anger.

Then they started arguing and making a mess out of the place. From what I can understand, Sussie had come here to surprise him, wanted to hear nothing about conspiracies and pizza, and Fischer was telling the truth; not that it was very useful. You can't reason away storms.

It was all very bothersome. They almost forgot to feed him, and wouldn't stop making noise.

Hours and quite a lot of angry sex later, they finally shut up. And after bothering them for a while demanding certain doors be opened or closed at random to be able to freely roam, he too fell asleep. He had stuff to do next morning, and took his job very seriously. It was at the crack of dawn when he had made all necessary preparations and snuck out of the apartment, leaving his staff to take care of themselves, and began his exploration of those unknown lands. Out of the window and passing to the next one, he found the first surprise: yet another known face. Teddy was watching from inside the neighbour's room. He recognized the heart he was always holding, and his cheerful eyes devoid of life. He tried to enter the premises to assess the feasibility of rescuing him, but some kind of invisible force-field had been installed between the exterior and interior of the room, and he couldn't find the way to deactivate it. So he continued his morning walk.

Suddenly, from nowhere, another cat appeared.

―Oh, so I guess this place isn't fully uninhabited after all.

They crossed each other, sniffed each other's butts, and meowed lightly. I will translate.

―Morning.

―Morning.

Ah, the pleasantries of civilization. But not all encounters went the same way. Another cat appeared shortly after, coming out of a student's room. This one puffed and meowed violently, and Oliver made the same. Then after a while, they also went separate ways.

―What was this guy's problem?

You see, for most cats, college is their first real taste of freedom. They were somewhat free before, but it's here they first truly taste being away from the insidious and omnipresent cultural influence of their households. Away from their obsessively helicoptering millennial caretakers. How someone reacts to such newfound freedom, this unique opportunity at individuation, varies greatly from cat to cat: some opt for regressing into a more feral state of survival, some drown themselves in the certainty of duty and the structure of expectations, some use this opportunity to explore all the ways their previous repressions can be subverted, some make their new life a mere continuation of their previous zeitgeist, and don't change. Others just turn into total dicks.

―Kitty, kitty, kitty!

It was still early, but some diligent human students were already emerging from their nests to get early to their morning studies. We call them girls. There were two of them.

―Come here, kitty!

―How dare you woman. "Kitty". I come from a lineage so remote and ancient your civilization was still unmade when it entered its millennium long decline. Show a little respect.

Some belly rubs later, Oliver continued his journey.

He roamed the entire campus. Student halls full of rows of tables, research departments, a cafeteria where you can go and they give you water and munchies, libraries full of books and nerds, fields where military looking guys were training a bunch of people dressed as hoplites... He had a look at a dog. That just stood there, running in circles, moving his tail and barking as always.

―Poor idiot. He isn't smart enough to understand how miserable he should be.

The place was buzzing with activity, and yet to Oliver it seemed slightly off. There was all that, possibility. Diluted in a subtextual sterilization and rationalization in the name of short term pragmatism. He pondered about his cultural observations while he was making, very slowly, his way towards base camp. I will put them in dialogue here, as I don't have yet a unicode sign that successfully and aesthetically communicates well enough that something is neither being said by a character nor the narrator, but is in fact the musing of an orange cat.

―Do they not see what is happening to them? The same thing that happened to us, in a way. But they don't even have the excuse of being lured from apex predation to the complacency of domestic parasitism by a bunch of hard-working monkeys. They're doing it to themselves. Don't they get it?

He stopped for a second, staring blankly at the void.

―Maybe they know it, and they're doing it anyway.

Then continued pawing.

―That's even more terrifying.

Finally, without much ceremony he snuck back to Fischer's apartment, a few hours later.

Sussie tried to grab him. He let her do it.

―Oliver! Where have you been? We were so worried!

―Meow?

Several templates of posters with his face plastered on them with the word "missing" were on top of the kitchen table. They really were worried. In a way, that helped reconcile them, as they were no longer fighting anymore. He looked at Fischer, who had been feigning preoccupation during several hours and looked exhausted by last night. He nodded at him. Man nod. International interspecies universal language sign that needs no translation.

―He gets it.

And took a nap.

CHAPTER 43 ― LAY LOW

Fischer needed a breather. Sussie and his cat had unanimously installed in his apartment full time during her unexplained break from nursery school. And he didn't mind that, he still loved her, his own way. But it was getting a bit suffocating for his taste, and it was interfering with his usual Fischer functions. Like watching TV. And playing videogames. And doing nothing at all. He had even started to go to his classes, all of them, even the ones that were in inconvenient moments of the day (like in the morning, and in the middle of the morning, and after dinner, and before dinner) just to get out of the house. He was socializing just for the sake of it, if you can imagine.

―And the sex, oh my god. I mean it's great, I like sex. But it's just exhausting.

―This is like seeing a man drown while dying of thirst.

Alphonse didn't know how to process that information.

He had been carefully reading all the files Fischer had pilfered from the asylum, making photocopies and cataloguing them. And was prepared to share his findings, if he could find a moment for Fischer to really care.

―So, the files.

―Oh, that's still going on.

―...Yes. It's still going on.

―What about them?

―There's nothing much there to keep looking for apart from what we had already discovered, but we did find where some of them seem to be coming from. Particularly the ones that looked like personality profiling of big groups of people. We only found it in one of them, so I guess it was not supposed to be there: the signature of the anthropology department. We found more files with that "control group" tab, and some of them were also part of the cafeteria club, but not all of them. So it's not very clear if you guys have been specially targeted.

He didn't react much, so Alphonse continued.

―Jeremy and I talked, and we think the best course of action is to lay low for the moment. Not launch a full scale investigation, but instead use the "excuse" of the whole interviews thing you have been doing to talk to people that might be related to this whole thing. Well, I digress. It was his idea.

Fischer shook his head disapprovingly.

―That guy is a loose cannon.

If Alphonse seemed to hear a hint of sarcasm in that statement, Fischer didn't mean it to be there.

―So let's do this. But be careful. Fischer, I really feel we have something here, that could be related to a lot of the work I have been doing here during the last years. The cafeteria, the advanced studies, the rising prices in the vending machines. It has to be connected. I want this to be done right. I know you owe nothing to me, but we are in this together. I will conduct my own research from another angle. Remember to lay low.

―Lay and low, nice and clear.

―Are you sure of this?

―As sure as I have been of anything in my life.

And left Alphonse wondering how much of a reassurance that was.

Then, Fischer decided he needed some cheering up, so he went to meet the cheerfulest person he knew.

―So the other day, we were with the orchestra performing in a theatre, and I realized. Why are these people here? They surely don't care about the music. There are better ways to listen to it. And they were so nicely dressed. That's when I realized the whole thing was a performance. And I don't mean me playing the violin and all that stuff, that too. But the whole listening thing. They were watching each other (and even more importantly, themselves) performing the high-culture appreciator character. It's no different in independent more underground music scenes, performing a class of cultural subversion towards a music they don't like.

―Stop, stop! You're killing me Robert!

So that was a blast.

Then he still had some leftover afternoon left, so he went to the cafeteria. But Jessica wasn't there. They were still doing reform on most of it, and he plastered his face against one of the exterior windows to better see what was going on. About three or four people were busy working there, dressed in full piece blue working suits. One of them removed the top half of it, revealing a white shirt with a giant mona lisa impression on the front. Then they realized the monstrous face of Fischer was pressed against the glass, like a kid would do trying to take a closer look at a huge aquarium, so the worker covered himself with haste and another guy pulled up the curtains.

So that was weird.

He entered the still functioning part of the cafeteria, sat down and ordered something strong. He noticed an unusual guy he hadn't seen there before, sitting next to him by the counter. He looked like a seasoned bohemian intellectual, with long hair, beard and glasses. He looked older than he really was, because looking at him, you would say that rather than "being old", he looked from "another time". The guy must have noticed Fischer noticing him, because he started talking to him before any kind of formal introduction. Which is a thing that happens in real life, I swear.

―Do you know what an anthropobot is?

―Of course.

He looked surprised.

―Really? Where did you hear about it?

―It's a character in genetic mutant gladiators.

―What is that?

―A Shitbook game.

―Oh, I see. It's a good game?

―No. It's a Shitbook game.

The man laughed discreetly, and made a sip of his something on the rocks. Fischer did the same with his smoothie.

―You know, in real life an anthropobot is a human cell, that has been taken from real human tissue, removed from its usual context, and deployed in isolation inside an environment where it has to search for food and in general fend for itself. A little bit like a game.

―Is it any good at it?

―Not very. But it survives. Do you know what's interesting about it?

―Nothing?

―Exactly! There's nothing interesting going on. It behaves mostly how you would expect a lonely eukaryote would behave. It's nothing but a single organism cell surviving in a given ecosystem. It's not very good at it, but not very bad either. And it does that while, essentially, genetically almost by definition, being a human being.

―I see.

Fischer wasn't annoyed by the unexpected company, but neither thrilled by the content of the conversation.

―Perhaps what is fascinating about it, is that the de-specialized human cell was always in fact this new independent being. What made it form organ tissue and a fully fledged multicellular organism with complex functions, behaviour, intelligence and consciousness like us was not a top-down genetic plan of hierarchies and structures. But a much more insidious, deep and unwritten social contract between billions of the same beings. Humans are social constructs.

Fischer looked at him. Another loony. He smiled openly, and stretched his hand.

―I'm Peter.

―I'm Fischer.

―Oh, I know who you are.

That surprised him.

―You're the neo-assyrian guy. I've been reading your work.

―I'm just a student. That was just like, an accident doing homework.

―Was it an accident? I don't know. Maybe it was. But that's how lots of world-leading experts on a topic were made back in the day. Do you want to know how I ended up working in SETI?

Fischer's eyes lit up. He, for the first time in his life, recognized what an acronym meant.

―You mean the institute for the search of extraterrestrial life? Yes! How?

―I taught an octopus how to play the piano.

To Fischer, that sounded like the coolest thing someone had ever said in the history of things that had been said, and put all of his attention into the conversation. At last, someone he could respect as a serious member of the academic community. But he couldn't exactly figure out what these two things had in common. Peter sensed it correctly, and explained himself.

―Well, it turns out there's not so much to search extraterrestrial life for, if you don't even know how extraterrestrial life can be or how to communicate with it. And octopuses are quite as much alien intelligence as you can find here on earth, but despite that we know nothing about how to talk or interact with them.

―How did you do it. Have you found aliens yet?

―Oh, no. No aliens here.

―Are you sure? Have you looked hard enough?

Peter got a bit up from his seat and looked around.

―I'm sorry.

―Damn... So how did you do it?

―Well, I can't talk with octopuses, it was more about finding a way to crack their reward function to make simple conditioning work. So amongst other things, I invented a progress bar for learning to play the piano correctly that doubled as a small crab delivery system. And that's how I became the leading world authority in cephalopod cognition. And from there to NASA. I was originally an english literature graduate, but nobody wanted to read my stuff.

Fischer had no words. He was legit impressed.

―That's how that sort of thing happened. Do you want to know the american leading expert in crocodiles?

―I do.

Peter got the attention of the waiter from across the room, but instead of asking for another round:

―Thompson, how did you become an expert in crocodiles?

―My grandfather owned a pond in Florida!

―So there's that. It's a shame things don't seem to work this way anymore. It's been long since I've been here. It feels quite a lot more, serious now. Don't you think?

Fischer pondered a bit about his recent experience in the university, that amounted to a little less than one very chaotic and nonsensical year.

―I don't know if that's true.

―I'm glad you sense it that way. Or maybe you're the exception.

And looked at him as if he were doing a very affable x-ray.

―I'm here to deliver a message, Fischer. I fear our encounter is not fully fortuitous.

―A message? From whom?

―Professor Miller.

I guess that was supposed to sound ominous, but Fischer didn't sense it that way.

―Oh! How is good old Miller doing? I haven't seen him in a while!

He had already half forgot about a number of things, like the mystery of the doctor professor disappearance, the whole stuff about the class of seventy four, and being used as guinea pigs for a version of advanced studies program that turned a bunch of people insane while that being maybe part of an international conspiracy to hike vending machine prices or something like that.

―He's... fine. The official version is that he hurt his elbow while riding a bike in Holland, which I expect sounds random and oddly specific enough so nobody questions it very much. He told me to meet you here and deliver this message. He will come back "soon" and that until that happens you should "lay low". Oh, and to not forget about your exams.

―That's it?

―That's it.

―I don't understand. Why doesn't he just call me. He doesn't have my number?

―No, that's not the issue here. If I had to guess, I would say he deemed it necessary to take a couple of precautions. And that's why he sent me. I'm glad he did so. We go way back, the professor and I.

―Class of 97?

His memory miraculously came back. The bohemian, who was already preparing to leave, stopped for a second.

―Yes, in fact. How do you know that?

―We...

―Never mind, don't tell me. I've said too much already. I hope we see each other soon.

Peter shook his hand once again and left with casual and earnest theatricality, walking away without giving room for Fischer to say his own. There he went, the coolest man in existence, the living proof that academia is not only full of pretentious douchebags in an eternal game of social recognition, institutionalized mad men looking for an excuse to justify their extravagances as "might help medical stuff in the future or something", but also of people that knew what was up. Fischer was left paralyzed for a second, but then reacted and went after him in what you would think is the sudden realization that something is left unsaid or some question still needs a proper answer. But he was already gone.

He came back, a moment later.

―Left my scarf.

―Yes.

Grabbed it, and left once again. Much more prosaically this time.

Fischer shrugged as "whatever", and attempted to leave too. But he was informed that the guy had not paid his tab, so he had to cover it from his own pocket (alcoholic drinks not included in the standard cafeteria plan). After some begrudging monetary exchange, he finally left. While he made his way home back to Sussie, he pondered deeply about the significance of the cryptic message Miller had left him, the words and equations floating in a very visual abstract bit inside his clouded headspace that is meant to symbolize thinking, and tried to uncover the hidden meaning of it all.

―What did he mean by "exams"?

CHAPTER 44 ― EXAMS

―What do you mean you "forgot" about the finals?

Said Jeremy, covered in textbooks and photocopies and fluorescent yellow markers.

―What do you think we've all been doing this past month, all the preparatory classes and everything?

―I don't know, for some reason I assumed they weren't for me.

Sussie had left from her sabbatical, to let him study for the incoming disaster. They were at Jeremy's.

―I think I've never been here before. Nice lamp! Is that oak?

―Fischer, focus. Exams. How many, and when.

―Well... I don't really know. How do I figure out?

―Just enter the virtual campus online. Here, take my laptop.

Fischer typed out his name and a password he had, with lots of foresight, made his name also.

―What does it say?

―It says "Welcome to the virtual campus! It's your first time here, we'll show you around".

―Unbelievable. You hadn't even entered before? How on earth do you even send your homework?

―There are free printers in the upstairs department.

―No, those are not free, you're not even supposed to... Whatever. Press skip. Click here. Now there.

―I'm tired. Can we watch TV and we'll finish later?

Fortunately, he was joking, because Jeremy was looking as if he was about to fulminate him.

―Fischer... it says here you have about ten different exams during the next two weeks. And you have already missed two. What were you thinking? What have you even been doing? Playing videogames?

―Hey! That's only half true. I've been "laying low", you understand? And with Sussie.

But Jeremy was fuming at his friend.

―Alright, alright. I don't know! With all the cafeteria stuff I had already assumed I didn't have to study and make exams and everything. I just have had a lot on my plate lately. We missed an entire semester of classes, how are we supposed to take the same exams as everybody else?

―But Miller said it himself, the day he terminated the project. That we would have to catch up.

Fischer used Curse!

―Stupid Miller and his stupid...

But it wasn't very effective.

―...hair.

Jeremy then had an idea.

―Didn't he also say that, if we had any problems with the transition, to talk with the secretary?

And Fischer jumped, instantly abandoning his somber attitude.

―That's right! I will go talk to that secretary and sort all this out! Hah! Have fun studying!

And left. Jeremy took that tempestuous five minute visit from Fischer as an official break between his four hour study sessions, and continued doing what he was doing before. He sighed, tho. He had planned to use that break to drink water and eat. Well, he would have to wait until the next one.

Fischer appeared at top speed in the department, sliding over the polished floors when trying to stop. He slammed open Miller's door, just to find it empty.

―Dammit.

But his department neighbour had heard the loud noise, and came to see what was going on. It was Berta, his old ancient history teacher. You know, the one at the beginning of the story that wanted to flunk Fischer and that led to all sorts of other things. She was strict but fair? No? Well, whatever. Not really my fault if you weren't paying attention. She got through the door armed with a baseball trophy. Which was also, in fact, a baseball bat. But dropped it quickly.

―Oh, it's you! Fischer, I thought you were... What are you doing here?

―Who did you think I was?

―I don't know. There have been robberies lately. Somebody got in this very room, and turned everything inside out, a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't here, luckily.

―Yes, for them.

He was still looking at the baseball bat. She ignored the remark.

―I was looking for Miller.

―He's out of the country, I'm afraid. But you can leave a message if you like.

Fischer facepalmed. He had forgotten. Again. Miller was out. Why was he so stupid? He wanted to cry.

―Why did you want to see him anyway? Is it that important?

―I need him to tell me where the secretary is.

―The secretary? What secretary?

―Of student affairs.

―Have you looked at the secretariat office? It's in front of the front door.

And there he went again. He left, leaving after him a very comical and self-pitying afterimage, like in the cartoons. Berta looked at him disapprovingly, shaking her head from side to side. She was so going to flunk him back to whatever hillbilly town he had come from. And that's because they didn't let her use her patented teacher's baseball bat. Those goddamn puritans of the international human rights foundation, always putting their noses where they shouldn't.

Fischer arrived at the secretariat office, and instantly got a chill down the spine. That place was strange. And huge. It felt like somewhere you shouldn't really be in, despite the decorator's desperate efforts to make it a somewhat natural and comfy place. Like a dentist's waiting room. Or an airport. Or one of those houses where everything is a bit too clean. He sat there a moment and waited. Because he didn't know what else to do.

The minutes passed, and nothing happened. There weren't even magazines or anything to distract yourself with, as after the coronavirus they were deemed unconstitutional or something and became something office people just stopped caring about. Not even a coloring kids book. Fischer used to love that. Eventually, a young woman appeared behind the corner, showing clear signs of being back from some kind of nondescript corporate-mandated-for-legal-reasons break. And it wasn't until she had ceremoniously put all her stuff in its place, opened a counterfeit version of solitaire on her workstation, and begun browsing her phone, that she noticed Fischer sitting perfectly still in one of the available chairs. She looked at him, annoyed by his mere presence.

―What are you doing here?

―I come to see the secretary.

―Do you have an appointment?

―No.

―You have to make an appointment.

―I would like to make an appointment, then.

―It's an online form.

You know that kind of people that work towards the public that make you feel stupid just for existing even when you are asking a perfectly reasonable thing, like for them to do their job? She was just like that. Not much different from Jessica, the genius waitress. But without any of the charm. Nor the genius. Is that a failure of human resources, or an intended feature of bureaucratic systems? You don't wanna find out.

Fischer was very annoyed. At the woman, at himself, and at everything. Also, he had forgotten his phone at Jeremy's. But powerless and intimidated enough to not throw a fit, he did something a bit alien to his nature. He got up, left, got his phone, and came back.

―It says here I have to wait a week for my appointment to be processed.

―Then wait a week?

―I can't wait a week.

―Well, you can send an urgent requirement.

―How much until they answer that?

―About a week.

―I can't wait a week!

She finally got her sight away from the monitor.

―I don't know what to tell you. I don't know why you're even here.

Fischer started explaining, but she interrupted him.

―And I don't care either!

―Why can't I just open a random door and talk to whoever is in there?

―You can't do that. This is not like in the movies. We have security here, you know?

―You would call the cops on me?

―Dude, I don't care about you! Of course I would, it's my job.

Fischer pondered for a second.

―What if I do it during your break?

And the girl relaxed immediately.

―Oh, then it's not my problem. Not my fault we are understaffed.

Then looked at her watch.

―Well, I'll be back in ten minutes. Don't do anything stupid, please.

And left. Fischer didn't waste the opportunity, and as he said he would do, opened a door at random.

CHAPTER 45 ― ANANSI

The room was unlike anything Fischer had seen before. It was dark, a little bit like a cave, in a way you felt you could explore it with a flashlight. The walls were covered by metal cabinets containing physical records of filing systems long forgotten by man. From them spawned all sorts of piles of files and folders, cardboard boxes full of abandoned or requisitioned material in labyrinthine formations, and it all converged, from the sides and floor and ceiling, into the absolute center of it. Where a minimalistic desk with a very slim and clean laptop were behind a man looking at you as a very interesting small animal that has finally and fatally entered his lair.

―Close the door, please.

―Alright.

He already knew that man. Despite all the people he had met and forgotten about this last year, he had the image of that slim african man with long fingers and nail paint stuck in his mind, lingering. Very calmly, with his laptop reflecting on his glasses, he addressed the intruder; whom he also remembered very well.

―What seems to be the nature of the situation?

Fischer explained to him the nature of the situation.

―Well, I don't know exactly what Miller meant originally when he said to you guys to turn to me with any problems regarding your student status, but I guess he's not here to ask him about it. Is he?

―No, he isn't.

―So since we don't know where he is, we will have to resolve it to the best of our abilities with what we have here. Or do you happen to know where he is?

―I heard he had a biking accident in Holland.

―Yes, I heard the same.

Making implicit that he wasn't buying that either.

―So, let me search your file.

Anansi turned to his laptop, and started to type very fast, his fingers moving efficiently and a little bit exaggeratedly up and down, like a... well I guess the whole spider analogy is well understood by now. Finally, he made a couple of clicks and.

―There you are. Indeed you were in a special regiment program, but that got cancelled and, I don't see here any special provisions curricular-wise. I'm afraid you will have to take your tests like any other student, nothing that I can do here.

―But...

―Not only that. I'm sure you're already aware but, you have to pass a certain amount of credits to re-enroll next year. It's not only about having to repeat courses. Your standard plan seems to be fairly homogeneous credit-distribution wise, so that would mean failing no more than four of your classes.

―Four? But I already missed two finals!

―I am aware of that. You can always go to extraordinary. But a more pressing problem is that, in fact, non-presence is a whole other thing. Because you didn't inform the faculty that you weren't going to take them, you're by default flagged as, technically, not a student here anymore. It's what we know as informal disenrollment.

A chill went down Fischer's spine. It was game over. All of a sudden. He couldn't believe it. No, no.

―But, I was. I didn't even know. What...

―Although, there's a bit of a gray area here. The system hasn't updated yet. Maybe we could consider this appointment a way of delayed notification in presence of "force majeure". Like what they did with the floodings in eighty-six.

―It did rain quite a lot last week.

―But I guess this is not exactly the same. What a conundrum. You see, bureaucrats like me don't often find ourselves in a position to make actual decisions, we limit ourselves to following the web of guidelines and protocols people better suited than us lay for us to manage things. But it seems here I have a decision between doing nothing, and letting nature take its course, or intervening and giving you another chance. How difficult.

Fischer didn't supplicate nor plead for his life. He just looked at him, from strange man to strange guy.

―Are you sure you don't know where Miller is?

―No idea.

The scene paused for a second. Fischer's future hanging by a thread.

―Alright.

Shrugged, and typed a couple of things.

―You're no longer, not a student here.

The double negative confused him for a bit, but then he understood and exhaled a whole lot of air, more than you would think was humanly possible. He was laughing now, and removing sweat from the front of his face. It really was a close call. Unless Anansi had made up that whole thing just to play with him, anyway. But it was when Fischer started to do a little innocent celebratory dance when he decided he had enough.

―Now, don't claim victory already. What you should do, if you would allow me to give you a piece of unsolicited advice, is to get out of here right now and study very hard for what I assume will be a desperate attempt to preserve your life. Starting by getting out of here, if possible.

Fischer stopped instantly. That guy was serious. He didn't say it as a threat or anything, and kept a deadpan delivery, if with a bit of venom, up until the end. Fischer got up and started walking backwards slowly, attempting with not a lot of success to exit the room without making lots of noise nor breaking anything, doubted as to whether to leave the door open or not, changed his mind a couple of times, and got the fuck out of there as fast as humanly possible after. Anansi was left, already working on something else. But he couldn't help himself but smirk for a fraction of a second well after a minute had passed.

―"It did rain quite a lot last week."

He scoffed unintentionally, and rubbed his eyes behind his glasses with one hand.

―What a guy.

CHAPTER 46 ― OLD FRIENDS

Fischer returned to Jeremy's apartment at light-speed. Not that he could avoid it, as Fischer had already made himself a copy of the key and blasted through the room using a voice not usually suited for interiors, updating him on the latest drama of his exams crusade.

―I have eight exams in two weeks, what do I do. How does one study. I know nothing about everything. I have forgotten everything that happened in the history of the world.

―Fischer, calm down. Don't panic.

―You're right! No, panic. There's no time for that. Fast, ask me a question, quiz me, anything, shoot.

And postured himself as to receive a long pass from a quarterback.

―Uh... I don't know. When was the Hindenburg disaster?

Fischer froze in place.

―The what?

And threw himself on the carefully made bed, moving around, lamenting, and messing it all up. But rapidly got tired of that and got up, and started hassling Jeremy, that only wanted to be left alone.

―You have to help me. This is life or death. I'm dead. What do I do?

―Fischer I have exams of my own!

―What do you care about them? You're probably gonna get all A's like always!

―Yes, but there are different kinds of A's.

―Are there?

―Well, not officially. But you can tell by how the teacher writes the letter what he really thinks.

―That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard and I have heard a lot of dumb things because I come from a long standing tradition of dumb people who can't shut the hell up and you have to help me or you will never see me again!

Jeremy stopped to think for a second, but Fischer intervened.

―See? That's your problem. You think too much. Study too much. How many hours since you slept or had something to eat? You're gonna kill yourself. And that's bad for performance. Let's make a trade, you help me, I help you. I will make spaghettis, it's my specialty, you won't regret this, deal?

I guess there was some part of reasonable truth behind Fischer's attempt at maniac persuasion slash food bribery, because Jeremy accepted. While he wrapped up what he was doing, Fischer ran to the store, came back, cooked up a storm, and was presenting now at the table with an exaggerated amount of white pasta with no other condiment than tomato sauce, a large soda, and three spoons. To a food deprived Jeremy to the point of mild hypoglycemia, those stupid spaghettis tasted like the best thing he ever had. Content after eating a fraction of Fischer's generous portion, he dozed off a little bit, and it took a little bit of Fischer's trademark shaking to make him not fall asleep on the spot.

―Exams. What do I do.

―I don't know man, I'm really tired all of a sudden. You should probably just study. Take the textbooks and read them, from beginning to end. Make summaries. Memorize them. Repeat all the exercises and homework, and then you can begin to...

―There's no time for all that!

Jeremy had a microsleep.

―...to really start with quizzes and last year exams and...

Again, just that this time, he wouldn't fully wake up.

When Fischer was done shaking him, he started to think. The plan Jeremy suggested wouldn't work. It was a Jeremy plan for Jeremies, but he needed a Jeremy plan for Fischers. And he looked at his friend again, still sleeping. One that wouldn't involve reading and thinking straight for the next ten thousand hours. He needed not a good student, but a hustler. A man with street smarts, and instinct.

And knew exactly who that was.

A couple dozen phone calls later, he ran out of ideas. Everybody was either busy, wanted nothing to do with this, or was powerless to help him. He made a long list of calls that included but were not limited to: the barefoot guy, carlos the gardener, the rich old lady with the mansion, oliver, the fire department, his own mother. He said goodbye to grandma Francesca, the one from the cafeteria club, not before agreeing to talk to each other soon and maybe one day make some muffins or panqueques together. Then, and only then, very reluctantly, regretting it as he was doing it, dialed one last number on the list.

―Please don't pick up, please don't pick up...

He picked up.

―Adrian! Long time no talk! How are you doing?

―Fuck!

It was that guy that kept calling him adrian for some reason. From the other cafeteria club. The rival one. That liked to feel superior to others, especially to Fischer, who disliked him every day a little bit more, even if he was not seeing or hearing or thinking about him at all. In fact, that had been his new year's resolution, and so far he had been nailing it. Fischer quickly explained his situation, but he did so with apathy, dragging his words and with a kindlishly half-sarcastic voice.

―Oh. You sure must be desperate to turn to me. I will help you on one condition, that you...

―I'm hanging up.

He was really going to.

―Alright! Alright! I will help you.

Fischer was confused and sad to have gotten what he wanted. So it only occurred to him to say:

―Why?

And Slinger thought for a second. And spoke confidently.

―My reasons are my own.

Mysterious.

―Alright.

Not that Fischer cared that much, anyway.

―How are we gonna do this? Where are you now?

Ten minutes later he appeared at Jeremy's doorstep, and Fischer let him in. It was a strange and unlikely situation, to be honest. Their host was still sleeping, still on the table they sat around, and it became the center stage for the strategic battle that was unfolding. Fischer explained to Slinger the situation further, including Jeremy's plan for study and his own provisions to become a cabbage farmer, that he had been developing in his head during the last half hour instead of, well, studying.

―Forget about that. What you need is a sound and proven strategy. Make-up exams, or extraordinary exams; that's where the gold is. You'll have a month to prepare for those, and are usually easier than actual finals. What finals and regular exams are for, is to pass the ones that you actually can so you will have less to study later, and to know what the subject of the class is about. Also, most professors are too lazy to make separate exams, and they start vacations immediately after they have finished grading finals, so they don't even bother making different ones. Make-ups are more often than not watered down versions of the finals, those are not for passing, they are for intel-gathering.

Fischer was taking notes for the first time in the whole semester. Jeremy was starting to wake up and was listening to the conversation in chunks, while still half asleep and without fully understanding who was talking and what was going on. But found this guerrilla style study planning very alien and interesting.

―So, what you need to do right now is pick the final exams that you can actually pass, whose grade doesn't depend too much on previous results and homework, and pass those. Pick two or three. And just be present the others to collect the questions. This way, your teacher can remember you exist and doesn't see you for the first time in June. That's also important.

―But how do I actually study for these ones? Do I read the textbooks or...?

―None of that. Most of them are useless context that puts everything into perspective. You will study from summaries, class notes, indian youtube videos about the subject, and powerpoints. Trust me, I have done this lots of times.

―But I don't have any notes.

―Good! Then you're unbiased. Good notes are an invaluable resource and should be left to the professionals. Here's the number of a guy. This dude has spent the last ten years going to every single class in every single faculty, has about twenty different degrees, and gains his livelihood selling notes to desperate students. Not that his titles are for much more use than that, anyway. Send him a message with all your classes, and go to an ATM. He only takes cash.

―Can't we just cheat?

―Cheating, next subject. It's actually quite funny. Very advanced. You have to know quite a lot to be able to cheat effectively, you have to study hard. Believe it or not, to just pass first year classes it's easier to just know the answers. Cheating is usually reserved for the academic elite. For the moment, we will focus on regular and usual small cheat sheets hidden in everyday objects, but that will come later.

―But... I don't understand.

Jeremy had finally woken up enough to be able to verbalize thoughts.

―How do you know so much about this? And why are you doing this? Don't you also have exams?

Slinger scoffed.

―No, I don't.

―How come?

―It's obvious, isn't it.

Fischer and Jeremy looked at each other, not knowing what to say. Slinger was in disbelief, and then got almost angry.

―I'm not an undergraduate, you morons! Why does everybody think I'm just a first year kid? The amount of disrespect I have to put up with, it's unbelievable.

―Wait, you're a postgrad? You're not a student?

―Of course I'm not a student! I work here!

―You're one of those professor aides, that give exams and make coffees and...

―The tongueless.

―No! Well, yes. But I'm supposed to be investigating. Those are just some of the things I have to do while I work on the research for my thesis. How do you think someone actually graduates? Hint, it's not studying. It's not absurd cafeteria clubs. You heist. That's why I know so much. I "was" you.

And there's nothing post-graduates hate more than themselves from four years ago.

Jeremy fell asleep again. Meanwhile, Fischer went into a very shady under-a-bridge style meeting with the "class notes" guy, and came back a little bit poorer than he already was but with stacks of papers full of arcane knowledge. Then they picked a subject and the real work began.

It was still hard work. It turned out, you can't wiggle your way around a little bit of learning while you're attempting to cheat your way around higher education, and Fischer really struggled with names and dates of events and people. His chaotic energy and accidental post-structuralism didn't do him any favours regarding that. Especially to him, it was very hard work. Slinger had semi-permanently installed himself in the apartment, and was reading a newspaper while attempting to tutor Fischer, giving him direction and little nuggets of wisdom here and there.

―You absolutely will have to bullshit your way around most questions, but bullshitting is an art. You have to put there small factual things that actually happened and dates that actually fit, so then your usual nonsense will have an aura of authority to it.

Of course, Fischer, who had managed after all to trick a university into accepting him, and passing his secondary studies in a public school, already knew all that. But it wasn't bad to refresh the fundamentals from time to time.

They got Fate in there, to much of Slinger's delight, who had her own ideas about how to best approach the problem. She made a collection of flashcards with very basic information he had to remember and link together, and plastered them all around the kitchen. This way, Fischer couldn't just escape to make peanut and jelly sandwiches and just slack off during half an hour without at least accidentally learning something along the way. Of course, she had her own tests, so she appropriated the small closet room to do her own thing there, and also to be as far away from Slinger as possible, who while he was not directly attempting to flirt with her (fortunately) was starting to behave in a magnanimous and chivalrous artificial way when she was present. Only to devolve into the now-adult rat kid he had always been and always will be. The barefoot guy, who had seen Fischer's earlier missed call late, appeared sometime after. To much of the big guy's delight, he had gone back to his old ways and was wearing no shoes, despite it being raining on the outside. He didn't care much about finals, but because he found the whole bootcamp dynamic very interesting, he planted a literal pile of books on the ground and installed himself in a vacant armchair; from there he would read, study, sleep, eat and live for the foreseeable future. Then Robert appeared with a trumpet.

―There's something I don't understand.

Said Jeremy, to nobody listening.

―Why is everyone in my apartment?

CHAPTER 47 ― NEO

Fischer was struggling.

After an initial and miraculous short string of victories in three of the finals, he was hard at work studying for seven very definitive make-up exams that were lingering on the not-so-distant horizon. And the pressure was starting to get to him. He was not built for this. The ecosystem in bootcamp remained the same, with a couple of important changes. Jeremy had passed all his finals with flying colors, and was now focused full time on preventing his flat from becoming a fully fledged jungle, and tutoring Fischer in a more involved and direct way. A couple of students from the same class as Fischer had seen his success and became devotees of Slinger study plan, who suddenly was seeing himself as an actual person with actual functions. Fate was long gone, to enjoy his vacations in the west coast with her Silicon Valley tyrannically absent parents, and Sussie had agreed to lend Oliver to Fischer for a couple of weeks for "moral support" and "to bounce ideas off", which achieved more than anything else to add a layer of cat fur to a floor already covered in empty pizza boxes, cans of empty energy drinks and disjointed notes on topics as separate as "The Delian League" and "The Krebs Cycle". They ran out of spaghettios, so Fischer went to the shop, and ever since then every single thing in the apartment that could at least theoretically hold food was now over-the-top full of macaroni with cheese. Barefoot guy remained barefoot, secluded in monastic self-imposed isolation in the ten feet square that surrounded his armchair. And so on, and so forth.

―This is impossible. How do they expect me to learn and remember all this in a week?

―They don't. That's why they made classes during a whole year.

―Oh...

As it hadn't occurred to him.

Slowly but surely, his mood was becoming more erratic. From long periods of somber smashing his head against the table and intermittent fake crying, to energetic episodes full of optimism and self-confidence, to moment of direct unabashed violence that they had learned to curb with strategic sessions of physical exercise. When the last volunteer to attempt what Fischer called "sports" but was actually more akin to "lawless wrestling" defected, they resorted to just make him take cold showers and run around the campus throwing long passes to him from time to time. Not a lot of flowers and decorative bushes survived the onslaught.

They were back at the table, Fischer concentrating, attempting to crack last years exam.

―No. I can't. I can't.

―Come on... It's easy, we read about that yesterday.

―I don't remember. I'm a fraud.

His old insecurities were coming back. The sensation that he was only pretending to know things, that he would any second being exposed as the moron he really was, the fact that he actually liked the new star wars movies. A year of being somewhat the center of attention in the cafeteria, of being told his nonsense was brilliant and that he was special, had served to made him weaponize his ignorances as a virtue. But now, facing against a wall of uniform and depersonalizing tests that he couldn't charm his way into, he was regressing into the same Fischer he was a year ago.

―You're not stupid, it's just that...

But Jeremy stopped right there. He had slipped. He said the "s" word to Fischer. The whole room contained his breath. I will explain. After half a decade of somewhat tutoring people less fortunate grade-wise than him in highschool, Jeremy had gotten used to certain phrases. The guy would attempt to solve an equation, fail and then lament himself saying something like "I am stupid", and then Jeremy would answer something like "You're not stupid, it's just that..." following some bland excuse as to why the stupid person can't solve the stupid problem. But here, Fischer didn't say anything about being stupid. Jeremy had just defaulted to it, implying indirectly (via denying it) that Fischer was, in fact, one of those stupid people that deflect blame on themselves on account of being stupid. Which he was. But it was still a big no-no thing to say to him, specially now.

Everybody was expecting the big Fischer reaction. And for a moment, it looked like he would maul Jeremy to death. They would have to lead the procession afterwards, and explain to his mother why there was a cat on top of the casket, that contained a symbolic part of his son's scattered and half-eaten remains. But to their surprise, Fischer remained calm. He grabbed the notes of what he was studying, said something about "can't study here with all this noise", and just left.

Ignoring the audacity of the fact that Fischer just complained about noise in a circus of rotating weirdos of his own creation that used to be his personal sanctuary, Jeremy felt guilty. And elated to still be alive.

―I didn't mean it.

―Yes, but you crossed a red line there. Be careful.

―I know, I know... Should I go look for him?

―I wouldn't. Don't worry, he will come back. He left his lunch.

―You think? Where did he go anyway?

―Who knows. Probably to his apartment, you know. To play videogames and disconnect a little bit.

―That sounds about right.

And as prophesied, Fischer came back a couple of hours later. But something was changed about him.

―Hey man, I'm sorry about earlier. I didn't mean to call you names.

―That's of no importance right now. You're my friend and you're helping me, and I want you to know I appreciate that. Now, where did we left off?

They were stunned. Something had happened. Robert tried to interrogate him.

―Fischer, where have you been?

―The library.

They were double stunned.

―And... did something happen in the library? Did they switch you with a clone?

―No, they did not. But that's very humorous, you have always been a funny guy. I wish to continue this conversation some other time, but right now I need to focus on my studies. Jeremy?

―Y...Yes.

―Let's get to it. Do you still have that test?

They were all left speechless. Fischer focused on the test, and the others focused on Fischer focusing, and well. Some were almost allowing themselves to dream with the possibility that he now magically would ace it first try, but it would be very clear very soon that it wasn't gonna be the case. But he was getting there. The other flunking students, inspired, started to take it seriously too. He himself proposed to try it again after a quick re-reading of the material. Robert and the barefoot guy were observing from the sidelines.

―What is he doing? Do you think he's on drugs?

―No, I don't think so. I think he's starting to believe.

CHAPTER 48 ― MYSTERIOUS GIRL II

Lidia was sitting on top of her bed, wearing soft and fluffy neutral blue pajamas (girls are color coded in this story). She had just showered with violently warm water, and was now brushing her hair with a brush she had since she was a small child, as she did every day before going to sleep. Allison entered the room. She was her designated roommate in the residency. They didn't know each other before, nor had much in common, but they have learned to get along quite fine, and these night-time conversations between them were not uncommon. Allison was holding a mug with both hands as if warming them, and taking small sips, but stopped all of a sudden. She saw Lidia, and knew instantly that she wanted to talk. It's one of these things girls that know each other and spend a lot of time together just know, and this humble narrator couldn't start to guess what cue revealed what fact. As she started changing into more modest and improvised sleeping clothes, she asked her about that.

―How was your day?

―Oh, you know. Not much. I spent most of the day in the library, studying.

―I didn't make you for someone that has to go to june. What happened?

―I don't know, I guess I have just been distracted lately. But it's only one class.

―You will stay here studying for the whole month just for one class and skip half the summer? You can just retake it next year, you know.

―No, no. It's just this one class that's really hard. I don't want to leave it hanging.

Lidia continued brushing, a little bit absent-minded. Allison also sat on her own bed, and took another sip from her mug. There was more to it than that. Lidia broke from her spell a little bit and continued the conversation.

―How about you?

―Oh, I'll be here for a couple of days and then I'm off with some friends. We will go to...

―I met Fischer.

Oh, that was something else. Unbothered by having been interrupted, Allison leaned forwards, toward a Lidia that was clearly attempting with all her mana to not make a big deal out of it while clearly being the centerpiece of the conversation.

―Ohhhhh! So this is what this is about? Isn't that the guy you always never talk to me about?

―That's not true. I tell you everything.

―Yeah. Sure. So, what happened?

She cleared her throat, and started talking while her eyes were looking for something upright in her field of vision, counting imaginary things with her fingers, probably details and bits of the story that she had already told herself and organized properly while taking the shower.

―So I was at the library, in my usual table. And I left my stuff there while I went to look up something, but it was really hard to find so I had to ask in reception where to find it and...

―Come on.

―Yes, yes. So I find it, I come back to the table, and he was there! He was studying, or something, looking straight at some notes, with his hands covering his sight. Didn't even see me coming, and obviously didn't even know I was sitting just there!

―That's great! What did you do?

―I wanted to run away, but my things were in front of him. I couldn't just abandon my notes.

―You're dumb. Continue.

―So I sat in front of him, and continued studying. It was very intense. I don't know when and how or if he realized it was me. We just sat there for a long, long time.

Allison inhaled deeply, trying to contain her desperate need to shout at Lidia for being a childish idiot.

―So, let me recap. This guy, that likes you. That you like. You made out last time you met each other. Appears suddenly. And you do nothing. Did you talk? Have you talked since then?

―No... we didn't talk.

―Why's that.

―I don't know. He has a girlfriend, I think. And he probably didn't even remember about me, or doesn't like me anymore.

―How could he...? What do you? Lidia, you know nothing about men. And you don't seem to remember what great tits you have. I'll lend you clothes. You can't keep hiding these to the world. No aspirant to fuckboy will ever resist again.

―Shut up! Maybe. So... yes. That's what happened. We sat there and read.

Allison, defeated, looked at the inside of her mug; and then took a big gulp to finish whatever was in there.

―And then we went to the bathroom and fucked.

Hundreds, if not thousands of big and small droplets of vodka showered a Lidia that was covering half of her face in innocent embarrassment. Allison started coughing violently, taken completely by surprise, and Lidia had to come rescue her by giving her gentle pats on the back. When she recovered enough to be able to verbalize words, she did so with genuine tears in her eyes.

―Bitch! What the fuck?

―I know, I know! I'm terrible. I'm a bad person, aren't I?

―Jeez, I don't even know how to process it. I wouldn't say you're a bad person but... God. That was unexpected. I didn't even think you... Uhm... Nevermind. You're dangerous. But wait, how did that even happen? You agreed to it, or it was like, a product of the moment...? How would that even work?

―I don't know! It was a little like last time. We didn't "agreed to it". As I said, we didn't talk.

―Wait, wait. I don't understand. How could you, in a library bathroom? Even I haven't even done that. Couldn't. It would be too embarrassing afterwards. And I thought that, from the two, you were the shy one.

―Why do you say that? Do you think somebody saw us?

―Well, I'm sure there are cameras. But they don't need to see you. They can hear you. It's a library.

Lidia connected those two dots in her mind a little bit too late, and drowned herself in embarrassment under a blanket while saying something about "I thought they looked at us funny!".

―Well, not sure how much covering yourself serves now.

She filled the mug again generously, and took another sit to drown the I-almost-just-die-drinking drink.

―Well maybe they didn't hear you that much. Do you moan a lot?

―Alli! That's private!

Allison scoffed. She didn't even know what world she was living on anymore.

―Well. Alright. So that happened. And then what?

―What do you mean "then what"?

―What happened afterwards?

―Oh, nothing. We kept studying, and about half an hour later they closed so we left.

―And that's it? Left separate ways into the sunset?

―Yes. But without the sunset.

―What did he say?

―Nothing. As I said, we didn't really talk.

―What a pig. You're my hero. I didn't know you had it in you. Good for you. Honestly. Cheers.

But the story wasn't over for Lidia. Shame was something she struggled with quite a lot indeed, but guilt was another kind of beast.

―But I can't do these things! I never do these things! Why now?

―I don't know. You were stressed. Don't think about it much. Things happen.

―It's not about the sex...

―Of course it's about the sex.

―...it's about doing the right thing. He has a girlfriend.

―What about her?

Said, dismissively. Lidia didn't pay much attention to that.

―I can't do this! I promised to myself I wouldn't do these things! And I can't even manage to not think about him. I tried, I've been very busy trying to avoid it. And then this happened. When someone did this to me, it hurt so bad. I had problems you know, from that time? With anxiety, not eating and... but well, that's in the past. The thing is I promised I wouldn't be one of those people, and would never, ever, ever do something like that to someone myself. I try to be good, all my life, every day. And then I do this. What's wrong with me? I'm supposed to feel happy, or liberated to have done something I wanted, but instead I feel so... bad.

She was really taking it to heart. Allison came over to her bedside to comfort her, but didn't have much success. You see, that's what happens sometimes, with Fischer's funnish but shitty character bits. Somebody else, eventually, has to put out with the inevitable fallout, and answer for the consequences of his actions for him. No matter how hilarious the punchline be. The scene went on, for a while. Lidia would have a lot of trouble trying to study during the next weeks, and would avoid the library at all costs, as it reminded her too much about both him, and her quickly dissipating self-image, molded by years and years of desperate integrity.

Allison eventually left her crying in peace, and went mug in hand to the balcony to have a smoke. From the one that came from the room next door, another couple of your girls were expectating, asking in whispers about what was going on this time with Lidia. She refused to share details, and as she was sipping from her mug once again and rolling a huge blunt, started shaking her head from side to side.

―She worries me.

CHAPTER 49 & 50 ― GODOT

Double chapter, switched it up on ya.

The camera slowly panned over the now desolate remains of what once was Jeremy's apartment. Now deserted, it was filled with small and big reminders of what happened there the last few weeks: dirty cooking utensils, crumpled music sheets, dry-mud human footprints, an inflatable pool party crocodile, a heathen sculpture of pizza boxes half finished that was meant to represent the god neptune, dirty clothes stinking of toxoplasmosis. They were lying there, awaiting an explanation of what actually happened there that would never come.

Weeks had come and gone. Its inhabitants, as they were progressing through their tests, abandoned the premises and most of their belongings there without much explanation; leaving behind a life that they would eventually return to after the summer break, but to which they wanted nothing to do with once the deed was done. By the end, only a few remained, and our unlikely heroes turned into the protagonists of this tragic tale were now patiently waiting and seeking the results of their last test.

Fischer exited the building. Jeremy was waiting for him by the front door.

―So? How did you do?

He had decided to forgo an entire month of summer to help Fischer study. Not that it was a great sacrifice to him anyway, he was exactly where he wanted to be. Who needs to go to europe with his family and run around Provence's fields under the mediterranean sunlight with girls wearing sundresses looking for their version of a midsummer night's dream when you can be in a dark room surrounded by losers teaching a walrus to play checkers? Figuratively, of course.

―I don't know. I don't care. I already forgot everything.

―No point of worrying now. Alea iacta est.

―What does that mean?

―You should know. Wasn't this last test the Latin one?

Fischer looked at him with a poker face. He was white as a sheet of paper and didn't even know what planet he was on, or if.

―I need a drink.

So they mechanically walked towards the cafeteria. They passed by the newspaper room, but nobody was there. In fact, there were not a lot of people in the whole campus. It made for a very strange sight, and made you realize what a strange place this really was. Like a recently built suburb of an affluent city that is already finished but not quite lived-in. A theme park for the mind that can't be understood without a couple thousand years of context regarding the whole of western civilization, whose primary function is to simulate such tradition; the same way they do by creating mock versions of different cultures and call them "themes".

And so, they reached the cafeteria. And to no one's surprise, there was nobody there. Not even a waitress.

They sat at a table, and on his indestructible phone Fischer began to refresh the page where they put the results every five seconds or so, despite having just left. He already had the results of the others. He had passed four, his eye of the tiger ringtone blasted at full volume during another so that's an automatic fail (you're not supposed to bring the phone to the exam) and an administrative strike that he candidly suggested to the professor leading the test a rich variety of places he could place it in regarding his body, failed another, and now was expecting the results for the last and definitive one. If my math and Jeremy's is correct, it would decide if Fischer returned for the next semester or would watch TV sitting on a sofa for the rest of his life. The uncertainty was killing him more than the prospect. He really needed that drink. But still, no waitress.

―Duuude. What is going on?

―No idea. Even when we had our club, there was always somebody here.

―Those were the good times, weren't they.

―They really were. We didn't know how good we had it until it was gone.

―Talk for yourself, I always knew.

―What? You went missing for a month to, and I quote, "reconnect with your ancestral roots".

Fischer chuckled.

―That's past history. The only thing that matters now is what is in front of us.

―That's... strangely profound coming from you.

―And what I need in front of me right now is a beer. Should we shout or something?

―That's more your area of expertise.

Fischer let out a barbarous yawp, that rumbled all across the cafeteria and made some of the poor crystal glasses rumble on top of the stands. But still, no answer. They scratched their heads, but not each other's.

―What should we do?

―I don't know. Why don't we call Jessica? I really don't feel like going home.

―Me neither. Let's do that.

Beep. Beep.

―Hi!

Jeremy chuckled. Fischer was now and suddenly using his soft talk-with-girl-on-the-phone voice.

―So, we're at the cafeteria, and there's nobody here. Any idea where we can...?

―Oh, shit. I forgot to close. Wait there. Don't touch anything, I'm coming.

―Alright, when do you think you will... She hung up.

Jeremy put himself at ease.

―Well, nothing to do now but wait for Jessica.

―And the test results.

―What do we do, while we wait?

They looked around, not sure what to do to kill time. Especially in this place, they felt like they had already done everything. But on the horizon, someone appeared, walking through campus.

―Isn't that Slinger?

―He is.

Before Jeremy could suggest it, Fischer had already gotten up, opened the door, and was shouting at the guy and waving at him with exaggerated gestures to come over there. Which he did.

―Yes, yes. I have seen you already. Sup Jeremiah?

―Hi.

―What are you guys doing here by yourselves? The whole campus is closed.

―We're waiting for Jessica.

―And the test results.

―Right! How did the tests go?

―Good-ish. We're waiting for the results of the last two ones. If I pass one of them, I'm saved.

―Isn't the tension killing you?

―Don't remind me. What are you doing here, still tutoring?

―Me? No, I had some work to do still. You know, investigation stuff. Not for undergrads.

―Sure. I must say, I am surprised you took those guys and helped them. You didn't have to.

―Well, you know me. I'm a good guy. Plus, it was quite lucrative.

―Wait. You were charging them?

―Of course I was charging them. Everything in this world has a price, amigo. You gotta make a living somehow, like the guy that sells notes I introduced you to.

―Are you gonna say now you take a cut for that too?

Said Jeremy, fully expecting the answer to be "no". As in "I couldn't fall so low" no. But instead, he just stared back at him, as if he didn't need to state the obvious. Turns out, his redemption arc was not so redemptive after all. Couldn't even do that right.

―You're disgusting.

―Welcome to the real world, fellas. Call me next year if you need me. Well, if you pass, anyway.

And left. They were left once again with each other.

―Do you think that's why he helped you too?

―I don't know. Probably. Can you believe the other day he asked me for Fate's number?

―It doesn't surprise me. She's pretty, after all.

―Is she?

―Well, I don't know if she's conventionally pretty, but she has something.

I'll venture to say that what "something" really is, is being able to tolerate their little boy-ish borderline pseudo-fraternity ecosystem through their common interest in casual videogames while at the same time being, indeed, a girl. Advanced social dynamics, everyone.

―I really don't see it. We just play videogames.

―Quite a lot, until pretty recently. I'd begun to think you guys had something.

Fischer trembled a little. He hadn't explained his affair with Lidia to anyone.

―But well, I guess you have Sussie, after all.

―How is your girlfriend by the way?

―We kind of distanced, I guess? You know that moment, when she starts giving you short answers for a couple of days, and you decide it must be nothing and you better give her some space, and next thing you know they bring you your things in a plastic bag? Well, it only happened to me once, but you get the idea. Not that I get a lot of opportunities to be with girls, anyway.

He sighed.

―You were right, she wasn't really for me. All the banality and padel... It was nice for a while, made me think maybe I could have that sort of simple life. Not think that much.

―You need something more like you. Smart and all.

―Oh, she was smart. I don't know. We'll see, in the future. For now, I want to focus on my studies.

―Yeah, me too.

Sure, right. Fischer wanted to focus on his studies. Now. While they waited for the results of his seventh make-up exam in a row. But that closed the topic of girls for the time being, as they scrambled once again with what to do with the excess of time they suddenly had in their hands, after a month of non-stop running. It's remarkable how small the amount of time boys talk about girls when they are together is: especially given how much mental energy they devote to the task of figuring out how to sleep with them.

While they waited for Jessica, Fischer went back to refreshing the webpage where the results would eventually decide his fate by crossing or not crossing an arbitrary threshold. Very fitting for a place where progress is not about meaning, but about bookkeeping. To distract himself, Jeremy took his laptop from his backpack and put it on the table, and started browsing. Until they decided at the same time to break the silence and tackle the next elephant in the room.

―So, have you thought about what you will do if you... are no longer studying?

―Cabbages.

―What?

―My grandfather used to own a cabbage farm. I always pictured myself doing that also. But then a bunch of stuff happened and I ended up here. I guess that's what I will do. Maybe own a couple of chickens. Who knows. What about you?

―Me? I don't know. I always pictured myself studying and all that sort of stuff. Actually, it never occurred to me to do anything else. Or what to do after that, for that matter. Is that weird?

―I don't think it's weird.

―Thank God.

They waited for Jessica a little.

―So. Do you realize this might be the last time we're here?

―True. That's wild. Can you imagine?

―I can't.

―That means we should do something.

―What do you mean?

―What have you always wanted to do here, but couldn't? Could be the last chance.

―Uh... I don't know. We already kind of did everything.

But Fischer had another idea. He got up, and trespassed one last and sacred boundary of their cafeteria experience. Despite nothing separating the "front" of the bar counter from the "behind", he jumped above the counter itself, almost destroying countless irreplaceable and ancient cheap napkin holders. After falling, he emerged smiling from the other side. And immediately started looking for the biggest jar he could find.

―Fischer you can't do that!

―Why not? Who's gonna stop me? Come over, help me find stuff. What do you want?

―I don't know. A coffee?

―There's the milk. Get yourself a spoon.

And Jeremy joined him, while they were waiting for Jessica. Which didn't really take that long. Fischer had chugged down a ginormous beer and was now juggling with small juice boxes and big bags of chips, when she made her appearance.

―What the fuck do you think you're doing? I told you not to touch anything!

―We were thirsty!

―It was his idea.

―You traitor.

―Shut up and stop juggling. You're gonna get me fired. Well, what do I care? I'm quitting anyway.

―No! Why?

―I found a job as a hairdresser. Huge opportunity. It's what I studied, anyway.

―Do you have to study to cut hair? I don't think my hairdresser studied very much.

Jessica looked at Fischer, she was chewing gum as always, and looked at him with a bit of endearing disgust, like always as well.

―I noticed.

Ouch.

―And I told you to stop juggling! Gimme that. You want a drink? I'll make you a drink.

And proceeded to make like, a lot of strawberry caipirinha. They didn't even know she knew how to make all that, always serving cheap drinks, omelettes and french fries. Turns out, she was probably the person most equipped in several miles to survive in the real world, and in a strange way, this whole place looked to her a lot like an overgrown kindergarten. No wonder she didn't feel attached enough to not leave. Once finished, and after attempting to convince her to stay here forever with them, they sipped from their drinks with a hawaiian themed straw. Then Fischer and Jeremy looked at each other.

―So, what do we do now that Jessica is here?

―So, what do we do now that Jessica is here?

She ignored the spontaneous synchronicity.

―Why are you guys even here? Everyone has left already.

―We are waiting for Fischer's test results. And didn't feel like going home without them.

―Here?

―Well, they post them online. Here.

And Fischer showed her the screen he spent the last hours refreshing.

―Wait, your name is Marcus? I thought you were just "Fischer". Like Cher. By the way it says here you passed.

―Wait, what?

And turned the screen towards him. They posted it half an hour ago.

If anyone was expecting some kind of subdued or strangely calm reaction from a Fischer more "relieved" of having avoided a career ending existential threat than "violently happy", I'm sorry to disappoint you, because that wasn't gonna be the case. Little it mattered that in the next days he would discover that the last test was in fact, not about latin; nor that he was going to pass into second year anyway because both of them had miscounted how many credits he needed; nor that he forgot about oliver and had to come back to rescue him from becoming the new kingpin of a near-college feline colony. Right now, he had won. In his confusion, he hugged Jessica, kissed Jeremy, drank a cup of hot coffee in one big swig, convinced them to go sing karaoke, got everyone there drunk, spent all night partying, woke up with the three of them in the same individual bed, attempted to make pancakes for breakfast, burnt them, ate them anyway, stole back teddy from his absent neighbour and left towards the sunrise wanting nothing to do with anything remotely resembling a book or anyone sort of sounding smart since at least, the next september.

Jeremy and Jessica were still in his destroyed apartment when he left, and were now eating the remains of the burnt breakfast Fischer had left for them to enjoy.

―You know, these are not bad.

―Not at all. A little bit singed, but nobody is perfect.

―By the way, do you remember what we did last night?

―Not very much. Last thing I remember is that I closed the bar when we left, so we're fine.

They munched in silence for about, approximately, twenty one seconds and a half.

Then Jeremy asked the obvious, follow-up existential question.

―What do we do now, that Fischer is gone?

Jessica looked into the distance, scrutinizing the horizon as if it owed her money.

―I dunno. Do you wanna make out?

―What? I mean. Yes, sure!

And they did.

[to be continued]